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Alaan posted:This guy is totally insane but I was curious HOW insane so I went looking. Atmospheric density at 85,000 feet which is about max SR-71 altitude is .714 inches mercury. 300,000 feet is .0004. 300,000 feet is at the Karman line. You'd need orbital velocity just to maintain lift. The SR-71 is cool, but it ain't an SSTO spaceplane.
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Apr 4, 2015 05:24
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bewbies posted:I'm also kind of curious about this, I mean I know it isn't a Deepwater Horizon type thing but it seems like that much oil on the water could mess up a not insignificant area. The ocean is pretty good at biodegrading fossil fuels, in reasonable quantity, in warm water. When an oil rig dumps two hundred million gallons that definitely overwhelms the natural processes, but a single aircraft worth of fuel in the open ocean is usually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
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Apr 19, 2015 17:25
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Forums Terrorist posted:I agree, we should lose the last flyable Vulcan to some punk with a MANPAD  Some punk with a MANPADS.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:02
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Alchenar posted:People shocked to discover that infrastructure which facilitates movement between vital parts of the country for economic purposes also facilitates movement between vital parts of the country for military purposes. He's probably thinking of the famous "one mile in five has to be flat to serve as an impromptu bomber runway" myth, which is in fact false. One of the reasons it's false is of course that it would cut off ground transport of military and civilian vital equipment. http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp
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Sep 6, 2015 14:41
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Mazz posted:Is there a DoD rule somewhere that states every single press release made about any product even remotely related to combat operations has to use the word WARFIGHTER? Preferably as many times as possible? It's just slightly less ridiculous than writing out "soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines", while still not offending anyone by omission.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:53
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Mazz posted:I don't know, probably troops or soldiers. Troops hasn't got a good singular. Soldiers would be perfect in a sane world, but our four-branch military isn't one.
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Sep 15, 2015 12:23
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mlmp08 posted:Additionally, not all "warfighters" are military members when you consider DoD civilians. I feel like "warfighter" goes from merely silly to actively risable when you apply it to people who aren't shooting or being shot at.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:34
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Splode posted:Nope, but he's made a pretty good point. Only in America would it be ok to advertise weapons on regular tv. Lots of countries do flyovers but that's a very different thing, because the military and arms manufacturers are very different things. They're not advertising weapons. If Toyota buys an ad spot, they want you to buy a Toyota. If Northrup buys an ad spot, they want you to buy the credibility of their company. And by "you", I mean their stockholders, their potential employment recruits, the managers of smaller contractors who might do subcontracting work, etc, etc, etc. If any company whose products are not sold at the consumer level is advertising, that's what they're doing. GE isn't trying to sell locomotives when they have some lady talk about the personal fulfillment she gets from being an engineer who designs energy-efficient rail engines to save the planet. On the way to work each day, I pass a Ratheon billboard that notionally advertises the Standard Missile 3. But Raytheon doesn't expect some general to drive by and think "Hmm, I should buy some missiles." They expect that some of the bazillion engineers and managers who pass that billboard on the way to the research park might think "Hmm, they're a cool company, maybe I should see if they've got any openings" or "Hmm, they seem to be good at stuff, maybe I can subcontract for/to them".
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Feb 7, 2016 06:20
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Forgive the cliche of quoting xkcd, but just replace "telescope" with "bomber" for that genuine "In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft" feel.
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Apr 17, 2016 20:42
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Booblord Zagats posted:TBH that seems like it would work wonders against helicopters Google image search "anti-helicopter mines" and you'll see several things that are basically a smaller version of this with a bomb attached.
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Jun 9, 2016 03:16
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VikingSkull posted:pounds sterling, perhaps Seven hundred thousand pounds sterling would probably buy you a spare tire on most of Lockheed's planes.
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Jun 18, 2016 19:55
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Godholio posted:Sure, but it was a lot more common for the company to work those kinks out on its own dime, rather than the government basically writing a blank check at the beginning of a program. During the cold war the contractors could do that because budgets were large and predictable. For the last few decades that hasn't been the case, so huge swathes of the industrial base gets laid off and moves on. Then the next procurement has to start from scratch without experienced people, and that costs time and money.
