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Joining on the bandwagon, my paternal grandpa rode right here on the USS Salt Lake City all over the Pacific (starboard stern AA gun director) Maternal grandpa had terrible eyesight and built aircraft because neither the Army nor Navy wanted him, then later in the war was able to join the Merchant Marine as a cook.
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Jan 16, 2014 04:52
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Grandfather was stationed in Alaska during the Korean war; He was the guy in charge of hot water. My other grandfather finished his draft in the Portuguese army right before they sent troops to Angola.
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Jan 16, 2014 04:58
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My great-grandfather flew C-47s during WWII, mostly in the North Africa theater from what he's said. I have several pictures of him and some fellow pilots on camels in front of the Pyramids, pretty cool. As far as I know he never flew again after the war, instead becoming a traveling salesman.
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Jan 16, 2014 05:40
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My grandpa was in Ireland being a teenager and generally not giving fucks about the second world war. The other grandpa was in the Merchant Marine academy, and was apparently a great swimmer despite being fat as hell. He got out in 1946 and sailed around the world doing generally cool guy things. Y'all really have old grandpas.
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Jan 16, 2014 07:05
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DeesGrandpa posted:My grandpa was in Ireland being a teenager and generally not giving fucks about the second world war. Hah, I just finished college and both my grandpas were too old to fight in WWII. My paternal grandfather who I never met wasn't going to fight anyway, he'd been in a bus accident that left him bedridden for years to get his legs "healed" to the point where one was bent and two inches shorter than the other. He was in the USO for a while and then worked in the Empire State Building which became relevant when that idiot took his B-25 into the side of it. Even though the elevators were out for a good while and his legs were a total mess, he didn't miss a single day of work because of it. My maternal granddad was also too old (I don't even know how, there's stereotypes I thought Irish Catholics had to live up to) to be of much use. He signed up for the Marines because he really wanted to be a Marine and when they told him he didn't have to do everything he insisted he do the whole training even though he knew he was going to get stuck behind a desk. My dad ended up not getting drafted for Vietnam, which had been the reason he abruptly stopped wanting to go into the Navy to try to become an aviator. I do have an uncle not sure what the generation gap is who went to WWII and apparently he was a hero or something because he got a Silver Star but he managed to avoid anyone knowing how he got it.
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Jan 16, 2014 08:37
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So I finally got to the end of this thread and it has been a great read. Interesting to read that other countries armed forces are as hosed up as the Swedish. The current situation of the Swedish defence is a combination of a colonial police with a military industrial complex. Gripen, that gets praised around here, gets its R&D funded by the military basically for export and Sweden have something like 140-160 of them at the moment, with 40-60 possibly on the way with Gripen NG. From what I've read we also don't have enough missiles to actually arm all of them with anti-air missiles. Also, earlier this year the Russians made a mock attack run on Swedish military facilities, and we didn't even scramble any planes. Picture time: This is what you will see while driving up the highway E4 around Linköping, home of Saab Aerospace.   
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Jan 16, 2014 08:42
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My grandfather on my mother's side of the family managed to get a Harvard education paid for by the Navy and, thankfully, made it to the Pacific too late to see any combat during the war. My father's side of the family is Latvian though, and they all had a hosed up war. The Russians shot everyone is my grandma's family and put her in an orphanage, and my grandpa is the only one of ten sons that didn't end up in some arm of German military service or other. He ended up making it out of the Courland pocket on one of the evacuation ships the Russians were so happily torpedoing, and his brothers were all in the SS. Until fairly recently my father and I didn't really know what that side of the family had done in the war, but when my grandpa's mind started to go, him and my uncles made an effort to go through the old family photo albums and find out more. There is no  greater than going through an old photo album and finding a whole collection great uncles in SS uniform. Apparently my grandpa's older brothers were all in the 19th SS Freiwilligen Division. Until then, all I knew was that I had a great uncle named Vilo in Canada who lost an arm in Berlin and wasn't allowed to come to the US because of what he did in the war.
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Jan 16, 2014 09:30
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Apparently my maternal great (possibly great-great) uncle was killed very late in WW1 in Palestine, although I don't know what exactly he was doing. On my father's side, his grandfather came from a town that was totally levelled by Ukrainian SS and mostly wiped out, but luckily for him he had been a Menshevik during the 1905 Revolution and was in Poughkeepsie by 1920, most of his relatives joining him, and I don't think anybody in his family was killed. My girlfriend had a great uncle who had some of his mother's jewellery replaced by good fakes (they didn't find out until after he died) so he could pawn the rest to pay to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. For the Nationalists. They might not have the best songs, but at least they won.
