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Oxford Comma posted:The Bear Lumbers On Loved the visual timeline of Bear interdiction. At this point, does the Bear serve any purpose other than "FEEL THE POWER OF MOTHER RUSSIA" dick waiving? Am I missing something, or is their only purpose to skirt along international borders to make the Russians feel better about their former world power status? Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's weirdly warm and fuzzy to see dangerous games of my childhood still being played.
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Feb 15, 2012 18:45
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Flanker posted:I think a bunch of you are failing to recognize the EW games going on. Remember that US aircraft that collided with a Chinese interceptor? I recall it was a P3 variant, gathering electronic intel. Just because it's an older airframe doesn't mean it's not packed with complex sensors gathering lots of data, such as radar freqs, IFF signals, radio intercepts etc. Yes, this is the point I was missing. I was thinking of the Bear and B-52 only as bomb trucks, not electronic surveillance or cruise missile platforms. I'm dumb sometimes.
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Feb 16, 2012 02:01
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omgLerkHat! posted:So in other words we should have military parades of physicists, technicians, aeronautical engineers, and nuclear scientists. A vast parade of A bit late, but don't forget the accounting types who are handling the logistics. All of that hardware running around to dramatic music isn't worth poo poo if nobody can figure out how to get gas to it.  Chiming in mostly to say that I love this loving thread. Thanks to all of you for taking me back to my childhood obsession with bad "dad lit" books and plane and tank models.
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Apr 5, 2012 13:54
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Dumb question, what happens to any people still in there? Breathing foam doesn't look fun, and it's not like this is a server room or something where you can fairly easily see that everyone is out before hitting the halon button. Do you have to do a head count before hitting the fire suppression system? stealie72 fucked around with this message at 14:15 on May 15, 2012 |
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May 15, 2012 14:10
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Didn't see it, so I hope I'm not doubleposting, but the F-22 is grounded until backup oxygen systems can be installed. Obviously, I don't know poo poo about poo poo, but that's not exactly the same as fixing the primary system. Are F-22s in such need that they can't be grounded until they put an O2 system in them that works? http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ry.html?hpid=z9 Washington Post posted:Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta ordered the Air Force Tuesday to curtail flights of its F-22 Raptor fighter jet and accelerate the installation of backup oxygen generators in response to pilot complaints of wooziness and fainting spells in the cockpit.
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May 16, 2012 20:56
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Psion posted:This is the Ace Combat style of plane appreciation and it's basically the best way. I'm with you on this. So by this logic, the Su-47 is the best plane of all time?
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May 17, 2012 03:51
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I don't think I've seen this posted, but I recently stumbled on this gallery of decaying soviet air hardware at Khodynka Field outside of Moscow. http://englishrussia.com/2011/10/03/view-of-the-plane-cemetery-from-your-apartment/ I'll leave it to the more spergy on Soviet hardware to identify things, but there's definitely a good representation of what they were fielding in the 70s and 80s. Teaser image: 
stealie72 fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Mar 19, 2013 |
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Mar 19, 2013 14:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:
This question is based on only my (non-extensive beyond some basic training) knowledge of industrial lockout/signout procedures, not anything military, but why was the detonator left at the other end of the system, and not with the crew that was setting up the charges? I'm sure there's some military reason, but it seems like the "some rear end in a top hat could kill us all with this" part should be held by the guy who's generally the last man out of the danger area.
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Jun 20, 2013 18:33
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Blistex posted:I'll achieve the same results for only $3.99 per unit. 
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Aug 19, 2013 15:05
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Go hog wild without stealing anything. http://www.sportsmansguide.com/net/cb/genuine-cold-war-era-fallout-shelter-sign.aspx?a=235059
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Sep 30, 2013 17:07
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Any cold war experts want to explain why the silo-filled areas out west are completely untargeted in the 500 warhead scenario, but absolutely obliterated in the 2000 warhead one? It seems somewhat counter-intuitive. Wouldn't you have a greater need to destroy the US's launch capabilities in a limited launch than in a "scorch the goddamn earth" scenario? Or, for that matter, why does Akron get hit 6 times in a limited strike, and only once in a massive strike?
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Oct 2, 2013 20:44
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Akion posted:I had my hopes and dreams of flying helicopters dashed by color blindness. Thanks, jerks. I had mine crushed by my inability to not get nauseous on things as innocuous as a merry go round. Stupid lovely inner ear. Cold war content: As a child of the 80s, I got to read all sorts of "end of the world" kid lit. One of the books that freaked me out for a long time involved a kid stealing an electronic chess game from the mall radio shack, and somehow that playing out being juxtaposed over the fear of nuclear annihilation. I cannot find what that book was. Sound familiar to anyone?
