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Can we talk more about SCROTUMS? What was that? Please tell me it's real.
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Apr 10, 2014 16:49
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Count Sacula posted:Can we talk more about SCROTUMS? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCtIHkMuDY8 The real problem is that it's not an acronym you really want to google.
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Apr 10, 2014 17:03
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Count Sacula posted:Can we talk more about SCROTUMS? A good username/post combo
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Apr 10, 2014 22:50
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Count Sacula posted:Can we talk more about SCROTUMS? It's not real, but it could be. The NATO naming convention for Russian missiles all start with S, so SATAN, SUNBURN, SPANKER, etc
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Apr 10, 2014 23:18
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iyaayas01 posted:So to bring it back to the original Gates comment that started all this, I could sum up my problems with him in one phrase: lack of definitive data when making decisions. He decreed that we would get 187 Raptors when we said we needed 381; we had hard data to back up 381, he said (almost verbatim) "I don't believe your numbers and think you're lying, you're getting 187 because I said so." He decreed that we would get to 65 RPA CAPs to support ground forces. He claimed that there were massive amounts of unfilled CAP requirements from the ground forces and that the mean, uncaring USAF was leaving ARE TROOPS out there twisting in the wind and not being all in to the fight today because we wanted our super awesome but completely pointless stealth fighters for some pie in the sky war with China 20 years from now. Setting aside the fact that when Gates was making his comments about the USAF not being committed enough to the wars there were literally thousands of USAF personnel deployed with the Army doing Army jobs (for which many of the USAF personnel received little to no training for) because the Army is too loving stupid to manage their own people effectively enough to do their own work so they have to drag the other services in to provide bodies to do the Army's jobs for them, another dirty little secret: even today, when we are about to hit 65 CAPs, there are still a shitload of unfilled COCOM requirements for CAPs. Many of those unfilled requirements are (paraphrasing) an Army O-6 wanting to have a bunch of Pred porn piped into his TOC/JOC/whatever so he can have 24/7 eyes on every inch of his real estate, regardless of whether anything is actually happening. Just because a COCOM/ground force requirement is unfilled doesn't necessarily mean it's valid or that the supported unit is going to effectively use the CAP when they are given it...the USAF tried to point this out to Gates when he decreed his (completely arbitrary) 65 CAPs number, he wasn't hearing it and proceeded to make more public attacks on the USAF and its leadership. I have no idea if this is actually accurate, but based on the process by which he cut F-22 numbers combined with how he has generally spoken about Iraq/Afghanistan, his decision kind of reeks of a mentality that the USAF can go gently caress itself with its shiny toys, because he was writing a bunch of death notification letters for service members whose lives would not have been saved by said aircraft. That is arguably not a great frame of mind to be in when making strategic decisions that will affect the next 40 years. I think one of my favorite and repeated examples of the Army being really loving dumb with how we employ the Air Force is the insistence by ground units to demand a particular aircraft to support them (A-10 ALL DAY EVERYDAY) rather than demanding a particular effect on the target. The same poo poo apparently kept happening with people requesting SDBs to minimize collateral damage and CIVCAS which led to time wasted and lives potentially lost as it became clear that just dropping a 500 pound bomb from the get-go would have been far more effective. Then there are the times that we request the most perfect, crystal clear, high def imagery ever from very special sensors/platforms when some half-poo poo image from any old thing in the air with a Polaroid would actually confirm or deny what the commander is looking for. But now I'm just thinking of all the times the military is dumb, and that's a lot of times. edit to add a plane pic:  The Scorpion looks like a jet added to a movie or video game specifically made to look kind of vaguely like a real plane, while avoiding any branding issues. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 13:49
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mlmp08 posted:
It really does look like something from Just Cause
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Apr 11, 2014 14:21
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What's the thread's opinion on the Scorpion? I haven't seen any performance testing, but the last time I remember a company privately funded a fighter jet venture like this was the F-20 Tigershark, and that had a sad ending (for the F-20, anyway).
