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StandardVC10 posted:poo poo, I was wondering where Something Awful did its airplanechat. Given that this thread is over 100 pages it's probably already been brought up, but the OP mentioning the rocket-salvo interceptor strategy from the 1950s reminded me of the amusing/terrifying anecdote of Battle of Palmdale. There's a lot more general airplane chat in this AI thread too http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3276654 , including a bunch of pictures from n. korea on the last couple of pages and some very nice zeppelin chat.
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Nov 7, 2012 03:37
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Veins McGee posted:The MEU was involved because its kind of a long flight from Italy. Not to mention you normally aren't taking off from a carrier that's floating 2100 feet above sea level. e. Not to mention the fact that with a carrier you can always be pointing into a nice strong headwind. Dr. Despair fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Jun 15, 2013 |
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Jun 15, 2013 19:58
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StandardVC10 posted:There's a company up by Mojave, Orbital Sciences, that launched Pegasus XL rockets, potentially into orbit, from underneath a Lockheed L-1011 airliner. I'm not sure how much launching they actually do these days, or the specifics of their setup, but they have gotten some work over the years. Just to be clear, Orbital Sciences and their Pegasus rocket don't get used because it's cheap. It gets used because launching from a fixed, land based launch point means you have a clear set of flight paths you can launch into without crossing over populated areas, so you have some limitations on which directions you can launch. Flying out over the middle of the Pacific means you have a lot more freedom with launch vectors, so it mostly get used for specialized research sats where the increase in launch cost (versus piggybacking on a full size rocket) is outweighed by the increased performance provided by such an orbit. Pegasus also isn't big at all, either, but it is a cool, niche system. They're working on a bigger model though. 
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Aug 14, 2013 19:13
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iyaayas01 posted:you're just a software upgrade for the SMS away from being able to employ SDBs. \/ So the F-35 is still hosed.
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Feb 1, 2014 09:38
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Dead Reckoning posted:From what I remember of high school technothrillers, Clancy didn't hold a candle to Dale Brown in batshit lunacy. I liked the one where the liberal president was OK with Russia nuking a bunch of american military bases and it was up to glorious hero to bomb Russia in revenge in his b52 because no one else would. Yeah.
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May 20, 2014 20:32
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Red Crown posted:If anyone's as interested in the theory behind this as I am, it's theoretically possible. It'd just take three 1KM wide detector arrays 4KM below sea level. Not impossible today (there's a civilian detector 2.5KM below) but probably impossible in the 80s. Theoretically possible in the sense that you could build a particle accelerator with a radius similar to pluto's orbit to do some kicking rad science. I was going to write up a pretty  post about neutrino physics but then I realized that I'm both had a bit too much bourbon to do math and that all my experience has been with accelerator experiments and not reactors. That said, what you're describing is literally something out of Star Trek. The Daya Bay experiment (among others) has detectors setup near reactors to do some fancy physics, so let me cite some numbers from them. First, if you're about 500 meters away from one of the biggest complexes of reactors in the world, with some good solid shielded detectors (and by that I mean you have a water tank outside of your real detector to act as a veto against cosmic rays) you're looking at 6-700 events on a good day. Move 2km away from that same complex, and your rates drops to 75 events a day. Move much farther away from that and you quickly hit the point where no one bothers putting a detector because you can't do useful physics with it. And that's with 5 GW of reactor power! A typhoon class sub has about 400 MW of power, so you might as well cut all those numbers above by a factor of 10 already. So yes, in theory you could detector a nuclear sub driving by your array, but really only if it happened to drive within a km of your detector for a useful amount of time, you're not triangulating poo poo from across the atlantic. And don't even get me started on how lovely running something like that in the ocean is, the PMTs experiments like ANTARES use are sensitive to single photons of light, so if you really wanted to defeat them all you'd have to do is maybe throw a glow stick by them and it would be blind as gently caress. Not that arrays like that have very good position resolution anyways, they just aren't designed for it. They're more of a "well did it come through the earth or not" level of accuracy. So it's not just a wall of text here's a diagram of the IceCube experiment, which has a few thousand PMTs buried in the ice at the South Pole. It takes a lot of detector to see neutrinos!  e. Not to mention all the work that goes into analysing data to understand what you're actually seeing! By the time you figure anything out the sub you just detected will be back in port!
