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Propagandalf posted:The KC-X program has been back and forth but was approved in February. The USAF's Pave Hawk replacement CSAR-X is still canceled last I heard. There's also some back and forth over a C-130 replacement but the Europeans are the only ones with viable alternatives and no one wants to buy non-American. The C-130J is basically a whole new aircraft and is ultimately going to replace all the legacy 130's. We'll be buying the C-27 soon. The CV-22 is a fancy transport helicopter. We just finished the C-17 buy. The KC-X is a few years out. The RPAs are being bought hand over fist. There's all the civilian planes were buying up for spec ops and ISR missions (NSAs and MC-12's). There's a lot of nondeathmobile aircraft in the pipeline!
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Jul 1, 2011 03:14
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iyaayas01 posted:Counterpoint: the U.S. literally paid them off with 50 F-16s, given to the IAF for free right after the war (on top of all the other aid the U.S. already gives them), not to mention the deployment of Patriot batteries by both the U.S. and the Netherlands. They were chomping at the bit to retaliate, consequences be damned, but since this would have torn apart the Coalition the U.S. had worked so hard to build, we bought their non-involvement for the cheap price of 50 F-16s (admittedly surplus Block 10s) and the deployment of some missile batteries. Not to mention that Israel gave the Coalition a list of targets that had to be hit on Israel's behalf. Coalition planners were bemused by the list because the majority of the targets were either locations that had already been hit by Coalition airstrikes or were empty desert (mobile SCUD launch sites).
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Oct 17, 2011 19:27
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My favorite is how the IJN thought ASW was just something those cowards and failures in England and the US did, and was totally unnecessary and beneath their brave samurai sailors.
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Jun 4, 2012 21:52
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LGD posted:Given how unimaginably lovely the US torpedoes were before about mid 1943 I think it is understandable that it wasn't a real point of emphasis. Here's some wiki concerning this. Wikipedia posted:In 1942 and early 1943, US submarines posed little threat to Japanese ships, whether warships or merchant ships. They were initially hampered by poor torpedoes, which often failed to detonate on impact, ran too deep, or even ran wild. As the US submarine menace was slight in the beginning, Japanese commanders became complacent and as a result did not invest heavily into ASW measures or upgrade their convoy protection to any degree to what the Allies in the Atlantic did. Often encouraged by the Japanese not placing a high priority on the Allied submarine threat, US skippers were relatively complacent and docile compared to their German counterparts, who understood the "life and death" urgency in the Atlantic.
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Jun 4, 2012 22:35
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Spending the day at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. I only have my iPhone camera but I'll hopefully have some pics for the thread tonight or tomorrow.
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Jun 15, 2012 12:34
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mlmp08 posted:"minimal time on station" I still see two external tanks. I want to see something like that F-15 model mockup Boeing made that was posted earlier.
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Nov 2, 2013 02:47
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Also highly recommend the British Museum. Not only is it awesome and home to a ton of cool poo poo from virtually every culture that has ever existed, it is also free! If you want to see the Imperial War Museum though, unfortunately they're in the middle of a major renovation for the upcoming centennial of World War 1 and will be closed from January to July. The Churchill War Rooms are still open and a real treat. And if you make it out of London, IWM Duxford should be on your list--unless you're a monster who doesn't care about seeing a SR-71 or going inside a Concorde.
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Jan 1, 2014 22:48
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AlternateAccount posted:Is there a political aspect to who gets what sort of assignment? My nightmare is that it would be a lot like the corporate world... Absolutely. Ultimately your plane selection is determined by your instructors/Leadership who judge you behind closed doors, on whatever criteria they feel pertinent at the time. Additionally, the "drop" (assignments) for your class is for all the pilot training bases, arbitrarily split between the training wings by AFPC. The Wing Commanders then horse-trade the assignments based on what they want to give their students. Hope you have someone going to bat for you with the boss you hopefully never met in person in order to get one of the two F-15s that dropped for 80+ students! (If any dropped at all.)
