SyHopeful posted:

Okay so can somebody give me a breakdown of the differences between the A-12 and the SR-71? Because I keep reading about how they were pretty different but have yet to find a categorical list of said differences.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Jeremy Clarkson didn't write that, it was Rowland White.

TheNakedJimbo posted:

priznat posted:

Most, if not all of the recent awesome Intel CPUs were developed in Israel. Nuff said!

Cyrano4747 posted:

about decision delegation and the Prussians.

Ygolonac posted:

MetaFilter link-pile regarding the P-3 Orion and its upcoming retirement:

http://www.metafilter.com/110509/The-Night-of-The-Hunter

Gtab posted:

hahahahaha this is amazing

Cyrano4747 posted:

Goddamn this is great.

mlmp08 posted:

That final punchline owned.

Smiling Jack posted:

I love how the original arcade Missile Command had poo poo like MIRVs, bombers and satellite launched missiles.

It always ended in a nuclear holocaust.

Legomancer posted:

It's video games. Specifically, video games you can win or finish. That's ruined everything. When we were kids, there was one thing we all knew: The Space Invaders were coming. Yes, you could shoot at them, you could destroy them, and you might slow them down a little, but then they would resume their inexorable march. You couldn't stop them. You couldn't win against them.

Missile Command, as well. It only had one ending: the flashing words THE END accompanying the inevitable nuclear holocaust. Yes, you could somewhat postpone this, but it was going to happen. The question was not whether you'd fail, but how much time would pass until you fail.

This taught us the reality of life. There is no winning. You'll never be on top of the mountain holding the sword and the princess with your foot planted on the corpse of the villain. There is no final boss who is difficult to defeat but still possible to defeat. There is only an endless marching horde of space invaders, bearing down on you until you submit.

Psion posted:

While we're talking Cold War, I suppose I could mention the source of a lot of the plutonium in all the various things that went bang.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Reactor


Hanford B Reactor, Exterior by notpsion, on Flickr

Hanford B Reactor is open to the public for guided tours from DOE and it is their hope to have it attain full museum status - that is, drive out in the middle of loving nowhere, WA (this was a design requirement from the Manhattan Project - gently caress nowheresville, USA, oh ps need a lot of water nearby) and go see it whenever. Right now, trying to get on any part of Hanford sans official approval would be ... unwise.

I've been twice and I apologize in advance for the photography - it's a bitch and a half to shoot in there. Both times I've been all at the tours not giving me enough time to set up and shoot for poo poo and there is so much in that building worth shooting photos of. I'm not going again until it's museum status so I can bring a tripod and take my time setting up something for the front reactor face; 2004 process tubes (1500 or so filled with the u-238 rods they bombarded into Pu-239) is staggering, especially the cooling system required to keep that stable - like 30,000+ gallons of water a minute shot through, front to back, in less than a second, and going from like 60F to about 200F that fast. And then dumped into a holding tank (ok so far) and then right back into the Columbia river.




Front Face 01 by notpsion, on Flickr



So yeah, here's where Trinity and Fat Man's Pu-239 was created. Also, friggin' amazing engineering: They basically designed and built this sorta-kinda on the fly after the tiny test under the Chicago squash courts, in 14 months, and it worked for decades. The first time I went our tour guide was a guy who'd actually worked shifts at several of Hanford's reactors, including B. There's a lot of amateur-hour video that could use some editing up to really make the experience hammer home but when the guy talking to you in the control room where criticality was first achieved was saying "yeah, so I sat in this chair for like five years" it's

And of course, the most critical part of Hanford:

Pie Making Machine by notpsion, on Flickr

I was deeply disappointed this was not saved and placed in the B Reactor facility. They do have a remote-control robot, though.

Also - apparently there's an annual inspection from a bunch of Russians who take photos of the water intake pipes (which are all staked open, have been since 1968) to ensure nobody's secretly started up B Reactor - or secretly built the shitpot of support buildings which it would need to function, but ssh. Our tour guide indicated the US does this to several Russian decommissioned plants, too. Personally, I would love to see a bunch of stone-faced obviously KGB guys with Nikons or whatever snapping away at B Reactor. LOVE IT. Alas, those 'tours' don't get advertised.

wdarkk posted:

Isn't that what the US does all the time?

Terrifying Effigies posted:

At least one of them is going on to better things:

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/2040-thunderbolt-10-warplane-storm-chaser.html

It will replace the National Science Foundation's 35 year old T-28, which has over 900 storm penetrations under its belt. The retrofit will include adding heavy duty de-icers, engine intake shielding, reinforced leading edges, lighting rods all over, and a conducting copper mesh around the canopy.

