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priznat posted:As long as it's over Alberta it's all good. 1) I don't think anyone would notice if you nuked Sudbury. 2) We need an Arrow thread, gently caress the haters.
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Mar 11, 2011 10:17
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MA-Horus posted:1) I don't think anyone would notice if you nuked Sudbury. I looked up the Ontario Bomarc site on google maps and it's literally right on (part of) the trans-canada, surprising that it's not a little more off the beaten path: http://goo.gl/maps/TttR Arrows were cool as hell. Oldschool interceptors were the best like that and the English Electric Lightning.. Powerrrrrrr!
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Mar 11, 2011 10:25
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priznat posted:I looked up the Ontario Bomarc site on google maps and it's literally right on (part of) the trans-canada, surprising that it's not a little more off the beaten path: http://goo.gl/maps/TttR Old-school interceptors were kinda like muscle-cars. Point in a straight line and loving boogie. I think the Arrow would have done it better then all of them.
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Mar 11, 2011 10:34
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My dad's cousin flew CF-104s and he managed to not crash any of them! (They had about a 50% rate of attrition IIRC) Another interceptor but then also used for strike and recon. Much smaller than the Electric Lightning/Avro/Voodoo though. He is a tallish dude and I think he was literally right on the extreme edge of height allowable for fighter pilots. Bonus: sweet tiger paint job  
priznat fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Mar 11, 2011 |
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Mar 11, 2011 10:45
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McNally posted:Thud Ridge is good. I remember reading a crazy book about a dude flying an F105 'thud' named Terrible Tina and everything was god awful.
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Mar 11, 2011 16:48
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Flanker posted:I remember reading a crazy book about a dude flying an F105 'thud' named Terrible Tina and everything was god awful. Pak Six, maybe? I haven't read it but I've heard decent things about the book.
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Mar 11, 2011 17:05
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MA-Horus posted:Old-school interceptors were kinda like muscle-cars. Point in a straight line and loving boogie. I think the Arrow would have done it better then all of them.  http://www.alexstoll.com/AircraftOfTheMonth/7-01.html  http://area51specialprojects.com/yf-12.html The LRIX project was pretty sweet and pretty much exactly the "point in straight line, hit GO!" style interceptors. They were designed around the missile that became the AIM-54 Phoenix. Yes, that is a weaponized version of the SR-71 blackbird. Edit: Oh, and the GAR-9 missile was initially designed with a 200 kT nuclear warhead in mind. Kablooie! NosmoKing fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 11, 2011 |
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Mar 11, 2011 18:25
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priznat posted:My dad's cousin flew CF-104s and he managed to not crash any of them! (They had about a 50% rate of attrition IIRC) Another interceptor but then also used for strike and recon. Much smaller than the Electric Lightning/Avro/Voodoo though. Couple of fun facts about the F-104: early in the design it was determined that the high t-tail would be too risky to clear with a conventional upward ejecting seat, so they designed it to eject out the bottom. As you might guess, this tends to be detrimental if you are ejecting at low altitude, and after a lot of pilots were killed because of this they retrofitted a new upward ejecting seat that was capable of clearing the t-tail. The pilots also had to wear spurs, which connected to a reel of wire in the ejection seat...when the ejection sequence was initiated, the takeoff reel would pull back, locking the feet into positions to prevent them from flailing and injuring/amputating them. Walking around with spurs only added to the  mystique a lot of the Starfighter pilots adopted.Regarding the loss rate of Canadian Starfighters...yup, they lost right around 50%, a lot of them operating in West Germany. The Luftwaffe lost around 30% of theirs, leading to the dark joke...what's the best way to get an F-104? Buy a plot of land in Germany and wait. The loss rate was probably a combination of the generally lovely Western European weather, lots of low level high speed flying since the -G and CF-104 models were intended to perform as multi-role aircraft with a nuclear strike mission being a large component of that, the adoption of a high speed high altitude interceptor design to be a low level strike aircraft (still not sure what everyone was smoking with that one...although this may have had something to do with it, and in its defense its high wing loading gave it a stable low level ride), and finally the fact that many of the air forces that adopted the Starfighter went from relatively low performance aircraft (think F-86s) straight to the F-104, which is quite a leap in performance. Additionally, that high performance nature also meant the F-104 had some nasty tricks it could spring on you if you weren't careful. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Lockheed C2 upward ejecting seat that replaced the downward ejecting C1 was not zero-zero capable; it required around 100 mph of speed in order to effectively function. This limitation turned a lot of mishaps into fatal ones, and many of the air forces who were operating the type after the USAF eventually replaced the seat with a Martin-Baker that had zero/zero capability. The J-79 engine powering the Starfighter had an interesting quirk...at certain throttle settings it would make an eerie howl due to the interaction of airflow around the exhaust section. Observe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozIRwMhRVRY&feature=related All J-79s were somewhat capable of doing this, but it was especially pronounced in the F-104 (and the F-4, to a lesser extent.) NosmoKing posted:
Point of order...the YF-12 was actually a development of the A-12 Oxcart program, the predecessor to the SR-71 (although they look similar, the A-12 and SR-71 were two different albeit related aircraft). The YF-12 basically turned into the white side of the Oxcart program...it was publicly announced to provide a plausible excuse when people saw a weird looking aircraft. "Nope, not doing anything weird out in the desert with reconnaissance aircraft or anything, just building a couple of high speed interceptors."
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Mar 11, 2011 20:05
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A bunch of people posted:book recommendations
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Mar 11, 2011 20:21
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Is Bat*21 an alright book? I kind of liked the movie for a lazy sunday flick. Gene Hackman + Danny Glover + O-2s + EB-66 = how can you go wrong. It looks like they had a ton of fun filming the O-2 scenes, especially.
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Mar 11, 2011 20:30
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iyaayas01 posted:Point of order...the YF-12 was actually a development of the A-12 Oxcart program, the predecessor to the SR-71 (although they look similar, the A-12 and SR-71 were two different albeit related aircraft). The YF-12 basically turned into the white side of the Oxcart program...it was publicly announced to provide a plausible excuse when people saw a weird looking aircraft. "Nope, not doing anything weird out in the desert with reconnaissance aircraft or anything, just building a couple of high speed interceptors." But the interceptors had essentially the same performance and design as the recon variant. Pull off the radome and remove the little under engine nacelle fins from the YF-12 and you've pretty much got the SR-71. The YF-12 fired several of the GAR-9 missiles and scored a hit with each of them with the exception of a missile that had a power failure. I liked the last launch where they shot a missile from 76,000+ feet and hit a target drone moving along at 500 feet. That's some "shoot down" capability.
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Mar 11, 2011 21:35
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NosmoKing posted:But the interceptors had essentially the same performance and design as the recon variant. Pull off the radome and remove the little under engine nacelle fins from the YF-12 and you've pretty much got the SR-71. Oh, I didn't mean to imply that they didn't have similar performance and design, I was just being pedantic about which airframe the YF-12 was developed from...I mean, technically speaking the YF-12 first flew about a year and a half before the SR-71's first flight.
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Mar 12, 2011 02:33
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A hundred feet over hell by Jim Hooper is a great book. The author also happens to be a photojournalist who covered a load of anti-communist conflict. http://www.jimhooper.co.uk/imagegalleries.html
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Mar 12, 2011 11:50
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Interesting fact about Canada's go-fast bird. The Iroquois Orenda engine, that was custom-built for the Arrow was flight-tested on a B-47 that was called the CL-52. It was mounted on the tail because that was the only place to put it, turning it into a real bitch to control. Another problem was that the engine kept overspeeding the airframe. At 75% throttle. In a climb. It got to the point that when the US got the airframe back it was so stressed they scrapped it on the spot. Those engines would have been MONSTERS, 30000lbs of thrust each.
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Mar 12, 2011 12:44
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The guy that wrote Thud Ridge also wrote another book called Going Downtown, which had interesting information about testing of rockets in Korea before advancing to Vietnam. He got court-martialed and his board had some pretty big names on it.
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Mar 14, 2011 22:04
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MA-Horus posted:Interesting fact about Canada's go-fast bird. 
