|
Flavahbeast posted:Roger Ballard is a cunning man, I wouldn't put anything past him iyaayas01 posted:He's right about STOVL being dumb and pointless though.
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 12:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 14:12 |
|
|
What's wrong with STOVL? I thought the concept proved itself quite well with the harriers in the Falklands?
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 12:29
|
|
|
Fangz posted:What's wrong with STOVL? I thought the concept proved itself quite well with the harriers in the Falklands? Harriers are very maintenance intensive planes and require reinforced decks/strips to take in VTOL/STOVL mode thanks to engine heat blasting the surface. With such high engine heat they're also very vulnerable to heat-seeking missiles. VTOL's also absurdly complicated to do/design and is the main reason why the F-35 is so overbudget since the other conventional models share the same airframe.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 12:47
|
|
|
Fangz posted:What's wrong with STOVL? I thought the concept proved itself quite well with the harriers in the Falklands?
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 12:58
|
|
|
Fangz posted:What's wrong with STOVL? I thought the concept proved itself quite well with the harriers in the Falklands? If I may TFR out for a moment: Basically the Falklands was more the exception to the rule for them working. The most advantageous bit for the Harriers there was the missiles they fired, the AIM-9L. The AIM-9 (Sidewinder) is an infrared seeking missile. Earlier variants, such as the B and J, were only useful for locking on at the rear of a plane, as that was where the engine exhaust and therefore greatest amount of heat was. The L model was the first "all-aspect" which could lock on to the aircraft at any angle, including head on. The main advantage was when it was first deployed in 1982 was that no air force had developed any type of strategy to counter this new weapon, which lead to the Argentine Air Force and the Syrian Air Force being hit hard in the Falkland War and the Battle of Bekka Valley respectively. Of course, for close air support the Harrier is crap and NATO might as well be using A-1 Skyraiders since there is next-to-zero effective anti-air capability out there.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 14:12
|
|
|
My thoughts are that the main advantage to STOVL is the reduced requirements with respect to, e.g. carriers. If the US wants to downscale the carrier battlefleet, with all the massive costs and inflexibility that implies, then doing something like switching to STOVL and smaller escort carriers is what they need to be looking at. With all their problems the harriers are at least a tried and tested technology, and still today sufficient to handle most roles versus enemies that are behind the tech curve. EDIT: Also being able to base planes out of forward operating bases frees carrier decks for other duties, thus helping sort out logistics problems. Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 14:28
|
|
|
McDowell posted:I'm talking about media outlets having pro-war agendas. There were alot of sensational stories about the sinking to produce support for the Spanish American War. Or a 'leaked document' that takes an international incident and spins it into a very provocative act of aggression. Shooting down a neighbor country's Aircraft in international waters isn't very provocative?
