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Australia has some ridiculously hard/durable woods. Why would you use a crap one?
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Jan 4, 2017 10:24
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JcDent posted:Phew, made it through the backlog. Simply put, you put a big rear end radar on a plane suitable to carry it, along with a number of operators to both track the radar and control friendly aircraft in the area. There are two big advantages to putting a large search radar on a plane: 1. Radar range increases as you raise the altitude of the radar, due to being able to see "over" the horizon. Same reason you put the radar at the top of the mast of a ship. This means that you can detect enemy threats from further out and direct interceptors onto them before they can do things like launch anti shipping missiles. 2. Having a plane with a big search radar nearby means you don't have to have your smaller planes broadcast their locations, since they can be directed onto targets by the AEW plane and only use their radar when they are prosecuting the target. This is where the idea of a passive seeking "AWACS killer" missile comes from, the idea is that you shoot a long ranged air-to-air missile at the strongest radar source (which is probably the AWACS) to knock out the enemy's eyes in the sky. The missile also can't be detected easily since it's not broadcasting itself. The idea usually disappears due to technological issues with the concept though.
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Jan 4, 2017 11:22
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MikeCrotch posted:This is where the idea of a passive seeking "AWACS killer" missile comes from, the idea is that you shoot a long ranged air-to-air missile at the strongest radar source (which is probably the AWACS) to knock out the enemy's eyes in the sky. The missile also can't be detected easily since it's not broadcasting itself. The idea usually disappears due to technological issues with the concept though. What is the technological issues with this technology? It sounds neat.
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Jan 4, 2017 11:24
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Boiled Water posted:What is the technological issues with this technology? It sounds neat. I can't answer, but I know both Russia and China withdrew funding for their programs eventually, so it must have not worked for some reason.
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Jan 4, 2017 11:42
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Is some SEAD HARM missile not maneuverable enough or too big?
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Jan 4, 2017 12:18
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JcDent posted:Is some SEAD HARM missile not maneuverable enough or too big? A HARM is designed for the task of engaging a static, radar equipped emplacement and is probably totally useless for engaging a moving airbourne target. As for size, it's likely that an AWACS killer would need to be even bigger than a HARM due to the long ranges required, since to kill an AWACS you want to shoot it from far enough away that its defenders can't shoot you back easily. Otherwise, you could just use a regular air to air missile instead of a big, expensive passively guided one. Big air to air missiles are generally kind of a pain in the rear end to carry and mount for the payoff - look at the F-14 and how often it actually used Phoenixes - and often require the plane to build from the ground up to accept them. The Russians might be able to fit one to the MiG-31, but even then it's not totally straightforward to interface a new missile (especially one with a novel method of tracking targets) with the aircraft's systems. There is also the issue of using passive tracking to guide an air to air missile, which I suspect from how it hasn't really panned out is much more difficult to do than people expected. Plus, what happens if the AWACS turns its radar off like SAM sites under attack do? True you've temporarily neutralised it, but I highly doubt there is any chance of building a missile that can remember the previous location of the target like a HARM when the target is moving at several hundred knots, so the AWACS is potentially free to turn its radar back on shortly. And again this kind of missile is probably big and expensive, so it's unlikely you have a big stock of them if that happens,
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Jan 4, 2017 12:47
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FrozenVent posted:The sea gives no gently caress, and does not give back her dead. Once you've figured out something that works, you tend to stick with it; the "move fast and break things" approach to innovation isn't very popular when it comes to poo poo whose failure mode is "in seven years, your next of kind can file to have you declared presumed dead." It's amazing what the word dreadnought does to this thread! I know about the time-keeping/latitude thing but that seems to be more of a navigation issue to me, so I get why the ancient Athenians never sailed to Bolivia (or did they!?!?!). What I was getting at more was were the kinds of advances seen in the age of sail only particularly useful for transoceanic voyaging or Why Didn't The Romans Develop Tall Ships? Or am I just overvaluing the highly romanticized period of the age of sail vs. ancient ships and a ship-of-the-line absent gunpowder cannons just not that much better than a trireme or whatever the Phoencians used.
