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Hedenius posted:Very cold war feeling news from Sweden. SÄPO (Swedish Security Service) found a network of about ten people who where collecting information about swedish military facilities. Taking pictures and making lists of installations. So of course they were Russian spies right? Or Chinese perhaps? Mortabis posted:TheFluff, check in please lol I've had my run-ins with the security service in the past, but I'll have you know it's never been related to anything that was actually my fault 
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Jan 23, 2020 16:57
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https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1080159632239276033?s=21
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Jan 23, 2020 17:25
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Captain von Trapp posted:That's a bold surmise on his part. I would love to see what percentage of people could answer even the most basic questions about nukes. How about whether China has any? Or whether we could shoot down Russian nukes? hm, very interesting, but imagine for a moment we're in the Cold War thread talking about a book published in 1987 wherein the author discusses public perception of nuclear weapons in the mid-1980's
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Jan 23, 2020 17:44
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I spent a few days with Moran in the course of the filming of the "Inside the Chieftain's Hatch" episodes about the strv 103 and the other tanks at Arsenalen. Seemed like a chill enough guy. He really wasn't all that well read on the Swedish tanks though - from memory there's a number of lines in those videos where he states a fact that I or the museum director told him about immediately prior to the shot. In retrospect I should have anticipated this because of course he doesn't speak Swedish and could not possibly have done his own research, and there's very little good info available in English, but he could have asked beforehand - I was available to him for at least a few months prior to the visit but he didn't really ask much at all, as far as I could remember. (As opposed to my research contact in Minsk, who had an absolutely neverending stream of questions about the most minute technical details.) I guess where I'm going with this is that as far as YouTube superstars go, Moran isn't half bad, but you gotta watch out for when he's talking about stuff he's actually done the research on and when he isn't. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 13:30
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when yeager was visiting sweden (to promote his memoirs, in 1986) and got a test flight in the viggen, he was relegated to the back seat for some bureaucratic reason or another, and apparently he was really salty about that. there's a interview with him in some old issue of a swedish flight magazine where he just spends several pages making GBS threads on the swedish airforce in general and the viggen in particular, it's hilarious.
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Dec 10, 2020 |
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Dec 10, 2020 09:28
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The systems complexity is pretty high yes (or was, for the early 1970's) but if you're just flying it around it's a very simple aircraft to deal with. You don't need to deal with the computer at all really for basic VFR flight. The HUD would not make a whole lot of sense to anyone used to basically any other HUD though - the symbology is "quirky", let's say. Also the SK37 has controls in both seats, so the instructor could take over at any time.
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Dec 10, 2020 10:57
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TK-42-1 posted:How much are UUVs used by modern navies? I'd think they would have a lot of utility in minesweeping and passive recon. It'd probably be pretty easy to set them up as mine equivalents that could actively seek targets instead of just static mines, but then again I'm not up to date on modern mines and how they function compared to the WW2 floaters. The Swedish navy operates a number of them for minesweeping, and so do the Norwegians. The navy estimates that during the world wars somewhere around 165,000 naval mines were deployed around the Swedish coasts and that around 40,000 of them are still there, so there's no shortage of realistic targets for minesweeping exercises. Here's an open source paper with a lot of interesting tidbits, by a Swedish navy officer. It's in Swedish of course but a lot of the technical terminology is in English so it probably machine translates fairly well. Mainly about minesweeping though.