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Jan 14, 2014 18:45
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AlternateAccount posted:Wow, that's viciously depressing. Welcome to the USAF! Enjoy your mandatory stay, length and location subject to the
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Jan 14, 2014 21:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:The military didn't underestimate the threat posed by the Japanese, at least not at any command-level. The Navy at the very least considered war with Japan inevitable pretty much as soon as the U.S. acquired the Philippines and a planner looked at a map of western Pacific trade routes. By 1911 the Naval War College had determined that such a war would go roughly as: - Japan would strike first, seizing U.S. holdings in the Western Pacific, particularly the Philippines. - The U.S. fleet would sortie from Hawaii with the goal of anchoring off of Okinawa. - The axis of advance would cut through the Central Pacific and include the island-hopping seizure of the Marshalls and Carolines. - Manila would be recaptured. - The fleet would sortie with its own, mobile, advance base. - Japan would be beaten through economic blockade. War Plan Orange pretty much had the major strokes set in stone. BIG HEADLINE posted:"Hey Japan, since you only have to defend *one* ocean, you only get to build 315,000 tons of ships for every 525,000 we and Britain get to build. Oh, and if you decide to build any of these newfangled 'aircraft carriers,' those gotta be smaller than ours, too." The secret behind the 5:5:3 ratio was that after years of wargaming a Japan-U.S. war, the USN had determined that 5:3 was the necessary tonnage ratio for the USN, accounting for attrition to skirmishes and the voyage, to sail across the Pacific and battle the IJN with at least tonnage parity on what was basically its home turf.
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Mar 29, 2014 03:39
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MrYenko posted:Clearly not. Everyone will die. Definitely impossible. You'd be a madman to even try!
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Apr 7, 2014 17:40
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Godholio posted:All of the military infrastructure we left behind was probably built in the 60s. It's probably made out of asbestos and Topps chewing gum, and the only way we're going to get permission to rebuild is to provide some sweet, sweet construction contracts for the local economy. Having just been to Keflavik, staging P-8's out of there would not be hard. Kef is Iceland's main international airport and plays host to a standing deployment of NATO fighters. The Icelandic Coast Guard has kept all the facilities they still own in good repair and the housing is actually really nice. The money pit would be all the support facilities like enlisted dorms, post office, commissary, MWR stuff, etc. cause that was all turned over to civilian use and is now apartment buildings and businesses. So you either have to start from scratch on all that or buy out a lot of locals. Or just make it a rotating deployment like the fighters and duck all that.
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Sep 24, 2014 10:42
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Cippalippus posted:I voted no, yeah. I prefer to let the rest of Europe and USA pay for Fixed for Cippalippus circa TYOOL 1913.
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Oct 4, 2014 22:54
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Pornographic Memory posted:To be fair swing wing planes look cool by default. Here, let me get that for you. 
SgtMongoose fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 05:16
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Knew what this was going to be before I clicked it. Still clicked it.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:12
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Party Plane Jones posted:Ionization smoke alarms have americium in them but they're only in the realm of micrograms per detector. Yeah. The Atomic Boy Scout got poo poo tons of defective smoke detectors from the factory and stripped them for the americium. He did essentially the same thing for tritium (glow in the dark stuff on gunsights and watch hands) and thorium (those little bags on gas camp lanterns).
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Mar 28, 2015 17:30
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So there was some concern that the Brits weren't going to buy enough F-35s quickly enough to actually make their new carriers worthwhile. Well it looks like they've solved that problem! The BBC posted:US and UK F35 fighters are to deploy alongside each other when the Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier begins her first operational tour in 2021.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:45
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Arglebargle III posted:Nobody has any idea what that means. Seems to me that Trump got a briefing on some of the big ticket defense industry issues and is just sharing his thoughts on them with everyone in 140 characters or less. For the SuperHornet vs F-35 stuff, an idea that's been floating around is that you could cancel the B and C models and go all in on SuperHornets. The USN would get stealth when they get their UCAV operational and the dream of USMC VTOL would finally be taken out back and shot. Savings would be reinvested into the A model as it could then maybe become very price competitive with new build F-15s and F-16s. This option was much more enticing before the Brits decided to kneecap their carriers and not install CATOBAR, but its not impossible that Trump wanted to know what the alternatives to the F-35 were and this was in the list. As for the nukes, he probably got a brief on the nuclear warhead refurbishment program or maybe the new warhead proposal from a few years back and liked what he heard.
