Scratch Monkey posted:Someone explain to me again why everyone has such a huge hate-on for the F-35? Hugely overbudget cold war project that doesn't do anything that can't be done by a drone and an A-10. Hell, it doesn't do anything that can't be handled with a drone and a A-1 Skyraider.
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Nov 9, 2011 16:53
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LP97S posted:Lockheed-Martin and jet fighters they design don't go too well. I'll have an effort post on it tonight, but this is pretty accurate...the political deals being cut with Israel are particularly disgusting, in my humble opinion, but that's less the JSF's fault and more the dysfunctional nature of U.S. policy towards Israel. The biggest problem with the F-35 is that it is in the middle of the road...it does not meet the requirements for a stealthy, high performing, first night of the war kick in the door type aircraft, but it has all this extraneous poo poo that isn't necessary on a day 20 bomb truck...but it is replacing aircraft in both roles (they curtailed the F-22 line to buy more F-35s, and the F-35 is supposed to replace pretty much every other fourth-gen tactical fighter in the inventory...in theory). If you want a high end kick in the door aircraft, buy more F-22s. If you want a bomb truck, buy more Block 60 F-16s. Really, if we were thinking strategically we'd rethink our focus on short range tactical fighters and place more emphasis on the all but DOA NGB project that we'll be lucky to see in my lifetime at the current pace, given the fact that we sort of are finally beginning to pivot towards the Pacific and land based fighters will only get you so far in such a vast region. But to do that would require us to a) sit down and think strategically as opposed to NEXT WAR ITIS GOTTA FIGHT COUNTERINSURGENCIES NOW GIVE ARMY MONEY 33%/33%/33% BUDGET BREAKDOWN DURRRR stupidity and b) not have funneling money to LockMart as our primary concern, and unfortunately both of those things will never happen.
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Nov 9, 2011 16:57
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iyaayas01 posted:I'll have an effort post on it tonight, but this is pretty accurate...the political deals being cut with Israel are particularly disgusting, in my humble opinion, but that's less the JSF's fault and more the dysfunctional nature of U.S. policy towards Israel. The biggest problem with the F-35 is that it is in the middle of the road...it does not meet the requirements for a stealthy, high performing, first night of the war kick in the door type aircraft, but it has all this extraneous poo poo that isn't necessary on a day 20 bomb truck...but it is replacing aircraft in both roles (they curtailed the F-22 line to buy more F-35s, and the F-35 is supposed to replace pretty much every other fourth-gen tactical fighter in the inventory...in theory). If you want a high end kick in the door aircraft, buy more F-22s. If you want a bomb truck, buy more Block 60 F-16s. Really, if we were thinking strategically we'd rethink our focus on short range tactical fighters and place more emphasis on the all but DOA NGB project that we'll be lucky to see in my lifetime at the current pace, given the fact that we sort of are finally beginning to pivot towards the Pacific and land based fighters will only get you so far in such a vast region. The main idea that "one plane can do everything" is pretty false if you ever look at anything ever done ever. Besides, I like Boeing's solution to the F-22 F-35 hold-ups. Make their best fighter/bomber better with stealth enhancements and new radar and offer it to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest users of F-15's. With that, they made the F-15SE. 
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Nov 9, 2011 17:13
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LP97S posted:The main idea that "one plane can do everything" is pretty false if you ever look at anything ever done ever. This was the same flawed logic that went into the M14. The one gun to replace everything(SMG, LMG, service rifle) didn't work then, and it won't work now in the air. 
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Nov 9, 2011 18:15
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Naramyth posted:This was the same flawed logic that went into the M14. The one gun to replace everything(SMG, LMG, service rifle) didn't work then, and it won't work now in the air. Or UCP camouflage.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:30
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iyaayas01 posted:Here's some more... 