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 14:31
|
|
|
Party Plane Jones posted:Harriers are very maintenance intensive planes and require reinforced decks/strips to take in VTOL/STOVL mode thanks to engine heat blasting the surface. With such high engine heat they're also very vulnerable to heat-seeking missiles. VTOL's also absurdly complicated to do/design and is the main reason why the F-35 is so overbudget since the other conventional models share the same airframe. They also have to carry their own water supply because they don't intake enough air to cool their turbines while in hover mode. And they can only hover for about a minute before the thing seizes up. gently caress the Harrier.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 14:45
|
|
|
Bolow posted:They also have to carry their own water supply because they don't intake enough air to cool their turbines while in hover mode. And they can only hover for about a minute before the thing seizes up. gently caress the Harrier. The hover's just for landings? It's not a helicopter.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 14:50
|
|
|
Fangz posted:My thoughts are that the main advantage to STOVL is the reduced requirements with respect to, e.g. carriers. If the US wants to downscale the carrier battlefleet, with all the massive costs and inflexibility that implies, then doing something like switching to STOVL and smaller escort carriers is what they need to be looking at. With all their problems the harriers are at least a tried and tested technology, and still today sufficient to handle most roles versus enemies that are behind the tech curve. The problem with Harriers is that they really suck at everything that isn't VTOL. They're slow, they have no carrying capacity, their range is poo poo, and they are giant maintenance nightmares. If you don't want to have carriers it makes far more sense to just invest in carrying around a shitload of TLAMs to blow things up ashore. Helicopters operate better out of unprepared FOBs because harriers still need prepared pads to land on and runways if you want them to take off carrying anything other than their own fuel. (A full tank of gas in a Harrier makes it too heavy for VTOL) And if you can establish a FOB you can build a serviceable runway in a day and just fly Super Tucanos off it which are better at CAS anyway. And if you're the US you just gently caress up the whole world from Nebraska with a bomber designed during WW2. Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 15:12
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:The problem with harriers is that they really suck at everything that isn't VTOL. They're slow, they have no carrying capacity, their range is poo poo, and they are giant maintenance nightmares. If you don't want to have carriers it makes far more sense to just invest in carrying around a shitload of TLAMs to blow things up ashore. Helicopters operate better out of unprepared FOBs because harriers still need prepared pads to land on and runways if you want them to take off carrying anything other than their own fuel. And if you can establish a FOB you can build a serviceable runway in a day and just fly Super Tucanos off it which are better at CAS anyway. I guess my mindset is fixed more in the British "should we keep the escort carriers we currently have, or should we invest billions in giant US style carriers just so that we can fly carrier variant F35s off them" debate.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 15:19
|
|
|
Fangz posted:I guess my mindset is fixed more in the British "should we keep the escort carriers we currently have, or should we invest billions in giant US style carriers just so that we can fly carrier variant F35s off them" debate. To get this somewhat back on topic: Does the current Libyan government still have any of the air force or navy left over from the Qaddafi regime or did it pretty much all get bombed during the revolution?
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 15:32
|
|
|
Soap Bat Derby posted:Shooting down a neighbor country's Aircraft in international waters isn't very provocative? It is, but recovering the pilots alive and then executing them takes it to a completely different level. Just shooting down a plane has the plausible deniability of 'we thought it was Israeli'
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 15:43
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:Real carriers does seem like kind of a pointless vanity project for the RN. They did alright blowing up Libyans with Apaches flown off the HMS Ocean. Actually the Royal Navy was majorly pissed off about that because the government dropped the axe on their Harrier force (which results in a massive clusterfuck for the F-35 fleet since there's no jets for their naval aviators to fly until whenever Lockheed finally puts that abortion into production) literally a few months before Libya happened. Whatever the British Army's Apaches did in Libya could've been done just as well or supplemented with Harriers. That being said, STOVL is generally speaking an expensive luxury and the Royal Navy were idiots to not just design their carriers for cats-and-traps operations in the first place despite the fact that every expert from Norman Friedman on down told them so. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 16:14
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:Real carriers does seem like kind of a pointless vanity project for the RN. Not least because crewing them will utterly gut whats left of RN.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 16:47