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Dec 12, 2020 13:48
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Binary Badger posted:Why do they want to build diesel subs, which haven't been in great use since WWII and the advent of nuclear subs?  You've gotten dunked on repeatedly already but seriously, this is just a bizarre statement. It's basically just the US and the UK that have gone all-nuclear. The Russians absolutely never did, operating hundreds of diesel boats. The USN had to lease a Swedish submarine to exercise anti-submarine warfare against diesel-electrics back when AIP was new over 20 years ago (HMS Gotland - the boat the USN leased - You go nuclear when you have power projection megalomania, basically. For coastal defense nuclear has very few advantages, if any at all, while being enormously much more expensive to build and operate. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Dec 21, 2020 |
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Dec 21, 2020 02:10
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PCjr sidecar posted:https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-of-the-first-microprocessor-f-14/ The hardware in first generation integrated circuit computers was surprisingly reliable. Saab had a similar experience with the central computer in the AJ 37 Viggen. That was roughly contemporary with the CACD but was not a microprocessor (since it wasn't all on one integrated circuit), but on the other hand it had far wider responsibilities than the CACD, being a central component in almost all the aircraft systems. After 30 years of service Saab's original estimates for component reliability compared rather favorably to the actual results:   Source, also worth reading but a lot drier than the Tomcat article
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Dec 28, 2020 00:43
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In the Swedish cold war armed forces the stereotype was that tankers were all short, squat and hot-tempered. The strv 103 in particular was really cramped and so the conscription system did not assign you to tank crew positions if you were over 175 cm tall (a bit under 5' 9"). Aggressiveness, quick reactions and ability to take own initiatives were also seen as desirable qualities for tank crews and particularly in tank commanders, hence the hot-tempered stereotype. Submariners on the other hand were stereotypically short, squat and composed.
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Jan 25, 2021 15:02
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Murgos posted:Granted. But if you don't think 'software defined' implies size, weight and power constraints then, well, you're completely wrong. Exactly this. One of the major selling points of the Gripen E/F over the C/D is a significantly expanded onboard EW suite, probably powered by Saab's new hot GaN-based emitters and all that jazz. Adding this capability though required an airframe modification in the form of an extra cooling air intake just ahead of the tailfin, just to cool the electronics. So while miniaturization made this new capability possible it didn't reduce the requirements for the airframe; instead it added new ones. JcDent posted:I guess they used up the supply of aggressive people on the tanks, huh. More like submariners have to be very patient and not prone to panicking.
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Jan 25, 2021 15:18
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Captain von Trapp posted:So there's IMUs and there's INS, an inertial navigation system that uses an IMU. The phone you're holding and that quadcopters use for orientation maintenance has IMUs of typically degrees per second and a few percent of g accuracy. If you want an INS to do inertial navigation over significant periods of time, that's a much harder task that requires many orders of magnitude higher accuracy involving breadbox sized IMUs with seven digit price tags. If you deny a quadcopter GPS or other kinds of position input, it's going to have no idea where it is in short order. Captain von Trapp posted:The two big question marks are IMU error and laser range. IMU position error growth is typically quadratic in time, but a good (thousands of dollars instead of the few bucks found in a phone or quadcopter) INS is self-calibrating for as long as it does have GPS and will thus have a lot of that error calibrated away once GPS gets denied. We'll leave aside spoofing - that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Ignoring that, we've circled back around to the cruise missile problem set. They're certainly good enough to fly inertially with good accuracy, although they might also have alternate methods of position finding like terrain following radar and so forth. Laser denial/damage thresholds against sensors depends on the specifics of the laser and sensor, often by many orders of magnitude. People who know about that kind of thing wouldn't talk about the details, of course. There's alternatives to full on inertial systems that don't involve GPS or other external sources. The AJ 37 Viggen had a pseudo-inertial system based on dead reckoning - the onboard computer used attitude in all three axes (taken from the same course and attitude gyros that powered the artificial horizon/ADI), airspeed, altitude and air temperature (from the air data sensors) to calculate a naive ground speed, then corrected for wind speed to obtain actual ground speed. Correcting for windspeed could be done either based on forecast wind as input into the computer before or during flight, or by comparing naive ground speed to the radar altimeter's doppler-measured ground speed. Then it integrated this speed every 103 