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Apr 11, 2014 15:24
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Ars has a fascinating article on how the common fruit fly is a better pilot than any human flying today.Ars posted:Once the flies detected a threat, they “altered their flight path in a remarkably fast and accurate manner,” the authors found. What’s remarkably fast? Fewer than two wing beats. These flies beat their wings 200 times per second, so that’s less than a hundredth of a second. Ars posted:In normal flight with no threat detected, the flies tend to turn in the same way an airplane does when it's using its tail rudder to shift direction while maintaining a constant speed. They manage this by rotating on their yaw axis. But for evasive turns, the flies shift direction fives times as fast. They pitch and roll in a way that would probably make some of the passengers on an airplane reach for their barf bags. The flies rotate their bodies in one direction and then rotate back within just a few wing beats, using torque and counter torque to bank like a fighter jet. And then a cool vid showing some of the super-slow motion moves they captured. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLjC_5FpYw
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Apr 11, 2014 21:19
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slothrop posted:It really does look like something from Just Cause Or the plane they'd use if they remade the first "Hot Shots."
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Apr 11, 2014 21:48
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mlmp08 posted:I have no idea if this is actually accurate, but based on the process by which he cut F-22 numbers combined with how he has generally spoken about Iraq/Afghanistan, his decision kind of reeks of a mentality that the USAF can go gently caress itself with its shiny toys, because he was writing a bunch of death notification letters for service members whose lives would not have been saved by said aircraft. That is arguably not a great frame of mind to be in when making strategic decisions that will affect the next 40 years. I think that's probably a valid point. Davin Valkri posted:What's the thread's opinion on the Scorpion? I haven't seen any performance testing, but the last time I remember a company privately funded a fighter jet venture like this was the F-20 Tigershark, and that had a sad ending (for the F-20, anyway). I truly don't understand what Textron is going for or what market segment they think they're going to get to buy this. The US military is a non-starter, period, regardless of how much sense it may or may not make for the US to procure some. Any significant US ally (NATO or major non-NATO ally) is probably the same. Outside of that, you run into the problem of who exactly is going to be willing to pay for a low performance jet combat aircraft. The US aligned countries outside of that category who can afford jet combat aircraft (Iraq, Gulf States, Taiwan) are all going to want to procure no kidding jet fighters (look at Iraq's insistence of buying several F-16s). The US aligned countries who fall outside of the "can afford jet combat aircraft" category aren't going to want to procure something like the Scorpion, no matter how affordable it is, because a) their threats are going to be best met by a turboprop type aircraft like a Super Tucano and (more significantly) b) most of those countries aren't going to be able to maintain the logistical backend to support something like the Scorpion, no matter how simple it is, because it's still a turbofan combat aircraft (Afghanistan is the first example that comes to mind here). So I just don't see what the market is that they see for it.
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Apr 11, 2014 23:48
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Speaking of the Tigershark does anybody have the story of why it was such a dud? As a kid I had a bunch of coffee table style books about planes and they all seemed to think that it was the bees knees. Also if you have the kind of kid that would be excited by a complete Jane's a Encyclopedia of Aviation for his 7th birthday, kick his nerd rear end.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:11
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Is there any rhyme or reason to how squadrons and planes are referred to in comms? Like is Voodoo Actual always a certain type of plane or mission, or Red Leader, or whatever? Or is it like Top Gun where the pilots all have call signs individually independent of mission?
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Apr 12, 2014 01:12
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iyaayas01 posted:I think that's probably a valid point. COIN if Scotland secedes.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:13
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DonkeyHotay posted:Speaking of the Tigershark does anybody have the story of why it was such a dud? As a kid I had a bunch of coffee table style books about planes and they all seemed to think that it was the bees knees. It was an evolution of an older aircraft, which is always a marketing problem, and the US wasn't buying any, which is always a marketing problem, and anybody you could sell an F-20 to would also be legal/able to buy an F-16, which while more expensive, obviously had a lot more headroom for upgrades and multi-role buzzword bingo. Mostly it was timing. When the F-5 was getting sold, the US was buying and giving away cheap and cheerful day fighters to sorta-allies. By the 80's when the F-20 was on the market, the US had started selling top line fighters to anybody not actively a member of warsaw pact, so cheap and cheerful daylight fighter not-top-of-the-line wasn't going to sell.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:24
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DonkeyHotay posted:Speaking of the Tigershark does anybody have the story of why it was such a dud? As a kid I had a bunch of coffee table style books about planes and they all seemed to think that it was the bees knees. Short answer is it only made sense if US DOD restricted export of frontline USAF jet tech. Once other countries could get full-zoot F-16s, with the default systems compatibility and economy of scale that comes with piggybacking USAF, the F-20's raison d'etre vanished.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:26