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Jan 16, 2014 10:29
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Here's my wife's grandfather talking about the Battle of the Bulge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi2fViMRhp0&t=39s I've got a VHS of the raw interview tape with him sitting on my desk. I really need to get it digitized.
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Jan 16, 2014 15:52
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My paternal grandpa was drafted and was supposed to be deployed to Korea. As his unit was waiting to board a plane to get to California to ship out, he was called back by the quartermaster to get different boots. While waiting for the quartermaster (which was hours and hours of standing around) his unit left. He told me how he was bitching about having to stand around and wanted to leave, but it ended up being the most important "Army moment" of his life because within 3 months of deploying ~98% of his unit was KIA, he never got deployed overseas, ended up stationed in Germany for most of his service and lived to meet my grandma. I still don't know what he actually did in the Army. I should ask I suppose. My maternal grandpa was deployed to North Africa. I only know what my grandma had told me about what he said to her... but he was an air traffic controller after the war and he told my grandma about how the Germans would drop metal ribbons on his radar tower (which the CO would then tell my grandpa to literally get on a ladder to climb up on the antennas and pull it all down) She told me he had a few pieces and it was like plastic with metal on the outside and I assume it was something like Mylar or the 1940's equivalent. I met his army buddy when I was a little kid, but I was too young to appreciate the moment and the guy ended up passing before I could talk to him more. He did tell me about the Carcano rifle that was sitting in Grandma's basement (which I have now) and how they shot a bullet into the bottom of a tree they had felled in the back yard... that's all I remember.
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Jan 16, 2014 16:30
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priznat posted:This is really similar to my granddad, I am not sure why he didn't get sent over but he never talked about his time as a pilot instructor either. It was for the RCAF and he taught on Harvards, I believe. Now that you mention it, my Grandfather didn't keep his license either. You know what that could mean. They were awesome Canadian SAS  Or more likely this vv Waldstein Sonata posted:I have a suspicion as to why your grandfather maybe didn't like talking about his air experience. My maternal grandfather was a B-17 bombardier instructor for pretty much the whole war, never seeing combat. However, between training accidents (such as getting bumped from a flight that ended up crashing on takeoff and killing all aboard) and seeing so many of his students, including those that became his friends, die over Europe, he never talked about it with us grandkids. The only way I knew anything about his experiences is from what my mother told me, and even then she always framed it with how depressed and sad he looked when he talked about it and, when she went through his photo albums from his time in service, nearly all of the airmen in the pictures would get commentary from grandpa like "died over Berlin", "lost in Italy" and so forth. While not viscerally traumatic, like infantry men had to deal with, it had to have been wearying to see so many young men through training and to constantly hear where and when they were lost. Thanks for this. It never occurred to me that being a trainer behind the lines could be traumatic. I think actually the only thing he had pictures of from the time was himself in a flight uniform, and a picture of my Grandma in a nurse's uniform from the same time. (They met in Ottawa and got along right away because they both happened to be from the same place in Newfoundland.) Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jan 16, 2014 |
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Jan 16, 2014 18:12
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Warbadger posted:The USSR suddenly revealing itself to be a German ally (and completely enveloping the Polish armies) basically put the brakes on any immediate allied intervention in Poland while simultaneously forcing the Polish military units to surrender (most which were still more or less intact). It actually is pretty likely that without the USSR getting involved the war in Poland would been a much longer and bloodier affair for the Germans. It's also important to remember that Poland had every reason to tell Stalin to go gently caress himself. The first loving thing, first loving thing the Soviets did after kinda-sorta-almost-not really getting their political house in order after the Revolution was to invade Poland. 1919-1921 the Poles fought a really nasty war against the Red Army to avoid being re-absorbed into a Soviet Union that very much wanted its territorial boundaries to match the old Tsarist frontiers pre-Brest-Litovsk. The very notion that the Poles would let the Soviet Union - and one run by Stalin, not even a comparatively cute and cuddly Leninist USSR - march a million men into them not even twenty years after fighting tooth and nail against them for their continued existence as a country is laughable on its face. They probably would have sooner just given Hitler the Danzig Corridor and whatever other western slivers they needed to pare off to gain a few years' breathing room. TsarZiedonis posted:My father's side of the family is Latvian though, and they all had a hosed up war. The Russians shot everyone is my grandma's family and put her in an orphanage, and my grandpa is the only one of ten sons that didn't end up in some arm of German military service or other. He ended up making it out of the Courland pocket on one of the evacuation ships the Russians were so happily torpedoing, and his brothers were all in the SS. Until fairly recently my father and I didn't really know what that side of the family had done in the war, but when my grandpa's mind started to go, him and my uncles made an effort to go through the old family photo albums and find out more. My best friend from grad school is Latvian on both sides of his family. He's got three grandfathers (one grandmother re-married in the 60s) and all of them served in the Latvian SS. He's got some really hosed up family stories from that war, like one Grandfather retreating through the family farm in '45, the same farm that my friend and his dad had to go to in the early '00s to sign some paperwork with some Russian dirt farmers promising that they wouldn't press any kind of 60-year-old legal claim on the property. Said friend is now a holocaust historian specializing in the role that the Latvian SS and one particular nasty group of volunteers known as the Arajas Kommando played in it. Talk about some  family history.
