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StandardVC10 posted:This guy is already making me wish I spent more than two years of high school doing chemistry. What I really like about that guy is his writing style. He takes something that is often very dry, and makes it enjoyable to read. If my math teachers had done this with geometry and algebra, I might care about mathematics. Oh poo poo.  Gotta start the new page with a plane!
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Feb 6, 2013 22:17
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LP97S posted:Also, there's no such thing as a boring rear end Mig-28. 
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Feb 7, 2013 04:35
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:What I really like about that guy is his writing style. He takes something that is often very dry, and makes it enjoyable to read. If my math teachers had done this with geometry and algebra, I might care about mathematics. I see your Beagle, and raise you a Blinder. 
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Feb 7, 2013 16:28
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In addition to the return of Red Dawn, cargo pants and the hi-top fade, the Air Force is looking at ICBM basing schemes first conceptualized in the 1980s, including variants of Racetrack, Shell Game and Subway. Personally, I hope they add Dense Pack into the mix. And Midgetman. Although today I guess they'd have to rename it Little Nongendered Missile.
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Feb 7, 2013 16:28
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Just Joe posted:ICBM basing schemes[/url] first conceptualized in the 1980s, including variants of Racetrack, Shell Game and Subway. The C-5 ICBM basing test was pretty ingenious come to think of it. Hideously impractical because of the C-5's safety record but ingenious.
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Feb 7, 2013 20:55
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Party Plane Jones posted:The C-5 ICBM basing test was pretty ingenious come to think of it. Hideously impractical because of the C-5's safety record but ingenious. I love stupid poo poo like that. ICBM from a C-5? Sure! C-130 on a carrier? Go for it! gently caress it, lets strap a poo poo ton of rockets to a C-130 and take off from a soccer stadium!
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Feb 7, 2013 21:01
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Many years ago in the mid-nineties I was a preteen train nut. During that time there was a magazine we got at my house, called Railpace, which once featured a picture of a big, many-wheeled boxcar looking thing that was actually supposed to hold a missile in it (not sure if they were ICBMs or smaller stuff) I can't completely remember the intended purpose of the exercise, it might have been tactical dispersal or it might have been moving the missile from one base to another.
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Feb 7, 2013 22:27
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StandardVC10 posted:Many years ago in the mid-nineties I was a preteen train nut. During that time there was a magazine we got at my house, called Railpace, which once featured a picture of a big, many-wheeled boxcar looking thing that was actually supposed to hold a missile in it (not sure if they were ICBMs or smaller stuff) I can't completely remember the intended purpose of the exercise, it might have been tactical dispersal or it might have been moving the missile from one base to another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacekeeper_Rail_Garrison_Car
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Feb 8, 2013 00:33
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The Things I Won't Work With postings were definitely worth reading even if most of the specific chemistry went over my head. Who knew little old Nitrogen was such a total bastard?
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Feb 8, 2013 01:11
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Yeah, that's the one, thanks. Wow, they started dicking around with this idea in 1986, it sounded more like something from quite some time before that.
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Feb 8, 2013 01:49
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Soviets were working on a similar system, forget the name.
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Feb 8, 2013 01:51
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Smiling Jack posted:Soviets were working on a similar system, forget the name. All that's old is new again. http://en.rian.ru/military_news/20121226/178413560.html
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Feb 8, 2013 02:00
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Smiling Jack posted:I love stupid poo poo like that. ICBM from a C-5? Sure! C-130 on a carrier? Go for it! gently caress it, lets strap a poo poo ton of rockets to a C-130 and take off from a soccer stadium! Land in and then take off from a soccer stadium. 
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Feb 8, 2013 02:04
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Alaan posted:The Things I Won't Work With postings were definitely worth reading even if most of the specific chemistry went over my head. Who knew little old Nitrogen was such a total bastard?  Nitrogen is a complete bastard. Hence TNT, ammonium nitrate, nitroglycerin, and so on. N2 gas forms an extremely strong (meaning stable and low energy) triple bond because each N atom has 5 valence electrons. When nitrogen-based explosives go off, the formation of N2 sheds a tremendous amount of energy and the gas is produced very quickly, pushing other stuff out of the way. That's why, for some delicately arranged organic compounds with nitro groups, it only takes a little jostle or a bit of heat or light to set off a really violent explosion. The flip side is that the stability of N2 also makes it very unreactive, which is why it's no biggie that it makes up 80% of each breath we take. I love that series. I don't know if I said it in here or in the GiP thread, but Lowe's a great writer and he really, really knows his poo poo.