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Jan 4, 2017 16:36
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Well, the compass is a big loving deal. Transatlantic voyages predate the sextant but that really helped make it easier to hit a specific destination. The 16 th C is also when people start to finally figure out scurvy. Politics is also a huge part of it.
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Jan 4, 2017 16:52
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You kind of have to think of over-the-horizon sailing in the same terms as space travel today...with a few exceptions it was a completely new thing for humanity and doing it in a way that made the risks in any way acceptable took a long, long time.Tias posted:I can't answer, but I know both Russia and China withdrew funding for their programs eventually, so it must have not worked for some reason. The biggest tech hurdle is just being able to communicate with the missile over these super-long distances with enough speed and reliability to give it a reasonable chance of being within its envelope for terminal homing. You have to be able to overcome persistent and very effective EW/jamming over hundreds of kms, while also maintaining some sort of position on the target, both of which are a big ask for an airborne platform. I think ultimately, at least in the case of the Russians, that they found ground-based interceptors were a better solution; India is still working on it. bewbies fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 17:02
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bewbies posted:You kind of have to think of over-the-horizon sailing in the same terms as space travel today...with a few exceptions it was a completely new thing for humanity and doing it in a way that made the risks in any way acceptable took a long, long time. Yep, just look at the way it birthed joint stock companies and insurance as the only way to stay in business when one ship sinks, one is waylaid by pirates, one disappears completely, and the fourth comes back packed full of spice.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:08
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MikeCrotch posted:A HARM is designed for the task of engaging a static, radar equipped emplacement and is probably totally useless for engaging a moving airbourne target. This talk about large missiles reminds me of the Taurus-class bunker-busters our Tornados and Eurofighters can carry. We don't really need our 600 fancy air to ground cruise missiles right now, but it's nice to have them in an emergency, I guess. I assume the US and other states also have missiles like that, but I don't know much about them besides what I saw in Hollywood-movies. What is the US using to destroy bunkers?
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Jan 4, 2017 17:36
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Still catching up on Cold War thread, but I wanted to harp in something they mention about once a year: people lose poo poo over lost fixed wing (fighter) pilots a lot more than over downed helos (full of marines) is because a fighter jet is a symbol of American technological superiority that's whittled from the bones of Uncle Sam and clad in Bald Eagle feathers, while the fighter pilot is a shining knight on the sky. If the American fighter can't kill everything that dares to fly against it, from the tiniest sparrow to archangel Michael, then America and freedom are vulnerable, and that's unacceptable. Meanwhile, helicopters, especially Chinooks and Black Hawks are just these flying lumps of stuff that isn't bleeding futuretech that is in every way better than what dirtfarmers can musters. Also, they fall down all the time, clearly something like that wouldn't happen to the destined defender of liberty, capitalism and evangelical protestantism. They also carry around infantry, and outside of highly publicized single cases of capture and torture, infantry is kind of boring, weak and bland.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:38
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Ahh, so nobles, defenders of Christendom, fly fighters. Peasants get a ride on lumps of machinery prone to failure.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:47
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zoux posted:It's amazing what the word dreadnought does to this thread! Why would the Romans as a Mediterranean power need them? They could already reach West Africa and Scandinavia and mostly didn't bother. Also as currently discussed in the ancient history thread, unlike the Phoenicians and the Greeks they weren't culturally that keen on sailing.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:47
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After the costly occupation of Britain which had really meagre political and economic rewards the Romans were way warier of expansionist adventures as well.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:58
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Plutonis posted:After the costly occupation of Britain which had really meagre political and economic rewards the Romans were way warier of expansionist adventures as well. What made it so costly? Did the Romans expect the occupation to bring greater rewards than it did and if so, why did they miscalculate? Why couldn't they simply withdraw early on, like what happened with Armenia and Mesopotamia when Hadrian became emperor?