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Aug 28, 2014 04:32
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Arglebargle III posted:Yeaaaah neutrino detectors are huge and heavy. Yup, each of the Daya Bay detectors is 20 tonnes of special scintillator. IceCube is a several km^3 block of ice, Super-K is 50 kilotons of water, LBNE (which is going to have a dedicated beam of neutrinos fired at it) was close to being 200 kilotons of water a mile underground, and now is likely going to be 34 kilotons of liquid argon. I forget how big antares is because honestly, it's just not as good of an option as any of the other detectors above. HyperK, if it happens, might be 300 kilotons worth of water (probably doped with gadolinium to make it more effective). Here's super-k, for scale.   E. each of the shiny golden orbs in that picture is a photomultiplier tube, basically a special type of vacuum tube that can amplify light by a million times so that we can see stuff on the individual photon level. They cost 3 grand a pop for ones that size, and at one point in SuperK's history one of them imploded, causing a chain reaction which detonated about 6000 of them. Even if you had an array of these things out there they'd be soooo easy to gently caress with it's not funny. Dr. Despair fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 05:04
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Any proposal that involves the phrase "I will imagine the possibility" is not,in any way shape or form, feasible. At least the dude ends with the phrase "But if this is all nonsense the blame is mine alone" after his acknowledgements. e. The real joke is any sort of proposal for a project that costs more than 1 billion dollars. That poo poo hasn't happened since they killed the SSC, even LBNE is only over a billion right now because of foreign investment. 
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Aug 28, 2014 16:10
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Snowdens Secret posted:Essentially nothing to do with submarines comes in under a billion any more. I'm fairly sure SSBN(X) planned costs including the replacement SLBM are well into 11 digits already. Oh, I was just referring to science projects. Military gets all the fun money!
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Aug 28, 2014 17:08
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BIG HEADLINE posted:RAAF Learmonth will be the one place in Australia free of snakes, since I'm pretty certain a B-1 on a full power takeoff roll will 1) collapse most burrows around the base and drive the prey away, and 2) scare the poo poo out of them through vibration alone. I dunno, at ellsworth it only seems to attract snakes (and prairie dogs). And spiders.
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May 26, 2015 01:57
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I went to an airshow today P6661440.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on FlickrI've got more stuff and videos, but lightroom is crashing on me nonstop, so it'll probably have to wait. Did get to see a few F-35's and an F-22 though, so that was cool.
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Aug 16, 2015 02:29
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4ncjpAw_I Here are some other short clips of the F-86/Mig-17 stuff that was going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rcXpz2LL7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTeyKe8JsbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ9lFxdtBCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZCmjqN-zRA
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Aug 16, 2015 04:00
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In no particular order: P6660596.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr P6660588.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr P6660243.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr P6660204.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr P6661207.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr P6661326.jpg by Douglas Tiedt, on Flickr
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Aug 16, 2015 18:08
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Sjurygg posted:Is that a lie-down cockpit? Nope, although it is pretty reclined.
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Aug 21, 2015 01:59
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AceRimmer posted:Isn't this idea a myth? If it is, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is really poorly named. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.cfm
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Sep 5, 2015 22:43
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monkeytennis posted:*crosses Abrosimova Bay off list of places to visit* Don't worry, water is a pretty effective shield.