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Feb 8, 2013 03:18
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grover posted:Tried to track that down, but could only find a couple unrelated papers dealing with liquid ozone. Tried to pull down "Flourine-steam flame and its characteristics", but my university isn't cool enough to have access to it, apparently. With many journals, Letters are the format for brief articles like this one. There's usually a limit of 1-2 pages maximum, and they're supposed to be a small, self-contained set of results that don't need a full-length article. This Letter definitely did meet JCP's rigorous standards, was sent out to be given an anonymous set of reviews, may have been revised before publication, and only then did it appear. If nothing else, I now know that liquid fluorine can act as a co-solvent for ozone-oxygen mixtures. Since I am not a crazy bastard, I feel very O.K. that my current research is not helped by knowing this.
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Feb 8, 2013 03:56
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Just Joe posted:In addition to the return of Red Dawn, cargo pants and the hi-top fade, the Air Force is looking at ICBM basing schemes first conceptualized in the 1980s, including variants of Racetrack, Shell Game and Subway. Dense Pack was obviously not going to work. Pretty much all of these were questionable at best in Soviet-first-strike scenarios, while being crushingly expensive. They were pretty much all obsoleted by the stealth of the Ohio sub combined with the accuracy of the Trident and its re-entry vehicles. Talking about spending large sums of money on essentially any land-based nuclear delivery vehicle while SSBN-X dies by a million cuts is just bonkers.
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Feb 8, 2013 04:49
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Just Joe posted:In addition to the return of Red Dawn, cargo pants and the hi-top fade, the Air Force is looking at ICBM basing schemes first conceptualized in the 1980s, including variants of Racetrack, Shell Game and Subway. What were these schemes?
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Feb 8, 2013 05:18
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Snowdens Secret posted:Talking about spending large sums of money on essentially any land-based nuclear delivery vehicle while SSBN-X dies by a million cuts is just bonkers. I think you misunderstand the point of the project. Nobody cares about nuclear deterrents any more; the ones we've already got are pretty good and even our international rivals like us more as customers than as a smoking crater. The really important thing is making sure the Navy doesn't get budget money that rightfully belongs to the Air Force. Oxford Comma posted:What were these schemes? They were ways to play "hide the missile" by keeping it on some kind of road- or rail-mobile vehicle, and shuffling it between a bunch of different launch points - silos, launch ports in a giant tunnel, or whatever. The goal was to make a crippling first strike more difficult, under the limitations of the various weapons treaties which restricted the number of missiles and warheads but not the number of launch facilities. By shuffling one missile around a bunch of different silos, you've massively increased the number of targets the enemy has to hit to guarantee that the single missile can't shoot back. The only problem is the staggering cost of either building a massive underground secret missile transport system, or constantly moving not just real missiles but also a bunch of decoys aboveground under the watchful eyes of Soviet spy satellites. It was so expensive that not even Reagan could justify it. Dense Pack was a different (and monumentally stupid) survival scheme, where the idea was basically "if we build a bunch of super-hardened silos close together, then the incoming warheads will surely all blow each other up and leave the silos more or less unharmed!  "
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Feb 8, 2013 06:28
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Space Gopher posted:Dense Pack was a different (and monumentally stupid) survival scheme, where the idea was basically "if we build a bunch of super-hardened silos close together, then the incoming warheads will surely all blow each other up and leave the silos more or less unharmed! No way that could possibly go wrong! 
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Feb 8, 2013 07:23
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StandardVC10 posted:No way that could possibly go wrong! It's as though nobody involved had ever heard of Time On Target barrages.
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Feb 8, 2013 08:23
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The idea is that an incoming warhead screaming along at ten kilometers per second will be shredded by the dust and debris whirled up by previous detonations. Of course the entire idea of housing ICBMs in land-based silos is utterly dumb in any case. Mobile TELs are somewhat better but need a shitload of escort troops and still have limited mobility in difficult terrain (you want to be light driving off the road and a Minuteman ain't.)
