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Preoptopus posted:posted it already but no one noticed. I watched it. I'll just say that I'm so speechless that I forgot to talk about it. The U-2 is basically just as impressive as the SR-71, except in a completely opposite manner. Which makes sense since it was built by the same people. Rather than using the SR-71's engine power approach to altitude, the U-2 is designed to fly high with lift. So it's built more or less by taking an F-104 fuselage and sticking on a set of sailplane wings. What happens when you put wings meant for a glider on a doublesonic turbojet interceptor fuselage? Well, it's so efficient that before the first official flight, the plane took off on its own in a taxi test. Watch the video and see how the plane basically jumps off the ground at 100 mph, and then shoots up into the air like a rocket. It flies nearly as high as the SR-71, but far more slowly. It's extremely efficient, so it can spend most of the mission near its maximum speed -- but the air is so thin up there that the stall speed is only 10 knots slower than its maximum speed! I forget what the pilots called that regime, but just imagine flying with only a 10-knot margin of error between overspeeding your engine and stalling out, for 6 hours over hostile terrain. Also, because the wings are so thin and entirely full of fuel, there is no place for landing gear. So the plane has bicycle landing gear, two pairs inline under the fuselage, and two little support "pogos" that hold the wings up on the ground. They drop off on takeoff. Landing is accomplished by having a high-powered chase car (Buick Wildcats back in the 60s and 70s) follow the plane along the runway and maneuver under one wing. The pilot drops the wing and it latches onto the roof of the car until the pogos can be reinstalled. Lockheed really makes the best stuff. dev/null posted:There's something with the French and low level flight Helicopters look slow when you see them at altitude, but seeing how fast the road goes by from not much higher than an 18-wheeler's cabin gives you a whole new perspective. orange lime fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Mar 15, 2010 |
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Mar 15, 2010 02:14
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Maker Of Shoes posted:That's just the way it is out here in Arizona I guess. Yep. Up here in Tempe, you'd think that you get used to the sound of jet engines from the one airliner every 90 seconds landing at Sky Harbor...and then some of the F/A-18s come in off training or whatever and you remember what a turbine REALLY sounds like.
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Mar 15, 2010 07:30
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Slide Hammer posted:Are they like laser tag? Does the aggressor "shoot" at the target and both planes calculate whether the target plane gets hit or not? Or is it just a lot of maneouvering. It's both. Yes, they have computers to calculate hits and locks and things like that, but any short-range combat is almost entirely about maneuvering. Rotary cannons fire so fast that you can literally put 30 explosive rounds into the enemy plane in less time than it takes for you to say "bang", so once you're close enough to have a firing position, the guy you're chasing is as good as dead.
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Mar 15, 2010 08:05
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leica posted:I've always thought Dragonflies were pretty cool. It was my dream to own one of these things, because it seemed like the perfect 2-seater jet. Small engines, straight wings, 2 tandem seats, carries all kinds of stuff under the wings in pods. Then I learned that the engines make a constant shrieking noise that's probably second only to the Thunderscreech in terms of sheer ability to infuriate.
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Mar 17, 2010 04:31
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VikingSkull posted:e-^^^ The C-5 operates on the same principles "Aurora" was the code name for the fly-off competition between what became the B-2 and the Lockheed competitor. All that stuff about hypersonic spaceplanes and weird triangular aircraft was likely to be someone seeing an SR-71 or F-117, if not just an outright lie. VVVVV Yea, that's what I said. Anything black and going at ridiculous speeds was probably an SR-71, and anything black and triangular was an F-117. Or it could have actually been the "Aurora", considering what the B-2 looks like (and how similar the Lockheed prototype was). Either way, it wasn't a hypersonic hydrogen-fueled scramjet spaceplane. orange lime fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Mar 17, 2010 |
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Mar 17, 2010 21:57
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ApathyGifted posted:Having actual jet engines on the tips make it easier to auto-rotate though - the higher moment of inertia gives the rotor way more momentum. Couldn't you just do the same thing with a compressed-air copter using a weight on the end of each rotor? You could maybe even have them mounted inboard normally on a catch, with an emergency system to release them and fling them outwards on rails to increase the inertia in case of engine failure. I've wanted one of those little 1 or 2 seat ultralight helicopters since I saw them in the back of Popular Science as a kid, but I can't imagine that they'd be anything like safe. Zero pilot protection, rotor directly above your head, inability to bail out in an emergency. Basically all they have going for them is the autorotation and low CG.