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Jan 13, 2014 17:15
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Holy poo poo, yes. Goons are the best. Searching google for things about the cold war and chess brings up a lot of Kasparov pages.
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Jan 13, 2014 18:11
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I'm imagining he had to land that with a nice 100+ MPH wind in his face while trying to peek up over the canopy and still keep his feet on the rudder controls? Better than crashing I suppose.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:21
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Pornographic Memory posted:So do you get credited with a kill if you manage to shoot yourself down? Hey, gun control groups always include suicides in their kill counts, so why not?
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Mar 1, 2014 14:18
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LingcodKilla posted:You dun unleashed the info-dragon. Im beginning to think Cyranno may be some kind of sentient super computer due to his ability to sperg on so many topics.
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Mar 30, 2014 18:31
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Even before the current dustup with Russia knocked them down our frenimies list, why the poo poo would the US allow any other nation's surveillance plane to fly over american airspace?
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Apr 18, 2014 15:34
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PCjr sidecar posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies I guess that's the "what" but I still don't really get the "why" other than "TERRISTS!" given that it was ratified in 2002. As a cold war kid, I don't think I've ever seen Russia as anything remotely like an ally in anything, so I'm pretty surprised this exists.
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Apr 18, 2014 15:44
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simplefish posted:"As you can clearly see, and are welcome to check for yourself, we aren't digging thousands more silos while trying to get you to sign nuclear disarmament treaties" Oh, satellite flyovers I totally get for exactly that reason. Leaving the cut off wings of decommissioned planes out in the open and obvious for X days until confirmed as required by the treaty, cool. And I guess if these official overflight planes are also open to inspection by the other countries to make sure that only sensors covered under the treaty are on them, I suppose I see the logic to that too. As a complete layman, I'm probably overestimating the amount of useful electronic intel that can be gathered by one of these flights anyways.
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Apr 18, 2014 16:32
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Outside Dawg posted:The Brinksmanship continues: And just when they got finished purging all the woodland cammo too.
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Apr 19, 2014 02:16
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Dead Reckoning posted:Seriously, anyone who knows is not going to tell you. A magical binary compound of termite on each piece of equipment that the pilot can activate with a rapid bank or dive? Some sort of magical aviation sea strainer that a crew member can open up to scuttle the plane while airborne? (Based on history, I'm going to guess some prayers, a fire ax, and maybe some sort of weighted bag, but I so hope I'm wrong). Actual thread content: If you are within any decent drive, everyone reading this thread owes it to themselves to go to the USAF museum at Wright Patterson. I hadn't been there in 25 years and was surprised at how they managed to cram even more stuff in there. If you don't know a ton about planes, it's not the best museum, since the exhibit writeups are a bit lacking, but if you already know what stuff is, it's way cool to just see shitloads of planes on display there. The cold war exhibit is amazing just for letting you see how many planes were put into active service year after year as major advances in design came online. And then you can see everything stop as soon as we figured out the ICBM. lovely as MAD is, it must have been cool as poo poo to be in aerospace from like 1938-1965 and just spend as much money as you wanted on whatever insanity your little mind could come up with. As an added bonus, the hangars are so goddamn big that they completely distort the size of things. My little museum has a P-51 hanging in the corner, and it looks huge here. There's one parked in the WWII exhibit there that looks positively little because it's sitting across from some weird Junkers bomber. There's enough planes in there that even the B-29 looks kinda little until you are right under it. Two of us were looking for a P-38 and walked right past it because it was nestled in under some other planes.
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Apr 21, 2014 15:24
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For whatever reason (probably camera angle) the others just look like they got some sort of electronics pods added to them, but the F-16 looks like it got swole. As for the German tanks, did they continue to be overengineered pieces of precision watchmaking after the end of WWII? I actually know very little about post nazi German armor, and most of what I know about WWII German armor was taught to me by Tamiya in 1/35th scale.
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Apr 23, 2014 14:11
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I may be getting it wrong, because it was 3.5 hours of listening, but I think Carlin's discussion of artillery is in regards to generals not really grasping what firing 40,000 rounds a day does to supply lines and how the sheer volume of artillery fire rendered standard infantry tactics useless.
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Apr 30, 2014 18:31
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I thought it's been discussed in here, but search sucks, so is Eric Scholsser's Command and Control worth reading? Randomly ended up with a copy of it.