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Feb 8, 2013 11:26
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Oxford Comma posted:What were these schemes? Here's the video for the C-5 test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96A0wb1Ov9k I probably got it from this thread a year ago come to think of it.
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Feb 8, 2013 11:33
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Sjurygg posted:The idea is that an incoming warhead screaming along at ten kilometers per second will be shredded by the dust and debris whirled up by previous detonations. It's not just debris, it's the neutrons. Plutonium warheads are very susceptible to predetonation, one neutron in the wrong place at the wrong time means the warhead blows itself apart long before it reaches its design yield. The idea is that once the first warhead goes off, other nearby warheads will be bombarded by neutrons and fizzle. Same idea behind the Sprint missile: smack the inbound warhead with neutrons and spoil the yield.
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Feb 8, 2013 14:55
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Party Plane Jones posted:Here's the video for the C-5 test. I probably got it from this thread a year ago come to think of it. 
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Feb 8, 2013 15:16
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They would need some heavy duty slats over the windscreen like on those MLRS vehicles! (And still explode in a fireball anyway)
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Feb 8, 2013 18:19
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The C-5 could just brake really hard and let the missile slide out the front, then ignite.
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Feb 8, 2013 18:34
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ought ten posted:The C-5 could just brake really hard and let the missile slide out the front, then ignite. You spelled break wrong, in the case of the C5. 
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Feb 8, 2013 18:58
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quote:The C-5 program has the dubious distinction of being the first development program with a one billion dollar overrun 
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Feb 8, 2013 19:01
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I used to love touring the C-5 when it came to the airshow here. Just so ridiculously mammoth. For a while I was seriously considering a career in flying military cargo planes (C-130s in Canada at the time, now C-17s too) but once my eyesight went lovely that was that 
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Feb 8, 2013 19:40
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The first C-5 I saw was after getting diverted to Steward ANGB from Newark Int'l after five landing attempts that had my neighbors thinking that they were going to die. We went to get refueled, and it was all: C-5, C-5, C-5, SAS A330, C-5
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Feb 8, 2013 21:31
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Groda posted:The first C-5 I saw was after getting diverted to Steward ANGB from Newark Int'l after five landing attempts that had my neighbors thinking that they were going to die. The C-5s are based at Stewart, and off-station transition training (low approaches and touch-n-goes) is actually required for pilot proficiency. I think it's more likely they were doing that than missing landings and diverting to their home base.
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Feb 8, 2013 22:38
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Godholio posted:The C-5s are based at Stewart, and off-station transition training (low approaches and touch-n-goes) is actually required for pilot proficiency. I think it's more likely they were doing that than missing landings and diverting to their home base. I'm pretty sure he's saying he was on a commercial flight that had five wave-offs (hence the freaked out neighbors) and diverted to the ANG base for refueling because they were running low at that point. The C-5s were what he saw on the ground.
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Feb 8, 2013 22:54
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Ha. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I totally misinterpreted that as a C-5 making multiple attempts then diverting to Stewart.
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Feb 8, 2013 23:06
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Snowdens Secret posted:Dense Pack was obviously not going to work. Pretty much all of these were questionable at best in Soviet-first-strike scenarios, while being crushingly expensive. They were pretty much all obsoleted by the stealth of the Ohio sub combined with the accuracy of the Trident and its re-entry vehicles. poo poo, the fact that even talking about removing a leg of the Triad is almost completely off limits officially (look at the reception Cartwright got when he suggested it) just shows you how loving dumb the thinking on strategic weapons is right now. The E in FRED stands for economic.
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Feb 9, 2013 02:17
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iyaayas01 posted:poo poo, the fact that even talking about removing a leg of the Triad is almost completely off limits officially (look at the reception Cartwright got when he suggested it) just shows you how loving dumb the thinking on strategic weapons is right now.