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Dec 23, 2016 10:52
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Thinking about the USAF buying new build F-15s, has there been any studies done on re-engine'ing either legacy F-15s or new build F-15s with the F119 engine in the F-22? The size and weight don't seem too far off based on wikipedia specs and the performance gains (and maybe supercruise and thrust vectoring) seem like they would be worth it--if the USAF went down that route. Or maybe the F119 engines just won't fit or would be prohibitively expensive. But imagine new build F-15s with supercruise and hardpoints for days.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:08
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Nope, they're Finnish legacy F-18s. Their home base is Rovaniemi.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:32
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Murgos posted:Yeah, this was at the airport. You don't actually want to base you air support at a location that is about to get overrun. That is the exact USMC aviation mission/basing plan that everyone is ragging on. That you can put STOVL fighters close to the front at rough bases they can provide CAS from and fight a full air war independent of the other branches. The counter argument is that such a plan is logistically unsound, needlessly vulnerable to enemy action, and actively harmful to procurement and readiness in the DOD flying communities.
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May 21, 2017 14:10
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JcDent posted:The answer is "drone-fired Hellfire." All the mission sets that don't involve slinging BVRs at optimal range on direction from the AWACS. Also that pesky issue of who to blame when MHXXX gets shot down live on CNN.
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Jun 4, 2017 15:13
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The only time I foresee serious fully autonomous engagements without serious consequences for the humans asleep at the wheel happening in the near future would be something ridiculous like Chinese/Iranian saturation attacks against US carrier AEGIS defenders. And even that has humans watching the computers duke it out in real time.
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Jun 4, 2017 18:39
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Not to downplay the difficulties in countering hypersonic vehicles, but how powerful of a laser would you need to sufficiently damage one in flight to allow atmospheric effects to destroy it ala the shuttle Columbia? Just enough energy to heat a small section slightly and let the atmosphere do the rest, or a gently caress off huge laser to punch through the already insane atmospheric friction around the hypersonic missile?
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Jun 7, 2017 16:22
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mlmp08 posted:Hello there, little buddy Lol. He's holding better spacing than the BUFF for the photo.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:22
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my kinda ape posted:What do you mean? Of course a B-17 can maintain level flight with a second B-17 lying upside down on top of it! That actually happened!
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Jul 12, 2017 14:10
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Speaking of museums, I'll be visiting the Edwards Flight Test Museum in mid-February. I'll also set aside a day to see the A-12 trainer (and I ~guess~ the F-20) at the CA Science Museum. Hopefully they've gotten some more money since I was last there cause their static displays weren't in the best shape. While you're there, try to drive around the base and admire the dozens of static displays all over the base. At the NASA research center on the base they have another blackbird on display out front as well as that F-15 prototype with the canards. Also swing by Blackbird Park in Palmdale outside Plant 42. SR-71, A-12, U-2, the Shuttle 747 carrier, and a whole lot more!
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Aug 24, 2017 12:22
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M_Gargantua posted:I want to use the maginot line vs the blitz as my example here but the metaphors got garbled. Pretty sure the solution to the not at all new or novel swarm/saturation attack problem isn't to disperse your assets even more. It's to group them into formations capable of mutual support or interdict the attack before it occurs. Hell, a 100 years ago strategists were suggesting the torpedo meant the end of all surface ships. And really, if an opponent is depleting your defenses by probing them everyday until they're gone, the right answer is to attack the probing forces, not sit back and watch your ammo counter drop to zero. Establish a defense in depth. "Overwhelm them with numbers!" isn't new or uncounterable. The lesson of the Maginot Line is that a static defense is useless if the attacker can simply go around and never fight it. Castle walls were pretty useless too against armies using secret tunnels into the keep. It's more a cautionary tale against a cyber attack turning all your poo poo off than "invincible drone swarm."
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Aug 25, 2017 07:13
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Prop Wash posted:That rate is just the general "desired" rate. Last year the rate was 93% (https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2017/07/19/air-force-selects-2311-officers-for-promotion/). Navigators were 95% whereas pilots were at 93%, suck it pilots. The point is, very few people do not make Major. The true purpose is to eliminate PRFs (Promotion Recommendation Form). A PRF is a 10 bullet point summary of an officer's entire career and is subject to voluminous unwritten arcane rules on content, grammar, word choice, aesthetics, etc. It's also the only part of an officer's file the board would look at for more than a minute. PRFs are a tremendous waste of manpower given it was going to be a 95% promotion rate anyway. This solves a lot of problems for the price of giving a pay raise to the 2-3% who weren't otherwise going to get it and maybe enticing them to stay in a few more years.