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Nov 9, 2011 19:40
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Since I'm on a Mort Kunstler kick (from the TFR photo thread), he's one of his covers that combines the best of Cold War jingoism/RAF fanboyism with the best of  racist paranoia.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:45
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for MEN only posted:Malcom X: Does he want to be America's Black Hitler? Jesus christ I would loving pay for a "let's read" of the entire run of that magazine.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:Jesus christ I would loving pay for a "let's read" of the entire run of that magazine. Go dredge up a copy of THE BLACK GESTAPO to watch. 
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Nov 9, 2011 19:58
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LP97S posted:The Canadians don't really want it (they can't refuel it mid-flight)
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Nov 9, 2011 21:16
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Apparently only the F-35C has the drogue option and not the F-35A Canada is buying. So says Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_refueling#Compatibility_issues
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Nov 9, 2011 21:22
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Scratch Monkey posted:Apparently only the F-35C has the drogue option and not the F-35A Canada is buying. F35 in a promo video says the while the A (CTOL) would normally come with a boom refueler, the A has been planned from the get-go with a drogue/basket option. Sounds utterly bizarre if it didn't, considering it's trying to market the fighter internationally.
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Nov 9, 2011 21:51
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iyaayas01 posted:Yeah, while an 11k foot rollout is pretty ridiculous, it wouldn't be too hard for an aircraft to find a runway capable of one, even if you limited it to military only runways. That, and Northrop had just come off the "billion dollar bomber" B-2 project, being wildly over budget and behind schedule the whole way. And Lockheed was just winding up the on-time and on budget F-117 program. Further, the F-23 was bigger, and bigger always costs more. So between a contractor with a lousy record for cost control, selling a larger aircraft, and it being Lockheed's 'turn', Northrop would have had to engineer a hell of a product to get the nod.
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Nov 10, 2011 01:10
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Since it's fairly long, I'm just going to link this. Since we've been getting off into tangents with Cole War literature and the like, I'm dropping a Heinlein bomb on y'all. Robert Heinlein - The Last Days of the United States This was included in "Expanded Universe," a collection of his essays and short stories. Interestingly for me, I first read it in 1997 when I was in the Navy, on a bus trip up to Rome from when my submarine was pulled in at Naples. I find it interesting that with this and the story immediately prior to it "Solution Unsatisfactory!" he appears to be calling for a world police organization with nuclear weapons to enforce a militarized peace. It's also interesting (though perhaps less surprising, him being a sci-fi author) that he effectively predicts SDI and the later experiments into directed energy weapons as a means of protection from ICBMs...and did so in 1946, when this was written. RAH posted:We can try for another Buck Rogers weapon with which to ward off atomic bomb rockets. It would need to be better than anything we have now or can foresee. To be 100% effective (with atom bombs, anything less is hardly good enough!) it should be something which acts with much greater speed than guns or anti-aircraft rockets. There is a bare possibility that science could cook up some sort of a devastatingly powerful beam of energy, acting with the speed of light, which would be a real anti-aircraft weapon, even against rockets. But the scientists don’t promise it. After that, he predicts something like the Distant Early Warning Line and Ballistic Early Warning Missile System, but posits that it would be required that it cover the entire U.S., shutting down all non-military aviation. RAH posted:We would need the best anti-aircraft devices possible, in the meantime. A robot hook-up of target-seeking rockets, radar, and computing machines might give considerable protection, if extensive enough, but there is a lot of research and test and production ahead before any such plan is workable. Not so much Cussler/Clancy/Brown/etc... Cold War stuff, but I find it fascinating to see the pop-culture reaction to the early days of the Atomic Age and the thoughts of how nuclear war was the inevitable future.
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Nov 10, 2011 01:32
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Before Ralph Peters flipped out and became Ralph "Fox" Peters, he was actually a fairly well respected and influential figure in proportion to his Lt. Col rank- hell, Newsweek had him as one of their Top 40 influential thinkers in a 1998 issue. His earlier works, especially ones with his Mary Sue standins, usually an Army officer who is a military intelligence or foriegn area specialist- are a bit more non-fictional than you would think. He does have a real hate on for a lot of state department figures, especially whoever it was who brokered the Dayton Accords. Last I heard I think he was calling for the assassinations of Wikileaks staffers. 
