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PANTS = FROTHY!! As a cold war kid (I'm 41) I have an absolute fascination with all things nuclear war. I've got a decent library of books on the different weapon systems developed at the time. Do one on the evoution of the NIKE system through the SPARTAN/SAFEGUARD series with Spartan and Sprint missiles. Do the sexiest looking bomber of all time, the B-58. The poo poo they were thinking about putting into service at the end of the cold war that got cancelled were mind bending. Maneuverable re-entry vehicles to goof up plotting software and potentially dodge interceptors. GPS guided ICBM warheads that could hit a minivan sized target from anywere on the planet. The Midgetman, the follow-on interceptors after the Sprint, all that jazz gives me a woody. All the CANCELLED programs during the cold war! The air launched ICBM, the nuclear powered bomber, the nuclear powered cruise missile, the Super MIRV'd Titan II's, the 25-30 megaton warhead for the Titan II, the XB-70, and more. Oh, how we used to spend money on cool poo poo. Now the military R&D goes to bomb proofing trucks and APC's
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Dec 15, 2010 16:28
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ OK, 2 girlfriends & a little something on the side? Scratch Monkey posted:That's a weird way to spell B-1. Can't I have 2 girlfriends? Edit: the XB-70 is the unattainable hotty of the group. I won't even put her on the list. NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Dec 15, 2010 |
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Dec 15, 2010 16:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:See, I'm a child of the late cold war, so nothing gives me Aerospace wood quite like the motherfucking B2. I'm pretty tingly in the pants on how they took the aircrew for bombers from 10+ in the WW II and just post wwII bombers to just 2 for the B-2. The proposed attack profiles for the older bombers (especially the B-52 and B-1) were loving end of the world poo poo. Not a whole bunch of stealth in using your under-wing mounted SRAM's to blast the poo poo out of any opposition on the ground (air defense sites, airfields, some guy who gave you the finger, whatever) and then drop megaton range gravity bombs on the DGZ's. Now, they are supposed to just sit back and fart out cruise missiles by the fistful and watch the world end from afar.
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Dec 15, 2010 17:53
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END OF THE loving WORLD VIDEOS. ICBM's from old to new Atlas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwLdGSSNPuE Titan I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-9pwtk0ZWU Titan II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuJqCdaTS7U Minuteman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrnfRfawtI0 Peacekeeper (MX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCSoN1tqmgU Midgetman (cancelled) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4rquFY8soE
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Dec 15, 2010 20:41
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The last bigass ABM program the US wanted to field (not the piddly "let's stick 25 missiles in Alaska!" hit a bullet with a bullet program of today) was the Sentinel program which used the dual layer Spartan and Sprint missiles. The Spartan was the long range exoatmospheric nuclear armed (5 goddamn megatons)interceptor that had an operational ceiling in the area of 350 miles above the earth. The idea was this would intercept incoming ICBMS and ICBM buses in space. stuff that got through was to be point intercepted by the short range Sprint missile. The Sprint ABM was farted out of the launch tube by a powder charge, then accellerated like a bitch. It reached Mach 10 in less than 5 seconds. In the video IIRC, the incoming ICBM warhead is the reentry vehicle from a Titan II. Folks got to test lots of different spendy rockets that day. Watch the video, especially at the end. The sprint missile fuckin' MOVED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vq4mWyYl2Y
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Dec 16, 2010 02:23
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Senor Science posted:It's such a mind gently caress to see the F22, a state of the art 21st century jet pursuing a cold war holdover. It's one of those deals where the plane is inexpensive, robust, efficient, and has a great endurance. It doesn't matter much that it was designed when my dad was a kid, it's still good for what it does now. Still, it's pretty trippy to see the old contra-rotating prop driven plane being shadowed by a spankin' new aircraft. I wonder what the difference in the stall speeds are between the two planes? IIRC, big and slow bombers or planes patrolling the edge of airspace would sometimes drop speed WAY back as a means of loving with fighters charged with shadowing them. The fighter simply couldn't go that slow.