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Jun 1, 2014 15:52
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Craptacular posted:A big enough plane nerd would know there's no operational B2's that have been retired. And a private museum wouldn't be first in line to display one if it were available. Isn't the one at rhe USAF museum a former operational plane?
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Jun 10, 2014 00:43
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Alchenar posted:The idea that Hitler had some kind of intuitive hatred of using chemical weapons against people seems implausible if you think about it for more than a few seconds. To be fair he didnt consider them people.
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Dec 1, 2014 15:32
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It blows my goddamn mind that the Blackbird first flew when cars still looked like this.  The thing looked impossibly futuristic even when it became widespread in the public consciousness in the 80s. Ten year old airplane nerd me couldn't fathom that it was 12 years older than me.
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Dec 23, 2014 03:07
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I always figured the realistic answer was always "stumble around double and triple checking the data until the nukes hit in a combination of standard snafu and not wanting to be the one that ends the human race because the simulation program accidentally got loaded in the computer." I'm hopefully wrong, and I dont expect anyone to tell me if I am, but the US government launching a nuclear response in the time it takes for a missile to get here seems awfully unrealistic. Maybe at the hair trigger height of the cold war when we all figured nuclear war was a "when" not an "if", but it seems barely feasible today.
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Jan 30, 2015 07:57
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Hauldren Collider posted:Sure, money isn't the only motivator for serving, but it is A motivator. Yeah, there's no unpaid volunteers in the military. But if you want to see the gigantic difference between free market value for what the military does vs. actual compensation paid to members of the military for those jobs, look at the millions of words spent bemoaning how much contractors got paid for GWOT jobs. There are, in effect, almost zero free-market forces within the military other than the very basic "I get paid if I join up."
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Feb 10, 2015 06:10
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I remember when I was growing up, I had the ability through my father's connections (and living in the Hampton Roads area) to occasionally talk to Tomcat pilots and RIOs, and one of them, a RIO, while in a foul mood at a party, decided to tell me - a six year old at the time - that if they'd made Top Gun entirely realistic it would've been a 45 minute movie - five minutes of scaring off those first two "MiGs" with the radar at max range, 30 minutes of Cougar and Merlin having a really boring time at Miramar, and ten minutes of briefing and images of Tomcat rippling off 50 million dollars' worth of AIM-54s at the mass of hostile aircraft for sheer overkill's sake. Once you skip over the love story and Goose dying, Top Gun's not much more than 45 minutes anyway.
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Feb 13, 2015 23:01
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Is it safe to assume that anything Russia produces now will be even shittier than things the Soviets made? I'm probably just being a dumb American, but it doesnt exactly seem that the current russian economy and government can make anything high tech.
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Mar 20, 2015 00:48
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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/drone-footage-over-russias-air-force-boneyard-will-make-any-plane-geek-freak?utm_source=mbfb Vice is retarded. Its a flyover of the Moscow plane museum. Thanks for sucking, web 2.0 . Still a cool video: https://youtu.be/2Vv5jorizdY stealie72 fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Mar 29, 2015 |
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Mar 29, 2015 12:32
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I guess 20-somethings were a lot different back then. I would ride the Pink Elephant to hell and back.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:43
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Thank loving god the end result of this was some pictures of planes.
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Sep 5, 2015 00:35
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Tythas posted:Awesome pictures
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Sep 23, 2015 05:04
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Tremblay posted:Such a beautiful piece of fiber board. Forget the fiberboard. That canopy looks like it would simulate being 10 beers in with messed up contacts on a foggy night.
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Sep 24, 2015 01:35
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Where did the lash go?
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Oct 13, 2015 00:46
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evil_bunnY posted:Yeah it's literally the equivalent of pointed a loaded firearm at someone. I could see, 30 years ago, tailing behind a guy at like 4 or 8 o'clock to be a nice, obvious, but not particularly threatening blip on their radar, but what do you do when your plane doesn't make that blip?
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Oct 30, 2015 14:22
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Akion posted:Just read that a Turkish News Agency is reporting that Turkish soldiers shot the pilot and co-pilot as they were parachuting down. edit: Also, the guy taking the video on the left is going to be deaf as gently caress in his right ear thanks to his comrades.
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Nov 24, 2015 15:35
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I assume he was an outlier fuckup (I remember seeing interviews and whatnot with him after the incident and he seemed like a huge douche), but are pilots like surgeons in that they are so highly focused and trained in one thing that they tend to be total fuckwits in just about everything else? With the added irony that their attitude is "I can fly a goddamn F-16, I can [do task they assume requires no skill]"?
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Nov 25, 2015 17:22
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