For that one A-10 it will be like it died and went to Valhalla

Alaan posted:

The embargo has to be one of the dumber ongoing political thing the US has going. It's hard to be like CUBA IS EVIL while we are trading billions of dollars with China who are pretty much across the board worse governmentally than Cuba. You'd think by now some second term president would be like "Cuba embargo? gently caress that noise! Peace out!" then flick everyone off and ride off on his horse.

mikerock posted:

Hey Boomerjinks why don't you tell us about how you stole an idea from AI and profited from it?

Throatwarbler posted:

about currency history

Warbadger posted:

The SR-71 had a very specific purpose for which it was designed. The JSF is following in the footsteps of the F-111 and is trying to do everything on a single platform.

iyaayas01 posted:

grover posted:

Can you lovebirds just go find a quiet place to make out? You seem to be confusing the TFR Cold War thread with your personal chatroom.

iyaayas01 posted:

More to the point, which is that the defense budget should be as big as it needs to be to meet the requirements outlined in the National Military Strategy (which in theory should be derived from the National Security Strategy), which should ideally be based on a realistic appraisal of the threats and challenges facing the U.S., the defense budget today, adjusted for inflation, is larger than the defense budget at the end of the Cold War. The defense budget under sequestration (which takes us all the way back to...FY 2007 levels! Quelle horreur!) is still larger than the defense budget at the end of the Cold War. At the end of the Cold War the U.S. needed to be able to deter major theater war in Western Europe and keep the North Atlantic open in the face of determined air and submarine opposition, all while maintaining forces on the Korean Peninsula sufficient to defend South Korea and be able to maintain LOCs from the U.S. to the Western Pacific, while simultaneously keeping enough forces in reserve to respond to any trouble the Soviets or anyone else tried to start in the Middle East. Oh, and we had to maintain a nuclear stockpile that was several orders of magnitude larger than the one we have today. Since that level of threat is absolutely ludicrous compared to today's worldwide environment, it's kind of hard to see how a rational, threats and capabilities/ends and means based analysis could support a budget larger than the one we had at that time. So what I'm saying is that the issue is not money (we could cut the defense budget by 40% and still be fine), the issue is how we choose to allocate it and how we choose to spend it.

Basically anyone who bitches and moans about how things are going to be terrible if sequestration occurs is missing the forest for the trees...and unfortunately that includes pretty much all of the top leadership in DoD as well as the majority of the relevant members of Congress (Armed Services Committees, etc). That's not to say that sequestration won't be extremely painful, but that's because of idiotic decision-making and asset prioritization within DoD, not because the budget will be too small.

Chantilly Say posted:

I should clarify: we're going full sperglord here, I'm looking for the years of commission and decommission for each individual boat in the series.

iyaayas01 posted:

not to mention the fact that they very well might prevent the jet from doing things like the TSP in the Pacific (there's a reason PACOM has a standing requirement for a squadron of F-22s to be forward deployed somewhere in the western portion of its AOR)

Armyman25 posted:

So, why couldn't this be done by an F-18 squadron?

Snowdens Secret posted:

I understand it was the first battle fought beyond line of sight, and this question is obvious nonsense along the lines of "who would win a fistfight between Napoleon and Hitler", but why would you say Midway was more significant than Salamis, Lepanto or Trafalgar?

mlmp08 posted:

Yeah. And plus, if you keep your forces alive at all and manage to down an aircraft, you either get to go capture the crew or force the enemy to mount one very complex, risky, expensive operation to recover the crew.

Just look at the forces we used to ensure we could get to O'Grady:

"Two CH-53 Sea Stallions with 51 Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, lifted off the USS Kearsarge to rescue the pilot. The two helicopters were accompanied by two Marine AH-1W SuperCobra helicopter gunships and a pair of Marine AV-8B Harrier jump jets. These six aircraft had support from identical sets of replacement helicopters and jump jets as well as two Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes, two Marine F/A-18D Hornets, a pair of anti-tank Air Force A-10 Warthogs and a NATO AWACS radar plane.[3]" + my Dad on a telephone at NATO HQ.

Flikken posted:

THEY DID!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis,_Mississippi#1960.27s_Vela_Uniform.2FProject_Dribble_Nuclear_Tests

Minto Took posted:

This must be what growing up is like. Seeing the news that one of your childhood heroes is dead.

grover posted:

And USSR training suicide attack dogs to carry bombs under german tanks; except they made the mistake of using soviet tanks to conduct training, and shouldn't have been surprised when the dogs turned around and blew up their own comrades.