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Feb 9, 2013 02:37
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Oxford Comma posted:What were these schemes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w Arms reduction treaties that reduced the number of launch vehicles resulted in a case in the '70s / '80s where a limited first strike with significant MIRVs on each could, in theory, eliminate US counterforce retaliation capability while still having more than enough warheads to deter a countervalue attack. The natural response was to pursue extra hardening of American silos, but the general gist is that at some point Soviet ICBM throw weight / MIRV accuracy was sufficient enough that no level of hardening can protect a silo from a direct multi-megaton hit. Keep in mind that, if you really wanted to, fusion warhead yield can be scaled essentially to infinity. There was an idea where silos could be built on the southern side of mountains, to shadow them from missiles coming over the North Pole, but it's hard finding locations and there are obvious susceptibilities. (Many of these schemes also required pie-in-the-sky new super launch vehicles, whose cost was completely prohibitive regardless of the crazy basing scheme.) Dense Pack moved missiles closely enough that a direct hit on one wouldn't be enough to disable the others but would pump enough x-rays into the immediate vicinity to fratricide any more incoming warheads. There is -some- validity to this idea simply because there are limits to how far away from each other in distance and time MIRVs from a single launch vehicle can hit, but those limits aren't tight enough to make the idea work. So then you get into things like putting missiles on trains, building six silos for one missile and playing a sort of three-card monte moving the missile around them, etc. There are lots of problems with each; for one, if you're riddled with spies then your shell games are transparent. Also (especially in this timeframe) warhead CEP was heavily dependent on knowing its exact launch point with a tremendous amount of precision, which just wasn't possible from a mobile launcher. This was part of why the Polaris/Poseidons weren't considered precise enough for counterforce strike, and was a serious hurdle to clear for any truck/train/C-5 launched system. In the end, when you're talking reasonably modern Armageddon-grade nuclear scenarios, any land-based delivery vehicle (including bombers) that isn't used and consumed in a crippling first strike is essentially wasted. This obviously leads you down the dark road to preferring a first strike to a worrisome peace. The eventual solution on our side was the Trident submarine and missile system. You could have enough warheads on a financially feasible small number of missiles and hulls, enough throw weight and precision to present a real counterforce threat, enough stealth to survive at short ranges to an enemy coast, and enough range that they could practically launch from the pier. The curious thing is, if the Soviets really were in a position for the first time in the atomic era to be reasonably assured of 'victory' in nuclear war, why didn't they launch? There were clearly plenty of high-placed Americans who thought we were screwed. Were the Soviets that afraid we'd just go after civilian populations anyway? Did post-Kruschev leaders simply not have the stomach for nuclear attack regardless of the odds? Was Soviet thinking on nuclear war and deterrence so different from us, and if so, what did they think creating such an effective first-strike capability was going to make us do?
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Feb 9, 2013 03:07
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This First Strike film was made before the Ohio-class subs and Trident missile system came online, right?
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Feb 9, 2013 03:38
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Do you want to be the guy to pull the trigger on "We THINK they can't counterstrike us as well as they need to?" Also the chance of just having your population centers vaporized. What's the fun in "winning" if Moscow, Leningrad, and everywhere else important is a smouldering heap of radioactivity. We really didn't like each other in the Cold War, but I can't imagine more than a handful of really high ups on either side legitimately wanted to nuke the other side without true provocation. The risks are just so ridiculously high.
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Feb 9, 2013 03:44
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Alaan posted:Do you want to be the guy to pull the trigger on "We THINK they can't counterstrike us as well as they need to?" Also the chance of just having your population centers vaporized. What's the fun in "winning" if Moscow, Leningrad, and everywhere else important is a smouldering heap of radioactivity. Not to mention the potential global ramifications even if you do pull it off.
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Feb 9, 2013 03:47
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Alaan posted:Do you want to be the guy to pull the trigger on "We THINK they can't counterstrike us as well as they need to?" Also the chance of just having your population centers vaporized. What's the fun in "winning" if Moscow, Leningrad, and everywhere else important is a smouldering heap of radioactivity. Yep, even in the "First Strike" movie example (a worst case scenario) there are enough nuclear weapons surviving the strike to destroy every major population center in Russia. What if the US and its allies launch back rather than throwing in the towel after your attack? What if they don't know you aren't going to target the civilian centers before the decision is made to launch?
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Feb 9, 2013 03:55
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