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Jul 28, 2016 02:40
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 This is neither air power nor cold war, but when I happened to see it on the Wikipedia main page today I thought the thread would enjoy the history of the Swedish warship Vasa. She was a new kind of flagship, armed to the teeth and decorated decorated to the gills. Her maiden voyage was on 10 August 1628. A little over one kilometer into that voyage, she encountered a breeze, tipped over, and promptly sank. Wikipedia's description of the subsequent inquiry is the fun part: quote:The Council sent a letter to the king the day after the loss, telling him of the sinking, but it took over two weeks to reach him in Poland. "Imprudence and negligence" must have been the cause, he wrote angrily in his reply, demanding in no uncertain terms that the guilty parties be punished.[28] Captain Söfring Hansson, who survived the disaster, was immediately taken for questioning. Under initial interrogation, he swore that the guns had been properly secured and that the crew was sober. A full inquest before a tribunal of members of the Privy Council and Admiralty took place at the Royal Palace on 5 September 1628. Each of the surviving officers was questioned as was the supervising shipwright and a number of expert witnesses. Also present at the inquest was the Admiral of the Realm, Carl Carlsson Gyllenhielm. The object of the inquest was as much or more to find a scapegoat as to find out why the ship had sunk. Whoever the committee might find guilty for the fiasco would face a severe penalty.[28]
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Aug 11, 2016 00:52
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ArchangeI posted:God only knows what the Bundeswehr is supposed to do against small recon drones. Maybe buy the new Stingers? Small, slow drones is the ideal target set for high-energy lasers. That class of drones is right in the sweet spot of fragile enough for currently-existing laser technologies to feasibly address, while retaining all the directed energy advantages of infinite magazine depth and not raining spent lead all over the Super Bowl or whatever. Several of the big defense contractors have projects along these lines, though it remains to seen what will come of them.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:34
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hobbesmaster posted:Maybe if you're a noob Target speed, altitude, and maneuverability decrease a SAM's effective range, but even back then strategic SAMs were a non-trivial threat to the SR-71. "Just hit the throttle and outrun it" is popular legend, not historical tactical reality.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:30
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Syd Midnight posted:OK, here's a grim one for you. I read shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane's book "Riding Rockets", and in one part he describes in detail how the Challenger disaster would have unfolded inside the cockpit. As a part of the investigation, with access to all of the recorded data, and having piloted a few shuttle missions himself, he was able to reconstruct how the event would have been experienced by the people on board, most of whom were close friends of his. I guess his mind would force him to imagine it whether he wanted to or not, so he may as well share it. I remember NASA trying really hard to avoid ever mentioning the crew being alive after the breakup. Seconding Mike's book as one of the best astronaut memoirs. As a very minor ray of hope, Mike did note that this was the worst-case scenario of the crew cabin not only maintaining structural integrity but being undamaged to the point of remaining airtight. This is somewhat unlikely because the destruction of the orbiter would have ripped out the umbilical connecting the cabin to the rest of the orbiter. If that rip broke the seal, there would have been a few seconds of consciousness at that altitude (accounting for the flipped switches and activated oxygen system (which was not pressurized and wouldn't have sufficed for a depressurized environment)), but mercifully the crew would have been unconscious for the descent. But it isn't certain.
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Aug 20, 2016 20:55
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Baloogan posted:we need a big space war Careful what you wish for. We are rapidly entering the era of contested space, and it's pretty much historically uncharted territory.
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Aug 24, 2016 02:32
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StandardVC10 posted:Both Presidential candidates have come out against it now. Hillary is lying, the Democrats will fall in line, and the Republican establishment is in favor of the TPP anyway. If she wins it'll pass, for better or (more likely) worse.
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Aug 31, 2016 01:32
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StandardVC10 posted:Launch insurance. I mean, I guess there's no reason why not, but I'd never thought of it before. My vague understanding is that every little event that happens in the satellite process is separately insured. Insurance for attaching the satellite to the rocket, insurance for orbital insertion after detaching from the launch vehicle, everything. I'd be really shocked if this wasn't covered by something - it would be a monumental screw-up on the part of the customer.
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Sep 2, 2016 14:36
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Cat Mattress posted:Saddam would have been toppled by the Iraqis themselves during the Arab Spring That is... pretty optimistic. He'd have probably been better positioned to crush a rebellion than even what we're seeing in Syria. He had no shortage of experience, after all.
