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poo poo, I was wondering where Something Awful did its airplanechat. Given that this thread is over 100 pages it's probably already been brought up, but the OP mentioning the rocket-salvo interceptor strategy from the 1950s reminded me of the amusing/terrifying anecdote of Battle of Palmdale. Also: jealous of the guy going to Pima. I went there once and did the AMARG bus tour but I had a lovely camera at the time.
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Nov 7, 2012 01:56
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Memento1979 posted:It's not just Airplane chat here, there's a lot of weird and wonderful cold war technological and espionage freakery as well. For only 100 pages, this thread is well worth reading from the start. I've covered a bunch of it, I just saw the F-89 Scorpion and FFARs in the beginning and thought "this is a thread I need to get in on." For content, something out of the "good airframes are hard to kill" department, just in case the Tu-4 chat didn't get far enough. Here's a turboprop AWACS B-29 from China. The project didn't get off the ground but it's kind of amazing to me that the B-29 airframe survived going from the USA to Russia to China and was still recognizable enough to look loving strange as hell with Russian turboprops and a radome. Especially since popular coverage of the B-29 tends to end at Nagasaki while in fact it was a major player in Korea and so on. And then it happened again.
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Nov 7, 2012 03:11
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Sjurygg posted:Another crash? Hope for their sake they didn't wipe out quite as many generals and colonels this time. Not what I was talking about, just the general concept. There's an Antonov An-12 under there somewhere.
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Nov 7, 2012 16:06
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Oxford Comma posted:A video from the BBC about "Rubber Curtain", a key component in Russia's new carrier ability: Our air mattress landing strip technology is clearly superior. 
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Nov 19, 2012 22:12
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Yeah, I was a pretty decent history student at a decent school so a lot of things got covered but the founding of Israel was not heavily talked about, anywhere. I think I got a general idea of the unrest beforehand but that is all. AP European History pretty much wrapped up at the conclusion of World War II.
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Dec 5, 2012 08:08
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grover posted:This is the same Iran who was unable to shoot down a predator last week with a Mig. I thought that was a Sukhoi Su-25 from Iran's Coast Guard, i.e. a plane largely unequipped for air-to-air and flown by Iran's D-list pilots, but maybe I'm thinking of a different incident?
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Dec 5, 2012 21:53
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Warbadger posted:The Revolutionary Guard (the only ones operating SU-25s) do a lot of dumb, provocative poo poo including the attempt on that drone over international waters but I'm not sure if you can call them D-list pilots in comparison to the regular Iranian Air Force. Personally I'd think the point is more that they tried to shoot it down rather than use their Djinn magic to capture it. I stand corrected then, I wasn't familiar with their training level, only that they weren't the complete legit Iranian Air Force and that they had a Su-25 rather than a MiG or other such fighter.
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Dec 6, 2012 05:39
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_firehawk posted:Mostly because of you know, the gun. My favorite aircraft gun has to be the GSh-23 "teeter-totter" though. Or one of these: 
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Dec 9, 2012 16:47
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iyaayas01 posted:Glazed nose isn't for bombing, it's for the navigator's position. Probably an equal part for possible wartime use (as a transport, not a bomber) and just a carryover from previous designs. Also, Russian navigation aids and similar systems didn't develop as quickly as in Europe and the United States, I don't think; furthermore, Russia is a goddamn big country especially when you include the former USSR members. It was something that Western airliners also sort of considered, in a way. The Boeing 707 had those little "eyebrow" windows above the main cockpit windows so it would be easier to navigate if the regular systems weren't working. Since the 707 nose was carried over wholesale to the 727 and 737, the little windows stayed around a pretty long time even when they were no longer needed, though new-build 737NGs now no longer have them.
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Dec 14, 2012 22:08
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Snowdens Secret posted:I don't understand how they'd work for navigation in the jet age. You'd be above the cloud layer at least some of the time, and Russia's geographic size and sparse population mean a lack of visually distinguishable navaids in much of the country. I don't know about the first point, but typically the glass-nosed Russian aircraft had a dedicated navigator in the crew, and yes, it's my understanding that the 707 windows were for celestial navigation. But I'm not an expert, just an enthusiast. Edit: This is the navigator's station in an Il-76. This is a civilian model but in the case of the Il-76 the difference between civilian and military versions is really slight, to the point of old Red Air Force examples sold on the cargo market with the tail gun turret just kind of plated over. StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Dec 15, 2012 |
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Dec 15, 2012 22:58
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I figure that if there was a military intervention Russia would have reached a neutral or "yeah, gently caress that guy too" stance before we did anything? At least with respect to the advisors mentioned in the article.