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Mar 29, 2011 22:41
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Groda posted:That thar's a Bomarc! What the Arrow was scrapped in favour of.. 
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Mar 29, 2011 22:44
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priznat posted:That thar's a Bomarc! What the Arrow was scrapped in favour of.. I think he knows that.
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Mar 29, 2011 22:59
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Okay so can somebody give me a breakdown of the differences between the A-12 and the SR-71? Because I keep reading about how they were pretty different but have yet to find a categorical list of said differences. Edit: I miss you John 
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Mar 29, 2011 23:23
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Flanker posted:I think he knows that. That may be, but it was more for the benefit of those folks who didn't The difference between the A-12 and the SR-71 is that I have not touched an SR-71 (yet)  Not shown: me touching the A-12 Also, the CIA released a tonne of information on the A-12 (FOI) and can be browsed here: http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp?pageNumber=1&freqReqRecord=a12.txt priznat fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Mar 30, 2011 |
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Mar 30, 2011 00:02
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Kinda cool video: AirLand Battle in action.
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Mar 30, 2011 06:39
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priznat posted:The difference between the A-12 and the SR-71 is that I have not touched an SR-71 (yet) Note: Museum curators hate when people touch old planes or equipment. Thousands of people pawing at them over the years can cause significant damage. That said, for your SR-71 touching needs, I recommend the top deck at the Strategic Air and Space Museum in Omaha. They also had some old nuclear C&C control panel desks (from Offutt?) in the auxiliary hangar you could paw at. Oh hey: there's the toggle switch for the base 30 miles away from my childhood home. It's a cool museum: two giant, shiny hangars in the middle of nowhere. There's some interestingly dated displays, and there are a few points where it feels threadbare. It seems like there is a lot of capital allocated but the operating budget wasn't quite there. This is accurate as of eight years ago. I don't know the current state of the museum. If you're ever in Dayton for some godforsaken reason, don't miss the R&D exhibition at the AF Museum hangar at Wright-Pat. Sign up early at the main museum; the bus fills quickly. Check out the YF-12 for your touching trifecta and marvel at how loving huge the XB-70 is.
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Mar 30, 2011 07:05
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I didn't actually touch it  but I could have!Plus it was sitting outdoors in Alabama anyway, not exactly hermetically sealed.
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Mar 30, 2011 07:16
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priznat posted:I didn't actually touch it  . quote:Plus it was sitting outdoors in Alabama anyway, not exactly hermetically sealed. It could be a worse environment: It could be like one of the only surviving examples of some WW2 / cold war aircraft: stored in an Ohio forest.
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Mar 30, 2011 07:38
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theclaw posted:Note: Museum curators hate when people touch old planes or equipment. Thousands of people pawing at them over the years can cause significant damage. The SAC Museum (I refuse to call it by its new name) is an interesting story...I think I've discussed it before in this thread but I'll go through it again since it got brought up. The museum started out as an idea from Curtis LeMay to serve as a memorial to the men and women of SAC and a way of preserving their history. As you probably know, SAC headquarters was located at Offutt AFB in Bellevue, NE, right next to Omaha (and just down I-80 from where the current museum is located at). The museum at that time was located right outside the base, on an extension of the Offutt tarmac. The concrete stretched outside the base perimeter so there was a chain link/barbed wire topped fence cutting down the length of the concrete with a big gate in it. Most of the aircraft were given to the museum in flying condition (several went straight to the museum without any sort of trip to the boneyard) so they just flew to Offutt, taxied over to that part of the ramp, and went through the gate. The aircraft were all stored outside on the tarmac, which as you've both alluded to isn't exactly the best environment for storing historical aircraft in. There was also a small building next to the tarmac that contained most of the non-aircraft exhibits that are in the current museum. It was a small operation and the situation with the aircraft was obviously sub-optimal, but it had one very big thing going for it: a single minded focus to the preservation of SAC history and heritage. There were a couple of old SAC guys that basically just sat around and answered any questions you had...I was pretty young when I went there (8-9 years old) but those guys had some stories. The ONLY thing at the museum was SAC and SAC related aircraft (had a MiG-21 in NVAF colors, for example...Linebacker II and all that). No other extraneous