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baupdeth posted:Glomar Explorer built for the CIA by Hughes looking for a new Soviet Sub K-129. This was apparently my father's first real job after college, he only tells a couple stories about it and they are all very short on details. There is a book about it, but according to him it isn't particularly accurate which shouldn't be a real surprise considering the nature of the project. The whole project really fits in that era of insane feats of engineering regardless of the cost and potential consequences, particularly with Hughes being involved. Talking to him about it now though I get the feeling he was just happy to finish the job and get off the ship alive. He used to have a cool set of shot glass sized styrofoam cups, the result of sending ordinary coffee cups down with the claw. I have no idea where they have ended up though, I'll see if I can't find them at some point.
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Dec 17, 2010 18:45
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slidebite posted:Hey, been gone out of this thread for a while but I found this referenced on another forum I go to every now and then and sounds kind of neat, a SAM simulator. This looks really neat, but as it says in the FAQ is not by any stretch of the imagination a game. The documentation looks relatively good, but not surprisingly it's fairly complex. Not helping is the fact that every screen I've seen so far is either in Russian or Hungarian moon writing. My Russian can most charitably be described as terrible to nonexistent, so it's been a bit of an issue. The AAR at least is in english, but when you have no idea what you're looking at that isn't terribly helpful. Probably doesn't help that I have no background in air defense, and my radar experience is limited to using yacht based sets to avoid ships and not drive into islands. It definitely seems to be in the same vein as the A-10 simulator discussed earlier that includes the 15 minute engine start sequence, except in Russian. I plan on playing with it some more, but they're serious about the RTFM step.
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Feb 11, 2012 00:19
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You can certainly do better than a mile by celestial, I got fairly good at it sailing when I was 16 or so. I will admit I was cheating and used gps time, which was a lot easier than tuning in WWV and hoping your stopwatch or "chronometer" was actually performing as advertised. No idea if you can do well enough to use for launching a missile, but celestial done well can be quite accurate. Being dead certain about your fix is another matter though, and we always did double check with the gps.
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Feb 12, 2013 03:04
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Crescendo posted:I agree with you, but surely even a modern jet flying that same profile would be susceptible to all manner of IR threats. I think seeing a real MANPADS in action would change some opinions too, though probably not any meaningful ones. You see the max speed listed in the specs for the missile, but it's always a surprise to me just how fast they are compared to stuff flying low and slow. I guess some of the apparent speed may be the fixed launch point as opposed to coming off a relatively fast moving rail on something, but still there's so little travel time in that video there can't be much time to react for most of those. This does assume it all works as advertised, but that one sure as hell did and I wouldn't want to bet everything on shoddy manufacturing.
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Feb 16, 2015 18:14
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xthetenth posted:There are a lot of assumptions about how reactors are built that make them crazy safe because of course they're built that way. It's also worth noting that even with the highly questionable design decisions and Soviet build quality there were a lot of them that were operated without major incidents. Wikipedia says Russia is still operating eleven of the loving things, although they claim to have retrofitted them with more safety systems, and the last reactor at Chernobyl was only shut down in 2000. Chernobyl really was a case of everything going wrong that could have, starting with them ignoring all of the engineers who said "Oh hell no" to the test they wanted to run until they found one that signed off for political reasons. There's definitely still the possibility one would have gone wrong somewhere else for some other reason, and the design wasn't all that great, but it wasn't a guaranteed disaster without the pants on head stupid turbine run down test conducted at the worst possible time.
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Sep 18, 2015 01:53
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Doesn't help that the Soviets covered up as much as they could, while the Japanese were relatively open about what was happening as it happened. I don't think Fukushima ever got to the burning exposed reactor core stage though, and they certainly didn't need hundreds of bio robots to clean up scattered bits of core, containment structure, and chunks of graphite moderator from all over the place. What would make it interesting is the difference in population density, I don't know how Pripyat and surroundings compare to Fukushima but it's probably a safe bet that the population density was higher in Japan. Somehow I'd missed that INES only went up to 7 till now, that also doesn't make comparing them any easier particularly for people who believe all radiation and nuclear is bad.
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Sep 18, 2015 02:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:Which is what I was saying. No one is claiming that every airplane ever will be self piloting, but we're moving towards more and more automation. Jets are the dominant tech these days to the point where flying on a prop driven airplane is something to note. Unmanned aircraft are already a thing, albeit in their infancy. It will only get more widespread moving forward. My Dad decided he wanted more filming for the few times we manage to get together and go skiing/surfing/kiteboarding so I started looking into what it actually takes. I figured it would end up being too expensive and time consuming to do and was absolutely astonished that right now, as of this morning, you can get all the bits you need for less than a grand. Everything, complete ready to fly airplane and all the RC bits included. You can certainly spend more, particularly on the camera end of things, and there's definitely some assembly and configuration required, but if you've done some RC sim time and crashed a couple micro size foam planes you shouldn't have any real trouble. That is for fixed wing, it looks like there's been a lot more work done on the multirotor end of things. Ardupilot is loving incredible, and that's a free open source project. It's going to be really interesting to see how things progress in the next few years.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:10
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holocaust bloopers posted:Oh my god someone post about the B-58 Hustler or something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVtosAjWUvY I had no idea they tried to launch ballistic missiles from the B-58. Not quite as nuts as an ICBM from a C-5, but still neat.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:44
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brains posted:too much parasitic drag? sounds like you need more thrust. The thing that makes this so great for me is it goes all the way back to the Wright brothers. It may be apocryphal, but their response to a question in one of their meetings with the Army was something along the lines of "Give us an engine with enough power and we can make a kitchen table fly."