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Mar 18, 2010 10:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:Though I honestly don't know what you mean by "are we done with airplanes." I think we're getting very near the end of piloted attack/fighter aircraft. When you can put up a drone with the same armament, a lighter, cheaper and stealthier airframe, much better maneuverability because you don't have to worry about crushing soft human tissues, and the ability to fly it from halfway around the world so that your trained operators aren't ever lost...
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Mar 19, 2010 07:40
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Nothus posted:That was just a convenient excuse that let them mothball it and save face. For most of its existence, the Concorde was an unprofitable prestige stunt. It was too small, too limited in the routes it could fly, and swilled too much fuel to be a mainstream airliner. Weren't they nearly always filled to capacity, though, even at $10,000 a ticket or whatever it was?
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Mar 19, 2010 19:33
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Ola posted:I failed this challenge. As did I, many times over. That's cool as poo poo.
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Mar 20, 2010 07:29
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azflyboy posted:There are also several F-16's sitting out there that were supposed to be sold to Iran before the Shah was overthrown. If they're being that anal about the legality of it all, I would think that they'd find some kind of abandoned-property law to allow them to be reclaimed.
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Mar 22, 2010 07:06
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Nebakenezzer posted:Did the navy ever have a nuclear bomber that had a twin tail like the F-15, and could do something like mach 3? Definitely never had anything that went mach 3 -- there are only two air-breathing aircraft that ever did that, the XB-70 and the SR-71, and both were designed as pretty much the opposite of what you need for carrier operations. The MiG-25 could theoretically reach Mach 3.2 as well, and it had a twin tail and I guess could carry a nuke, but it was a suicide mission because doing so would destroy the engines. [e] I'm not counting things like that experimental scramjet thing because it was basically just a missile.
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Mar 22, 2010 23:25
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Phy posted:I just realized, there are villages smaller than this plane. And there are cities that use less fuel per hour. But isn't it goddamn gorgeous?
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Mar 22, 2010 23:56
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Nebakenezzer posted:
The idea of a Navy plane with its home ship painted on the side, but the name referring to another airplane, is absolutely 
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Mar 26, 2010 06:52
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Strabo4 posted:JESUS CHRIST how have I never heard of this before You can fly it in IL-2. It's really loving hard to hit airplanes with the big gun (and it's really slow), but man is it great hearing a single KABOOOOOM and then the bomber in front of you explodes all at once.  Also fun to watch the gun recoil into the pod and poop a shell the size of your arm out the back.joat mon posted:One 75mm cannon in the nose That sounds to me like a maximum of ten guns that could fire at that ground simultaneously. How about eighty-eight?  Or rather, 88 PPSh submachine guns pointed downwards in the bomb bay of a Tu-2, rigged up to a single trigger. I love the disc magazines -- it's like something that a crazy mafia don would come up with and fly around in.
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Mar 27, 2010 21:09
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Slo-Tek posted:
Yeah, but I mean, the thing looks like a goddamn spaceship. That's pretty awesome.
