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That also made it a rather miserable experience during winter if I remember right.
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Jun 5, 2013 18:55
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It's not the sexiest bit of hardware news, but the British Army have a new bit of kit. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...Army-Knife.html
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Jun 5, 2013 19:07
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The unmanned capability is pretty neat, even if its only half a mile. I'm surprised we haven't seen more concept work on unmanned ground vehicles.
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Jun 5, 2013 19:11
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The British show Top Gear had a bit last series with the TerraMax that was pretty neat. Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pl_Pont_Zk
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Jun 5, 2013 19:15
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Koesj posted:e: and old favorite of mine that someone happened to reintroduce: How to hide a task force That is a pretty interesting article...the particularly interesting bit relevant to today being that with it being written c. late '90s the one big thing it doesn't consider is space denial ops. Yes we have absolute awareness thanks to SATCOM, overhead assets, and our network, but what happens when the other guy starts breaking down our network? I shudder to think what would happen to US forces without GPS, much less all our other enablers. Also a very, very valid point about the limited range of the CSG now thanks to the all Super Bug strike force...particularly relevant in WestPac, doubly so in say a South China Sea scenario, where you are already somewhat constrained by geography. Smiling Jack posted:Data from the '73 Yom Kippur war indicates that production rates couldn't keep up with missile expenditures, much less combat losses of tanks and aircraft. I post this every time the subject comes up, but data from pretty much every war a Western/Western-equipped power has fought from '73 on indicates that production rates can't keep up with munition expenditures. n0tqu1tesane posted:Looks like Redstone Arsenal was testing some chaff yesterday, and it got caught on weather radar. Someone (Godholio IIRC) posted a story earlier in the thread about a time a BUFF EWO pulled an oopsie and laid a chaff corridor at something like FL330 during a Flag...as I recall the story LAX Center was not pleased. Are we still posting armor killing weapons? I give you the CBU-97/-105 armed with the BLU-108/B SFW. When you absolutely, positively, have to destroy an entire armored column in one pass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKdFCsycYm8
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Jun 7, 2013 18:02
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Annoyingly, when I was in San Francisco last weekend the Nike missile site was closed on all the days when the bus up to Marin was running, so I couldn't do it. I did get to see the USS Hornet museum though. After its impressive WW2 combat record, the carrier was a bit undersized for newer jets, so it became an anti-sub carrier with aircraft like this:  I think the S-3 entered service a little late for it, but they have one:  They have an extensive explanation of things like sonobuoys below decks too. 
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Jun 7, 2013 19:07
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iyaayas01 posted:Are we still posting armor killing weapons? I give you the CBU-97/-105 armed with the BLU-108/B SFW. When you absolutely, positively, have to destroy an entire armored column in one pass: Pretty sure I remember reading about a strike in the first weeks of OIF where some spotters called some of those in on a Iraqi armored company (or something - bunch of vehicles) they found idling outside a city. Worked as advertised, too. Had some pictures that were pretty hosed up.
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Jun 7, 2013 19:18
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If you ever find yourself in Charleston, SC I highly recommend checking out the USS Yorktown. And the Gin Joint, but that's not cold war related.   
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Jun 7, 2013 19:30
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DakianDelomast posted:If you ever find yourself in Charleston, SC I highly recommend checking out the USS Yorktown. And the Gin Joint, but that's not cold war related. It is cool, but it's just not the same since the nuclear cargo ship left.
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Jun 7, 2013 20:35
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iyaayas01 posted:I post this every time the subject comes up, but data from pretty much every war a Western/Western-equipped power has fought from '73 on indicates that production rates can't keep up with munition expenditures. We haven't fought a total war since '45 though. I mean, I still agree, it just needs to be qualified.
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Jun 8, 2013 04:03
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Short of WW3 I don't think we'll ever see that level of military spending/production again. It peaked at over 40% of GDP which is loving ludicrous considering we spend a ton of money on the military now and its well under 10% of GDP. Edit: the sheer complexity increase of war material and specialized technologies also makes it more difficult. You can't turn a Ford plant into an F-35 plant. Alaan fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jun 8, 2013 |
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Jun 8, 2013 04:32
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iyaayas01 posted:
"The explosively formed penetrator incorporates a center core for hard target lethality, while the fragmentation ring effectively defeats soft targets, and their ancillary equipment." You know. The meat. 