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Drav posted:Is there any rhyme or reason to how squadrons and planes are referred to in comms? Like is Voodoo Actual always a certain type of plane or mission, or Red Leader, or whatever? Or is it like Top Gun where the pilots all have call signs individually independent of mission? Generally speaking, there is a list of names for the various types of mission. So maybe there are 25 tanker callsigns, 50 CAP callsigns, 50 CAS callsigns, etc. As missions go out each day, the next callsign in line is used for that flight. A name is not reusable until the previous use of that name has landed and ended mission. In this way you might have a "Knight" flight every day, but have it be a different set of aircraft and pilots each time. Using actual callsigns such that you can identify which pilot it is and what kind of plane that pilot flies is bad OPSEC. Within flights, the wingmen use the same prefix name, but different numbers. Like Knight 61, Knight 62, Knight 63, Knight 64 for a division of aircraft within Knight flight. All of this information, plus a hell of a lot more, is published in a daily Air Tasking Order (ATO). That way when you see a given IFF response, callsign, whatever, you can use the ATO to find out what the flight's mission is, where they are expected to go, etc. Actual USAF guys feel free to correct me, but I don't think I hosed anything up, because I'm leaving out the finer details.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:28
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mlmp08 posted:Generally speaking, there is a list of names for the various types of mission. So maybe there are 25 tanker callsigns, 50 CAP callsigns, 50 CAS callsigns, etc. As missions go out each day, the next callsign in line is used for that flight. A name is not reusable until the previous use of that name has landed and ended mission. In this way you might have a "Knight" flight every day, but have it be a different set of aircraft and pilots each time. Using actual callsigns such that you can identify which pilot it is and what kind of plane that pilot flies is bad OPSEC. So Ace Combat lied to me?!  But if certain callsigns are always associated with, e.g., a strike mission, wouldn't that also compromise OPSEC? Or is the list of the "25 tanker callsigns, 50 CAP callsigns, 50 CAS callsigns, etc." re-randomized every day?
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Apr 12, 2014 01:36
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That's the detail I'm not sure I'm correct on. We often use the pool of names based on mission in training out of simplicity, but I can't recall if that's done operationally or not.
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Apr 12, 2014 01:46
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Man, aircraft sure were cooler back when no one gave two shits about OPSEC. "Just paint the loving thing red. Yes they'll know it's not just another Albatross, that's the whole loving point." "Make mine yellow" "Can I get a sick dragon down the side? I've got some sketches. . . . "
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Apr 12, 2014 02:55
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"hey guys we should really rotate Black Sheep Squadron as a name so the enemy doesn't know things" *annihilates every single foe* *sometimes gets hit by an rpg*
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Apr 12, 2014 04:03
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mlmp08 posted:Generally speaking, there is a list of names for the various types of mission. So maybe there are 25 tanker callsigns, 50 CAP callsigns, 50 CAS callsigns, etc. As missions go out each day, the next callsign in line is used for that flight. A name is not reusable until the previous use of that name has landed and ended mission. In this way you might have a "Knight" flight every day, but have it be a different set of aircraft and pilots each time. Using actual callsigns such that you can identify which pilot it is and what kind of plane that pilot flies is bad OPSEC. This is all correct. Davin Valkri posted:So Ace Combat lied to me?! Little of both, there's a few different ATOs that overlap. Callsigns are super overrated from an opsec perspective anyways. Yeah, it's protected information, and that's so dumbasses get the point, but it's also fundamentally disposable information with every expectation that it'll eventually be compromised. If there's a callsign you can't afford to have compromised, you shouldn't be saying it because you should always assume your comms are collected by the adversary. So to offset that, ATOs will change at fixed intervals, or whenever some knuckledragger in a Kiowa lets his rotor downdraft suck his ATO copy off his kneeboard and into the wild brown yonder because he can't be arsed to memorize his own loving callsigns. Against a competent adversary who knows your hardware you're not fooling anyone for very long, doubly so when ISR gets involved, triply so when the shooting starts and people start lighting each other up with intercept/targeting radars. So any serious expectation of security based on callsign alone is long since a thing of the past. Thus the objective of a callsign isn't to conceal identity, it's to conceal it long enough that your identity doesn't matter because the missiles are on the way in. And more often than not, it's crazy conspicuous when they're vague names, kinda like flying around with a false mustache and trenchcoat with eyeholes in a newspaper and calling yourself Mr. Anonymousson von Incognito. Doesn't matter who you are, you're attracting attention simply because your name isn't British Airways 187 or Air Singapore 22 or Fedex 444 or N123456. Go pick up a UHF/VHF scanner, and it's immediately apparent which of these things is not like the other. It works better for heavies and stuff that can otherwise behave like a normal plane or blend in with civilian traffic patterns/profiles so even though they have clearly military callsigns, it's harder to figure out who they are from flight profiles. Sometimes you're just hosed because irrespective of callsign there's no mistaking a slow mover at 60,000 feet for anything but a U-2 or Global Hawk. Nor is there any chance to confuse that pair of small/medium blips going 600kts towards a published refueling track where a very large blip is slowly orbiting for the tanker itself. Unless you're French. A lot of CONUS military birds will just use their classic airframe callsign, so Warthog, Viper/Falcon, Eagle, Dragon, Spirit, etc so there's no small degree of GEFGW in play for daily ops.