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Sep 17, 2015 00:09
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DakianDelomast posted:I had a snarky nuke joke about 95% being a bomb but after some research you're correct. The problem with a 95% reactor is that if you yank the rods out like what happened with the Russians instead of a steam excursion you get an atom bomb which is a drat slight worse. 20% is a more operator friendly enrichment but results in a much larger reactor size. My guess is that the American reactors have a tighter set of controls on them. I am civil nuke though not navy nuke so it is only a guess. Calling it an atom bomb (instead of just saying prompt critical) is a pretty lovely way to describe it. Unless you're trying to scare people or something. And even then a prompt critical reactor generally results in a steam explosion destroying things (chernobyl, sl-1), and not an atomic bomb style explosion (see: no reactor ever). That said, even if you yank the rods out of a highly enriched reactor that isn't water cooled you don't get an atom bomb style explosion. A good blast, to be fair, but nothing like a nuke going off. This is KIWI-TNT (Transient Neutron Test... good acronym for the test though). It was a nuclear rocket engine using highly enriched uranium, and they pulled the rods out completely to see what the worst case scenario would be.   Not sure it's any worse than a steam explosion to be honest... superheated steam has a poo poo load of energy, especially under pressure. e. mostly I just wanted to remind people that we've successfully blown up working nuclear rocket engines... that were designed in the 50's.
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Sep 17, 2015 19:42
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DakianDelomast posted:I am not starting a shitfit about a hypothetical reactor that doesn't exist and I am not insinuating that US Navy reactors are unsafe or floating bombs. No, you aren't. That's like saying a dry ice "bomb" is similar to a hand grenade that uses high explosive. Just because it's a bad critically event, doesn't mean it's the same as a nuclear bomb, and there's no way your reactor is going to melt down fast enough that you get a bomb scale reaction before it tears itself apart (that's half the trouble with bombs... making things happen fast enough to get as many reactions as possible before it tears itself apart).
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Sep 17, 2015 22:32
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TasogareNoKagi posted:The SL-1 incident is relevant. It destroyed the reactor and contaminated the area, but didn't take out Idaho. and it was still the steam explosion that probably did much of the damage inside that building, and not the "atomic bomb" created by the prompt criticality.  dooooble posting
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Sep 17, 2015 22:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:Sorry, nuclear generators towed by semis? Sure, why not  The army built several "portable" reactors, but afaik they were portable in the sense that you could build the parts somewhere else and ship it to site for assembly, not that you could just run them off of a semi truck. That's crazy. Need to talk to the air force for something that crazy. 
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Sep 18, 2015 18:37
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Shooting Blanks posted:It's technically possible, it just isn't economically feasible. That said, the Russians are working on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station One was also used to help power the panama canal for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH-1A Either way, not something you can probably have just sitting around waiting to go power some pumps on a moments notice.
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Sep 18, 2015 23:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvNuZLASdE I love the fact that there is a cover over the engines to keep them save as it gets shoved out of the silo, especially since it uses a rocket engine to get out of the way before the main engines fire. Meanwhile the minuteman just lights itself on fire, because why not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUiGs8qqWG8
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Nov 25, 2015 05:57
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Dead Reckoning posted:P. sure 20mm can't reach up to the altitudes where heavy bombers fly. The trick is to just use CRAM as designed, and have it detonate the falling bombs as they come into range. 
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Dec 7, 2015 05:52
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Force de Fappe posted:This is the way the world ends comon, that's not even a satan launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvNuZLASdE
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Dec 18, 2015 19:20
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That Works posted:Probably, but I think that it and Fusion power are one of those things that's perpetually "going to be ready in 20 years". The difference between a thorium reactor and a fusion reactor is that the technology to operate a molten salt thorium reactor was tested and shown to work back in the 60's, and the Aircraft Reactor Experiment in the 50's operated liquid salt reactors as well. We're still in the "try and find a way to make fusion actually work" stage and will probably be there for a long time.
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Dec 21, 2015 04:14
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FrozenVent posted:Walking up stairs is pretty complex, though. poo poo anything that emulates human or animal locomotion is hard. Splode posted:Yeah, to do a full automatic landing, they had to install a big weird cable because the original layout was designed specifically because astronauts were getting cranky about being entirely redundant. Not to mention that the soviets' one shuttle flight with their Buran was completely unmanned, and it worked pretty well in 1988.