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Dec 24, 2012 14:28
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A much older operational history of the F-14 that I have (IIRC, it was published well before the F-14D's retirement in 2006) mentions several shootdowns by Iraq and one defection by an Iranian F-14 pilot to the Soviet Union, but nothing about an Iranian defection to Iraq. edit: freaking letters man StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jan 18, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 20:12
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mikerock posted:No the reason the F-104 got its reputation is that the Luftwaffe was using it as a low level strike aircraft which it was not designed for. It could not take the stresses placed on the airframe for these kinds of operations and consequently a lot of them crashed! In the air forces where it was used as an interceptor it preformed well and did not crash. A lot of air forces had high loss rates with it, it's not just that. But that's not fair either because at the time, a lot of air forces had high loss rates with everything. Also, seconding or thirding the love for black painted combat aircraft. Okay so that one's a trainer, but you get the idea.
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Jan 26, 2013 08:34
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Phanatic posted:There's a story I read once about one of the B-17s in Operation Aphrodite. The controller lost contact with it and it just made a gradual descent to a belly landing in Europe. German troops surrounded it and yelled for the crew to surrender, got no response, and opened fire, at which point it blew up with great enthusiasm. I've heard this story about unmanned B-17s landing almost-safely, but I don't think they were of the flying-bomb variety. A better-sourced example of a post-ejection airplane landing itself can be found here.
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Jan 26, 2013 16:31
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PhotoKirk posted:The Battle of Palmdale is still my favorite. I agree, I think I brought it up in this thread earlier.  Though I still love the mental image of a rural sheriff staring down a belly-landed fighter, phoning up the spit-polish whiz kids from the Cold War air force, and asking "well, what am I supposed to DO with it?"
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Jan 29, 2013 02:21
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iyaayas01 posted:Them doing a fourth series about the US Navy in the Pacific would be pretty dope...Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway, Ironbottom Sound and the conflicts around Guadalcanal (probably be a two parter if you wanted to truly do it justice, you could do one with Savo Island, Eastern Solomons, Cape Esperance, and Santa Cruz Islands, ending with the sinking of the Hornet and the pyrrhic IJN victory, and then the next starting with the Tokyo Express running the Slot with some PT boat action, building to the nighttime battleship slugfest of 12-15 Nov, and tacking on Tassafaronga and Rennell Island on the end as an example of the challenges the Navy still faced despite winning a decisive victory in November), Philippine Sea/Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, and then another two parter for the Battle of Leyte Gulf (one part would be for Taffy 3 alone), and then probably one more for the action off Okinawa. Maybe to make it an even ten do an episode about the little known ABDA rear guard/fighting retreat campaign at the start of the war in the waters around the Dutch East Indies...the Houston ("Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast") would be a perfect focus for that episode. Talking of Guadalcanal naval battles....  ...they were pretty hardcore. 
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Feb 1, 2013 07:42
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iyaayas01 posted:Pretty much that...Germans did more or less the same thing, which is why the top US ace (Dick Bong...seriously, that's his name) only had 40 kills while Hartmann had 352 (and multiple German aces had well over 200) and Hiroyoshi Nishizawa had 87. Also the fuel situation and lack of air superiority certainly didn't help things as far as providing a friendly training environment. Richard Bong.  Also, early war Japanese doctrine of low pilot protection meant that if a pilot messed up, there were fewer second chances, which meant it was probably harder to develop experienced pilots to begin with.
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Feb 1, 2013 16:23
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:If I recall correctly, the US would take experienced pilots from the front and send them back to help train new pilots. The Japanese did not. Russia had a succession of interceptors, operated under a separate command from the regular Red Air Force, that are quite obscure today. Which is a shame because some of them are cool or weird. Others include the Tu-128 which was massive, and the Su-15 which actually is reasonably well recognized but only because it shot down flight Korean Air 007 (among others.) The Su-15 just looks like how my 10-year-old self would draw a fighter plane- huge-rear end radome, little triangle wings, bubble canopy.
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Feb 1, 2013 16:51
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:Mmhm. And while we're talking about weird Russian planes, lets take a look at some Yaks. I can't really do an in-depth write up on any of these planes, and I won't try. Someone far more knowledgeable than I am might come along and lay down some facts. Another unusual Yak, though not part of the VTOL line you were showing off:  The Yak-15.
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Feb 1, 2013 19:34
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Alpine Mustache posted:That guy has a whole bunch of posts about more chemicals like that here: This guy is already making me wish I spent more than two years of high school doing chemistry. quote:When we last checked in with the Klapötke lab at Munich, it was to highlight their accomplishments in the field of nitrotetrazole oxides. Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows. We're talking high-nitrogen compounds here (a specialty of Klapötke's group), and the question is not whether such things are going to be explosive hazards. (That's been settled by their empirical formulas, which generally look like typographical errors). The question is whether you're going to be able to get a long enough look at the material before it realizes its dream of turning into an expanding cloud of hot nitrogen gas.