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Dec 16, 2010 02:51
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Burning Beard posted:I've been tapped to teach a "World Politics" course for Spring. Rather than a bland survey, I've decided to theme it around the Cold War, yay The last sequence in Atomic Cafe is terrifying. It goes a loooonnnnggg way to show that the simple ideas that are proposed in the film as "countermeasures" are pointless. I read several books that discussed the civil defense program and talked about the Eisenhower "shitload-o-shelters" plan and city evacuation plans. They were quietly abandoned when it was shown that sheltering in place in a city was simply a good way to end up with orderly corpses for the ones that weren't reduced to constituent atoms. Evacuating a city in the time it takes for a nuclear attack is a pointless exercise. That idea was quietly dropped as well. In the early 80's when everyone was worried that Reagan was going to bring about global thermonuclear war, I asked my dad what the hell was going on and why everyone was so scared and nervous about the president's plans. I was 10 or 12 or so. Dad said, "they're scared because if the right people make the wrong decisions, in roughly one hour, everyone everywhere will be dead or dying soon". I don't think the youth of today get the idea that we lived in a time where it was no bullshit that in 60 minutes, every city you've ever read about in the US, Europe, East Asia, and the USSR could have been green glass and char. They may have decided to blow the poo poo out of a few parts of other continents, because, gently caress YOU, we can.
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Dec 16, 2010 03:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:The Swiss still have those bomb shelters. Now are you talking blast shelter or fallout shelter. Fallout shelters can work, but a REAL fallout shelter rather than "pile some crackers in the church basement" is a lot of work and a big investement and engineering challenge. Blast shelters are often far more trouble than they are worth, and when you pop your head up, everthing is destroyed and irradiated to poo poo and back.
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Dec 16, 2010 15:17
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Burning Beard posted:Bombers were alllll the rage until the advent of effective ICBMs. Suddenly the idea of keeping huge forces of nuclear capable bombers was no longer in the strategic interests of either side. Why keep bombers on station when you can install things like NORAD and multiple silos around the country for cheap? (Comparatively, that is). ICBMs also played a huge role in reducing the conventional ground forces for the US. One of the platforms Eisenhower was elected on in the '50s was his stated goal to reduce the defense budget. You see, the only way it was thought to counter the Soviets was to stage huge conventional forces in Europe. Bombers are great for saber rattling and shows of force. You can send up a poo poo-ton of aircraft and they can loiter and show you're angry, not loving around this time, whatever. ICBM's are a bullet from a gun. Once the trigger is pulled, it's on the way and there's no way to stop it.
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Dec 16, 2010 19:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:As I recall they also had some hilariously huge as gently caress Soviet transport aircraft at that airshow. I remember being rather disappointed that it wasn't a bomber or something cool. Russians ain't afraid to make poo poo BIG. Edit: I'm directly on the flight path of MSP airport. This summer, I heard engines that sounded odd. I looked up and saw a BIG 4 engine aircraft with a LOOONNNG stabilizer and two vertical tails set on the ends of the stabilizer. Some casual searching didn't show me poo poo. I think it was coming in for an air show or something. NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 16, 2010 |
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Dec 16, 2010 23:11
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SyHopeful posted:AN-225 sounds similar to what you describe but it's 6-engined They're pretty high still when then come overhead as I'm about 30 miles straight from the airport. One of the cooler things is the doppeler compression of the incoming aircraft. You hear a really high whistle sound that persists for a bit, then the tone deepens to the noise of the engine. They must be still moving pretty drat fast to get that sound compression. One of the SALT treaties limited the number of warheads on an individual launcher to 10. Several of the ICBM's out there were designed to carry more than that. The Trident series was initially designed to carry 14 MIRV's. The SS-18 IIRC was somewhere in the high teens to 20 of the drat things. The US looked around and saw the giant diameter Titan II and the hyooge throw weight and said "poo poo, we can do that too". Never happened due to the treaty. The Sprint/Spartan missile system was initially set up to cover all the major cities in the US AND the various military installations. There were going to be thousands of missiles in sites all over to protect the US cities. Then the system got cut back to just protecting ICBM fields. Then just a single field. Then it was open for a few days when it got defunded by congress and died. Nobody liked the idea of detonating thousands of nuclear weapons over the US to destroy the incoming warheads, but the other option was to let the warheads detonate themselves over their intended targets. Somewhere out there on the intertubes is a government document that was very well written that detailed what it would be like to be a CD person in charge of a survivor/refugee center. it went over the triage procedure for giving people supplies. Limited supplies=limited support for survivors. People well enough to do heavy work like shoveling, moving corpses, and general break-back debris clearing got something like 1500 calories a day. Folks who could do office tasks got something like 1000 calories a day. Wounded were pretty much written off if they were past basic first aid.