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:STOVL is only a thing because the Marines are giant heavily armed babies who are still butthurt over Guadalcanal. Off topic but why would they be butthurt over that unless they believe that the entire US navy should have been providing support 24/7 for the entire campaign instead of only what they had available at the time. VVV That doesn't answer the Guadalcanal question since the campaign areas for the Pacific were changed specifically to prevent MacArthur from having any say over the Guadalcanal campaign. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 20:30
|
|
|
USMC institutional memory is that they were the sacrificial lamb at the altar of MacArthur's ambitions for the entirety of the Pacific campaign.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 20:45
|
|
|
This is an interesting twist to the Gaddafi storyquote:Bashar al-Assad 'betrayed Col Gaddafi to save his Syrian regime'
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 21:18
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Off topic but why would they be butthurt over that unless they believe that the entire US navy should have been providing support 24/7 for the entire campaign instead of only what they had available at the time. That was a little bit of a joke, but the Marines are probably the most history bound of the services...which can be both a good thing and bad thing. It's a good thing because despite the stereotype as a service they are actually quite intellectual, generally speaking, and learn many lessons from history. It's a bad thing because they do things like insist on having a separate air arm capable of operating independently from the amphibs operating with an ESG because of a thought process that started because of one campaign 70 years ago where they were "abandoned" by the Navy. (They weren't abandoned, but the carriers did bug out earlier than planned, for a somewhat legitimate concern, which meant that the supply fleet had to withdraw due to a lack of air cover which meant that the Marines had to fight the campaign without a lot of their planned supplies and with the half-assed Cactus Air Force for air cover.) It's particularly dumb now because there is no way in hell the U.S. would ever deploy an ESG into a situation where they need air cover without sending at least one carrier along for the trip. I didn't mean to start a page long derail with my snarky comment, so I'll just add one last bit...the idea of operating STOVL from forward operating locations (like actually close to the frontline FOLs, not "FOB" in the U.S. military definition where it is a full on built-up major base) is absolutely ludicrous, because in addition to the issues with requiring at least a semi-built up area there is the logistics nightmare of supplying enough fuel/ammo/other consumables as well as spare parts to a forward location, which basically makes it unfeasible in the real world. And to answer the question about Libya's military tech like aircraft and naval vessels, given that the majority of it was barely operational before the revolution and that most of it was probably bombed, I would be highly surprised if whatever's left is in anything close to operational condition. e: To flesh out the Guadalcanal thing a little bit further, the original plan for the campaign was for the carriers to remain close to Guadalacanal to provide air cover for the off loading supply vessels for a week-ish. Japanese aircraft based on Rabaul were hitting the supply fleet rather hard from day one, causing concern for Fletcher, both for the loss of his fighter strength and the possible threat to his carriers...remember this is after the Lex and Yorktown were sunk so carriers are a pretty hot commodity in the USN. He made the decision to withdraw his carriers out of range of the Rabaul aircraft after two days. The loss of air cover meant that Turner (the admiral commanding the supply fleet) had to withdraw as well, after one more day of unloading operations. This was compounded by the fact that the logisticians who loaded the supply ships did them the normal way, with like supplies being grouped together, instead of combat loads where each ship carried pre-planned landing craft sized groups of supplies....so instead of your first wave of landing craft maybe carrying nothing but cans of peaches, you would prioritize what needed to get ashore first and make sure that you varied the loads so instead of getting all food but no ammo or vice versa you got some of everything that you needed, so if you didn't get all the supplies off loaded you still had at least some of everything. So because of those two factors (early withdrawal of supply vessels and poor planning in offloading the supplies) the Marines on Guadalcanal had to make do with a lot fewer supplies than they planned on having for the first several months of the campaign. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 21:19
|
|
|
Let's leave the armchair generaling to another thread  So Fars apologized for the Onion article they reposted and used the good old excuse of "well everyone else has done it" and "but IF we polled everyone in the US they would prefer ANYONE over Obama." It's hilarious that a "news" organisation can say that based on absolutely no facts. quote:The Fars apology article then continued by citing a number of blunders by other news outlets. Also; an interesting event: quote:A suicide car bomb has rocked the Kurdish city of Qamishli, state television said, killing four in the first such attack in Syria's Kurdish region which has kept out of the conflict between rebels and the regime.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 21:39
|
|
|
Here's something I've not seen before, the FSA using a battery of mortars, in the instance to target an airport in Aleppo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb1rHMe7vUc Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 21:49