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Feb 6, 2013 07:37
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Many years ago in the mid-nineties I was a preteen train nut. During that time there was a magazine we got at my house, called Railpace, which once featured a picture of a big, many-wheeled boxcar looking thing that was actually supposed to hold a missile in it (not sure if they were ICBMs or smaller stuff) I can't completely remember the intended purpose of the exercise, it might have been tactical dispersal or it might have been moving the missile from one base to another.
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Feb 7, 2013 22:27
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Yeah, that's the one, thanks. Wow, they started dicking around with this idea in 1986, it sounded more like something from quite some time before that.
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Feb 8, 2013 01:49
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Space Gopher posted:Dense Pack was a different (and monumentally stupid) survival scheme, where the idea was basically "if we build a bunch of super-hardened silos close together, then the incoming warheads will surely all blow each other up and leave the silos more or less unharmed! No way that could possibly go wrong! 
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Feb 8, 2013 07:23
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grover posted:Real Q: Why do we still need nuclear bombers? Aren't land & sea based nuclear missiles good enough for a deterrent? I can't answer it in context relative to other reasons, but there was always the ease of recalling the bombers (or changing their target) once they are on their way, whereas once you launch a missile, you don't have a whole lot of time to change your mind. Or at least, you didn't used to. OTOH there are a lot of other reasons for one type of nuclear strike or another, so I don't know if that's considered very important relative to the rest.
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Feb 10, 2013 01:40
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slothrop posted:Is it just me or does that Catalina have two different props on it? Also, what's the bottom plane? An Grumman F4F Wildcat, and I think next to it is one of those battleship-launched seaplanes (someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
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Feb 12, 2013 15:57
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Are the Israeli and French nuclear programs now submarine only, or do they still have air capability also? I think the French made some nuclear stores for the smaller Mirage strike fighters after they took the Mirage IV off that duty but I don't know if that's still the case. (click for much larger)
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Feb 16, 2013 21:26
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priznat posted:Canada supplied the US with a bunch of plutonium from the Chalk River Labs back in the day. Nuclear free zone I can understand declaring if that's your bag, nuclear weapon free is kind of to be expected. Still, comforting to know!
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Feb 21, 2013 06:12
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Warbadger posted:One of the other fun things about the Talos was that if it lost the original signal it was sent after it could actually find other enticing signals to go after instead. This sounds like the beginning of one of those old stories about airplanes getting shot down by their own missiles. Content:  My notes say that this is a Lockheed SP-2E Neptune, not sure if I got those specifics correct but whatever, it's a Neptune and they're pretty rad. The most interesting thing about this one was that it still had the whole big list of what types of munitions it could carry inside the bomb bay. I tried to get a picture of that specifically but my hands were too shaky.
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Feb 23, 2013 00:53
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With the dual cockpit, the A-4 looks like a cartoon caricature of a military jet. Adding another seat does strange things to some aircraft proportions.
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Feb 23, 2013 21:19
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mikerock posted:The Pentagon keeps on truckin' with the F-35 but every day it looks more like a dog. Wait, how do you get headrests and visibility wrong? Not only have people been dealing with that in fighter planes for years, they've been dealing with it in every other type of vehicle for years....
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Mar 7, 2013 05:26
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TheFluff posted:A lot of Swedish Cold War military spending was of a similar character; it would look very appropriate in an action movie but ended up being of questionable utility. Take a look at this place: In fairness to the Swedes, they made the Viggen (and the others also) STOL, and presumably also this crazy
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Mar 31, 2013 23:38
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evil_bunnY posted:I don't understand what's not to like when you have planes that are basically designed from the ground up to climb like hell and shoot bombers. I didn't say it was a bad idea, I just said it was unconventional. It seems they got the launching part pretty well worked out, and the scheme might have been more easy to make operational if they weren't also trying to put nuclear weapons on the things.
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Apr 1, 2013 00:48
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This thread was having a vaguely B-17-related derail a few pages ago, so here's a present.  I think it'll be in Burbank soon if anybody from that area wants to try and track it down.
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Apr 1, 2013 05:19
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Given Israel's small geographic size and, in a relative sense, numerical weakness, it would sort of make sense as a way of forcing an escalation of a conflict- instead of making possible enemies consider just Israel's own nuclear deterrent, they'd have to consider that and whatever players Israel could force into a war. Or something, I don't really know.
