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Shnitzel posted:Speaking of SR-71s, Good luck - I've never seen a copy sell for less than several hundred dollars, if they give em out free I'd almost be willing to make the trip next year for a chance at one.
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Aug 8, 2011 00:02
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Smiling Jack posted:Spies who wanted significant amounts of cash got it. Ames got 4.6 million. The Walker spy ring also supposedly broke the million dollar mark, and Robert Hansen started with asking for a $100k, and then operated for a long time. poo poo, Larry Chin probably cleared a million during the years he worked for China and China was harder up for cash in the '70s than the USSR. Isn't the acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego) for the main reasons people spy?
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Oct 15, 2012 23:51
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Snowdens Secret posted:It at least used to be basically impossible to get a meaningful US clearance with a recent bankruptcy or even high credit card debt on your record - is that not generally the case elsewhere? I think it's been linked in TFR before, but there is a report online that's been made available by the government that contains anonymized results of the reasons different people's classified access is put under review, and whether or not it's revoked. It makes for some....interesting reading.
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Oct 17, 2012 15:00
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Mortabis posted:I very highly doubt that North Vietnam would have kept its word with any peace agreement. Speculation, who knows. I had no idea that Nixon went that far, holy poo poo.
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Mar 19, 2013 08:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: I am a retard. You are an australian. What's the difference?
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Jun 3, 2013 15:18
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Awesome photos, and I'm hoping to make it there someday since I'm 50% Swede. Oddball question: In modern wars we use military transport planes to move troops from one hemisphere to the other, and in WWII it was troop ships. Without going to too much trouble, can someone give some background as to when that became the norm, and what the catalysts were? Logistics are at least as interesting to me as front line stuff, I'm rewatching BoB with a friend of mine right now and it occurred to me that the idea of a troopship is really a relic of a previous era. Edit: And why did so many biplanes end up wings down? Shooting Blanks fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 05:19
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Another example of a ship that was saved is the USS Lindsey. Took a pair of kamikaze hits to the bow, made it to drydock where my grandfather was stationed and helped repair it  I posted the pics here awhile back, but there's a good one of the damage in the link.
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Sep 18, 2013 18:44
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It's pre-Cold War, but I think this is probably a better place to post it than starting a new thread. 70 years ago today, Doris Miller died on the Liscome Bay during the Battle of Makin Island, when her ammunition store was struck by a torpedo. In case anyone recognizes the name but can't immediately place it, he was the first African American to be awarded the Navy Cross for his actions during Pearl Harbor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Miller   Godspeed, sir.
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Nov 24, 2013 15:10
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Smiling Jack posted:The Navy attempted to cover up the gross incompetence of several senior officers by smearing one of the victims as a gay saboteur who committed a massive murder-suicide. My Google-fu is weak today, got a link to more information?
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Nov 28, 2013 17:12
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SopWATh posted:The British Museum is loving huge. Even powering through the Greek and Egyptian areas could take a full day. The artifacts are the real deal, it's not a copy of the Parthenon, it's the actual Parthenon... Take time to really appreciate what is probably the number one collection of the ancient world on Earth. Wait, what? It's not that big, I powered through the whole thing in about 2 hours. This was a decade ago, but still....
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Jan 2, 2014 13:18
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Not Nipsy Russell posted:A German did it first. A German flew a P51 under the Eiffel Tower first? 
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Jan 5, 2014 16:05
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My maternal grandfather was 2nd in command on a floating drydock in the Pacific - I've made a thread about him previously here. My paternal grandfather...no clue how or even if he was involved in the war, we don't talk about him much.
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Jan 16, 2014 22:26
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Plinkey posted:I'm no expert but I'd guess that it has something to do with ejection from a Mach + aircraft and trying to keep head bones together. Also Korean war pilots wore helmets. This made me remember the partial ejection of a guy at Mach 1 and made me wonder about the highest Mach ejection with a pilot that survived. Didn't find that, but found this which is pretty  Guy survives disintegrating plane at Mach 3.18
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Feb 25, 2014 06:51
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simplefish posted:Ask and ye shall receive! I cannot stop laughing at this, I can't even imagine how much hell that guy caught for that.
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Mar 5, 2014 12:20
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FrozenVent posted:At some point you hit the Dr. Evil conundrum: you make more money with the legit cover up activity than by actually being evil. Isn't that also the Goldman Sachs business plan?
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May 1, 2014 22:47
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priznat posted:This is my porn watching setup An escort would have been cheaper.