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Feb 9, 2016 05:30
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For sure, they were absolutely right, and the engines definitely helped, but they did a lot of aerodynamics work as well. I only found out recently that they built their own wind tunnel after their first attempt, I believe based on Otto Lilienthal's work, failed miserably. This led them to discover that Lilienthal hadn't been as correct as they'd thought, which was probably a big part of the reason he died crashing one of his gliders since he was off by something like a factor of three on the lift provided by his wing designs. The couple of books I had read about them largely managed to gloss over the years of research and incrementally improving prototypes. Edit: How about the Mosquito if the H4 doesn't count?
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Feb 9, 2016 06:03
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That's a really neat piece, below that it talks about how they used MAD gear and sonobuoys for antisubmarine duty later in the war which I'd never heard about. Along with bombs and smoke flares that used a forward firing rocket to cancel out the plane's velocity because the MAD gear was so accurate. I hadn't thought the Catalina could get cooler but playing chicken with Condors and having the first aerial integrated antisubmarine warfare suite definitely does it for me. Related to the Command and Control talk awhile back Sandia labs did an interesting documentary that's on youtube called Always/Never. I don't recall seeing it mentioned before, this is the first part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk Includes Fred Ikle talking about his experience touring Europe, but leaves out or glosses over some of the things that are discussed in more detail in Command and Control.
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Mar 4, 2016 05:18
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The Reaper is actually small airplane size and the Predator is slightly larger than average RC plane size right? I know the Scan Eagle is small enough that someone briefly produced and sold a knockoff airframe for hobbyists, I actually spent some time looking for one because it would have made a pretty good fixed wing video platform with enough volume and weight capacity to be workable with an electric powerplant. Granted some of that was due to the fact that we didn't need any of the really fancy gadgets, just a couple HD cameras and an Ardupilot setup.
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Mar 11, 2016 04:28
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Making that even better are all the fuckwit nimbys who bought property near a place that's been a Naval Air Station since 1941 whinging about planes being noisy and trying to get it shut down. I just wish they'd fly my way and lower more often, haven't been able to get any decent pictures. Been tempted to call their complaint line and tell them they don't fly enough, but don't want to add to the calls received statistic.
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May 6, 2016 01:06
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Saukkis posted:How an earth did Admiral Kuznetsov end up with such poor engines? In Russia even ice breakers are nuclear-powered. It's doubly weird because wikipedia at least claims he's steam, not diesel. Bunker C is utter poo poo to deal with and is dirty as hell, both before and after it's burned, but it's absolutely possible to burn it without visible smoke. Economy haze used to be a thing for ships and power plants, but that should be light grey smoke that is just visible if I'm remembering right. Even with the shittiest of poo poo fuel something is seriously, seriously hosed with the boilers on that ship, and I'd love to know what is actually wrong because it's more impressively wrong than anything I've seen before. Unless they've actually converted it to coal, which makes no sense at all since coal is significantly less energy dense and presents its own handling challenges even compared to glop that doesn't pump until you get it inconveniently warm. Slo-Tek the easiest answer is yes, they tend to burn residual fuel while out at sea and switch to distillate when they are forced to. Don't know about Rotterdam or Singapore but California has a huge "no burning cheap fuel" zone for its ports, Long Beach is the one that really stands out in that regard but I imagine Oakland is similar. They don't get towed in unless something is wrong, and even assuming the tugs produce no pollution that still wouldn't mitigate it all. Even a nearly unmanned ship still has substantial non propulsive power needs, particularly container ships carrying reefer boxes, this may be met by diesel generators, turbogenerators fed with waste heat from the main engine, or a combination. Steam ships present an additional wrinkle in that they produce substantially more pollution when they are initially lit off, so shutting everything down and letting it cool off may actually be counterproductive, this doesn't matter anymore because there aren't many left. Much like coal, distillate fuel has less energy per unit mass and is also significantly more expensive that residual, so it costs quite a bit more and you end up burning a lot more to move the ship the same distance. It is cleaner burning, but a lot people don't take into account the reduced energy density when calculating the benefits. Real answer is all nuclear all the time, gently caress the haters. I'm a bit out of date on this and haven't actually had anything to do with the field in quite awhile, so if I'm wrong on anything or if anyone has better information please correct me.
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Nov 13, 2016 17:32
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Doesn't seem that bad, looks like most of the asbestos is still relatively well contained. At least in that shot.
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Nov 20, 2016 23:19
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Steam turbines can suffer uncontained failure just like gas turbines as well. It's rare, but more impressive than on an airplane because the shrapnel weighs quite a lot more. That's assuming whatever is massively wrong with their boilers allows them to make enough steam to get things up to speed. More likely everybody not flying their deathtraps just dies of black lung and/or asbestos related illnesses. Do we have any other cases like the V2 where the weapons system kills more of its crew than the enemy? I know V2 was people building it, not crew, but can't think of any similar examples.
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Nov 21, 2016 15:38
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Hopefully hypoxia gets you first. It'll still be incredibly uncomfortable as you boil alive but it'll be over in a minute or two rather than hours or days. Steam is scary, scary stuff but it's so very handy for some things.
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May 31, 2017 17:14
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I'm wondering if they're using a powder charge or compressed gas to give the projectile an initial boost. Memory is fuzzy since it was years ago but I remember reading that one of the problems is that the projectiles have an annoying habit of welding themselves to the rails before they start really accelerating. The easiest fix was a shot of compressed air or something as the contacts were closed. Initial velocity factored into the equation for total acceleration too, not sure by how significant it was.
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Jul 27, 2017 03:18
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