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Dec 17, 2010 00:27
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iyaayas01 posted:Well, others have pointed out Korea/Vietnam as the most obvious, and Cyrano brought up a few more (Arab-Israeli conflict, etc.) To piggyback on what he said, there were MANY times during the '50s that U.S. and Soviet military forces were no kidding shooting at each other. Most of them were related to U.S. (and RAF) penetration overflights by SAC reconnaissance aircraft, most of whom (prior to the U-2) were just modified nuclear bombers. In a few cases the Soviets actually shot down U.S. aircraft, and in one case they were able to capture multiple U.S. personnel from a B-47 crew. There is a very good (and very readable, unlike many of the other works on the subject) book about these overflights titled "By Any Means Necessary." Nuclear strategy is what this poo poo is all about (in addition to the cool toys). Depressed trajectory SLBM launches were (are) the scariest thing possible for the Washington DC people. Launch to vaporized is measured in single digit minutes. At least the Soviets had the historical good sense to put their capital city WAY inland. NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Dec 17, 2010 |
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Dec 17, 2010 00:30
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iyaayas01 posted:Dude, you saw the discussion that led to the creation of this thread, right? This thread is built on being a pedant. Dark Sun has one of the most chilling sentences I've ever read when describing the effects of the detonation of the Mike device "Elugelab was gone." A substantial island of rock and coral had been completely obliterated and consumed. Edit: the pants shittingly scary part of his first book is when he describes and explains that in a given nuclear explosion, there's a ring where people who are in the open will literally have their skin ripped off. They're flayed alive by the bomb. The heat prompt vaporizes water under your epidermis. Basically it's like a huge blister or it's like a quick blanching of a tomato. The skin gets separated from the rest of you. A teeny bit later, the blast wave hits you, not enough to crush you flat, but more than enough to RIP YOUR loving SKIN OFF. That poo poo has to sting. NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Dec 17, 2010 |
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Dec 17, 2010 03:27
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gfarrell80 posted:Fascinating thread. I've heard about them before, but it always blows my mind a little bit reading about nuclear-tipped SAM's. Nuclear tipped ABM's were introduced because of the challenges in hitting a target moving at Mach 20 with a bullet moving at Mach 10. There's precious little time to interact object A with object B as they pass. Conventional explosives are literally TOO SLOW to effectively hit an incoming warhead. Plus, the radius of damage is teeny compared to a nuclear explosive. The warheads used on nuclear ABM's were enhanced radiation warheads or "neutron bombs" which apparently as far as is unclassified, uses non-fissile and non-neutron capture tampers on the secondary. When you get a fusion reaction, you release an awful lot of neutrons. If your secondary is jacketed with uranium, you get a fission reaction from it. If it's jacketed with some dense heavy metal that does NOT absorb neutrons, they just pour out into the surrounding space. First off, if you are exposed to a large amount of neutrons zipping through space and through YOU, you're deader than poo poo. Second, the neutrons scoot out of the reaction at a significant fraction of the speed of light. They also gently caress up electronics as well as damage the fissile material in incoming warheads. Apparently, the neutrons were supposed to be the main RV damaging component of the nuclear ABM warhead. If the RV got fried by heat or blast as well, so much the better. Defense of the US with the Sprint/Spartan missile system would have lead to thousands of neutron bombs being detonated right overhead. Hope you put that 3 feet of dirt and 1 foot of cement over top of your fallout shelter.
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Dec 17, 2010 13:55
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Books you should read: ICBM Making the Weapon that Changed the World US Strategic and Defensive Missile Systems 1950-2004 Rings of Supersonic Steel: An Introduction & Site Guide Air Defenses of the United States Army 1950-1979 (Nuclear Weapons) Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy TITAN II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon by Those Who Built It (Apogee Books Space Series) With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000 Cold War Peacemaker: The Story of Cowtown and the Convair B-36 Valkyrie: North American's Mach 3 Superbomber (Specialty Press) that will keep you busy for a bit.