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Jan 4, 2017 18:12
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The Lone Badger posted:Australia has some ridiculously hard/durable woods. Why would you use a crap one? it kept breaking the saws 
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Jan 4, 2017 18:15
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zoux posted:I know about the time-keeping/latitude thing but that seems to be more of a navigation issue to me, so I get why the ancient Athenians never sailed to Bolivia (or did they!?!?!). What I was getting at more was were the kinds of advances seen in the age of sail only particularly useful for transoceanic voyaging or Why Didn't The Romans Develop Tall Ships? Or am I just overvaluing the highly romanticized period of the age of sail vs. ancient ships and a ship-of-the-line absent gunpowder cannons just not that much better than a trireme or whatever the Phoencians used. I'm not a naval expert, but this is my understanding. You need a very different design for ships intended to paddle around the Mediterranean and for actually oceanworthy ships. The Mediterranean is a fairly placid sea, while a real ocean has a lot more wind and currents and so forth.As a result, the design of the Phoenician/Greek/whoever ships was probably more unstable and much more muscle-powered("trireme" refers to 3 banks of oars), rather than wind-powered. I'm not sure they necessarily needed a large advance in technology(although I think there were some with regard to being able to control the sails), but if you took a quinquereme out into that atlantic it would probably sink and I'm pretty sure it couldn't possibly sail across because the design just wasn't compatible. Kopijeger posted:What made it so costly? Did the Romans expect the occupation to bring greater rewards than it did and if so, why did they miscalculate? Why couldn't they simply withdraw early on, like what happened with Armenia and Mesopotamia when Hadrian became emperor? They never really pacified Wales and the northern areas, so they had to deal with lots of raids and revolts or leave a large standing army there, and that's ignoring pirates and raiders from Ireland and Germania(where Germania refers to anything to the east that the Romans didn't control). As for not withdrawing, the Romans really really didn't like withdrawing. It was hard for Hadrian to sell retreating, and part of the reason he'd been able to manage was because it hadn't really been conquered yet, just occupied. When Aurelian backed out of Dacia(a province that had been conquered around the same time as Britannia), it was incredibly unpopular, even though having this province on the other side of the Danube made the defensive lines much harder and the silver mines were exhausted by that point.
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Jan 4, 2017 18:27
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The romans Greeks et al had a lot more than just triremes. Sails were very much used even by boats with oars. They were also active outside the med. One major innovation I forgot earlier was the rudder. That was medieval tech.
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Jan 4, 2017 18:33
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zoux posted:It's amazing what the word dreadnought does to this thread! Didn't the norse make it to the Americas using ships not all that unlike what the Romans had?
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Jan 4, 2017 18:43
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It's not often mentioned, but HMS Victorious served briefly with the USN in the Pacific during the dark period in early 1943 when Saratoga was the only operational fleet carrier.Cyrano4747 posted:The romans Greeks et al had a lot more than just triremes. Sails were very much used even by boats with oars. They were also active outside the med. Wrecks of Greek (etc) merchant ships—fat round sail-powered vessels—have been among the most productive marine archaeology sites. I want to say Texas A&M has a salvaged and restored one on display.
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Jan 4, 2017 19:26
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Fangz posted:Didn't the norse make it to the Americas using ships not all that unlike what the Romans had? Yes they did. But you can island-hop from Scandinavia to Newfoundland and never have to be at sea for more than a few hundred miles (a couple of days, albeit very damp and chilly ones). People have crossed the Atlantic on fantastically unsuitable boats if they've got lucky with the weather. There's certainly no technical reason why something like a Roman merchant ship couldn't get to North America - Colombus did it with caravels that were no bigger (50-70 feet long). And while caravels had a much more efficient sail arrangement they weren't drastically more seaworthy - the Med isn't quite a placid inland lake it's sometimes made out to be. It can have severe tidal flows in some spots and fierce wind such as the sirocco and gregale. The Romans ceased commercial shipping on the Med during the winter because of the weather conditions - from an official, rather than an actual, standpoint at least. It's where the phrase mare clausum comes from.
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Jan 4, 2017 19:29
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feedmegin posted:Why would the Romans as a Mediterranean power need them? They could already reach West Africa and Scandinavia and mostly didn't bother. Also as currently discussed in the ancient history thread, unlike the Phoenicians and the Greeks they weren't culturally that keen on sailing. I'm assuming bigger and faster ships are always going to be in demand. Maybe I'm operating under some misconceptions, because I'm assuming that Age of Sail ships and crews are at the pinnacle of sea-worthiness and seamanship without synthetic materials or computer modelling or whatever. So were classical era ships not much worse than them in terms of speed and size when operating littorally? Also how restricted to littoral waters was classical era shipping? If you wanted to go from say Cyrene to Sicilia, did they just go in a straight line there or did they have to hug the African coast all the way up to Carthage?