Smiling Jack fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Nov 10, 2011 |
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Nov 10, 2011 02:14
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The gist of the F35: At 50M a copy like originally planned, it's a fine aircraft. At the 100+M a copy it's going to cost, it's not a fine aircraft. The one really interesting thing that it does bring to the table is the DAS (distributed aperature sensor) system that in theory, once it's working, allows a pilot to look through his own plane and other such macrossy shenanigans.
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Nov 10, 2011 05:52
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That SVTOL F35 really needs GERWALK mode 
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Nov 10, 2011 06:45
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priznat posted:That SVTOL F35 really needs GERWALK mode I thought this exactly, was expecting it to stand up and pop out fists any moment now While we're on STOVLs someone talk about the Harrier, why the Brits built it, why the Yanks ended up with it, maybe some poo poo about the Falklands, why they crash all the damned time, and what if anything the STOVL F-35s are going to do to not also crash all the damned time
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Nov 10, 2011 07:01
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Who would have thought that balancing on a pillar of exhaust gas would be tricky?? Brits built the Harrier because Rolls Royce owns.
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Nov 10, 2011 07:21
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priznat posted:That SVTOL F35 really needs GERWALK mode Oh god YES
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Nov 10, 2011 08:25
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Snowdens Secret posted:I thought this exactly, was expecting it to stand up and pop out fists any moment now "Well, we don't know just yet how we're going to solve this 'crashing all the drat time' problem, but if you cut us a check for a few billion more I'm sure we can try to come up with something."
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Nov 10, 2011 08:38
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I would expect it to land automatically, like put one of those printable mobile phone codes that redirect you to a website but with 1 foot squares on the deck and the thing lands on it. I guess it's preferable to have some tired pilot try to get it down a moving carrier... meh. If my phone can identify one of those, why can't this fucker?
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Nov 10, 2011 09:00
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karoshi posted:I would expect it to land automatically, like put one of those printable mobile phone codes that redirect you to a website but with 1 foot squares on the deck and the thing lands on it. I guess it's preferable to have some tired pilot try to get it down a moving carrier... meh. If my phone can identify one of those, why can't this fucker? I know all of those words, but none of that makes sense to me.
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Nov 10, 2011 10:10
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McNally posted:I know all of those words, but none of that makes sense to me. automatic landing via electronic interpretation of pattern painted on the landing surface
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Nov 10, 2011 11:52
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atomicthumbs posted:automatic landing via electronic interpretation of pattern painted on the landing surface QR lander. 
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Nov 10, 2011 16:14
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Nov 10, 2011 17:06
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Hey cold war thread here are a bunch of vintage CIA videos produced to keep Ronald Reagan abreast of the Soviets. They give me the impression that I'm watching them on a 27" CRT strapped to a rolling cart at the front of social studies class.
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Nov 10, 2011 21:44
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Ygolonac posted:Go dredge up a copy of THE BLACK GESTAPO to watch. Yes! I want to find out how I can make this be my new avatar.
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Nov 10, 2011 21:52
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I found this wallpaper sized photo of the b1 popping flares. I am linking rather than trying to timg it. http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/100224-F-6911G-503.JPG
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Nov 11, 2011 05:24
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Handley Page Victor doing a rocket assisted takeoff. Once again, from the xplanes tumblr. http://xplanes.tumblr.com/ Did the British get Chris Foss to design their cold war jets, because that thing looks so drat sci-fi.
