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Pretty sure an inop radar on an AWACS would make it mission incapable for combat, no? 
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Feb 24, 2014 01:34
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MrYenko posted:Pretty sure an inop radar on an AWACS would make it mission incapable for combat, no? Like I said, it depends. Does HQ need a datalink relay, even if it's only the fighter-generated data? How about radio relay since there are aircraft that don't have SATCOM capability? (granted, that's being solved). Is there actually an air war where we need to see what's happening, or is it Iraq or Afghanistan where we can literally control everything with a couple of radios and a paper map?
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Feb 24, 2014 04:44
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iyaayas01 posted:I've had discussions with some of the old school dudes I've worked with who were around in Desert Storm, the amount of aircraft we put in the air once every couple of years as a publicity stunt today is what they were doing on a daily basis for the duration of the war. So I think I'd agree with Godholio that initially they'd be sky high because a lot of extraneous bullshit would go away but I don't think it would be sustainable, not with our current manning and supply chain. During Desert Storm they had state-of-the-art revetments and facilities, and the crews were fresh out of the European theater after having been drilled hard for years in regards to precision and expedience in regards to maintenance and deployment that they could've done everything in their sleep. No offense met to current crew chiefs, but the Cold War variety were drilled in a sense that in a scramble they should expect warheads to be raining down momentarily, and those were the guys who got tapped to arm and maintain those planes. Nowadays the impetus to be decent at your job is a good EPR, not knowing that you got your planes aloft before your base got vaporized.
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Feb 24, 2014 11:38
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Speaking of the A-10 http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/military-spending-cuts/pentagon-wants-cut-troops-1940-levels-ditch-10-u-2-n37086
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Feb 24, 2014 15:29
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Breaky posted:Speaking of the A-10 Third paragraph: quote:The plan, to be unveiled Monday afternoon, is likely to face stiff opposition on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers will battle for every troop, weapons program and dollar. It's a strategy to get congress to throw money at them, instead of the military having to fight for every buck.
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Feb 24, 2014 15:52
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When they teach strategy at the various military colleges in the US, you know, how to defeat an enemy. Is it the enemy on the battlefield, or the enemy sitting next to you at congressional funding hearings?
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Feb 24, 2014 17:35
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Blistex posted:When they teach strategy at the various military colleges in the US, you know, how to defeat an enemy. Is it the enemy on the battlefield, or the enemy sitting next to you at congressional funding hearings? The enlisted man, with his slothful and deviant ways and constant perversions
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Feb 24, 2014 17:40
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Blistex posted:When they teach strategy at the various military colleges in the US, you know, how to defeat an enemy. Is it the enemy on the battlefield, or the enemy sitting next to you at congressional funding hearings? Do you think love can bloom even in the congressional funding hearing?
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Feb 24, 2014 17:43
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Blistex posted:When they teach strategy at the various military colleges in the US, you know, how to defeat an enemy. Is it the enemy on the battlefield, or the enemy sitting next to you at congressional funding hearings? One of those enemies can kill your men, the other can kill your retirement. This documentary has some pretty nice interviews with McNamarra and a Russian pilot who dropped a bomb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62x16IKGmYQ Hope this doesn't count at 
FrozenVent fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 24, 2014 17:45
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Snowdens Secret posted:The enlisted man, with his slothful and deviant ways and constant perversions I was going to answer "subordinates" but I was being serious.
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Feb 24, 2014 20:36
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FrozenVent posted:One of those enemies can kill your men, the other can kill your retirement. This is awesome, thanks. Also, I think it's fair game if it's on YouTube. If that gets counted as we better shut this whole poo poo down like yesterday.
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Feb 25, 2014 01:31
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Snowdens Secret posted:The enlisted man, with his slothful and deviant ways and constant perversions For some reason I really wanted this to be a reference to something (it isn't, so thanks for this wonderful phrase), and when I put it into the googles the first result was something called "The Grand Strategy of the Reptilians" and now I can't stop laughing.
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Feb 25, 2014 03:05
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Terrible Robot posted:For some reason I really wanted this to be a reference to something (it isn't, so thanks for this wonderful phrase), and when I put it into the googles the first result was something called "The Grand Strategy of the Reptilians" and now I can't stop laughing. I literally did this same thing and it made me want to reinstall Dues Ex.