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Mar 28, 2010 03:31
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VikingSkull posted:You're drat right. In some respects they should love it more because in Vietnam it arguably played a more important role than the A-10, namely as the "Sandy" designation we're all familiar with. Rescuing downed airmen, of which they did exponentially more times than the A-10 ever has. How do you rescue people on the ground from a fixed-wing aircraft? I'm picturing project Skyhook but I can't believe that they would actually do something that cool. [e] damnit, Skyhook was a bunch of weather balloons. What was the name of the CIA project to extract agents where they'd release a balloon on a long line and a C-130 would fly over and catch the line and haul them into the air? They showed some comic-book version of it in the new Batman movie. [e2] I don't know if they ever actually did that with humans, but they did do a similar thing with the first spy satellites. Before they had reliable, secure datalinks to transmit electronic images, the satellite would literally eject a canister with the exposed film inside, which would parachute down over the ocean. A plane would fly by at exactly the right time and ensnare it in midair, carrying it home for retrieval. If they missed and the canister hit the water, it would float for a few minutes to let a boat possibly pick it up, then sink to prevent it falling into enemy hands. orange lime fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Apr 2, 2010 |
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Apr 2, 2010 03:31
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Slo-Tek posted:This is what you were after, I think: Well I just don't know what to say about this, quote:Fulton first used instrumented dummies as he prepared for a live pickup. He next used a pig, as pigs have nervous systems close to humans. Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 mph (200 km/h). It arrived on board uninjured but in a disoriented state. Once it recovered, it attacked the crew. other than 
orange lime fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Apr 2, 2010 |
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Apr 2, 2010 05:17
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Godholio posted:Well, yeah...but burning it isn't all that great either. Many planes put their dumping valves at the end of the wings, since that's where the fuel is stored. The F-111 for some reason (maybe because of the swing-wings?) puts its dump valve just below the vertical stab, between the engines. Which means that, using its afterburner, it can do this neato trick at airshows.  It's like something I would have drawn in fourth grade.
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Apr 5, 2010 03:07
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NightGyr posted:you got it backwards. he said 1 mile / 1.6 seconds, not 1.6 miles per second. Yeah. 60/1.6 = 37.5 miles per minute = 2250 mph. Right what it should be.
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Apr 8, 2010 07:31
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Mobius1B7R posted:Wow a double post, I am an idiot. Well lets make something fun out of this, what is the best engine noise to your ears? I personally love the howl of the RBs on the 757. You really have to ask? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBmm5YnoKsk [e] this one is better. Love that scream just before it passes you.
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Apr 9, 2010 04:59
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Imp Boy posted:Pretty much every bomber from that war had an absurdly cramped interior. I have no idea how crews got out when the things were hit, because there is hardly enough room to turn around. The nose position in a B-25 pretty much consists of being crammed into a 3 foot high cabinet. Still not as bad, I think, as being the ventral gunner in (and I do literally mean IN) the ball turret on a B-24 or B-17. I regrettably forgot to take a picture of the one on a -24 at the Pima museum -- they have a dummy stuffed inside in firing position, and let me say that I can see why they had the youngest, smallest kids on the bomber crews. Here's how you operated that turret:   Yep. Rolled up into a fetal position, sighting between your legs, with the guns mounted directly beside your ears, crammed into a conspicuous three-foot-wide ball that hangs off the bottom of the plane. The only way in or out is through a hatch in the top (which leads into another cramped space full of electronics and ammo belts) that requires the guns to be unlocked and swung around to access. I wonder if any ball turret gunners in a plane that was going down ever made it out alive. [e] "Ironically, post war analysis of B-17 crew fatality records revealed that the ball turret gunner had the safest job on the plane (with the pilot having the most dangerous)." The more you know! From here: http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~josephkennedy/sperry_ball_turret.htm orange lime fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Apr 14, 2010 |
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Apr 14, 2010 06:18
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Imp Boy posted:Of course, the poor bastard in the ball turret was really hosed if the hydraulics failed and the pilot had to do a belly landing. Without power the turret couldn't rotate to where the hatch could be opened, and he was stuck until the plane landed one way or another. I dunno what turret you're thinking of, but the Sperry turrets were electrically powered and had backup hand cranks as well.
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Apr 16, 2010 08:39
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Imp Boy posted:drat, that's what I get for posting before going to sleep. I distinctly remember reading about turrets getting jammed up and some poor gunner getting squished on a belly landing. It was still a lovely job to be stuck in a bubble for 10 hours at a time. Well, it's still quite possible for a bullet to hit the ring or something and jam the rotation mechanism. Just that a loss of electrical power wouldn't stop it.
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Apr 17, 2010 06:00
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We just went over how the F/A-18E/F is basically a completely different aircraft from the A-D. Congress wouldn't approve a new airplane for the Navy, so they made their new plane look like the Hornet and called it an upgrade. The thing is as big as an F-14 (though not as heavy) and really only shares the avionics package with the older F/A-18s. Look at the top view in particular:  The Rhino (E/F) is big and impressive, but it can't compare in appearance to the original. An F/A-18 with all the stores and pylons removed is beautiful to see. orange lime fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 19, 2010 |
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Apr 19, 2010 06:02
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Minto Took posted:Silly Hornet! Ten AMRAAMs is too many AMRAAMs. There won't be any left for the other planes. Go put some back. Like I said above, the Hornet is beautiful, but only when it doesn't have crap on its wings. Here's a CF-18 with even the wingtip rails photoshopped off:  Purty.