milliseconds to keep the aircraft position continuously updated. This was developed in the mid-1960's. Of course this sort of system is not 100% accurate so it accumulates an error over time - it drifts. You had to overfly a landmark (or measure its position with the radar) once or a few times per mission to correct the position. In the early 90's though most of the need for this was eliminated by introducing a TERNAV system, a terrain altitude database which would automatically correct the position as long as you were over land and low enough for the radar altimeter to work. This terrain database was stored on a data cartridge with a whopping 8 megabytes of memory, and that included the program executable that actually used the database (the original 1960's computer had something like 26 kB of ferrite core memory in modern units, IIRC - the memory unit was the size of a microwave oven and weighed something like 50 kg). The upside of this system was that they didn't have to install an expensive super accurate INS gyro in the aircraft and they didn't have to deal with the readiness problems stemming from half hour long INS alignments either (instead, the gyros take a maximum of 102 seconds to align). I don't know if you can put a reasonable air data sensor in a drone but other than that I don't see why you couldn't do something like this with some super cheap microcontroller today. Or you could measure ground speed with laser, probably. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 00:04
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https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39081/swedens-bigger-badder-gripen-fighter-packs-a-lot-of-punch-in-an-incredibly-efficient-package this reads like it was written by saab's marketing department but it's still pretty interesting
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Feb 5, 2021 09:29
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lasers are fundamentally fair-weather-only weapon systems so I don't see how they're going to replace existing systems except in applications that are exclusively for targets at very short range (significantly less than a kilometer). like, the effective range is reduced to basically nothing in rain or snow (or in dense smoke, for that matter, which is not unheard of on an actual battlefield). relying entirely on lasers as CIWS in the north atlantic in winter is just not happening. that means miniaturization has to come far enough not just to replace existing systems on a 1:1 basis, but significantly further such that you can keep the existing system and have a laser as a cheaper alternative in good weather. i remain unconvinced lasers will be fielded at a large scale in the foreseeable future. or, rather, except as a countermeasure to other systems that are also fair weather only though, like very small and cheap drones.
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 23:24
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I think this is the highest quality footage I've ever seen of Viggens in actual military service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0S8eA7PzaY From 2004, the last days of the 4th air wing out of Östersund and also the last days of the Viggen in service. Bunch of interesting things going on that you won't ever get to see Viggens do anymore - formation takeoffs and landings, for example. Also check out 27:25 for some sweet afterburners-at-night action. Unrelatedly, interesting posts about Switzerland. The fortresses have a lot of Swedish parallels, although usually with less mountains and more water (but not always, as in Boden - the one in Norrland, not Bodensee). I recently got a great book about the coastal artillery in the Stockholm archipelago, and, well, it turns out there was a lot of it. Remind me to post about 12 cm tornautomatpjäs m/70 and its predecessors sometime.
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Mar 2, 2021 03:14
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JcDent posted:And a completely left field question: can you repurpose an obsolete AShM or AA missile into a Yemeni cruise missile, and why not? Is it the range (the Krug can do Mach 4... for 55 kilometers), the missiles not being designed for maneuvers, or the difficulty of developing and producing the guidance kit would mean that you'd be better off with a clean-sheet design? Turbojet powered anti-ship missiles are basically cruise missiles already, all they need is some new targeting logic. Saab sells versions of the RBS 15 that can be used against ground targets with various seeker options, but even the base version of the missile can be programmed with a navigation polygon (waypoints to pass on the way to the target and altitudes to keep between them), and it has evasive maneuvering in the terminal phase etc. It's also designed from the start to be possible to launch from a variety of platforms (planes, trucks, ships). That's mid-1980's tech, but you could maybe in theory have added the same sort of targeting capability to the older rb 04E that was carried by the Lansen and Viggen, if you replaced the entire seeker head and just kept the airframe, the engine, the control surfaces and the warhead. It wouldn't really make sense though for a number of reasons - for one thing it has much shorter range (only a bit over 20 km, maybe approaching 30km on a good day - it's got a solid rocket motor, not a turbojet), and it doesn't have anywhere near the thrust needed to accelerate to cruise speed. It relies on being at high subsonic speeds when it separates from the carrying aircraft to begin with. It can only be used over open sea too because it just maintains a set distance (<10m) over the surface with a simple radar altimeter.
