Wingnut Ninja posted:

Airpowers.

piL posted:

It actually can counteract what I think is one big problem the military. The military's rigid authority system combined with time served requirements means that you get these large cohorts of officers with the same experience. Every Admiral and General in the US, for example, last had undergraduate experience before 2000, some before 1990. It may be longer than that (if ever) since they worked a job that wasn't in the military. You might get some new experience when these people went to grad school, but since they likely did that before their ten year mark that was still 2010 and assumes they didn't receive that experience from a war college or military postgraduate school. Bringing people in at higher point could mean more modern ideas in the conversations 20 years from now.

When Mattis retired in 2013 for example, he was 63 years old. It was 41 years since he had attended a school not funded by the DoD, ran by a military officer. There's a huge opportunity for senior members of the military to form their own shared and sheltered opinions that requires active effort and lots of reading to avoid.

For it to be worth it, you have to be careful about how many you let in, and that indoctrination probably has to be very strong to ensure your newly gained O-3 can work effectively with people who have 4-8 years of military experience.

quote:

NIFC-CA technology, which has used both an F-35 and E2-D Hawkeye as an airborne sensor to track and relay threat information, connects to a ship-based fire-control system able to launch an SM-6 to intercept store threats at further distances the ship defenses were previously able to do.

LingcodKilla posted:

Well we only had proxy wars and vaguely low scale wars compared to WW2 and nobody cares about browns or poor people so yes.

quote:

B-52, known as the Big Ugly Fat Fellow

Top Hats Monthly posted:

https://youtu.be/1B1EAeh6H_I

Imagine hearing this with no warning

Saukkis posted:

Why does it seem so difficult to equip a plane with a new missile, is the LRASM too large for P-8s or does it require extensive testing how the missile behaves when dropped? I would think the hardpoints were standard, is the problem with data interfaces with the plane or does P-8 require new equipment to be able to provide required data for the missile?

Mazz posted:

Pylons have to be safe to support weapons on takeoff, in-flight and landing
interfaces to the weapon need to be wired/installed
avionics need to support the weapon
weapon release needs to be safe
LRASM is pretty fuckin’ complicated

Arglebargle III posted:

Maybe it would be wrong to expect the water they were wading through to be heavily contaminated. After all, fire fighting water that contacted the core itself probably vaporized rather than flowing down into the sumps.

LibCrusher posted:

but making an easily visible line back to the sub ain’t one of them, chief.

Stravag posted:

Is the soviet/chinese bit because they used their own gear?

LibCrusher posted:

That $3 sensor is not an imager. You’re not getting that thing to display anything other than a voltage output indicating the presence of SWIR radiation.

You’d need something like this: https://www.oemcameras.com/tau-swir.htm?gclid=CjwKCAiAvonyBRB7EiwAadauqSrtUNMy_3BK2PsPdOXyf8wEuxAmHhNVA6SkU-k7Rzw_r8qtk4VC4BoC6-AQAvD_BwE

But again, you’re not going to get enough atmospheric scatter to see the beam.

I’ve worked with military laser designators in the 1-2 nanometer range for years and it is fairly easy for a special camera to see the spot, I have never once seen the beam itself.

piL posted:

We don't hear about the focused effective development plans with narrow objectives and effective outcomes because they don't get funded. Squeaky wheels get the fix and two squeaky wheels are louder than one.

bewbies posted:

M SHORAD is tentatively looking like it will deliver a world-class mobile short range air defense system below the cost of its relatively small initial budget

unsure why national interest hasn't been writing story after story about this

evil_bunnY posted:

That poo poo isn't and IMO shouldn't be newsworthy. Congrats on doing your job.

aphid_licker posted:

Hiring a guy with no own horse in the game isn't the worst move probably

BIG HEADLINE posted:

They could always buy an F/A-18A with a nice pedigree: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~nmartin/newhome/TheonlyF.html

Blistex posted:

So the question I have about the hyper-ranged rocket-assisted artillery shell is, how do you get it to hit anything but a stationary target you have a laser pointed at or the exact GPS coordinates of?

priznat posted:

You gotta, concur is a real stickler!!

ought ten posted:

I’m not an aerospace engineer or anything but I’ve been on planes and they already have holes cut in the fuselage. They’re called doors. Just roll the bombs out the side, I don’t see what the big deal is.

FuturePastNow posted:

If they can put a bigass telescope sticking out the side of a 747, they can probably put a giant artillery piece on one. Like a AC-130 but with 10x the range.

Just like a 280mm cannon firing laser-guided projectiles from 40k feet and 30 miles away, with a drone or a dude on the ground painting targets

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

If you get hit by a missile in a plane you are almost always hosed regardless of the thickness of the skin of the airplane.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Iran feels like it has the Tony Stark of aerospace industries in their ability to create solutions from limited resources.