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Apr 5, 2013 03:58
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Nebakenezzer posted:Cool! I've always wondered why military Helicopters were not more into the dual-rotor approach - it seems to me to be flat-out superior compared to a tail rotor. I think it's worse for absorbing battle damage somehow, but I don't remember the specifics. There was some major drawback or other for using them on the Ka-50 that they had to work out. edit: This dude thinks that the rotors will hit each other quote:Some observers believed the Hokum was the inferior choice in the first place and that it only won through political lobbying efforts. A coaxial-rotor helicopter does provide good lift capability and is well-suited for shipboard operation, due to its small footprint and insensitivity to crosswinds. However, critics claim that the danger of collision between the coaxial rotor blades limits such a machine's maneuverability, a definite drawback in a helicopter gunship. In addition, damage to the rotor system that a conventional helicopter might survive will very likely lead to a rotor collision that will send a coaxial-rotor machine into the ground. Nebakenezzer posted:As far as I know, the Hind is almost phased out in the Russian inventory. When the USSR used the Hind in Afghanistan, they only used the Mi-24's cargo area for emergencies; usually they just used them as straight gunships. The troop compartment was often used to take along a mechanic, who could man a side machine gun, and could carry reloads for the rocket pods. Given that for a attack helicopter it was huge, and suffered some dynamic shortcomings, the Havoc as a more traditional attack helicopter makes sense. (Though the Havoc does have a one person 'emergency passenger compartment'.) Like Mike-o said, the Ka-50 was soon replaced by the Ka-52 (something about a pilot-gunner duo working better than just one person). The Ka-52 is the support gunship of the special forces, while the Mi-28 is for the regular army. To expand on this: from what I've read, the pilots of a Hind with a load of troops hated it because they couldn't perform the same evasive maneuvers owing to the weight, and had to worry about the troops' safety as well as their own. So the Hind was basically an attack helicopter with extra space, and could be replaced with more conventional attack helicopter layouts, since the soldier-carrying assault mission was carried out by the Mi-8 Hip anyway. StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 00:04 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 00:01
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iyaayas01 posted:So I'm out in SF visiting my sister, we went to SF-88 yesterday, REALLY cool. The only fully preserved/restored/functional Nike site (there's one up in AK that they've managed to preserve and are starting to restore, but it's been a long slog...they just opened to the public for one weekend for the first time last year, but being open to the public is going to be a pretty rare thing for the foreseeable future.) Anyway, SF-88 is fully functional: the search radar spins, the lift from the underground magazine functions (they've got a full complement of 6 missiles down there), and the launcher fully elevates. If you're in the Bay Area you need to stop by and pay a visit, you can see the entire site in about an hour and you should be going over to the Marin Headlands/Golden Gate National Rec Area anyway because it's awesome. Also if you do go up there make sure to check out the old fortifications...they're all over the place. Hey, thanks for posting about this as I was considering heading there myself on my next trip up to the Bay Area (I had learned about it before but the bus up there wasn't running at the time) and now I know I'll do it for sure.
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May 20, 2013 14:52
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Annoyingly, when I was in San Francisco last weekend the Nike missile site was closed on all the days when the bus up to Marin was running, so I couldn't do it. I did get to see the USS Hornet museum though. After its impressive WW2 combat record, the carrier was a bit undersized for newer jets, so it became an anti-sub carrier with aircraft like this:  I think the S-3 entered service a little late for it, but they have one:  They have an extensive explanation of things like sonobuoys below decks too. 
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Jun 7, 2013 19:07
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Fearless posted:...Except the strategic bombing campaign didn't really bomb Germany into submission. Germany's war production, the primary target of allied strategic bombing, hit its all-time peak in July 1944 and only really began to fall away once the Reich started to lose territory in the East and West as the allies took it. Arguably, the campaign's greatest accomplishments were to 1) tie up an enormous number of interceptor aircraft and then draw them out to be destroyed, and 2) tie up an enormous number of high-velocity guns (somewhere around 100k of them as I recall) and prevent them from being used to blunt the Russians in the East. The spin I read on it was also that it had a decent effect upon German oil refinement capacity, but while the Ploesti raids and the like were certainly spectacular I don't know if that's true.
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Jun 11, 2013 00:32
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Snowdens Secret posted:It seems less an issue with the airframes and more the weapon systems themselves. .50 cals were obviously obsolete by war's end, and even 20mm cannon are of middling use at jet intercept speeds. Plus trying to take down a bomber wing by hosing them down one by one is time consuming and dangerous. Effective air-air guided missiles were decades off. Nukes (the eventual fix) weren't small enough. So mounting a big rack of unguided rockets seemed like the best hope. They also had the Genie rocket, for which accuracy would only be a minor concern, because its warhead was nuclear.
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Jul 17, 2013 23:13
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Snowdens Secret posted:That's what I was referring to when I said nukes (the eventual solution) Oh, oops, somehow I skipped over that word. 
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Jul 18, 2013 00:56
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