bullshit, the entire focus of the museum was SAC. By the mid '90s, the condition of the aircraft was beginning to seriously deteriorate and since many of them are on load from the National Museum of the USAF at Wright-Pat, they put their foot down and said either you get the aircraft in better conditions or we're taking them back. To be clear, the condition of the aircraft was pretty bad...birds nest's in several of the engines, all sorts of corrosion, paint faded beyond all belief (you can still see the effects of the faded paint, as several of the aircraft have yet to be restored and still have the faded paint from outside storage, most notably the BUFF). To solve this situation, they got a bunch of corporate sponsorship from corporations based in Omaha (UP, Berkshire Hathaway, ConAgra, etc.) along with a really strong grass roots campaign to raise the money to build the new facility out new Ashland (the one you want to). So far, so good. New museum is finished in '98, so they moved all the airplanes out there, including a major effort to truck several of the ones they couldn't disassemble the 30+ miles between sites (had to move power lines, street lights, etc...it was a pretty big deal). I will say there was a certain historical charm to all the old airplanes sitting on an old beat up tarmac (you really got the old warhorse put out to pasture vibe from the whole scene) but the conditions really were unacceptable. In 2001, some genius made the decision to change the name to the "Strategic Air & Space Museum" which "incorporated the Museum's rich past while attempting to reach a larger audience through dynamic programming and exciting educational programs that seek to captivate the interests and imaginations of everyone."  What this meant in effect is that instead of focusing on SAC, that stuff stayed static and they turned their focus to children's bullshit. No exaggeration, every. single. one. of the SAC related exhibits in the new museum was there when I first went to the old museum in 1993...Linebacker II, Vietnam POWs, the Doolittle Raid, the last SAC Shield, 8th AF in Europe, all of it. Instead of improving/updating that, they've filled it up with a bunch of stupid crap to make things "more accessible" to children. You want to make things "more accessible" to kids and get their attention? You don't need a bunch of bullshit "ooh, ahh, space and NASA is cool" or the loving pod-racer from Episode I (currently there on a traveling exhibit), you need cool poo poo like the walk throughs they used to do. Back at the old museum they'd have this event once a year in the summer where they'd get a bunch of Air Force active duty guys over from Offutt volunteering and they'd open up most of the old jets so you could crawl around inside. You want to get someone interested in aviation and history? Let them crawl through the tunnel between pressurized compartments in a B-29 or sit in the gunner's seat on a B-36 (both of which I did as a little kid). That's going to get them a helluva lot more interested than some bullshit Star Wars exhibit. I don't think I can sum it up any better than this...while there is a loving Star Wars exhibit inside, the last Looking Glass to fly airborne alert (after 29+ years of continuous 24/7/365 operations) sits outside unrestored in pieces. Sorry for the sperg fest, but the path the museum has taken is a bit of a sore spot with me...it's not that they don't do anything well, because their restoration guys do a really good job and they still do some cool aviation related stuff, like the Nebraska ANG RF-4C they just did a bang up restoration job on, but it just feels like they really lost their focus after the name change.
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Mar 30, 2011 08:28
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You in NE?
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Mar 30, 2011 17:08
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Groda posted:You in NE? No, he's in the AF. 
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Mar 30, 2011 17:48
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iyaayas01 posted:I don't think I can sum it up any better than this...while there is a loving Star Wars exhibit inside, the last Looking Glass to fly airborne alert (after 29+ years of continuous 24/7/365 operations) sits outside unrestored in pieces. Aw, Jesus. My dad flew three years on Looking Glass with 2nd ACCS back in the 70s. I should send him that link, it might piss him off. Edit: Well, that's kinda depressing. McNally's dad posted:I flew on 049 many, many times. It was a good bird and always brought me home. McNally fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Mar 30, 2011 |
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Mar 30, 2011 19:15
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So I finally went got to visit the A&S Museum's hangar at Dulles this past weekend. It was amazing, as expected, and it was great to see all the planes that I knew were there -- an SR71, the Space Shuttle Enterprise!, great, wonderful, all that. I expected that. But my friend and I both stopped and did a holy-loving-poo poo look at the Enola Gay just hanging there, suspended, next to the walkway we were on. Maybe it was because I didn't know it would be there, but there was something.. daunting?.. about being right next to that particular plane. I know that this isn't 100% connected to this thread, but without the Enola Gay, the Cold War would have gone differently, to be sure. Anyone else weirded out when seeing it, or other planes of specific historical significance?