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May 3, 2014 18:25
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simplefish posted:Clancy was good at describing the science stuff. Like 10 pages on wave/particle duality in Timeline That was definitely Crichton, and his science was generally pretty good, even if a lot of it was highly speculative (Congo and Prey in particular).
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May 19, 2014 19:37
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Insane Totoro posted:Has anyone ever hosed on top of the radar dome? Now THAT would be a story.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:20
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Micr0chiP posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_SCuPId8KA Project Pluto is almost comically evil. Let's build a nuclear drone that will drop nuclear bombs on our enemy, and then have it do laps over enemy airspace irradiating everything nearby just to be sure we got the job done.
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Aug 1, 2014 15:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yes, clearly a budget that even post-cuts is still larger than it was under the worst of the cold war (in inflation adjusted dollars) needs further inflating. If you really want more information on this, assuming you haven't already read this series, Reuters published a few articles on just how hosed DoD is when it comes to budgeting and accounting: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 It's broken into 3 parts: Payroll issues, fraud/waste, and back of house accounting systems It's a long read, but the cliff notes is that it's a problem that won't be going away without massive investment, punitive action from Congress to the Pentagon's budget if they don't fix it, and most importantly some senior officers/officials/something who can dedicate 5-10 years of their careers just to getting it fixed by stepping on every little fiefdom in their organization just to get it done.
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Sep 9, 2014 00:22
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Dead Reckoning posted:Fuckin' I'm not advocating one way or the other, I'm just an average taxpayer. I understand that it's political suicide to actually yank funds from the DoD, but for the budget problem to be fixed, someone at some point will have to step up and take responsibility for it - whether it happens internally, or via political pressure via Congress or POTUS. That said, at some point something's gotta give. Either US citizens have to accept that defense spending is a complete black hole, or we have to figure out some way to begin to control it somehow. I'm not smart enough to do the latter, but I'm really not in favor of the former either.
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Sep 9, 2014 03:38
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If we're wishing for things, can I have a McLaren P1?
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Sep 11, 2014 21:23
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LostCosmonaut posted:Number of Saturn V on display in former confederate states: 4 1/2. I'm still pissed off that NYC got a shuttle and Houston didn't. loving idiots even managed to damage it before putting it on display, assholes.
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Sep 25, 2014 04:10
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Pornographic Memory posted:Why do the Iranians always seem to have stuff written in English on their planes? UN/NATO compliance Edit: New page, so have a Cold War video! Enjoy a ride on a SRB motor on the shuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aCOyOvOw5c Shooting Blanks fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 03:35
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xthetenth posted:Advanced Western-style livery. Air show camouflage  We'll never see them coming!
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Oct 10, 2014 03:54
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Fucknag posted:
The shuttle is a product of the Cold War, regardless of the date of the video
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Oct 10, 2014 07:07
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They didn't start flying onboard exterior cams until after Columbia fireballed, a full 12 years after the Cold War ended.
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Don't worry, it won't live up to that promise once LockMart decides stealth is a requirement for the new reactor.
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Oct 16, 2014 19:24
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BIG HEADLINE posted:There's a story about Hoser Satrapa and his RIO getting ready for ops and he supposedly asked him "hey, do farts have lumps?" When he got "no" back, he said "okay, you preflight, I'll be back in fifteen minutes." What book is this?
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Nov 4, 2014 11:59
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Fearless posted:Well, when the SIOP was updated after the Cold War, it was discovered that there were multiple strategic nuclear weapons being used on out of the way targets like bridges in Siberia and so many nuclear weapons aimed at the major Russian cities that the detonation of one would have probably destroyed at least a couple of other incoming ones. Wasn't a big part of the problem that the various commands didn't really integrate their plans and just assumed that they'd have the only operational nuke chuckers? So Air Force, Navy, and whoever controls the ICBMs were all getting ready to take potshots at the same targets?
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Nov 10, 2014 05:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:The F-22 is that pretty chick that you blew off because you thought you could do better. No wonder you post so much about the F-35.