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Feb 25, 2014 03:10
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So apparently Hagel wants to kill off the U2 for good and I assume throw more money at NGC to make block 40 global hawks. http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/u-2-retires-again-pay-and-benefits-slimmed-down-cruisers-cut-2015-budget-preview-by-hagel/
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Feb 25, 2014 03:40
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Until a few days ago I hadn't even known we were using the U2 again after it's last shutdown/threat of shut down.
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Feb 25, 2014 03:43
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Plinkey posted:So apparently Hagel wants to kill off the U2 for good and I assume throw more money at NGC to make block 40 global hawks. Hahahaha. For so many reasons.
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Feb 25, 2014 04:07
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Did they really justify axing the A-10's in favor of the F-35 to save money? Do they know how much money they continue to spend on the F-35?
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Feb 25, 2014 04:47
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Clearly this means it's time to roll out the U-10 
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Feb 25, 2014 04:47
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_firehawk posted:Did they really justify axing the A-10's in favor of the F-35 to save money? Do they know how much money they continue to spend on the F-35? That part isn't totally insane. The F-35 costs a truckload, but the A-10 is falling apart and needs replacement parts that don't exist, AFAIK.
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Feb 25, 2014 04:58
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What exactly can the U-2 do that a drone can't?
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Feb 25, 2014 05:10
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Cost 1/3 per flight hour apparently.
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Feb 25, 2014 05:14
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Alaan posted:Cost 1/3 per flight hour apparently. I thought the Global Hawk was down to like $10k per hour.
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Feb 25, 2014 05:30
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Party Plane Jones posted:What exactly can the U-2 do that a drone can't? Land consistently
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Feb 25, 2014 06:04
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I've been wondering something, if any of the air force goons in here knows the answer, why is it that pilots wear helmets today but didn't in World War II or Korea?
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Feb 25, 2014 06:09
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Plinkey posted:I thought the Global Hawk was down to like $10k per hour. Apparently one of my numbers was old on U2 cost per hour, but still slightly cheaper than Hawk. U2 is ~30,000, Hawk 33-35000. That should flip fairly soon.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:11
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Mortabis posted:I've been wondering something, if any of the air force goons in here knows the answer, why is it that pilots wear helmets today but didn't in World War II or Korea? I'm no expert but I'd guess that it has something to do with ejection from a Mach + aircraft and trying to keep head bones together. Also Korean war pilots wore helmets. Didn't WWII pilots wear leather helmets? Alaan posted:Apparently one of my numbers was old on U2 cost per hour, but still slightly cheaper than Hawk. U2 is ~30,000, Hawk 33-35000. That should flip fairly soon. I guess I was thinking of the contractor CLS cost per hour, which is around $11k for the global hawk as of 2013. Plinkey fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Feb 25, 2014 |
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Feb 25, 2014 06:12
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Alaan posted:Apparently one of my numbers was old on U2 cost per hour, but still slightly cheaper than Hawk. U2 is ~30,000, Hawk 33-35000. That should flip fairly soon. Yes, if cost to operate is the only reason why U2s still fly. It isn't.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:21
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Mortabis posted:I've been wondering something, if any of the air force goons in here knows the answer, why is it that pilots wear helmets today but didn't in World War II or Korea? Hard helmets for pilots came about with the development of ejection seats. Pilots in Korea absolutely did have them. Helmets in WWII were basically just communications carriers with a place to strap an oxygen mask.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:25
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Party Plane Jones posted:What exactly can the U-2 do that a drone can't? Turn academy grads into generals.
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Feb 25, 2014 06:42
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Plinkey posted:I'm no expert but I'd guess that it has something to do with ejection from a Mach + aircraft and trying to keep head bones together. Also Korean war pilots wore helmets. This made me remember the partial ejection of a guy at Mach 1 and made me wonder about the highest Mach ejection with a pilot that survived. Didn't find that, but found this which is pretty  Guy survives disintegrating plane at Mach 3.18
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Feb 25, 2014 06:51
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http://www.military.com/video/aircraft/ejection-seats/f-15-ejection-at-supersonic-speed/1111680507001/
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Feb 25, 2014 06:55
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Plinkey posted:
quote:The only thing holding my leg on was an artery, the vein, the nerve, and a flap of skin.  Jesus CHRIST
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Feb 25, 2014 07:11
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He deadpans that poo poo too like it was no big thing.