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Mar 2, 2021 16:13
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Nebakenezzer posted:I watched the sub brief youtube Please don't do that. I only watched one video, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HIyW4PC8vo and it's full of complete nonsense and poo poo the guy just makes up from whole cloth. To give some context, the Swedish navy set off a big sub hunt near the Muskö naval base in October 1982. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move, because the navy insisted it was a submarine but had no proof. This was only one year after S-363 had run aground near Karlskrona so a lot of people were willing to take their word for it, but when the whole thing was finally declassified enough to analyze, 30 years later, it turns out the whole thing was basically an example of how dangerous classified-info echo chambers can be and how cult-like such environments can become. The Defense Research Institute published a report in 2008 (PDF, in Swedish, summary in English) that concluded that the only recording the navy had managed to actually get was of a taxi boat ferrying journalists (reporting on the whole circus) around. Now, over a decade later, this guy sits on youtube and implies he's cut down hours of classified recordings to find these sounds, which he as a sonar operator is qualified to confidently state is a submarine. The truth is that this recording is exactly 3 minutes and 47 seconds long and was declassified and published in 2007 (it's in fact colloquially known in some particular nerd circles as "the 3:47 recording"). It's the same recording as the one being analyzed in the report above, and that recording concluded with a great deal of confidence that this is indeed not a submarine. I know it can't possibly be any other recording because this is in fact the only recording from this whole debacle that has ever been published. There may be other recordings rotting away on tape in some navy archive but not even the navy themselves are claiming those contain submarine sounds. So this guy is basically just making poo poo up based on the recording, which he fundamentally misrepresents in the first place, and has absolutely no reference to the mountains of reports, articles and books that have been published about this whole debacle, let alone to any primary sources. As far as I can tell he's some lovely video game streamer who's tried to pivot to military history. Don't watch this garbage. Seriously, any military history channel on youtube must be approached with extreme suspicion. In fact, don't watch military history on youtube at all, it's basically just garbage and the small fraction that isn't garbage is going to have a list of works cited in the video description so just go read those books and/or papers instead. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2021 00:47
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priznat posted:https://twitter.com/9NewsSyd/status/1372060067051175937 In the US the navy has an army, but in 18th century Sweden the army had a navy (in addition to the actual navy, of course). Glad to see this practice making a comeback. Ironically by the way there are barely any significant Swedish naval victories, and the one really big one there is (Svensksund, 1790) was won by the army's navy.
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Mar 19, 2021 01:50
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American government agencies are just structurally terrible at contract writing and procurement in general, but especially when it comes to engineering projects of various kinds. If you want to buy custom engineered solutions you must understand what you're buying and that means having an in-house engineering team of your own, or you'll get ripped off no matter what. There are other factors as well (such as the legal system) that hamper American government procurement, but I think in general American government procurement is just fundamentally broken on a structural level. All government procurement is corrupt to some degree but in the US the state is actively trying to get ripped off.
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Apr 6, 2021 01:30
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CarForumPoster posted:Hey so I've actually talked to the engineers working for the government. There's plenty of issues but "they don't exist and/or they don't understand how these systems/subsystems work" is not one of the issues. No, it was mostly me being an rear end in a top hat late at night. Most of what I've read in depth about American procurement actually has more to do with public transit than military matters, and I was kinda assuming things were similar everywhere. Transit is plagued by a lot of structural issues with government side organizations that seem to be intentionally designed by the political side of things to be unable to do anything effectively other than siphoning public funds into fraudulent contractor pockets, and basically every project is at least twice as expensive as anything equivalent elsewhere in the world. I apologize for posting unsubstantiated garbage. In completely unrelated news, the saber-rattling along the Ukrainian border has escalated into saber-rattling all over Russia: https://twitter.com/pmakela1/status/1379408781407354882
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Apr 6, 2021 16:53
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Wingnut Ninja posted:I can buy the argument that, in retrospect, the B-29 didn't provide a capability commensurate with its huge development cost, but "boondoggle" implies that it was not an effective combat aircraft, which doesn't seem to be supported. It was an effective combat aircraft against Japan because by the time it got into service the Japanese didn't have any high altitude fighters left to oppose it with. As bewbies points out, in Korea they had to relegate it to night bombing once the MiG-15 showed up. This is the perennial problem with USAF bombing doctrine - it assumes the US already has massive air superiority, or it won't work. The lessons learned in WW2 echo even today. So was it an effective combat aircraft? Yes, well, it could drop a lot of bombs from very far away, assuming there weren't too much resistance on the receiving end. Was it actually necessary to have that range and payload for anything other than Japan in WW2 though?