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Dec 17, 2010 16:10
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I kept holding off on it, but no discussion about cold war flying death machines is complete without a mention of Project Pluto. A giant mach 3 treetop level unmanned bomber that was powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor that pumped out lethal amounts of radiation as it flew. http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html I was personally pretty fond of the Midgetman concept. Latest strategic arms treaty says "no MIRV's", so the idea was to take one of the 10 RV's that was in the Peacekeeper and build a booster big enough to send just one RV over to the EVIL EMPIRE. It was a teeny missile by ICBM standards and it was road-mobile. The EVIL EMPIRE had more than one ICBM and IRBM that you could drive around in the woods prior to launch while the US had none. It could be put in silos, rails, trucks, all sorts of basing options. Got cancelled. Now our ICBM force is based on the as old as some of you dad's Minuteman missile. It would have been neat to have a fleet of teeny single warhead ICBM's.
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Dec 18, 2010 14:15
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Senor Science posted:I would be! Late 70's early 80's IIRC. The rationale was that the US weapons were getting accurate enough to dig the silos out of the ground. Solution: Don't be where they think you'll be by being mobile.
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Dec 18, 2010 19:25
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Factory Ten posted:Anyone interested in reading a book on the politics of the latter period of the Cold War is highly encouraged to pick up a copy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dead Hand. The first half of the book discusses how Reagan and Gorbachev almost agreed to do away with all nuclear weapons, but Reagan refused to give up SDI and that moment in time slipped away. Since I have a hard-on  for all things end of the world, I have several books on Soviet bioweapons programs. The scale of the bioreactors they built apparently was loving staggering. They could turn out TONS of weaponized anthrax and smallpox every DAY if need be. They also tested a variant of the SS-18 that had interesting RV's that decellerated quickly then deployed parachutes. They were ICBM plague delivery systems. Sleep tight kids...
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Dec 18, 2010 23:52
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iyaayas01 posted:Glad everyone has been enjoying the thread and contributing...sorry I haven't been around as much the past few days, been having some other stuff I need to work on. Rest assured, I'll have time over the holidays to do a few write ups...right now I'm leaning towards the first being the nuclear war strategies and tactics write up, and the second being an A-1 Skyraider/A-X/A-10 write up. Don't be the hot chick at the party who dances close to us and flashes us her tits, then never puts out. GET TYPING or I'll be forced to keep up my own wankfest here in your thread.
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Dec 19, 2010 14:36
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Factory Ten posted:If anyone actually did finish The Dead Hand, can you tell me how it ends? With 50 pages left, my two-year old son got ahold of it and put it...somewhere. It looks that way, but the ending sets you up for what seems like a crappy sequel. The original bad guy is probably going to come back, or we get some cliche "terrorist" plot line. Nothing as cool as the first time, for sure.
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Dec 20, 2010 11:43
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iyaayas01 posted:
I'd like your interpretation of the shift from MAD to the Regan "sure there's still MAD, but let's talk about how to WIN a nuclear war" during the 80's.
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Dec 20, 2010 18:26
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http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/ A guy who tours and photographs and collects items about the Civil Defense program. Pretty neat site.
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Dec 23, 2010 11:18
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Rocket fun time! The Atlas was the first ICBM the US fielded that could reach targets in the USSR from launch sites in the USA. The Atlas had several interesting features. First off, it was essentially a giant stainless steel balloon. Seriously. There were no internal fuel tanks. The outside skin of the missile was the skin of the fuel tank. Most of the missile had a skin thickness roughly the thickness of a dime. The missile would have collapsed under its own weight if it had not been constantly pressurized. The Atlas presented several interesting engineering challenges. One of them was, since it’s essentially a 100 foot long stainless steel balloon, was flexibility and pogo-ing. There’s really heavy stuff on one end of the balloon (a dense heavy warhead) and really heavy stuff at the other end of the balloon (guidance, and the drat rocket motors). Inflate a torpedo shaped balloon, then put a coffee cup full of cement at the front end, and try to push it fast from the back end. It bends, it compresses, then springs back to length (then starts to oscillate due to stretching PAST max length from the momentum of the warhead, then snapping back, repeat over and over) it does all sorts of wacky poo poo that doesn’t help it go straight. The Atlas had a unique staging method. At this point, everyone knows what staging is and why it’s done. You drop off parts of the missile as you use up fuel to get rid of excess weight, drag, etc. When