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Jan 16, 2014 18:35
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Neither of my granddads saw combat. One was an instructor at an Army Air Force base in Lubbock and the other ended up in Ascension Island, of all places.
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Jan 16, 2014 19:45
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Well it wasn't really like the most of the Latvians had much of a choice, the Germans conscripted all the males they could find who were born between 1906 and 1928 with the choice of either the SS, being sent to a slave labor camp or being part of a Wehrmacht auxiliary unit. If they tried to avoid the conscription they were immediately sent to a concentration camp.
Pump it up! Do it! fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jan 16, 2014 |
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Jan 16, 2014 20:30
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Why not pick the auxiliaries then?
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Jan 16, 2014 20:45
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I'm not quite sure but I don't think that they were auxiliaries in a supporting way but more straight up infantry that was treated like poo poo by the Germans and given poo poo equipment, then they were mostly used as Anti-partisans which means that they went around burning villages. The Latvian SS divisions were pretty much frontline units and for some loving reason the Parliament in Latvia decided in 1998 to have an official remembrance day for the SS veterans.
Pump it up! Do it! fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jan 16, 2014 |
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Jan 16, 2014 21:07
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Forums Terrorist posted:Why not pick the auxiliaries then? Yeah, someone who knows more can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but generally speaking "auxiliaries" in the German military was code for "dudes who came in behind the frontline forces to 'secure the rear' which typically meant executing 'partisans'/burning villages/rounding up Jews/generally committing war crimes." IIRC this was particularly true in the Baltics.
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Jan 16, 2014 22:11
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My maternal grandfather was 2nd in command on a floating drydock in the Pacific - I've made a thread about him previously here. My paternal grandfather...no clue how or even if he was involved in the war, we don't talk about him much.
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Jan 16, 2014 22:26
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I believe there was also a lot of popular support for the Germans in Latvia during the war. Remember, the Russians had just launched a brutal crackdown on the local population and were busily executing the intellectuals and destroying the local culture when the Germans invaded. The local population very much saw them as liberators, and were more than happy to join in to destroy the barbaric, Russian oppressor. That seems to be a view still held by a majority of the modern Latvian population as well, probably due to the fact that the Germans never got around to brutalizing the (non-Jewish) Latvian population during the war. There also seems to be considerable ethnic tension in Latvia between the natives and the Russian population that settled in the country during the Soviet occupation. In any case, whatever the Russians did in the Baltics, it must have been really bad. Whenever my Grandpa saw or heard a Russian person in public, he would sort of stop, clam up, look visibly distressed and mutter under his breath incoherently. Oh, and I also have an Uncle who lives in Riga. He says the SS veteran parades are a big deal there. Also, everyone is really, *really* proud to be in NATO now. So, yeah, lot of trauma over there.
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Jan 16, 2014 22:28
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Craptacular's pic made think of this pic I found of my grandfather's ship when I did some research into it. I still have no idea how this picture was taken. I was able to get a .zip file the Denver's logbook from it's entire time in the Pacific as well.
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Jan 17, 2014 00:07
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Both my Grandpa's served in the Navy. The one on my mom's side served in the North Atlantic on 2 destroyers and a mine sweeper. All 3 were sunk while he was on them. The one on my dad's side served in a Catalina squadron in Morrocco as a radar operator. He said he would look on the scope to spot Uboat periscopes. If he spotted one they would drop a bomb on it to force it to the.surface and then they would do a pylon turn strafing it .50's to keep the deck clear till a destroyer showed up to finish it off. He said he did that twice.