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Apr 12, 2014 05:33
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Also generally callsigns are only used in encrypted comms, so hopefully the enemy wont hear that Viper 69 is configured in a certain way for a certain mission.
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Apr 12, 2014 12:48
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I figured I'd ask here because we get a good volume of mil-types in here and this seems like something you guys might actually know where to get for a good price. Long story short I'm looking to get a super basic, custom metal token/chit like thing done up. Think similar to an AA token or a challenge coin. Nothing too complex but I"d like it engraved a bit deeper than what you'd get with a steel blank and a laser engraver. I'm also not looking to spend megabucks on this, I'd like to keep it sub-$25 if at all possible. I'd just go yank on the coat tails of the TFR metal shop crew but the basic lettering I'm thinking of for this is probably a bit out of their area of expertise. I only need one, maybe two so I'm gently caress out of luck when it comes to volume discounts.
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Apr 12, 2014 15:48
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  Cyrano4747 posted:Man, aircraft sure were cooler back when no one gave two shits about OPSEC.  The German's approach to color usage was very interesting up until they realized things like advertising squads via emblems and even individual rank was probably more trouble than it was worth.
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Apr 12, 2014 15:53
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Thief posted:
I've always been a bit mystified by the USN habit of painting not only squadron numbers and callsigns but also huge squadron insignia, carrier identification and even the names of pilots on their aircraft. I guess with today's weapon ranges it doesn't really matter, but still, as far as I can tell they were doing that even in Vietnam and it just seems a bit odd to me. Were there plans to paint that stuff over in case of WW3? I mean, the other guy is probably going to find out which carrier is in the vicinity pretty soon anyway, but still, there's no reason to give away freebies in war. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 16:32
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Now they're restricted to only one plane in the squadron having the fancy livery, AFAIK. I'm not sure if that's more about opsec or just cutting costs on giving all the planes garish colors. Cyrano4747 posted:I figured I'd ask here because we get a good volume of mil-types in here and this seems like something you guys might actually know where to get for a good price. I hope someone has a better lead, but the last time I was put in charge of pricing out and shopping around for coin production, the most expensive part is making the initial proof. It was something like $100 IIRC to make the initial proof, on what was a rather large and detailed coin compared to some, and then maybe $4/each to make them beyond the first coin. We certainly could have saved some cost by starting with a standard shape that the producer already has on hand and simply adding a design or engraving to that stock shape. Our coin was a custom shape and design. Other sellers do not have a die setup charge, but require that you purchase bulk, such that you're effectively paying for the die setup anyway.
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Apr 12, 2014 16:34
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mlmp08 posted:I hope someone has a better lead, but the last time I was put in charge of pricing out and shopping around for coin production, the most expensive part is making the initial proof. It was something like $100 IIRC to make the initial proof, on what was a rather large and detailed coin compared to some, and then maybe $4/each to make them beyond the first coin. We certainly could have saved some cost by starting with a standard shape that the producer already has on hand and simply adding a design or engraving to that stock shape. Our coin was a custom shape and design. Yup, I was the snacko at my previous unit and all the places we went through all charged a die fee...even our new designs that were the standard circle shape still needed an upfront die fee. That said, I've had good results with either Coinforce or Aviator Gear.
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Apr 12, 2014 17:33
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 What the gently caress is going on here, and why am I thinking that this looks incredibly fun?
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Apr 12, 2014 18:12
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Russian jets run unpressurised cockpits so they can have open vomit scuppers.
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Apr 12, 2014 19:08
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:
Pretty sure thrust vectoring + balls. Confirm?
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Apr 12, 2014 21:20
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Confirmed. Not shown in the gif: he does that cobra roll directly into high-alpha, slow, level, forward flight. Here's the whole display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCt_rYkVAYI
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Apr 12, 2014 22:48
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I'm curious how the instrumentation gives them any idea of what the plane is doing when the nose is pointing so far off from their movement vector.