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Feb 25, 2014 07:42
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McNally posted:Hard helmets for pilots came about with the development of ejection seats. Pilots in Korea absolutely did have them. Helmets in WWII were basically just communications carriers with a place to strap an oxygen mask. The leather helmet and glasses worn with them protected you from oil spills and headstrikes. Some of them had hardened leather strips with cushioning.
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Feb 25, 2014 09:48
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Something random for the thread: the Guardian reviews the MREs of various nations.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:30
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Spain's rations look like canned meat and packs of rubbers.
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Feb 25, 2014 16:10
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regarding helmets - The other important thing to remember is how far plastics came during WW2 and the years immediately afterward. The really early plastics that were coming out in the 20s and 30s, like Bakelite and Durofol, were very hard and fairly brittle. They were OK for making something like a fountain pen or the handguard for a rifle, but were prone to chipping and cracking. After the war is when you start getting plastics that were flexible enough to bend and deform rather than straight up shatter, so plastic protective gear starts to become an option. To really see this in practice just look at the progression of headware in Football.
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Feb 25, 2014 16:28
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Vahakyla posted:The leather helmet and glasses worn with them protected you from oil spills and headstrikes. Some of them had hardened leather strips with cushioning. Oil spills weren't as big of an issue once they moved away from open cockpits. As far as headstrikes go, most helmets didn't really offer that either. Chuck Yeager mentions in his autobiography that he modified a tanker's helmet to fit over his leather flight helmet to protect his head from bumps and knocks.  This is a Navy helmet from WWII. Just a cloth communications carrier.  This is an Air Force helmet from WWII. Place for earphones and oxygen mask. About the only leather flight helmets I've seen that had anything that looked like reinforcement for head protection are more modern MiG flight helmets.  That ain't doin' much for you as far as side-to-side goes.
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Feb 25, 2014 19:23
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Shithead Deluxe posted:Spain's rations look like canned meat and packs of rubbers. Supposedly France's MREs are the most sought after.
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Feb 25, 2014 23:02
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Party Plane Jones posted:What exactly can the U-2 do that a drone can't? I can't remember what's open source so this will be general, but the answer to your question is "a lot." From a sensor standpoint the two aircraft aren't even comparable. Here's a decent article on what NG's proposals were for upgrading the Global Chicken's sensor suite to something closer to the U-2...the proposals basically boiled down to "pay us three quarters of a billion dollars to integrate the sensor suite that already works on the U-2, also that doesn't include actually procuring said sensor suite, so you would have to pull the sensors off of the U-2, where they work, onto our plane, where we can't guarantee they will." And they wonder why we wanted to shitcan their colossal piece of poo poo. That's not getting into the fact that it is a maintenance pig. The blue suit maintainers on it can hardly do anything (it's even worse in that respect than the Pred/Reaper), so we're beholden to a bunch of contractors to fix it, and as has been pointed out already it costs more per flight hour (although NG played some numbers games to make it look like the CPFH was down below the U-2 last year). Finally, it (like most other RPAs) is pretty weather sensitive, which is just another strike against it vs the U-2. It's worth pointing out that everyone in the USAF (all the way up to Hostage at ACC and Welsh at the very top) wanted to keep the U-2 and get rid of both the Block 30 and Block 40 RQ-4s but NG's Congressional delegation put language in the 2014 NDAA explicitly forbidding the USAF from getting rid of it. We don't have enough money to support both the U-2 and RQ-4 sustainment (not to mention all the money we're going to have to spend to try and get it up to the U-2's standard), and since we were legally forbidden from doing anything to NG's piece of poo poo, our hands were kind of tied. e: I used to be ambivalent on the Global Chicken vs U-2 debate but after talking with a couple of friends who work on it and getting a bit of tangential first hand experience while I was deployed, I can't stand it. That whole thing should rank up there in crookedness with KC-X as far as "people needing to go to jail" over this. NG's just smarter than Boeing about who they're paying off (it's a lot easier to stay in the clear when you get Congress to do your dirty work for you). iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 02:06
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