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Jan 17, 2014 00:25
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pkells posted:Craptacular's pic made think of this pic I found of my grandfather's ship when I did some research into it. I still have no idea how this picture was taken. I've seen pictures of little gondola-looking things that they used to transfer people back and forth on a wire between the two ships. I'm betting they sent up the photographer in one.
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Jan 17, 2014 01:26
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My maternal grandmother's first husband died on Bataan. After the war she met my grandfather, who was in the Army in the ETO...no idea what he did. Paternal grandfather was in the Army during Korea but I'm about 95% sure he never actually went there, he probably just did a term and went to school. A couple of uncles were air assault during Vietnam. Dad fixed airplanes in the AF in the 80s/90s.
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Jan 17, 2014 03:21
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My grandad was cook in Korea. He was pretty drat good at making stews.
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Jan 17, 2014 03:31
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One of my uncles does spook poo poo for Sandia. I think it's radar-related but for obvious reasons I don't have details. I do have a visitor's handbook from the late '60s that goes into surpising detail on their test range tracking radars, I scanned it intending to post but can't remember if I ever did. We had one Thanksgiving / Christmas holiday at the grandparents' in the mid '80s that must've been either during some unusual tension or just Red Dawn madness because this uncle kept poking his head through the curtains, checking the South Carolina skies for paratrooper-loaded Ilyushins or other nonsense. He had also brought a huge fuckoff revolver which he left out on top of a dresser in one of the guest rooms, with kids all over the house, which earned him a fiery tongue-lashing from my mother. Dad's side of the family always did suspect Mom's of secretly still being Communists.
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Jan 17, 2014 03:49
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Craptacular posted:I've seen pictures of little gondola-looking things that they used to transfer people back and forth on a wire between the two ships. I'm betting they sent up the photographer in one. A bosun's chair.
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Jan 17, 2014 04:35
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Another possibilty, a Breeches Buoy 
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Jan 17, 2014 09:41
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Grandpa a was a machinist who made gears and gear assemblies. Too valuable a worker to send to the front. Other grandpa ran away from the nazis and the soviets as he and his family got the gently caress out of the Ukrane prior to the war really heating up.
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Jan 17, 2014 12:54
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Maternal grandpa was in the communist resistance and got some serious PTSD issues for the rest of his life. He never, ever, ever spoke about his resistance work, keeping your mouth shut had been branded into his very personality, the communist witchhunts of the 50s probably played a role, too. I saw him smile twice, but he was a kind man. Bought me my first bicycle out of the blue once when he came to visit. His sister fared worse, she was a messenger and courier, and I also think she was a border pilot, leading the way during the night for Jews and other fugitives across the border into Sweden. The Gestapo got her name during a roundup. During the manhunt (womanhunt?) she broke her leg and wound up in a hospital. During her stay, the Gestapo searched the place for her on a tipoff. She was hidden behind some screens in the corridor, hearing them walking by just inches away. She always had an odd streak on her, mum used to say, but that was when the twig broke. She was a mental patient for the rest of her life. Still kind, though, like her brother. She never spoke a word on those weird, uncomfortable times we went to say hello to her at the inpatient mental health centre, but I remember once when we were leaving and she walked over to me and gave me the warmest hug, and then put a huge bar of chocolate in my hands and clamped my hands around it as she looked me into the eyes. I guess mad people can have love in their eyes, too. Mom gave me her flashlight after her, it's got a red and green screen that can be pushed in front of the lens, I think she said she used it for signalling. My paternal grandmother got into trouble from her brother, who fled in a fishing cutter across the North Sea and wound up in a British-trained intelligence and infiltration unit led by Martin Linge. He was landed at the fishing hamlet of Telavåg with another guy, they got ratted on, and during the night they were assaulted at the house where they were hiding. My grand-uncle was killed, along with two Germans, and the other guy was wounded and later executed. The entire village was razed, and the men sent to concentration camps where 31 out of 72 perished, and the women and children were imprisoned. My grandmother got into some bad times in jail afterwards, but never would talk about it at all. They're part of the reason I joined the national guard here after my military service, I kind of felt I owed them as much.