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Apr 7, 2021 16:09
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The Swedish air force's most prominent Gripen display pilot has the call sign "Starbutt", but I don't know if the why is public information...
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May 18, 2021 14:56
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Swedish newspaper DN is running an interesting story today; bunch of old pilots and other air force men reveal that the Swedish air force was doing very aggressive recon flyovers of Soviet territory as late as autumn of 1958. Not just taking high altitude photos from across the border while over the Baltic, but actually penetrating Soviet airspace at very low altitude and overflying harbors like Gdansk (Poland) and Liepaja (Latvia) as well as the former Nazi V2 development complex in Peenemünde to take close range photos from directly overhead. They did this in the recon version of the Saab 29 Tunnan, the S 29C, with all markings including nationality roundels blacked out. It was previously known the airforce had been flying recon Spitfires very far into Soviet territory over the Kola peninsula in the early 50's, but this has been kept completely secret until today. This is contemporary with the U-2. Pretty nuts. Hopefully I may get around to posting a translation later. e: small animated slideshow explaining the mission profile: https://ext.dn.se/qs/widgets/patron/VideoSwipe/?id=5894 TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 18:18
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duodenum posted:Speaking of shooting down airplanes, when I was in the Marines I worked on Prowlers. I’d heard stories about how they supported this mission and that mission, but most of what they did (and could do) was pretty secret. Even the most basic radar antenna is going to have strong side and back lobe suppression. That is to say, radar designers try very hard to make the radar incapable of receiving signals from any direction other than the one the it's pointing. This is because aiming the main lobe (pointing the antenna, so to speak) is actually the only way a radar has to determine the direction to a target. It's not possible to suppress the side and back lobes perfectly, but the open literature I've read says that typically the main lobe returns are amplified to be roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than the side or back lobes. I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that in general, a radar antenna that's pointed at a target is not susceptible to jamming from any signal source that isn't in the same place as the target itself. The story becomes a lot more plausible if the idea is that an EW aircraft creates fake targets that the SAM then locks on and launches at, because that's quite doable, especially against older equipment. With enough knowledge of how the radar operates, you can generate signals that look like its own echoes and thus make it see whatever it is you want it to see. This is much harder than it sounds though because the radar operator can change a lot of settings at any time and if you don't match them immediately they'll know something's up. So then you try to automate it, but they probably have secret modes that are only to be used in an actual shooting war that you didn't know about and now you know why there's so much hush-hush about EW. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 11:18
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Unrelatedly: is the USN seriously going to just go ahead with the Zumwalts even though they have no actual weapons now? The super fancy 155mm guns (AGS) have been unusable for years now since there's no ammunition and no plans for any ammunition, and the navy's railgun project seems cancelled and is winding down this year, and there's... nothing else? I guess they're just gonna run around with empty turrets? lol? e: I guess it has VLS cells? fewer than a Burke though despite being significantly larger 
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 11:34
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Military organizations and similar secretive in-groups are absolute hotbeds for collective delusions for a variety of reasons (they have some disturbing similarities with certain types of cults), so it's probably just that. There's plenty of historical examples of this; see for example the Swedish navy being absolutely one hundred percent convinced that the entire Stockholm archipelago was full of tracked submarines driving around on the seabed for over a decade, despite there being absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever put tracks on a submarine (no such submarine ever existed, of course). They were just comically incompetent, not even managing to turn sonar recording equipment on and off reliably, and still they worked half the nation into a frenzy that made people see frogmen in every bay and inlet. For a more recent example just look at the USN's whole UFO circus in all its magnificent glory. The sad part about these things is that so much prestige tends to get invested into insisting that it's absolutely not delusional that everything gets classified for being too embarrassing to talk about until everyone relevant has at least retired, so we don't even get to laugh about it until decades later.Sagebrush posted:In fighter jets, negative stability means that the plane always wants to turn harder than it currently is, which is great in combat. It also makes the plane extremely difficult to fly by hand, so you have a flight computer that's constantly making the tiny adjustments needed to keep the marble balanced. When the pilot pulls on the stick, the computer just "relaxes stability" in the pitch axis and basically lets the plane go and pitch up like it wants to.  