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:
More than half the Navy got NATO'ed, but the Cyrenaica-based ships defected early and survived; a frigate, a corvette, a few patrol boats, all vintage Soviet stuff. And a bunch of minesweeper, submarines and missile boat hulks, too. There might be enough spare MiG/Su/Aero/Soko parts to build a handful of functioning craft, not that it would be very effective to do so. That said, their best fighters are those two famous Malta-bound Mirage F1s, so expect France to lobby for a maintenance/sale deal soon. Hercules and Chinooks are first on the shopping list. There's even been talk of Rafales and Typhoons, but I am skeptical. Hinds and Antonovs everywhere, though.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 21:51
|
|
|
More of those supposedly leaked documents from Al Arabiya, this time claiming the Syrian government carried out one of the major bombings in Damascus. It's like the FSA are writing these themself.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2012 22:49
|
|
|
Concerning SVTOL making carriers cheaper, the aircraft wing's more expensive than the ship anyways. SVTOL fighters are dumb, but something like the Osprey makes sense as an eventual replacement for almost all helicopters.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 01:07
|
|
|
Hey Brown Moses or someone, can you find a copy of this video?quote:The al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group fighting government forces in Syria, has reportedly posted a video saying it has captured five Yemeni soldiers sent to help quell the uprising.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 08:05
|
|
|
I'll ask about, see if I can dig it up. [edit] Here we go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fobGwBXl6S0 Pretty good production values, clear shots of the IDs. As always, additional details from Arabic speakers is welcome. Brown Moses fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Oct 1, 2012 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 08:11
|
|
|
Turkey responds to the al-Arabiya claimsquote:Turkey denies claims pilots killed by Syria
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 09:23
|
|
|
Disappointing article about how the US underestimated security concerns in Benghazi. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/world/africa/mistaken-sense-of-security-cited-before-envoy-to-libya-died.html
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 10:39
|
|
|
Worth a read on the rebels supplies of arms from abroad, Syrian rebels' backers block arms cache until bickering factions unite
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 10:58
|
|
|
I'm seeing something on Twitter about Syrian TV telling people in a round about way that neighboring countries are preparing to invade. I wonder what the rationale is for telling people Syria's about to go to war?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 12:13
|
|
|
Highspeeddub posted:I'm seeing something on Twitter about Syrian TV telling people in a round about way that neighboring countries are preparing to invade. I wonder what the rationale is for telling people Syria's about to go to war? When your own army starts killing people you can say it was justified. If anything I would think it means they're planning on intensifying current actions.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 12:57
|
|
|
I think Caro is in trouble in Turkey.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:03
|
|
|
"Assad-affliated Turkish police". Uh-huh.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:09
|
|
|
He's tweeting like crazy. Keeps saying he's about to captured and drugged. Poor Caro.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:19
|
|
|
"Unique mutations in my genome" - maybe he's suffering some kind of schizophrenic breakdown. Not going to comment any further, is Caro-chat probatable?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:19
|
|
|
Go for it, he's currently accusing me off being some sort of traitor at the moment, think he's not very well.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:20
|
|
|
Highspeeddub posted:He's tweeting like crazy. Keeps saying he's about to captured and drugged. Poor Caro. Apparently his superhuman genetic composition renders him invulnerable to such tactics, though. I have no idea what the gently caress is going on.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:21
|
|
|
For the record he's currently in Harbiye, in the Hatay Province of Turkey, on the Turkish-Syrian border, and has been waiting to cross for the past several days, and I think it's gotten to him.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:24
|
|
|
I never really followed the deal with Caro before his Libyan tour. He seemed reasonable enough in his follow-up videos so it's kind of disheartening to confirm that he is indeed a crazy person. It can't be stressed enough that for somebody in his condition going to Syria is quite possibly the single worst thing for his mental well-being. Like, literally, the worst thing in the entire world at this point in time. I know he won't listen to anybody but if any of you still keep some sort of contact with him please try to talk him out of it. He's gonna have a mental breakdown and die and it's not going to be funny.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 14:12 |
|
|
I've done my best, problem is any "talking him out of it" does down very badly indeed. I've done everything I can think of to make him aware of the dangers, but he wants to go there so badly it appears to have driven him literally insane.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2012 15:29
|
|