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Jan 17, 2014 15:12
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Lord Tywin posted:Well it wasn't really like the most of the Latvians had much of a choice, the Germans conscripted all the males they could find who were born between 1906 and 1928 with the choice of either the SS, being sent to a slave labor camp or being part of a Wehrmacht auxiliary unit. If they tried to avoid the conscription they were immediately sent to a concentration camp. Eh, this is only kinda half-true. It's a bit more complex than that. There were a LOT of volunteers. The tl;dr of it is that the guys inducted before the fall of '42 were pretty much all volunteers, mostly inspired by what awful shitheads the Soviets were during their 1940-1941 occupation of the country. In a lot of ways they're pretty tragic figures, because they either personally experienced or saw their families suffer some really awful poo poo at the hands of the Soviets but then they went on to be the actual manpower and trigger pullers for most of the Holocaust in Latvia. You have to remember that Latvia's jews all died before the death camps came on line, and all that killing was done the old fashioned way. Hell, the clear mental health problems that the soldiers tasked with those duties were suffering was a huge part of why the Germans moved to mechanized killing in the first place. Fall '42-44, though, and you've basically run out of the people who had a serious hate-on for the Communists, plus people were figuring out that the Eastern Front loving sucked, plus it just became increasingly obvious that the Germans weren't going to win this one. An increasing proportion of people pulled in during this period were conscripts, with them practically all being conscripts by the end. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 17, 2014 |
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Jan 17, 2014 16:40
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pkells posted:Craptacular's pic made think of this pic I found of my grandfather's ship when I did some research into it. I still have no idea how this picture was taken. I think the basket transfer and breeches buoy happened amidships, like where the fuel line is in the picture. The picture is from the stern of the cruiser. Perhaps the seaplane crane was swung out over the water and the photographer climbed out on the arm of the crane?
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Jan 17, 2014 20:17
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My maternal grandfather was an electrical engineer at the time of WWII, working for GE. He was a company man and worked for them from graduation to retirement. I'm not sure exactly what he did, but he was considered war essential in his current position and probably couldn't join the military (or leave GE) if he tried. I believe he worked on radar systems, or radar warning receivers, or something. Grandpa lived in my hometown of Glens Falls, NY, and worked at the Hudson Falls GE facility, which is now a superfund site. He died of leukemia in his late 70's. My paternal grandfather has an odd story. He was a blue-blood, old-money rich kid descended from 19th century robber barons. As was typical of the time, after getting his BA and MBA from Harvard (with nothing but the gentleman's C for grades), he took a world tour. During this tour (which was in 1938, I think) he attended one of the Nuremberg Rallies, where he concluded that war with Hitler was inevitable. After shooting a lot of now-endangered species in Africa and India he returned home in 1940 and immediately went about getting a commission in the Army Air Corp. He wound up as an intelligence officer in the 8th Air Force, and finished his service in 1946 or '47 as a LTC. Not bad for a guy who started as a 2LT just six years prior. We don't know much about the details of his service, as he didn't like to talk about it. He was involved in the planning of some major disasters, such as the Schweinfurt Raid, and may have felt personally responsible for the deaths of possibly thousands of airmen. Among other odd stories, he allegedly got in serious trouble for using training aircraft silhouettes that were more accurate than what the Army Air Corp intelligence were giving out to airmen to study. His superiors believed he might be some sort of spy or double agent. It was later determined that grandpa still had contacts he made in Germany before the war who were sending him modeling magazines, published in Germany, through neutral countries. These included highly detailed photos of German aircraft. Since they didn't shoot him, I assume everything must have blown over. There is some scuttlebut that he may have been on the ground in the early days of the Normandy invasion to collect intel from downed German aircraft and overrun airfields, but we don't know if that's true. The only reason we know any of this is because after the war Grandpa served in the occupation forces, where he befriended a former German officer (some stories say he was former Waffen SS panzer commander, but he may have been Wehrmacht). Regardless, Grandpa was a happy alcoholic and he spent many an evening getting drunk with this guy. After my dad graduated from college he went on a trip to Europe, where he looked this man up. If it weren't for that German we probably wouldn't know anything about Grandpa's service. Grandpa wore a signet ring his entire adult life, including during his war years. My dad found it in a safety deposit box and gave it to me after graduating from undergrad, about 14 years ago. It fits like it was made for me and I am wearing it even now. Gold, with a red stone with a signet cut into it. It appears to have been made by Tiffany's, but it's been worn so much the engraving on the inside of the ring has worn off. Grandad wore that ring as he watched shot-up bombers return from raids he planned, with dead and dying crewmen, and usually far fewer came back then left. It must have worn at him greatly. I can't imagine being in that position. My paternal Grandfather's brother-in-law was the last person in his family capable of passing on the name of his particular line. He was an armor officer, like his father before him who served as a tank instructor at Plattsburgh, NY during WWI. My great uncle served as some sort of armored scout and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. The story is that he was stranded on the wrong side of a destroyed bridge, blown to slow down the Germans, and made a heroic last stand before his vehicle was destroyed and the crew killed. The Van Cortlandt line (our family's branch, anyway) died with him, sadly. There will never be any more. RIP Lt. Agustus Van Cortlandt. If I have kids I want to name one after him, just so he isn't forgotten. This might be a problem if I have a daughter. She could be little Gussie, I suppose.