This is a very common pop understanding, but it's not really correct. Negative static stability isn't generally beneficial; the hypothetical ideal aircraft has perfectly neutral static stability at any alpha (but this is of course aerodynamically impossible). Any control surface deflection causes extra drag, which is something you don't want, and the stronger your negative static stability, the more you have to deflect the control surfaces to stop the alpha from increasing. It's the exact same thing as with positive stability but working in the other direction - instead of wanting to return to a stable attitude, the plane wants to flip over, and in both cases you need a constant control surface deflection to keep it at any given attitude, in one direction or the other. On paper it would seem like negative static stability could be beneficial in the sense that it could make attitude changes faster (since they become self-reinforcing feedback loops), but in practice this is not the case, because you run into rate limits on the control surfaces - you can easily make an aircraft with strong negative static stability capable of attitude changes that accelerate so quickly that the control surfaces cannot physically be moved fast enough to counteract them. You just need a tiny little control surface deflection to start the maneuver but then you immediately need a bigger deflection in the other direction to prevent it from immediately going out of control.We can thank NASA for finding that out for us with the X-29 (that wacky thing with the forward-swept wings) back in the 80's. After a long series of trials and FCS development they concluded that it in fact had significantly slower pitch control response than conventional fighter jets did. It wasn't that the plane itself was slow to respond, but rather the opposite - it constantly wanted to flip over so bad that the limiting factor on how fast the flight control system could allow it to change attitude was how fast the hydraulics were physically capable of moving the canards to counteract the attitude change that they had just initiated. NASA estimated that in order to make the X-29 as responsive in pitch as the F-18 was, they'd need actuators that could move at least 50% faster (and the existing ones were already capable of rotating the canards at over 100°/s). See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.500.28&rep=rep1&type=pdf if you want the gory details. Page 16 has a nice diagram directly comparing the pitch rate of the F-18 vs the X-29. e: actually lemme just screenshot that for you, that paper is pretty heavy reading and is mostly about control theory and not so much about aerodynamics. (highlights mine, of course)  e2: clarification: forgot to mention that there is one benefit of slight to moderate negative longitudinal static stability though. to keep an aircraft with positive stability at a stable positive alpha the tailplane has to generate a downforce, which the rest of the lifting surfaces have to carry. with negative stability you don't get that, so e.g. flying at a constant high alpha in an aircraft with negative stability costs less lift (and hence has less drag) than it would with equivalent positive stability. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Oct 10, 2021 |
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Oct 10, 2021 01:48
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Robert Bartholomew on Havana syndrome. Psychosomatic problems are some weird poo poo, and the worst thing is that although the symptoms are very real people tend to react with violent rejection when you tell them it's psychogenic, as if psychological problems were somehow less real. brain not good.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:36
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Davin Valkri posted:Wasn't one of the criticisms of planning for the Cold War that industrial centers and such were heavily targeted, when a "cold war gone hot" scenario would be over one way or another before that industry came into play? Some saw the writing on the wall even before Trinity, and tried to counter it to the best of their imagination. SAAB started construction on a full combat aircraft factory in an underground bunker blasted 35 meters down into the bedrock in 1943. Over 21000 square meters of floor area in a two story concrete building constructed inside the blasted cavern. They used it as a workshop in some form until 1998; these days it's just storage. See here for some cool photos.