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Nov 11, 2011 09:33
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 The Firing Range > AIRPOWER/Hadley Page Victor Thread: There is a Bear in the Woods
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Nov 11, 2011 10:06
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atomicthumbs posted:
ftfy
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Nov 11, 2011 16:28
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atomicthumbs posted:The Firing Range > AIRPOWER/Handley Page Victor Thread: There is a Bear in the Woods no, now I fixed it
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Nov 11, 2011 17:18
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I forget who posted that link but I just got around to reading it. Back when we were talking about Red Storm Rising, I wanted to comment about how bizarre Clancy's portrayal of ASW, particularly surface-based ASW and its effectiveness, was. The book's plot (and American strategy of the time) depended on convoys from the US to Europe making it fairly unmolested by SSN interdiction, which seemed hopelessly optimistic. I had forgotten just how badly contemporary Russian boats sucked compared to the Western subs and how easily they were tracked at range by SOSUS and other fixed assets. Nevertheless there are still several things wrong with Clancy's idea of sub warfare; his descriptions of sonar are so goofy that, knowing he's been on a real 688, I wonder if they're deliberate misdirections, and I can't imagine ever conducting a wolfpack op like his sub strike on the airfields with modern nuke boats operating in anything like the proximity he describes. Some other interesting points from the linked article. The US Navy had no torpedo that could meaningfully prosecute a hostile SSN target from the '58 debut of the November class to the '72 deployment of the Mk 48; while there were tactics to maneuver ASW assets such to force the red sub to drive himself into the torp there was a pretty explicit assumption that ASW ops would need to go tactical nuclear almost from day one of hostilities. I knew the Mk 37 sucked but I never realized it was that bad. Also, more recent ('80s) WWIII planning had American boats rushing to the North Atlantic and polar ice to hunt down Soviet SSBN assets and destroy them during the conventional phase of the war, to try to discourage them from going nuclear and reducing the damage if they do; this apparently was rather controversial since several higher-ups in DOD thought blowing up Soviet nukes would actually accelerate nuclear escalation. The article later mentions how modern SSN hunting is like our hunting of SCUDs; very flashy and manpower-intensive but depressingly impotent. This ties into a bit about how in modern limited combat our political side is going to be fantastically risk-averse, and how unlike a SCUD even a poorly handled enemy sub is a tremendous threat if appropriately rigged, since a lucky shot could kill more people and do more damage than a year's worth of ground fighting.
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Nov 12, 2011 08:57
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nnnnghhhhgnnngh posted:Going to concentrate on tailsitting VTOLs because, for some weird reason, they're my favorite technological dead-end. Not sitting tail but.... Here's a video of the Flying Bedstead aka Rolls-Royce Thrust Measuring Rig (not NASA's Lunar Landing Research Vehicle which it pre-dates by a decade). It performed its first untethered flight on the 3rd August 1954. One of the two didn't crash and now hangs from the ceiling in London's Science Musuem*. When I'm there I like marvel at the madness of the guy who agreed to fly it. The technology from the Bedstead fed in to the experimental Short SC.1 (video), and then eventually the non-experimental Harrier that we all know and love. * A remarkable place if you ever get the chance to visit. Turning on the spot you can see Puffing Billy, Robert Stephenson's Rocket, the Flying Bedstead, a V2 rocket, the Apollo 10 command module and if you peer in the correct glass case, Crick and Watson's original model of the double-helix. It really is a treasure trove.
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Nov 12, 2011 11:22
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Snowdens Secret posted:http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n8...ld-war-asw.html
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Nov 13, 2011 00:25
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ACHTUNG JABO click for big edit: is doubble vju doubble vju two allowed in this thread? Trench_Rat fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Nov 17, 2011 |
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Nov 17, 2011 13:03
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Trench_Rat posted:ACHTUNG JABO Short answer, not really. The intentions of this thread are to cover the post-WW2 through glasnost period. Y'know, the Cold War. Certain posters have decided that it isn't enough having massive WW2 derails in every other thread and that this thread needed them too, but that's not an endorsement for WW2 stuff. Honestly I love WW2 stuff, so if you have some good writeups or pics I suggest you make a WW2 Air Power thread or something similar 
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Nov 17, 2011 17:24
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SyHopeful posted:Short answer, not really. With the / it means airpower or cold war. At least that's how i read it.
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Nov 17, 2011 17:29
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If loving WW2 airpower is wrong I don't want to be right. Requesting pictures of P-38s. 
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Nov 17, 2011 18:53
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