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Jun 8, 2013 06:55
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MrYenko posted:"The explosively formed penetrator incorporates a center core for hard target lethality, while the fragmentation ring effectively defeats soft targets, and their ancillary equipment." Armorchat: if I recall correctly the reasons that DU makes such a good armor penetrator has more to it than just hardness and density. It's pyrophoric, so it lights itself on fire on impact. It's also self sharpening. Rather than blunting or riveting on impact, flakes snap off the point, continually presenting a sharp tip to the armor the penetrator is punching through. Glad to see to Skeet submunitions are working. Those things have been in development since the 80''s.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:00
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StandardVC10 posted:Annoyingly, when I was in San Francisco last weekend the Nike missile site was closed on all the days when the bus up to Marin was running, so I couldn't do it. I did get to see the USS Hornet museum though. We'll have to trade SF experiences, because I wasn't able to get over to the Hornet last time I was there (when I did the Nike site). Looks cool, it's on my to do list for the next time I visit my sister. Cyrano4747 posted:Pretty sure I remember reading about a strike in the first weeks of OIF where some spotters called some of those in on a Iraqi armored company (or something - bunch of vehicles) they found idling outside a city. Worked as advertised, too. Had some pictures that were pretty hosed up. Yup. That's basically Textron's go to "hey look air force x, our poo poo works as advertised, ~~COMBAT PROVEN~~, buy buy buy!!" selling point. They even made a little cheesy CG movie about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1URyNpiy4xA Here's a video featuring one of the BUFF aircrew describing a related action (IIRC the action depicted in the first video is the one that's mentioned in the second part of the below video, about a second target inside a MEZ during the same mission): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JQngyfKhA One BUFF, two passes, two destroyed or surrendered Iraqi armored columns. Alaan posted:Edit: the sheer complexity increase of war material and specialized technologies also makes it more difficult. You can't turn a Ford plant into an F-35 plant. That's the issue. Turning out bombs (the actual warheads) isn't an issue...poo poo, at my last base part of our stockpile consisted of bombs and 20mm that was literally built at the tail end of Vietnam. The US govt (and a fair amount of our allies) have no shortage of the explodey bits of weapons. The problem is that the things that make the explody bits go where we want them to go are expensive and complex, and the production just can't be scaled up at the drop of a hat. This is the beauty of the JDAM, all you need is the tailkit, which is (relatively) cheap and easy to produce. You strap that onto one of the many dumb explodey bits that we have lying around, and instant all-weather PGM. This is in contrast to something like the JSOW or JASSM, where the entire weapon is built from scratch, and is consequently more complex and more expensive (of course those do things that JDAM can't, which is kind of the point.) The problem only gets more pronounced when you move from small things like munitions to larger things like aircraft or tanks.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:08
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NosmoKing posted:
The latter quality is far more important than the former. When a metal dart punches through your armor at 1000mps, spraying the inside of your tank with white-hot razor-sharp fragments, you are not going to have time to think "Well, at least they're not actually on fire." Many metals are pyrophoric if you divide them up into pieces that have enough surface area, including iron and aluminum, uranium's pyrophoricity doesn't have much to do with why it's used to kill tanks.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:30
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iyaayas01 posted:We'll have to trade SF experiences, because I wasn't able to get over to the Hornet last time I was there (when I did the Nike site). Looks cool, it's on my to do list for the next time I visit my sister.  How much does one of those things cost? I get that it is probably way less than an entire goddamn tank column, but daaaaamn, that can't be cheap.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:06
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FrozenVent posted:
$360,000 according to wikipedia.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:24
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Warbadger posted:$360,000 according to wikipedia. That's much cheaper than I thought it would be. That's a very cost effective weapon.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:37
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:That's much cheaper than I thought it would be. That's a very cost effective weapon. Yeah, seriously, considering the quantity of equipment it'll destroy and the advantage it gives ground troop, that's a real bargain.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:39
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FrozenVent posted:
I'm too lazy to go into work tomorrow and look up the unit price (and I don't think I have access to that system anymore even if I wanted to, or at least I don't out here), but wiki cites a unit cost of $360,000 a pop for the baseline unit, which sounds about right. That's one CBU-97 carrying 10 BLU-108/B, each of which has 4 skeets. If you're talking about a CBU-105 with the WCMD GPS/INS tailkit (basically a JDAM for CBUs) tack on another $9K or so per unit. Now just to work the math on this, each individual CBU-105 can, in theory, destroy 40 vehicles (if each skeet finds a vehicle to target and no double up...in reality it's probably more like 30-35 depending on the dispersion of the vehicles and a few other things). A BUFF can carry something like 45 CBU-105s, if it was carrying nothing but CBU-105s. So 45x10x4...that's 1800 skeets. Even if you factor in a considerable amount of overlap and some misses, that's a shitload of destroyed armor/vehicles from just one bomber expending about 2-3 tanks worth of bombs.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:52
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It's kind of impressive just how much engineering is involved with that thing. Someone tried really, really hard to design the ultimate tank fucker. I remember reading about those things in the 1990s in some trashy paperback and it seemed so incredibly absurd that I didn't believe such a thing existed.
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Jun 8, 2013 20:19
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I don't know how Cold War this is but have Taistelukenttä. It's a Finnish Defence Force video from 1998 that shows bits of a hypothetical war with some force that uses Russian equipment, emphasis on Finns getting shot and other bits. Skip to about 2:30 in case you get tired of the Finnish tourism ad in the beginning.