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Oct 19, 2021 18:13
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From Alex Wellerstein comes some real good research about the US response to the Soviet 100 megaton Tsar Bomba - An unearthly spectacle: the untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb. This is as cold_war.txt as it gets - they made the biggest bomb casing that could fit in a B-52's bomb bay, with the doors removed. It's ridiculous. Then there's this bit, which is just  quote:At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons. Most of Teller’s testimony remains classified to this day, but other scientists at the meeting recorded, after Teller had left, that they were “shocked” by his proposal. “It would contaminate the Earth,” one suggested. Physicist I. I. Rabi, by then an experienced Teller skeptic, suggested it was probably just an “advertising stunt.”[4] But he was wrong; Livermore would for several years continue working on Gnomon, at least, and had even planned to test a prototype for the device in Operation Redwing in 1956 (but the test never took place).[5] Footnote 5 reads: quote:A Freedom of Information Act request by the author in 2015 obtained a few reports on Gnomon research at Livermore. By March 1955, there were at least 40 of them. Unfortunately, nearly every word in said reports, except for the date and number, were redacted by the National Nuclear Security Administration. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 16:40
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It's a return to earlier work but it's a lot of new material. The article isn't really about Teller's wild ideas (I just quoted that because, well) but rather about the prototypes for an US 50-100 MT weapon. I don't think the Flashback and BTV programs were known before (and there are pictures now, too).
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 16:54
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madeintaipei posted:How hard can it be developing a small, strong, twin-engined, propeller-driven AWACS platform? saab would be happy to sell you some they stopped mounting them on 340's though and started putting them on (canadian!) business jets instead (bombardier global 6000). swedish air force just ordered a couple of them, to replace the old ASC890 ones (that's the ones on saab 340's)
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Oct 30, 2021 17:55
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Sort of related to that Iranian chopper buzzing from a few pages back, here's a good cold war story from the Viggen days of the Swedish air force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKiloUCxtSw (Video has some footage of one of the two currently flying Viggens at the start; story starts at around 3:07) It's in Swedish but I'll post an English transcript below. I've made only very mild attempts to clean up the off-the-cuff conversational style, but I did leave some notes/clarifications in square brackets. Keep well in mind though that this is a pilot story, which is another way of saying "a tall tale". I'm posting it for its entertainment value, not to make any sort of historical claim. Alf Ingesson Thoor posted:The yanks had their aircraft carriers out between Norway and Denmark, and were doing some kind of big rear end exercise... and they had declared that nobody could come close to their carriers, they had a "no-fly zone" of... I don't remember, a number of kilometers. And that... the commander of E 1 [1st Air Group; essentially the Swedish equivalent of the Strategic Air Command but without the nukes], he saw red. So we were basically ordered... We planned our exercise flights such that we were going to pass through that area, all the time. Because nobody's gonna tells us that we're not allowed to fly over international waters. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 19:34
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bewbies posted:F-35 definitely costs more per hour, but I don't think there's any way they get Gripen-E (I'm assuming this is the variant they're interested in) for anywhere near the flyaway cost of an F-35...I feel like Brazil paid in the $140mm range for their Gripen buy? Cost aside, F-35 makes your air component a whole lot more coalition-relevant, plus its a far more capable and future-proof platform. Fighter costs are fundamentally not comparable without access to classified info. In the Brazil case yeah it's 4.7 billion for 36 fighters in 2015 dollars, but that doesn't actually say anything about the cost of the fighter itself. It's a gigantic contract that runs over decades and includes development costs (for one thing Brazil basically paid for most of the development of the two-seater F version AFAIK, and I think they'll get their own custom big head-down display too), technology transfers including Saab taking on a bunch of Brazilian engineers, a license production agreement, spare parts and support, and so on and so forth, but none of the details are public. The details of what just the jet itself costs are almost never public in general. There's an old figure for the Swedish defense material administration writing up a series production contract for 273 million SEK (roughly $30M) per tail, but that's probably changed since then and there was probably horse trading involved, so who knows. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 14:36
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quote is not edit