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Apr 12, 2014 22:55
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I'm curious to know how the F-22 would compare at low speed acrobatics like that. Do they attempt stuff like that in airshows (pre-sequester)? Or is it just that kind of stuff, while amazing and thrilling, is really not a big priority in a modern fighter. I like watching airshow footage and I can't recall ever seeing any as impressive as the Flanker variants out of the modern fighters. All the flashy moves in the world won't matter if you don't even know someone has you targeted until they launch a missile at you.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:05
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priznat posted:I'm curious to know how the F-22 would compare at low speed acrobatics like that. Do they attempt stuff like that in airshows (pre-sequester)? Or is it just that kind of stuff, while amazing and thrilling, is really not a big priority in a modern fighter. I like watching airshow footage and I can't recall ever seeing any as impressive as the Flanker variants out of the modern fighters. Maybe you might be able to get a missile to deviate it's course a fraction of a degree before it blew up and cut all your controls and set your craft on fire. I imagine it would make a pretty pattern if you were spewing IR flares the whole time and might bluff the missile's sensors, but then again flying straight or a bank in one direction might be miles more effective than that. I'm not that sure how a modern fight would go down if a 4th Gen or less fighter were to engage it. Would they let loose with something 20 miles out, or try and close the distance and get a favourable angle on it? Would an F-22 fire from miles out, or would they use their stealthiness to try and get into a position where the first warning the enemy pilot would get was their cockpit decompressing and shards of metal shredding their internal organs? Inquiring minds would like to know.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:18
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F-22s have thrust vectoring and a high thrust to weight ratio so I suspect they're probably pretty good at doing those kinds of maneuvers; that said, there is maneuvering and there is maneuvering. I am led to believe what really matters is being able to change your direction of travel, not the direction the plane is pointing, so that you can fly out of a missile's engagement envelope (maybe the wrong term? basically fly away from it so it burns out before it reaches you). Also those maneuvers look like they'd eat up a ton of the plane's kinetic energy which would put you at a disadvantage. USAF folks please correct any mistakes here TIA.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:35
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Looks like the F-22 can do the Pugachev Cobra and the Kulbit, both maneuvers that used to be the exclusive realm of Flankers and Fulcrums: (in the fighter world, afaik) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrBx6G2O6A4 Scares me to watch that more than the Flanker ones, because who knows when software decides to do something weird! priznat fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 00:52
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Another point: despite the drastic cuts to the F-22 program, they still outnumber the SU-35 187 to 48. (48 is the order total, with deliveries continuing through 2015.)
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Apr 13, 2014 01:22
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:
Looks like they're trying to do a Cobra manuever in a SU-27/35 and overcommitted. edit: beaten, and badly. Party Plane Jones fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 01:40
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I believe the theory is that none of these moves would be used defensively. They're entirely for pointing your aircraft at the enemy, at any moment, regardless of airspeed, so you can fire upon them. The ability to just snap the plane to almost any attitude, then lock and fire a short-range missile, is the selling point of these types of super-maneuverability. In theory (in about 10 years when the software and integration is nearing completion), the F-35 and F-22 will have the ability to execute "lock after launch" IR missile engagements where the missile is launched, turns to the target, acquires the lock, then homes. Which should achieve the same basic goal, but without the loss of airspeed that occurs when you tell your airplane to fly loving backwards temporarily. The tradeoff is that the missile itself loses airspeed executing the turn, the target might be missing when it finishes the turn, and it's all very complicated and expensive. deck fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 06:20
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| # ? May 23, 2024 10:02 |
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deck posted:I believe the theory is that none of these moves would be used defensively. They're entirely for pointing your aircraft at the enemy, at any moment, regardless of airspeed, so you can fire upon them. The ability to just snap the plane to almost any attitude, then lock and fire a short-range missile, is the selling point of these types of super-maneuverability. You're correct: Back in the day, you had to point your aircraft at the other guy in order to get a gun kill or good parameters for a missile launch, and highly maneuverable aircraft like the Flanker were developed with the idea that it would give their pilots options that the other guy didn't have. Unfortunately, right about the time they were reaching operational status most of the major players started fielding helmet mounted cueing sights and crazy maneuverable dogfight missiles that can fly straight across your classic turning fight and kill you, making the whole thing rather redundant. The same extremely agile missiles make any endgame maneuvers by a manned platform effectively pointless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YMSfg26YSQ deck posted:(in about 10 years when the software and integration is nearing completion)
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Apr 13, 2014 09:57
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