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Dec 30, 2015 02:27
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Propagandalf posted:This is the Airpower thread, get that numbered windows poo poo out of here. XP still gets used somewhere, especially on planes? Sounds awful. I remember getting a tour of an EC-130H (I think) and the guy was bragging about how they didn't have any windows, it was all linux now.
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Dec 30, 2015 05:12
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Hey, the a-10 storm penetrator should be flying sometime this year, assuming it doesn't get delayed.
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Feb 19, 2016 19:07
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Mr. Despair posted:Hey, the a-10 storm penetrator should be flying sometime this year, assuming it doesn't get delayed. I will say the a-10 looks slightly off without the canon.  http://www.newson6.com/story/28040199/a-10-warthog-to-take-on-oklahomas-thunderstorms
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Feb 19, 2016 21:00
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Propagandalf posted:Unless they show it next to a pile of enriched uranium big enough to fill that sphere, that's about as threatening as a rolled up newspaper. well you wouldn't want a solid sphere that big (unless you want everyone in the room to die as it goes critical), the trick is to have a hollow sphere that stable and boring but gets compressed into something more interesting when the explosives fire. Looks to me like it could be a mockup or something with all but one of the explosive modules removed, but I can't really comment on if the scale is really feasible (it's certainly much smaller than the gadget was).
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Mar 9, 2016 06:57
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ughhhh posted:Was there ever a two engine COIN/CAS plane like the Bronco which had a turret on the back of the center fuselage to shoot at the ground? I remember seeing something like that but I could be mixing up my crimson skies with reality. Yeah, there was.  wikipedia posted:The U.S. Marine Corps YOV-10D Night Observation Gunship System (NOGS) program modified two OV-10As (BuNo 155395 and BuNo 155396) to include a turreted forward looking infrared (FLIR) sensor, laser target designator and turreted 20 mm (.79 in) XM197 gun slaved to the FLIR aimpoint. NOGS succeeded in Vietnam, but funds to convert more aircraft were not approved. NOGS evolved into the NOS OV-10D, which included a laser designator, but no gun.
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Mar 10, 2016 17:07
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Dead Reckoning posted:Except with less endurance, less survivability, and the inability to go back to hauling cargo when you realize you've made a huge mistake. If anything, I suppose the laser designator wound up being handy considering that bit stuck around.
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Mar 10, 2016 19:52
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Doctor Grape Ape posted:Holy crap. Was this pre high bypass turbofan engines? Pretty sure it came later actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propfan
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Mar 12, 2016 21:47
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The B-21 DoubleDown brought to you by KFC helps keeps the costs down!
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Apr 15, 2016 05:31
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holocaust bloopers posted:B-21 Of Course I Love You B-21 MEATFUCKER
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Apr 15, 2016 19:00
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A bit late to bomber maneuverability chat, but I just made this so w/e http://i.imgur.com/RtyGmqW.gifv
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Jun 9, 2016 03:44
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Rotacixe posted:One area where it is trivial to improve upon are the engines. Hard to believe they only now are moving forward with upgrades. Not when you think about how many engines they had paid for and in storage already.
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Jun 9, 2016 15:42
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I got to fly in the b-1b simulator at Ellsworth, it was awesome. the pilot showing me around kept telling me to go lower and faster. I also got to crash a b-1b in the simulator at Ellsworth. It was awesome.
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Jun 9, 2016 20:55
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StandardVC10 posted:Were these two facts perhaps connected? Honestly if I remember right it was more me loving up the trim (it was backwards from the flight sim I was used to at home, or I just heard the pilot wrong, dont remember the details ). Eventually just got to the point where full back stick wasn't enough to stay level and I didn't realize what was happening until after the fact.
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Jun 9, 2016 21:44
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Enourmo posted:Nevermind CO2 emissions, supposedly coal plants dump way more radiation into the environment per unit power than nuke plants do. yeah, you've got 10 ppm or so of uranium in most US coal, so when you burn that it's gotta go somewhere. I'd be way more worried about breathing that in because it's a heavy metal though, and not as much because it's radioactive.
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Jun 15, 2016 02:34
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