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Dec 3, 2021 14:41
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Mortabis posted:The problem is at this point the F-35 is actually a better jet all the way around the board and also the Liberals ran like a decade ago on not buying it. Even Switzerland picked the F-35. Switzerland picked the Gripen but then a public referendum rejected the idea of buying any fighter. As an additional data point re: Gripen costs, the figure that gets thrown around in domestic politics here is 90 billion SEK for 60 aircraft (~$10B, ~$166M per tail), but that's actually the projected total life cycle cost of the entire program over 30 years. That's buying the jets themselves, all the spare parts and maintenance, operational costs, almost everything except weapons and development AFAIK (e: no, that actually includes development costs as well). I can easily believe the claim that you can get at least twice as many Gripens as F-35's for the same money, but I don't think there's any reasonable way for me to convincingly prove that so it's just some worthless internet opinion. All that being said I too doubt that Canada will choose the Gripen, but I also don't think Saab would stay on as a bidder if they didn't think they had at least a chance. They've backed out of bids before when the odds seemed too stacked against them. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 17:07
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Double posting because I found a better source (paywalled and in Swedish but let me know if you want me to quote it). As of January 2019, the total sum of all the Swedish government contracts with Saab for the entire Gripen E program was 36.8 billion SEK (~$4B), or 613 million SEK per aircraft (~$67M) for the 60 aircraft on order. That's program cost, not flyaway cost - it includes development. I'm not sure to what degree it includes spare parts and support contracts though, if any. I believe Lockmart's most recent claim of F-35 flyaway cost (marginal cost to build a single aircraft off the existing production line at that point, excluding all historical costs of the hilarious development program) was something on the order of $70M. So, yeah, a Gripen E being half the price (flyaway cost) of an F-35 sounds pretty reasonable.
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 17:30
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ought ten posted:What would make them pull out even if they thought it was hopeless? Is it expensive to stay in at this point? Or more like “I’d rather quit than be fired”? It's a bit of both I think. Making a bid on a huge government contract like this is really loving expensive. You need to provide an enormous amount of data, probably in some incredibly obnoxious format nobody else uses (that means you hire a bunch of extremely expensive consultants specialized in writing bids to this particular government), hire a gazillion lawyers and lobbyists, and of course bribe a lot of people. Then the entire process takes many years so you need to keep a lot of these people on retainer for a long time. It's also bad PR for the plane if it gets rejected, even if it's on purely geopolitical grounds, because nobody actually says that it's for those reasons, they just say "we chose the best plane". TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 17:50
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knox_harrington posted:https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-set-to-vote-on-multi-billion-fighter-jet-purchase/46057020 Yes, that's a different referendum. Last time (in 2014) the air force and the parliament picked the Gripen E but the referendum blocked it - not on the grounds that it was the wrong plane, but rather that they didn't want to spend money on fighters at all. Different bid this time with different offset agreements and a different geopolitical situation, but it still was very close to getting blocked again, for basically the same reasons. The Gripen E bid was submitted again but retracted before evaluation, because the Swiss authorities recommended Saab not to participate in the trials, ostensibly on the grounds that they would be only intended for aircraft in operational service as of 2019. I read that as meaning "we're going to pick for geopolitical reasons this time so don't even bother". I guess you could say they've actually picked both the F-35 and the Gripen. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 20:53
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Vahakyla posted:But now rumors appear that PM Marin’s government had made the choice long ago. Well yeah, they set the total budget and the number of tails several years ago, so who could possibly have guessed that they'd choose the most expensive alternative in order to use up all the allocated money? Powerful departmental end-of-fiscal-year-spending energy here. It's really comical how they're claiming that a plane that literally costs twice as much as the competitor is actually cheaper, though. F-35 is definitely the wrong choice of course. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 10, 2021 |
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Dec 10, 2021 16:28
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:27 |
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f-35 bad
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Dec 10, 2021 16:34
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