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Nov 11, 2014 00:38
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So apparently China is going to give everyone a demo of the J-31 sometime this week: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/china-to-debut-fighter-jet-as-u-s-brass-attends-airshow.html Assuming it's a successful demo, and knowing US observers will be watching this like a hawk, what are we looking for and how might this impact our own development? Obviously we'll be looking for performance envelope, and equally obvious is that we won't get a chance to check its radar signature, but what else will we be looking for? So far, everything I've read has been that this plane is vaporware but who knows - it's been largely a black hole like the PAK-FA as far as I'm aware, but maybe I'm wrong.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:36
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the JJ posted:Definitely pilot cards. Very careful attention to where the guns are, head on and profile views, listing things like horsepower (the top box of the table) and the one below it is something per hour. The others might be ceiling, that sort of thing. How accurate it is can vary pretty widely based on the age of the card vs. The specific plane being flown. A lot of planes on both sides had numerous models developed with incremental improvements, enough that an early war zero and a late war zero could be wildly different. As to how they got the information, I'd guess it was by whatever means necessary. Pilot interviews/observed characteristics, reconstructed wrecks and captured planes, etc. I know for example that the US started seeing a lot more success against zeroes once they were able to capture one, I think it was the one that crashed in the Aleutian islands.
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Nov 25, 2014 20:05
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New Leaf posted:That was because it smashed into a huge snow drift or something, right? I heard someone talking about that recently. It crash landed but was mostly intact, though the pilot died. It wasn't found for quite awhile (I thought it was a couple weeks, according to Wiki it was more than a month), but with some repairs it gave the US a flyable zero. Not only did that help the war effort by giving us insight into what the Japanese got right, but it also helped in that it gave us the ability to determine its weaknesses as a plane, and develop specific tactics to fly against it. How valuable that is is a source of debate but it was definitely a turning point in the Pacific air war.
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Nov 25, 2014 20:33
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Bacarruda posted:Just wait until Harvard starts buying F-35s. Then we can have a Harvard-Yale dogfight... Until MIT punks them both with stealth weather balloons.
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Nov 29, 2014 23:36
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Japanese F-14s might've happened had this occurred sooner: http://theaviationist.com/2014/08/18/the-story-of-a-legendary-f-14-pilot-and-the-gun-kill-on-an-f-15-that-could-sell-tomcat-to-japan/ more Hoser stories: http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/921898_The_Hoser_Chronicles.html Yes, it's arfcom, deal with it.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:51
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TheFluff posted:I don't get the laser hype either, but for completely different reasons. Isn't it just a fair-weather system? How would it work at all in fog, rain or snow? I mean, sure, it's a good response to this asymmetrical warfare poo poo with people in speedboats which also rely on fair weather, but I really can't see it completely replacing conventional CIWS when it comes to shooting down cruise missiles in the north Atlantic in winter. This is exactly what I was going to post, and I haven't seen it addressed yet. Someone who's smarter than me on lasers (read: almost everyone), any ideas?
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Dec 12, 2014 06:41
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Alright, here's something I've been mulling over for awhile: At a very high level, can someone describe what percentage of parts in a modern system (avionics, radar, missile guidance - whatever) are off the shelf vs. bespoke? I understand everything has to be certified for use (hence why the shuttle never got any major computer upgrades) especially on man-rated systems, but is there actual value in using customer Lockmart CPUs vs. off the shelf Intel CPUs? Again I can see it being a supply chain/logistics issue, and for certain components I can see it being a national security issue but I have a hard time believing that we can't use a lot of off the shelf CPUs for some of the more basic functions rather than whatever custom solution Raytheon or whoever wants to install. Even without going with top end Intel chips, sticking with simpler but more numerous ARM chips seem like it would be more cost effective, but I could easily be wrong. I guess to put it simply: How much value is there in using custom one off gear rather than buying something off the shelf when commodity hardware is available? And even if the commodity hardware doesn't necessarily meet every single requirement up front, how much of that is because the requirements are written in such a way that subcontractors can own the entire supply chain rather than including other parties (Intel, IBM, whatever)? I'm using computers as an example here but this seems like it could be applicable to more than just technology.
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Dec 19, 2014 19:54
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Thanks for the answers y'all, that kind of lines up with what I was expecting/hoping to read, I just didn't know where to start looking.
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Dec 20, 2014 01:10
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Smiling Jack posted:19 miles wasn't the flow, it was the blast zone where trees were uprooted. Why was Mt St Helens unique?
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Jan 21, 2015 11:33
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What I got from that isn't that it's a software problem, but that it's fundamentally a process problem. They're trying to force a schedule without correcting critical errors - yes, that's the way every major corporation in the world writes software (ship it, issue a fix pack), but when you're talking truly mission critical software (i.e. people's lives depend on it), it's the worst way to do it. The US Government DOES (or at least used to) know how to write good code. They're just allowing the horse to drive the buggy (or should I say, the bean counters to fly the jet). This article may have been posted way back in the thread and while it's definitely Cold War related, it's from the shuttle program so some of you may not care. They Write the Right Stuff
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Jan 25, 2015 01:58
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