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Jan 4, 2017 19:46
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feedmegin posted:Why would the Romans as a Mediterranean power need them? They could already reach West Africa and Scandinavia and mostly didn't bother. Also as currently discussed in the ancient history thread, unlike the Phoenicians and the Greeks they weren't culturally that keen on sailing. This, if you've already walked all the way to rainy
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Jan 4, 2017 20:06
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OwlFancier posted:This, if you've already walked all the way to rainy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas
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Jan 4, 2017 20:17
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zoux posted:I'm assuming bigger and faster ships are always going to be in demand. Maybe I'm operating under some misconceptions, because I'm assuming that Age of Sail ships and crews are at the pinnacle of sea-worthiness and seamanship without synthetic materials or computer modelling or whatever. Not in the Med, where galleys were still a big thing up until Lepanto in the Early Modern for example. Oars have their advantages and you don't necessarily need long distance ocean going ships.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:15
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zoux posted:I'm assuming bigger and faster ships are always going to be in demand. Maybe I'm operating under some misconceptions, because I'm assuming that Age of Sail ships and crews are at the pinnacle of sea-worthiness and seamanship without synthetic materials or computer modelling or whatever. So were classical era ships not much worse than them in terms of speed and size when operating littorally? as has already been said a few times the major limitations are navigational, not structural issues with the boats themselves. The sea is really loving big and if you lose sight of land you can be really, really hosed if you don't have a good way to figure out where the gently caress you are and how to get to where you are going. The compass and sextant are a BIG loving DEAL when it comes to sailing out of sight of land. There were certainly advances made in shipbuilding between Rome and Admiral Nelson. The rudder, all sorts of improvements in rigging sails, deeper more sicentific understandings of what makes ships stable and speedy in water, etc. That doesn't diminish the fact that a 18th century frigate that had no way of telling which way it was pointing or where it was in the middle of the ocean would be a very hosed boat indeed.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:as has already been said a few times the major limitations are navigational, not structural issues with the boats themselves. Also, preserving food and water.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:19
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The largest naval battle ever fought in the Baltic Sea was the second battle of Svensksund fought in 1790 and galleys were still an important part of both Russian and Swedish navies.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:26
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Fangz posted:Didn't the norse make it to the Americas using ships not all that unlike what the Romans had? Just because kon-tiki made it from Peru to Fiji doesn't mean the Incas ever did. The surety of knowing something is out there is hard to understate.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:as has already been said a few times the major limitations are navigational, not structural issues with the boats themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutter_(nautical)
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Jan 4, 2017 21:29
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Nenonen posted:The largest naval battle ever fought in the Baltic Sea was the second battle of Svensksund fought in 1790 and galleys were still an important part of both Russian and Swedish navies.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:30
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The Romans didn't have much of a need for bigger and badder ships post-Carthage because they were the only game in the Med. All you need is local coast guards to keep the pirates down.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:33
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Was there a first contact doctrine by europeans during exploration of the Americas like did Spanish monarchs tell Spanish explorers " yo if you see natives kill em all and take their stuff?"
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Jan 4, 2017 21:33
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Were ships during the age of sail even all that safe? I know disease would kill crews like crazy, but was it common for the ships to just wreck/sink/vanish? Seems like they probably would be, but I guess comparing the safety record against Mediterranean shipping would be tough owing to a lack of records.KildarX posted:Was there a first contact doctrine by europeans during exploration of the Americas like did Spanish monarchs tell Spanish explorers " yo if you see natives kill em all and take their stuff?" Not during Columbus' original journey. Once he got to the Americas the Spaniards started kidnapping and enslaving the locals like crazy, and the Spanish monarchs told them to stop enslaving the locals; the response from the colonialists was basically "nah we're gonna keep doing it". e: Also, that user name... 
PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 21:57
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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It actually enraged me as a kid for some reason watching a documentary on Pizarro's conquest of the Inca where he read a letter from the King of Spain going "Yo, so yeah, the Emperor of the Inca is a Sovereign like me, I'd like if it you treated him as though he were me." and Pizarro's reaction was basically to go "Meh" and tortured and killed him anyways.
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Jan 4, 2017 22:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:It actually enraged me as a kid for some reason watching a documentary on Pizarro's conquest of the Inca where he read a letter from the King of Spain going "Yo, so yeah, the Emperor of the Inca is a Sovereign like me, I'd like if it you treated him as though he were me." and Pizarro's reaction was basically to go "Meh" and tortured and killed him anyways. Pizarro strikes me as a guy who would gladly kill the King of Spain and take all his stuff, had that option been on the table.
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Jan 4, 2017 22:07
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PittTheElder posted:Were ships during the age of sail even all that safe? I know disease would kill crews like crazy, but was it common for the ships to just wreck/sink/vanish? Yes it was, but that didn't mean that people didn't sail, and sail a lot. Someone compared pre-industrial oceanic sea travel to space travel and the analogy works here: space travel is an inherently risky business that can quickly become disastrous if something even relatively small goes wrong. But we managed to send people to the moon on an annual basis with only one fatal disaster and one major near-disaster. There were 135 shuttle missions, two of which ended in disaster. The age of sail was similar - there were a lot of shipwrecks, deaths and disappearances but there were a lot of ships out there on the sea. If it wasn't at least a decently reliable way of getting from place to place no-one would have done it. Even today the sea is a hostile environment, and that's with steel ships, diesel engines and GPS. Back then scores of ships did just disappear, with only an 'Overdue' listing in the local papers to mark its passing. But many times that number successfully made their voyages again and again. It's a matter of 'IFs'. IF a wooden sailing ship accurately knew where it was, IF the weather was cooperative (and those crewing it had a decent idea of what the weather was going), IF the ship's structure and rigging was in good condition and IF the crew hadn't been laid out by scurvy, cholera or dysentry then everything was fine. But many perfectly good ships ran aground because they were miles off course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_1707), because the wind blew from the wrong direction and sent them onto a lee shore, or were caught by a squall or storm they had no way of predicting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Charter_(ship)). So understanding the causes of scurvy and other diseases, the invention of the chronometer, the establishment of scientific meteorology, the invention of the steam engine and iron hulls etc. etc. all massively improved the safety of sea travel but it wasn't exactly a death sentence in the age of sail and it's hardly risk-free today. Before the mid-19th century no-one went to sea unless they absolutely had to. It's only when sea travel began to become routinely safe, courtesy of steam engines and steel hulls, that the whole 'Romance of the Age of Sail' nostalgia kicks in and you get people going sailing and yachting for fun
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Jan 4, 2017 22:43
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P-Mack posted:Pizarro strikes me as a guy who would gladly kill the King of Spain and take all his stuff, had that option been on the table. I feel this is a fair characterization In the cold war thread somehow we're on a tangent on the competence of the RN before the 20th century. Some wikipedia links have been posted, and let me tell you friends, there's some *stuff* in there: SimonCat posted:I looked up the article about Camperdown. This sentence about the captain is amazing: Antti posted:Re: Camperdown, I tried to figure out what Tryon thought he was going to do with the orders. It looks to me like he wanted to turn two parallel lines of ships to port together, keeping the formation, but hosed up the orders and ordered the ships to turn into each other instead. So instead of both lines going port, he ordered the left one to go starboard and the right one to go port. Terrifying Effigies posted:Massie's Dreadnought has the best account - lot of parallels to modern day disasters like Fairchild: Godholio posted:That's what I was thinking, too. It seems like the kind of thing a man with his command style might do. "Here's my ship/line doing its thing; your job is to find a way to obey my order." Sperglord Actual posted:Let us not forget the loss of HMS Montagu in 1906 or the story of how the British lost and had to rediscover the cure for scurvy. PittTheElder posted:Good lord it's like some sort of comedy sketch:
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Jan 4, 2017 22:52
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it's like the "i'm a ship, i'm a lighthouse" joke but real
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Jan 4, 2017 23:05
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