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Apr 19, 2010 09:08
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movax posted:Yeah, sorry my fail. Didn't read closely enough to see that previous poster was talking purely about the Hornet, not Super Hornet. I really don't know why more Air Forces don't do it. I can't see any downsides at all, and if it actually does make it harder to see which way the plane is banking, great.
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Apr 19, 2010 21:27
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Sterndotstern posted:Also keep in mind that ground speed for a given Mach number decreases as altitude increases, so Mach 3.5 at altitude is slower than Mach 3.5 at sea level. I'd be hugely surprised if the Sled couldn't punk the poo poo out of Mach 4 with a little oxidizer tank to help it breathe at 100k+ ft. Might not even need one. At the plane's marked top speed, the engines have transitioned almost entirely to ramjets (I believe only 20% of the air goes through the compressor), which can work just fine up to Mach 5. Higher speed just means more air rammed into the engine.
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Apr 20, 2010 20:41
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jandrese posted:It's kind of a shame that nobody really built a scramjet. Impracticality be dammed, it would be awesome! They have, actually. It's just really really hard to do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-43 "Fuel was flowing to the engine for eleven seconds, a time in which the aircraft traveled more than 24 km." Also, more research needs to be put into the linear aerospike engine, because it looks so drat cool:  The fuel burns on the outside, with the expanding shockwave forming one half of the combustion chamber. VVVVV You only said "it's a shame that nobody really built one." A number have been constructed and run in ground tests, and two have flown. orange lime fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Apr 20, 2010 |
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Apr 20, 2010 23:02
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The ski-jumps on those Russian carriers reminds me of of a story I heard once. On a ski-jump takeoff in a swept-wing plane, you don't build up enough speed to start flying for a few hundred yards. Pilots would hit the throttle, release the brakes, get flung a hundred feet into the air by the jump...and then fall 80 feet down towards the water as they built up speed. To prevent pilots from being lost should the takeoff screw up because of a tailwind or something, a number of Soviet jets had a short-range radar altimeter built into the belly that would arm as soon as the weight was off the wheels and automatically fire the ejection seat if it read less than about ten feet or so. This system was enabled and disabled with a switch in the cockpit. So, on occasion, a new pilot would have made a successful takeoff and flown their mission, and would be returning to the carrier on a perfect approach. They'd have their flaps and hook down, and high alpha, lined up perfectly on the runway, sweep over the fantail... ...and get punched out a fraction of a second before contact by the radio altimeter that they'd forgotten to turn off.
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May 11, 2010 00:03
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Looks like an air tractor flying through a cloud of red smoke. The spiral is the tip vortex. If it's not an airshow, and he actually sprayed that red stuff (he's not spraying anything in the photo), then I have no idea what the gently caress it is. Probably really bad to inhale. So many memories of hanging out at my grandparents' dairy farm and watching the crop dusters in the fields down the road...and then the buttery chlorine smell that hangs around for a few hours and makes you feel just a little bit drunk. Good times orange lime fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Sep 4, 2010 |
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Sep 4, 2010 01:39
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2ndclasscitizen posted:
The F-111 is a fat ugly pig that was never truly good at anything it did, and it killed the SR-71 to boot.  *slaps with glove* CommieGIR posted:Actually, I know what you are thinking, however the Tu-95 is based on B-29 designs "Entirely ripped off, down to the placement of rivets and routing of wires" is more like it. Though I understand that there are a few weird differences, such as the Tu-95 being somewhat heavier since the closest metric equivalent of the panels used for the B-29's skin is actually marginally thicker than the actual Imperial dimension.
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Sep 5, 2010 01:33
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Speaking of building models, I really want to try building a radio-controlled version of some of those crazy turn-of-the-century flying machine designs, just to see what they could have done with a modern engine and a good power:weight ratio. How awesome would it be to see these things flying around?   The first one in particular -- that poo poo's awesome.