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Jan 17, 2014 21:13
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My mom's dad flew C-47s and then B-24s over the hump. I haven't been able to verify it, but he is fairly sure that this was his aircraft: A few months ago my uncle was changing out as the superintendent of the USAFA and as a part of that whole thing one of the two surviving airworthy B-24's ("Witchcraft") came down to CO Springs. My uncle arranged a ride on it for my grandpa and my aunt dutifully hauled a 94 year old man down from Denver and with great difficulty got him on board the thing (they are not easy to get into). He had a great time. After the flight the pilot went with my people for a beer. He was sort of razzing my grandpa about his flying days and asked him "where's your short snorter?? Think you owe me a drink!" He explained to everyone what that was and a hearty laugh was had by all. Meanwhile, Gramps was fishing the 70 year old dollar bill out of his wallet where it had been since the war. Once the pilot recovered his wits he bought everyone a round. bewbies fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 17, 2014 |
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Jan 17, 2014 21:33
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My Dad died in the Holocaust (fell out of guard tower). (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 17, 2014 23:58
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bewbies posted:After the flight the pilot went with my people for a beer. He was sort of razzing my grandpa about his flying days and asked him "where's your short snorter?? Think you owe me a drink!" He explained to everyone what that was and a hearty laugh was had by all. Meanwhile, Gramps was fishing the 70 year old dollar bill out of his wallet where it had been since the war. Once the pilot recovered his wits he bought everyone a round. That's awesome. Almost makes me want to put a challenge coin in my wallet and forget about it for a moment like that decades down the road.
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Jan 18, 2014 00:13
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Maternal grandfather loaded bombers in the pacific during WWII, at least from what I remember. He died before I was born, and the box of his military records, medals,etc, is packed away somewhere a few states away. His brother in law was at Normandy, never talked about it with anyone, EVER. Grandma's second husband was in Korea, and the only notable thing about his service were the terrible tattoos on both forearms and "Sweet" and "Sour" over his nipples. Paternal grandfather was too old, and never would have joined anyway. He might have called himself a pacifist, but the truth was he just didn't give a poo poo. All of his sons would end up in the Army. Oldest went to Korea, middle one spent time as a supply sergeant in Texas during 67-68, and my dad ended up infantry in Vietnam in 68-69.  Dad on the left, Grandpa Alvin in the middle, and my uncle Gary on the right.
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Jan 18, 2014 03:25
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My Opa was a runner for the Dutch resistance, and Oma saw a cow got killed by a Stuka. That's I all got.
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Jan 18, 2014 13:08
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My grandfather invented war. Stealth aircraft rely on precisely angled surfaces to reflect RADAR properly. What happens when the pilot uses his controls? The ailerons and rudder can't be stealthified through their full travel, can they?
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Jan 18, 2014 16:08
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hogmartin posted:My grandfather invented war. A lot of aircraft look perfectly smooth in photos, but look quite different up-close, with rivets and seams damned near everywhere. For example, here's a close-up of an Su-27 Flanker:  And F-4 Phantom:  Compare that to a modern composite low-observable aircraft like the F-22 which has absolutely smooth body panels with a reduced number of access panels, panel edges designed to reflect energy in specific direction, and special treatments on the edges of every panel to further reduce what gets reflected out: 
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Jan 18, 2014 17:54
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Wouldn't networking several receiving dishes together allow you to track a stealth plane, then? Provided that they are far enough apart to pick up the deflected energy.
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Jan 18, 2014 18:00
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