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Mar 30, 2011 19:30
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priznat posted:Is this the center in Huntsville? I live like a half-mile from it now, and have been meaning to check it out.
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Mar 30, 2011 20:00
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Japanese Bug Fights posted:Is this the center in Huntsville? I live like a half-mile from it now, and have been meaning to check it out. Yep! I have more photos of it, I was in town for work. We went to the space center on the way to the airport. Was pretty cool because I don't think I'd ever have visited Huntsville otherwise if it wasn't a work thing. Nice place though, I liked it. Definitely go and check it out, especially for the real Saturn V on its side. That thing's awesome. I wonder if they've followed up with the plan to put it inside a building, it was just outside in the elements too which is a drat shame.  (all the rocket boosters were covered up because it was in the midst of being spruced up and repainted)
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Mar 30, 2011 20:08
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IanCaw posted:So I finally went got to visit the A&S Museum's hangar at Dulles this past weekend. It was amazing, as expected, and it was great to see all the planes that I knew were there -- an SR71, the Space Shuttle Enterprise!, great, wonderful, all that. I expected that. Even then, nothing in that museum was quite as emotional as standing under the 707 Dash 80 prototype. It was like you could feel it staring down at every airliner that's come since, softly calling "Who's your daddy? Who's your daddy?"
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Mar 30, 2011 20:17
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theclaw posted:Note: Museum curators hate when people touch old planes or equipment. Thousands of people pawing at them over the years can cause significant damage. 
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Mar 30, 2011 20:19
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IanCaw posted:So I finally went got to visit the A&S Museum's hangar at Dulles this past weekend. It was amazing, as expected, and it was great to see all the planes that I knew were there -- an SR71, the Space Shuttle Enterprise!, great, wonderful, all that. I expected that. Yeah I got the same feeling there, love the way they have the plane displayed. I want to go back when/if Discovery is put there. IanCaw posted:Anyone else weirded out when seeing it, or other planes of specific historical significance? Seeing day and night launches of the above mentioned space shuttle was pretty awe inspiring. priznat posted:(all the rocket boosters were covered up because it was in the midst of being spruced up and repainted) Shirley that doesn't have F-1s installed???
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Mar 30, 2011 23:06
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Styles Bitchley posted:Shirley that doesn't have F-1s installed??? I think you're right, I remember seeing something about how the engines installed were not real ones or something, but when they moved it indoors they were going to put some F-1s they had lying around on it. Literally, there was an F-1 engine just sitting outside near the Saturn V. Pic of the installation now (not my pic): 
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Mar 30, 2011 23:36
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SyHopeful posted:Okay so can somebody give me a breakdown of the differences between the A-12 and the SR-71?
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Mar 30, 2011 23:43
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SyHopeful posted:Okay so can somebody give me a breakdown of the differences between the A-12 and the SR-71? Letters and numbers?
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Mar 31, 2011 01:45
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From memory, operational ceiling, sensor packages, range, and weight. http://roadrunnersinternationale.com/a-12s.html Also that foi request that was posted mentioned regarding Oxcart was a good read. Syrian Lannister fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Mar 31, 2011 |
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Mar 31, 2011 01:56
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priznat posted:I think you're right, I remember seeing something about how the engines installed were not real ones or something, but when they moved it indoors they were going to put some F-1s they had lying around on it. Literally, there was an F-1 engine just sitting outside near the Saturn V. There's the cold war, right there. "You can orbit a sattelite? Pfff, Get them Germans we captured after the war to land a guy on the loving MOON with the BIGGEST ROCKET EVER BUILT. A goddamn skyscraper of a rocket. Yep, that'll show 'em our wieners ain't small..."
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Mar 31, 2011 02:06
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