Electric Wrigglies posted:

Is all the explanation a cover story to explain why the US went out of its way to obtain air defense hardware so they can supply the counter measures to Israel / Turkey for their games in Syria (does Iran get AD hardware from Russia?)? I assume the Russian electronic warfare equipment has been a bit more effective in countering efforts than has been led to believe.

Linking the coasts of Syria and Libya with truck mounted hardware into a integrated southern flank against NATO sounds like hogwash.

Nutapii posted:

I don't understand how this part is allowed. As a warship, isn't there an immediate need to repair damage it might suffer rather than waiting for a contractor to come out meaning the manuals have to be part of the package? If the manufacturer are concerned about manuals somehow being subject to FOI couldn't it just be classified?

Godholio posted:

It's not just allowed, it's celebrated and emphasized because COTS is usually cheaper than developing a new thing. Ideally the military would also buy a big stockpile of whatever, but we've been slicing and dicing the logistical capability for that since fall of the USSR.

piL posted:

But then there's all these in between that I have my doubts on. Is it worth it to fly a contractor out if we could just have a system that's Navy owned? What happens during wartime when [insert specific company]'s repair team isnt available to fly to such and such warzone?

Something I would advocate for if I knew how would be to fund open source manufacturing processes (or something conceptually similar). Need a pump? Let's pay someone to design an effective 'standard' pump and release the plans as a public good for industry to take advantage of. We get plans and the world gets plans, and the more US companies that make it, the easier it is to fit those factories into logistics if a protracted war a started. That might all be more expensive than buying a proprietary pump, but the advantage is further reaching than lots of ships.

Wingnut Ninja posted:

Mil specs aren't plans for how to build something though, they're just standards for how it has to perform. It's still left up to the manufacturer how to actually make the widget that meets those specifications.

What piL is proposing sounds more like building equipment under license from the designer, which was a big thing in WWII to increase capacity. You'd have multiple factories all making the same design of tank or airplane or engine or whatever, using the same plans and maybe even the same tooling (I'm not super knowledgeable about how that worked logistically). In this case, the license would simply be open source and freely available and pre-approved by the DoD.

piL posted:

we have to spec it ourselves or pay someone else to spec it, then pay someone to design and manufacture based on those specs. When we do this, even if its technically not sole source, it serves de facto as sole source, since other companies that don't make it don't have the data to affordably replicate or service it. If it starts costing twice as much for xcorp to make that item, so be it. These are specifically the cases I was thinking of. Obviously not appropriate for weapons or things with solely military purposes, but a database app to manage training requirements? Maybe someone else can use it.

Murgos posted:

the government is also the prime integrator [...] one of the MIC typical primes is [...] on contract to provide support for the integration effort.

We'll see how it works out on 4-5 years.

BIG HEADLINE posted:

I said diplomas have become more of a 'social contract' in recent history than a symbol of achievement. I'm open to dissenting opinions.

Signed, a dude with a BA and two MAs, because I was a glutton for punishment, but not so much as to go for a Ph.D.

mlmp08 posted:

No, they cannot. Receivers and local signals can be disrupted by such things. Sometimes the solution is as simple as digging a 1 foot hole, putting your receiver in the hole, and then you have signal again. GPS jamming is a real problem, but it's so often put out as "the satellite got jammed" when it's more that receivers get locally degraded by the highly local jammer. No $5 jammer is going to reach out to a GPS satellite and shut the whole thing down.

A cowbell doesn't block a concert, but ringing a cowbell at the person next to you during a concert will disrupt them, sure.

aphid_licker posted:

Yeah but what do you do with that, just lots of screws into the bottom of the body?

human garbage bag posted:

Are the people who maintain the US Air Force's planes considered to be part of the Air Force?

Blistex posted:

They were asking Honeywell to make the 737 avionics package "unpressurized rated". The word was it was probably for the B-21.

Syrian Lannister posted:

Carillon posted:

Does anyone have any good resources I could check out on the development or operational historys of the F-8 and A-7? My father flew both in Vietnam and in Top Gun, I know specifically the A-7 off the Oriskany in the Silver Foxes squadron, and I'd love to have some fun information next time I chat with him.

A lot of my knowledge, such as it is, on jet development tends to start at the end of WWII, some knowledge of the Sabre, and then a jump to everyone talking about the F-4. He's pretty proud of being part of the last gunfighter group, so any more info I could either share new or provide fodder for a conversation would be cool

bewbies posted:

I feel like an F-16 with an actively scanned radar and the latest AMRAAMs is probably the best bang for buck out there right now, although one cannot begin to tell the actual flyaway cost from any of these press releases.

Dante80 posted: