iyaayas01 posted:

That story was pretty amusing, and your dad was awesome. Seriously, the fumes those early liquid propellant ICBMs put off were no joke...one exploded after a mechanic dropped a wrench and punctured the skin, causing the tank to leak. The resulting explosion blew the 8,000 lbs warhead several hundred yards away.

As for that picture...


I'll go ahead and tell the history behind that picture...the contrails in the foreground are of a couple of F-15s operating out of Elmendorf. The contrails in the background are of a couple of MiG-29s...that were on their way over to an airshow in BC...in 1989. So while the Cold War was still going on, the Soviets sent a couple of their top of the line fighters to an airshow in a NATO country. To top it all off, the aircraft stopped over at Elmendorf to top off their fuel tanks before continuing on to BC. The irony there can't be understated; Elmendorf was probably neck and neck with Keflavik in Iceland for sheer number of interception sorties launched from there (and the other satellite airfields, like King Salmon and Galena).

I know a few people that were stationed here when they landed, and apparently the flightline perimeter was PACKED with people wanting to catch an up close glimpse of an aircraft of the Soviets, a country that many of them had spent their entire careers viewing as a major threat.

Anyway, regarding higher-res pictures, wikipedia has a couple of nice shots.

Here is a close up of one of the MiGs, here is a good shot of the escorting Eagles and MiGs flying formation, and here is the one you were originally asking about.

McNally posted:

I have a book called "101 Things You Should Never Ask a Marine To Do" and all this talk of nuclear tipped missiles and things reminds me of one of them.

"Never ask a Marine to design weapons."

The cartoon accompanying it shows a Marine general giving a briefing on a nuclear hand grenade. Throwing radius, 30 meters. Killing radius, two miles.

mlmp08 posted:

Alternately, space launch vehicles can be repurposed into ICBMs. Iran has been playing around with that.

priznat posted:

Low altitude B-1B is super cool anyway

mikerock posted:

I want that as a shirt

Sunday Punch posted:

So in the 1970s the US Navy was interested in VTOL fighters to operate from the carrier fleet. One of the proposed modes for VTOL operations was VATOL, for Vertical Attitude Take Off and Landing. Vertical Attitude meaning the aircraft would be standing on end when landing or taking off. Now most of the proposed aircraft using this mode weren't designed to actually land vertically straight onto the flight deck, rather they would land belly-first on a vertical platform hanging over the side of the ship. This way the platform and accompanying aircraft could be rotated back to horizontal for servicing, and it avoided the problems associated with jet exhaust blasting directly into the deck.

But landing an aircraft while lying on your back and staring into the sky is a bit tricky, so one of the proposed solutions was tilting the entire cockpit and nose area of the plane forward by 90 degrees. Since nothing like this had ever been attempted before some design studies were in order. NASA-Langley built scale models of the F-16 and F-17 with the hinged cockpit for wind tunnel testing. They determined that the idea was workable, but the accompanying weight penalties meant it never went any further than the initial round of tests.

YF-17 scale model with rotating cockpit module (click for full size):




Would have been quite something to see an aircraft carrier with a flock of fighters perching bird-like off the side.

SyHopeful posted:

also make it so the B-70 flaps its outer droop wings

SyHopeful posted:

make it into a gif and i will love you

theclaw posted:

Note: Museum curators hate when people touch old planes or equipment. Thousands of people pawing at them over the years can cause significant damage.

Sunday Punch posted:

Yeah like Wkarma says, you can't turn them off once they're firing, which is a bad thing if you need to abort for whatever reason. Also, they have lower specific impulse than liquid bipropellant rockets. They can provide high thrust though, which is why they're generally used in first stages like on the space shuttle. The SRBs on the shuttle provide about 80% of the liftoff thrust, each one produces 12.5 meganewtons of thrust. For comparison the Saturn V's F-1 produced 6.6MN.

priznat posted:

Did I read somewhere that with the shuttle design the SRBs can be just disconnected right on the launch pad if something goes awry so they just take off on their own, leaving the orbiter and the fuel tank sitting on the pad?

That'd be quite the sight. Perhaps I just imagined it.

Sunday Punch posted:

I've always wondered about the wisdom of using a parallel staging design for the shuttle. It would seem to be a lot safer to put your crew vehicle on top of the stack where it's out of the way of falling chunks of frozen insulation foam, and not right next to the volatile SRBs and the honking great tank of LOX/H₂. If the crew vehicle is on top you've probably got more abort modes available too. I guess this stuff is easy to say with hindsight though. The Dynasoar configuration was like this:

Naramyth posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

Everyone talking about "safer" ways to put together a shuttle launch needs to remember one big thing:

When it comes to failure modes for any kind of orbital space flight they all pretty much begin and end with the phrase "catastrophic."

Styles Bitchley posted:

It was worried about, for instance on STS-27 in 1988 the orbiter was so badly damaged that the crew thought there was a good chance they would not survive reentry.

Naramyth posted:

A lot of it reads like nutter conspiracy talk and with little evidence, I am skeptical.

B4Ctom1 posted:

atlas silo's
Minuteman 3 Silo
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=41.30...49&z=18&iwloc=A

wkarma posted:

Let me save you some time.

http://goo.gl/Pfyv7 <--kmz download

http://goo.gl/Tb2h9 <--gmaps

B4Ctom1 posted:

Just so that you understand. When a missile takes off, it quickly accelerates to many times the speed of sound. Passing through only air alone the top of the missile will get glowing hot from friction. Imagine a shooting star but going up instead.

Adding only a small amount of material to the air such as dust, the missile would be shredded apart on its way to apogee. No material in the world could handle the friction of that forceful extrusion through the dust filled air at that velocity.

Morgenthau posted:

We could call it Dongland.

Those three domes have absolutely no phallic connotations whatsoever, no siree!

As an avid model builder, I been recently fascinated with the old F-19 model kits and by extension those fantastic stealth concept designs from the 80's.
Who'd thought of the massive troll when the real thing turned out to be the F-117.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-19

The F-117 was incredible in its way but it's interesting that the stealth super fighter in everyone's minds would only materialize with the F-22.

Sadly they were just concepts, this is so much a more cooler design than the F-22.

priznat posted:

Microprose sims were awesome. I liked M1 tank platoon a lot.

VikingSkull posted:

Probably the XB-70.

VikingSkull posted:

An 11,000 foot rollout is just wrong on many levels.

LP97S posted:

The Canadians don't really want it (they can't refuel it mid-flight)

Scratch Monkey posted:

Apparently only the F-35C has the drogue option and not the F-35A Canada is buying.

So says Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_refueling#Compatibility_issues

mikerock posted:

We would still be using the Arrow today if it had gone into production.

mikerock posted:

We're still flying Sea Kings and they went into service around the same time the Arrows would have.

ruebennase posted:

the austrians used to fly saab drakens until 2005 or so and the germans are still flying phantoms.

FrozenVent posted:

That's assuming someone could get close enough to an AWAC to launch a missile. I don't think they'd let those things fly around by themselves.

Alaan posted:

I'd be very surprised if they were functional. Weren't the AIM-54s maintenance hogs compared to a lot of missiles and needed to be watched carefully?

gohuskies posted:

What happens when the wings fall off a C-130? With the magic of Youtube, we can see.

MA-Horus posted:

The F-35 is such a joke of an aircraft. It's trying to fill too many roles. CAS in a single-engined supersonic fighter? Really?

quote:

I really really really wish the Canadian government would get it's head out of it's collective rear end and realize that this plane will be MORE expensive to buy now, than to buy new block F-18's, and then replace THOSE down the road with something more capable.

gohuskies posted:

Harvard trainers doing an exhibition

MA-Horus posted:

Realistically whatever we order will most likely be Canada's last manned fighter.

quote:

UCAVs will take over within the next 30 years, and Superhornets can easily fill that gap.