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Oct 3, 2017 21:31
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:I'm listening to Orlando International ATC right now because I'm bored and am picking up family members from there in a bit, and holy poo poo, people actually do that "guuuuuuuuaaaaaarrrrrddddd" thing on the radio. loving Aircraft radios generally have as their basic operating mode where you monitor (i.e. listen to) guard in addition to your selected frequency. Also, you can switch to transmit on guard generally with a single click on your mode selector. One wrong setting on the "wafer" switch and you are transmitting on guard and everyone will hear you and be able to respond immediately with an appropriate amount of derision.
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Oct 12, 2017 15:31
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Alaan posted:Well, you aren't wrong. Not the info dump you were probably looking for but my two cents: The USAF is an organization that is undermanned/overworked, instills in every junior officer that careerism is the highest virtue, and has a review and promotion system that values patronage and bureaucracy above all else. It’s senior leadership is image obsessed and isolated by a cadre of fawning yes men. Any attempt to solve problems are actively undercut by an abject refusal to accept blame and pathological resistance to change. And now civilian industries are poaching practically all of its technical personnel (particularly pilots) that actually kept the whole thing running with pay, benefits and lifestyle that can’t be matched by the USAF.
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Oct 21, 2017 19:43
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Blind Rasputin posted:Do they still use those things in war zones? They were all officially retired a few years back since their mission was taken over by F-22s and B-2s. Whether you believe the official line is another story.
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Dec 18, 2017 01:47
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Zebulon posted:To be fair if I was an Admiral I'd pretty gung-ho on the idea of getting a class of transforming battleship spider-walkers. You could actually end up saving money by just negating the need for the Marines. The (lack of) actual necessity of amphibious infantry as a separate branch instead of a couple specialist divisions in the Army has never stopped the USMC before!
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Feb 18, 2018 18:39
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hypnophant posted:blah blah Permissive Environment blah blah Peer Conflict blah blah They'll be employed in the same way as the vaunted, king of CAS, irreplaceable, A-10. They'll be 100% thrown into the meat grinder for about 2 weeks after which there will be none left. Captain Log posted:The military seems to have its own set of corporate buzzwords! You have no idea. Welcome to a whole new plane of buzzword reality.
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May 20, 2018 07:06
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fvl will never be employed in a fulda gap scenario and will be employed continuously in a pound dirt scenario
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IPCRESS posted:CEP for mobile launched ballistic missiles depends on how accurate fix is on your launch position. Physically attacking the GPS satellites probably also means a physical attack capability/willingness/wanton endangerment on the DSP satellites, and that would be a trigger for Armageddon for sure.
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Jun 21, 2018 02:22
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Kesper North posted:https://www.defensenews.com/space/2018/08/02/one-possible-job-for-spacexs-bfr-taking-the-air-forces-cargo-in-and-out-of-space/ This will go the same way as the "conventional" ICBM proposal from the Bush years went. Yes your rockets can deliver a payload anywhere in less than an hour, but it'll also start WW3. You retard.
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Aug 4, 2018 02:24
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If only there were centuries of historic Russian imperialism in these regions we could use to figure out some possible motives other than pure agency-less reaction to the US. Nah, the Georgian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, etc. should all remain in their proper subordinate place under the guidance of their Russian betters. Edit: beaten.
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Sep 2, 2018 19:20
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Hexyflexy posted:Thanks - I knew there was a load of things I wasn't thinking about. Imagine any Ace Combat or other combat flight sim you may have played that highlighted other aircraft for you, identifying them, and maybe even gave you a helpful arrow pointing to them if you weren't looking directly at them. Imagine what an advantage that is over trying to look at a 2-D top down view screen by your knees or simply using your eyeball.
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Nov 12, 2018 06:32
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aphid_licker posted:If you're doing that wouldn't it make sense to have a "proper" cockpit setup to get the button pressing muscle memory going along with the checklist routine? Yes, but cockpit mock ups cost real money and a lot can be learned just getting the look and location down. The USAF issues pilots posters of the cockpit so they can practice switchology at home.
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Dec 14, 2018 08:02
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The argument for the F-35B as turning every LHD and Helicopter Destroyer into a long range stealthy JASSM slinging strike platform with built in air to air CAP is a strong one. Does it justify the price and pain of getting it fielded? For the US, no. For the Brits, Japan, Italy, Spain, India, and every other country that might be interested, yes. Now that it's here and fielded, every country with a baby carrier and friendly to the US would be stupid to turn it down.
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Dec 15, 2018 03:47
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