the Atlas was designed, starting liquid fuel rocket motors was about 1/3 engineering, 1/3 black arts, and 1/3 luck. The Atlas used 3 motors. It ignited all of them on the ground. Part way through the flight, the two outboard motors and the big heavy skirt of other gear around the base of the missile was ejected. The center sustainer motor stayed on for the remainder of the powered flight. We had to wait for the Titan until we got true liquid fueled rocket in-air 2nd stage starts. The basing of the Atlas went through several variations as well. The Atlas used liquid O2, which had to be loaded just prior to launch. You can’t store it in the missile for extended periods of time. There was a “fuel up” time required prior to launch. You can imagine that this added a pretty big window of vulnerability to the weapon, sitting there unfueled, hoping to get gas in the drat thing prior to the Soviet ICBM warheads zipping down on their heads, 30 min from launch. At first, the Atlas was loaded and launched like a space launch vehicle. There was a huge roll-away gantry, a big pad, all that jazz. Getting ready took forever. Eventually, they went to a “coffin” style shelter where the missile was laid down on its side in a big cement box, then raised vertical to be readied to launch. After the box on a pad, the USAF did another box, but this time it was in a trench. Now, the top of the missile storage was at least level to the ground. Less stuff to get hit by blast, fragments, etc. Finally, the Atlas was based vertically in silos. They still had to be raised after fueling to be launched as they couldn’t stand the stresses of being launched from inside the silo, but combined with the advances in fueling technology, the Atlas became a weapon that could theoretically react to a first strike or at least have part of the fleet survive an initial attack.
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Dec 23, 2010 15:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:THe most terrifying thing about all of this is that THIS was the vehicle that we used to get the first Americans into space with. I love "The Right Stuff" (book and film) and the section where the Mercury 7 are watching all the launch vehicles blow the gently caress up are all shots of real test footage from the USAF and NASA. In fact, if you read the Stine "ICBM" book I mentioned a bit ago, he details all the things that happened to each rocket as it had to be blown up. SO, you're Alan Shepard and you've just watched 15-20 ICBM's blow the gently caress up in front of you, then they say "Guess what? You get to ride one of these things next week!" How do you get through the spacecraft door with balls that huge?
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Dec 23, 2010 17:19
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Don't forget kids, rockets that can put nuclear weapons anywhere they want on the planet, can also be re-purposed as space launch vehicles. They're expensive pieces of hardware and it would be a shame to just cut them to scrap. The Atlas, the Titan, and even the MX/Peacekeeper have been re-tooled after they were decomissioned to be sattelite launchers. Swords into plowshares and all that jazz.
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Dec 23, 2010 21:53
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mlmp08 posted:Alternately, space launch vehicles can be repurposed into ICBMs. Iran has been playing around with that. And the ultimate example of this is Sputnik. The USSR built an ICBM, but used it to launch a beepy thingie. The whole point in Sputnik was to say "hey! we can fly space delivered weapons, right to your "welcome" mat." Ya gotta admire Stalin for his "ICBM FIRST, BEING ABLE TO HIT poo poo WITH IT SECOND" philosophy. They had a big throw weigh, but not a bunch of smarts in terms of how to get the warhead down, so they wrapped a 15 megaton warhead in laminated plywood and said "It'll ablate just fine, and smell like burning pine right before we blow poo poo up a few miles from the DGZ."
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Dec 24, 2010 04:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Did. . . . did this actually work as intended? Dang cell phone connection dropped my post. It's actually not the worst idea ever. Wood is easy to shape and machine. Wood chars to carbon in a fast hurry and the carbon is an excellent ablative exterior material for a warhead. Wood is an excellent insulator and doesn't transmit heat to the interior of the warhead with any speed. The biggest issue is that it ablates somewhat unevenly. If one side has more drag than an other even by a bit, it greatly widens the CEP. Still, Stalin saw that the political capital of having a functional ICBM no matter how crude or area target only accurate was still goddamn huge. He was right. NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Dec 24, 2010 |
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Dec 24, 2010 19:52
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Great video about the MX/Peacekeeper missile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHlYc_MzvLk
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Dec 24, 2010 22:22
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McNally posted:Airplanes cost more than soldiers. As do pilots.  The US went with either single warhead ICBM's with the RV just stuck on the front of the missile, or they went with MIRV's where the RV had a shroud around the RV's. The shroud was removed in space with teeny rocket motors that would pull it away from the bus as well as move it out of the way of the RV's. The soviets did it a different way in many of their ICBM's (especially earlier MIRV's). The RV's are mounted on the OUTSIDE of the nosecone of the bus. I'll see if I can get a good scan of what that looked like soon.