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Jun 8, 2013 20:54
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:It's kind of impressive just how much engineering is involved with that thing. Someone tried really, really hard to design the ultimate tank fucker. I remember reading about those things in the 1990s in some trashy paperback and it seemed so incredibly absurd that I didn't believe such a thing existed. I know this or at least a similarly described system was used in Dale Brown's books (so trashy paperback is pretty accurate).
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Jun 9, 2013 02:08
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Totally TWISTED posted:I know this or at least a similarly described system was used in Dale Brown's books (so trashy paperback is pretty accurate). I think it gets mentioned in passing in Clancy's Bear and Tiger.
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Jun 9, 2013 02:22
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I think it was in Ralph Peters' Red Army?
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Jun 9, 2013 02:36
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Worse than all of that. I'm pretty sure it was in a series called Wingman, which was hilariously stupid but was fun to read back in middle school.
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Jun 9, 2013 03:04
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I've only read Bear and the Dragon(which it was definitely in), but I'm willing to bet "All of the above"
Alaan fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Jun 9, 2013 |
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Jun 9, 2013 06:13
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How realistic is a scenario where an entire enemy armored column exposes itself, yet the US has such complete air superiority that we can lumber a heavy bomber across the sky without even worrying about SAMs? Outside of Iraq, that is, where the land/air mix was all sorts of off in foolish ways long before hostilities started. Was there a time where we really thought we could be putting B-52s over a hot Fulda Gap? Or are those weapons also deliverable by something more F-15E/F-16-ish?
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Jun 9, 2013 06:23
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Snowdens Secret posted:How realistic is a scenario where an entire enemy armored column exposes itself, yet the US has such complete air superiority that we can lumber a heavy bomber across the sky without even worrying about SAMs? Outside of Iraq, that is, where the land/air mix was all sorts of off in foolish ways long before hostilities started. Was there a time where we really thought we could be putting B-52s over a hot Fulda Gap? They had F-16s in the video.
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Jun 9, 2013 06:24
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Snowdens Secret posted:How realistic is a scenario where an entire enemy armored column exposes itself, yet the US has such complete air superiority that we can lumber a heavy bomber across the sky without even worrying about SAMs? Outside of Iraq, that is, where the land/air mix was all sorts of off in foolish ways long before hostilities started. Was there a time where we really thought we could be putting B-52s over a hot Fulda Gap? The BLU-108 could be delivered by the AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, which for sure could be fielded on F-16s. edit: beaten like a battalion of T-72s on the wrong end of a Davy Crockett. Memento fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jun 9, 2013 |
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Jun 9, 2013 06:27
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CBU-97/105 can be delivered by just about anything in the USAF inventory, including F-16s, F-15Es, A-10s, etc etc.
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Jun 9, 2013 06:35
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MrYenko posted:CBU-97/105 can be delivered by just about anything in the USAF inventory, including F-16s, F-15Es, A-10s, etc etc.
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Jun 9, 2013 14:36
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grover posted:And soon, the F-35.
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Jun 9, 2013 14:39
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evil_bunnY posted:"soon"  http://www.thebaynet.com/news/index.cfm/fa/viewstory/story_ID/32442 e: big version of the photo here: http://blogs.militarytimes.com/flightlines/files/2013/06/F35_AAVI-2.jpg grover fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jun 9, 2013 |
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Jun 9, 2013 14:43
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That picture makes it look like it has motion-capture balls on the underside.
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Jun 9, 2013 14:46
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grover posted:Yeah, soon. They're presently in the weapons-testing phase. Bunch of bomb drop tests last year, first missile test yesterday at Pt Mugo (instrumented AMRAAM). The problems are getting quietly fixed, and the program is moving forward. First USMC squadrons will be operational in 2015 and USAF in 2016. Lockheed already delivered a squadron of F-35Bs to USMC to develop training and tactics and basically start learning how to fight it so the pilot pipeline will mesh up with the maturing technology. We're building a plane we don't know how to fly or arm. drat this rushed production thing is messed up.
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Jun 9, 2013 15:20
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I like how it still has to pick between carrying weapons or stealth but not both.
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Jun 9, 2013 15:26
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It has two internal (stealth) weapons bays which can hold a ton of weapons. Well, two tons actually, plus extra missiles on top of that. After the conflict settles down, it can do the bomb truck thing with underwing hardpoints, too.  NightGyr posted:We're building a plane we don't know how to fly or arm. drat this rushed production thing is messed up.
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Jun 9, 2013 15:41
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie3SrjLlcUY&t=609s
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Jun 9, 2013 16:08
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| # ? May 27, 2024 00:27 |
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Hahaha, 2x jdams and 2x AMRAAM is not impressive. At least it can carry a pile of SDBs to precision kill soft air defense and comm targets.
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Jun 9, 2013 16:32
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