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Sep 6, 2010 21:47
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Plinkey posted:I've always been partial to B1s taking off at night with afterburners. Imagine being in the Soviet Union and seeing a bunch of those things blasting down a canyon, 200 feet above the ground, at Mach 1.5. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM And what's the huge-rear end cloud of smoke on takeoff? Water injection?
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Sep 6, 2010 23:14
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I was thinking of using a little tiny brushless motor, balsa for the main spars, carbon-fiber for the thinner struts, and mylar instead of fabric. The guy wires would be actual ~30-ga aluminum wires. Just need to mount the battery and electronics into a balsa block shaped like a person and we're golden. I admit that nearly anything can fly when it's tiny and light (a paper airplane for instance?) but it would still be pretty drat cool to see the Vuia II flying around at the field. Too many people get all nuts about making models of warbirds, or of the latest Russian vaporware fighter, when the truly weird and wild stuff happened in the first 10 years of powered flight. [e] and yeah with the power:weight ratios of some of the systems out there now, you can make any model just hover and accelerate vertically. I'd be shooting for something more equivalent to "what if they had an engine with twice the specific power?" orange lime fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Sep 7, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 07:07
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Wicaeed posted:YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH 'The Final Countdown' was the BEST movie ever* Huh, I thought he was talking about The Philadelphia Experiment. Got it backwards though -- in The Final Countdown, it's an aircraft carrier going from the 1980s to the 1940s, and in the Philadelphia Experiment, it's a destroyer going from the 1940s to the 1980s. Obviously two totally different movies. I must say I love IMDB's spoiler system though. Unspoilered text: "A modern aircraft carrier is thrown back in time to 1941 near Hawaii, just hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour." SPOILER ALERT! ROLLOVER TO VIEW PLOT KEYWORDS!! Japanese | Pearl Harbor | Aircraft Carrier | Uss Nimitz | Harbor Nice. orange lime fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Sep 7, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 09:23
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LobsterboyX posted:IIRC there are some minor differences in the landing gear too. Constellations really are pretty. There's one in bare aluminum with TWA(?) markings on it at the Pima air museum...the plaque points out that there are no two cross-sections of the fuselage that have the same profile. Also they're really surprisingly high off the ground. Low wing and big props, I guess.
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Sep 8, 2010 23:46
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Looks cooler!
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Sep 9, 2010 12:19
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MrChips posted:This ought to be an absolute riot to watch, as a King Air is as pleasant to maneuver as an old dump truck is. Here's what their show routine looks like: Ah yes, the "sequence of banked turns", most lethally thrilling of all aerobatic maneuvers
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Sep 11, 2010 08:11
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monkeytennis posted:Oh my God I need this. CFS3 is so dated. Get yourself a copy of Il-2, then. It's the best WWII flight sim out there. There's a thread about it in Games. SoW is the sort-of-sequel to Il-2...too bad it's never going to come out.  Oh and whatever you do, do NOT go to the official forums. You'll want to kill yourself when you see the level of sperg in that community. "That Bf-110-E-4 has the pitot tube from a Bf-110-E-5!  " is completely normal and accepted, but you also get this kind of poo poo:quote:i see a windmill in the bottom of that picture . will blade sped change with wind speed quote:there are animals in the field! quote:The overall interface, it looks too techie for a ww2 sim, loosing immersion. Probably if the background look more like a sheet of an old flight manual, or something like that, IMHO would look more immersive. And don't even get them started on DRM; I have never seen a group of games so dramatically in FAVOR of DRM in their game. Why? Because they have a collective fangirl crush on the developer, who posts on the forums, and they get completely infuriated by the idea of someone not paying their idol for his work. quote:Take your time guys, don't rush it. Do it right and make sure you implement some copy protection that guaraties you get paid for every copy. It's a gorgeous-looking game and I can't wait for it to come out, assuming it ever does, but christ the community sucks.
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Sep 28, 2010 19:29
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Do they exhibit realistic herding behavior? just enough so that they travel in packs around the field and scatter realistically when you fly over
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Yeah, I'll bet those are really stealthy, what with the engine on a pylon, swinging a big propeller, and the pilot sticking his head out the cockpit 
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Sep 29, 2010 07:45
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