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Dec 27, 2010 21:08
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mlmp08 posted:
Pfff... Some cold war buff YOU are. The pointy one is the SM-62 Snark and the black nosed blunt one is the MGM-13 Mace.
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Dec 29, 2010 23:51
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rossmum posted:These things: Never heard of these things. Is it just a set of fuel tanks with a warhead in the front? That's almost like the pod under the B-58.
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Jan 1, 2011 15:37
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iyaayas01 posted:The A-5 was the only aircraft to carry things that way...it had what was called a linear bomb bay: That's almost as dumb as the 'over the shoulder toss' method of low level, but don't blow yourself up, delivery of nukes by tree skimming fast movers. More or less, they came in at treetop level, pulled into a loop, and as they were passing the target they released the bomb so it went backwards and up. The fighter theoretically had enough time to get away from the area before the bomb came back down and blowded everything to smithereenies
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Jan 2, 2011 14:04
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MazeOfTzeentch posted:I always thought the Idiot's loop tossed the bomb on the way up the loop at a forward angle, and then the plane finished the half loop and scurried off in the other direction. Read the air and space article. It describes how you can use the LABS to do either throw the bomb in front of you OR toss it over the shoulder!
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Jan 3, 2011 11:31
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Yeah, yeah, yeah... Where's my nuclear warfighting strategy writeup?
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Jan 7, 2011 04:25
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rossmum posted:I can't look at that without getting the mental image of some guy trying to fish with one, and I have to say... it owns. Irradiated and homogenized fish. That's good eatin!
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Jan 7, 2011 11:12
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Miso Beno posted:These two videos are 100% relevant to the interests of this thread. You sir, are more tits than tits. I have the neato video capture tool for Firefox. I'm going to be a busy guy at archive.org.
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Jan 8, 2011 00:33
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So happy this thread popped back up! Can we toss in love for NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON movies in this thread yet??
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Jan 21, 2011 14:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:Quote this if you had the ever loving gently caress freaked out of you by watching "The Day After" at too young of an age. I LOVE "The Day After"! I'm a sucker for background news coverage as a way to advance plot. Lots of folks have heard about "Threads", but I'm a fan of the rather haunting "testament".
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Jan 22, 2011 03:37
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It's only sorta-kinda airpower related, but don't forget all the anti-air assets developed in the arms race. The USA worked under the AIR FORCE BLOW poo poo UP theory of air superiority for the most part. There were a few different SPAAG's and missile carriers fielded, but for the most part, the US's anti-air mobile assets kinda sucked. You had the old M163 Vulcan 20mm rotary cannon that was wedged into an old APC. Then along with that was the MIM 72 Chaparral system which was essentially 4 AIM-9 sidewinder variants strapped on a turret on top of the same old APC. Then the US tried to field a 40MM dual gun system, the Sgt. York. After eating up roughly a zillion dollars in defense $$$, it was abandoned as a failure. The USA had a few systems that were more or less haul around, then set up in a forward position (hawk, patriot which still exits), but not much in the way of a mobile AA "road march along with the tanks and IFV's" style weapon. There were lots of studies, proposed adoptions of foreign systems, stuff like strapping podded Stingers to Bradley's and Hummers, but nothing really developed. The Soviets on the other hand churned out a new gun system and especially missile system seemingly every other drat month. The later variants have some neat vertical launch capability with little directional change motors towards the nose of the missile. The missile gets farted out of the tube, the motor at the nose quickly tips the missile towards the target, and then the main motor ignites, zipping off towards said aircraft.
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Feb 10, 2011 04:10
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mlmp08 posted:Their main drawback is that the Stinger missile has a much shorter range than many, many weapons which could be used to target the Avenger, and a HMWWV is harder to hide than a guy holding a MANPADS. Huh, I thought that those never got actually fielded. Learn something new every day. I thought the reason behind the cancellation was in your first sentence. mlmp08 posted:Our HIMAD systems are pretty clearly superior to Russia's, but their SHORAD systems are pretty awesome. I find it interesting to look back and see that you can see how the NATO forces were worried about tanks, so they built and tested piles of different anti-tank systems and the USSR was worried about aircraft, so they built mobile AA like crazy fuckers.
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Feb 10, 2011 14:07
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