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Oct 8, 2016 23:54
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Mortabis posted:That should be pretty easy to guess at from known physical constraints. The power and wavelength of the laser are public information, right? There are relevant factors that are not public (beam quality, jitter, etc). But in general, it's a 30 kW laser, not exactly the Death Star. The stated use case is more like poking holes in rubber small boats.
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Oct 20, 2016 17:49
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Here's a German company's similar laser being demonstrated under ideal conditions, in front of an audience, in the clean mountain air. It makes for a snazzy if slightly contrived killer of model planes, quadcopters, ball bearings launched from an air cannon, and mortar shells sitting static on a post .
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Oct 21, 2016 04:26
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Small cheap drones have gotten really really good, there's no question. But as somebody once said, there's a whole lot going on in air defense artillery (and related). Off the top of my head: 1. EW. The $999 grenade-bearing terror-copter is not equipped to deal with even rudimentary spectrum denial. 2. Tactical radar. It's small, portable, cheap, and very effective. 3. Optical sensors (VIS and IR). Ditto. 4. Actual anti-aircraft artillery is pretty well-suited to killing small slow targets at close range. And you're shooting bullets, which are cheap. Well, a lot cheaper than missiles anyway. The bullets in this nice little German defense contractor promo film are programmable in-flight and detonate just before impact to fill the air with birdshot-esque projectiles. You can buy them now. 5. Lasers. They're still not quite ready for primetime, but basically any of the R&D efforts for C-RAM type missions would also work fine for small drones - especially in view of the fact that ISR optics are very fragile against laser radiation. While it's always hard to predict how wars will be fought in the future, U.S. infantry fleeing in terror from the manhack menace is will probably remain largely fantasy.
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Oct 25, 2016 02:44
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mlmp08 posted:I can imagine some neat fancy pants swarm usage to cripple systems or mess up an unhardened motor pool but if you're deploying some mega-swarm, it's presumably being transported in a big, fairly conventional truck/ship/airplane. Also, if it's a mega swarm, it's no longer $1k. It's hundreds of thousands, and suddenly even traditional proximity fused CIWS isn't all that much of a cost disadvantage.
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Oct 25, 2016 21:06
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SimonCat posted:DIRCM with better lasers will take care of it. Modern MANPADS are legitimately really good. It will be interesting to see how that particular problem set progresses over the next few decades. In fact arguably I'd say MANPADS and ATGMs are really the techy flying things that are actually doing the kinds of stuff people worry about drones doing.
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Oct 26, 2016 02:39
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M_Gargantua posted:When it loses its link to its C2 it analyses its situation and either continues its mission or withdraws based on preset conditions. If man portable ECM is expected then you can set your drones to simply search out and destroy it and its operator in the course of their mission, if you expect the battle zone to have ECM trucks then you suddenly have some very expensive targets of opportunity. If on the other hand you don't expect that then you can tell the drone that ECM represents a greater than expected opposing threat and to RTB and dump all the passive Elint it just gathered. More or less the whole point of EW is to make that kind of thing as hard as possible. "Simply search out and destroy it" is almost underpants gnome-level oversimplification.
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Nov 1, 2016 03:08
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my kinda ape posted:Wouldn't it be pretty easy to find the radiation plume from what's essentially a dirty bomb? Straight uranium or plutonium is almost nonradioactive by the standards of acute human health hazards. Scattering the metal around wouldn't be a dirty bomb.
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Nov 5, 2016 04:28
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I think they really are just that bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGvaO6zubLs
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Nov 15, 2016 04:59
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CarForumPoster posted:Also this is amazing...if we get cuban missile crisis close to SHTF again I now know how to calculate where I move. The actual answer is probably South America, fwiw.
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Nov 23, 2016 03:59
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Sperglord posted:Ok, let me rephrase: many people say that low-frequency radar cannot get sufficient accuracy for a missile seeker-head basket. That is presented as a fact, without supporting evidence based upon radar physics / weapon seeker physics. Is this an actual physical fact or a limitation of current technology / sensor processing / etc? There's a pretty large body of open civil/academic/industry radar research that's not sensitive about this kind of thing. Basically the shorter the wavelength, the narrower the beam. The wider the aperture, the narrower the beam. Finding the direction of the peak return is therefore more or less a function of the beam width at the target, the signal to noise ratio coming off of the target, and terms involving how clever your signal processing is. Now, the size of that reflected signal coming from targets that try very very hard not to reflect a signal is the sensitive bit for the most part. That's what makes your question difficult, not so much the radar physics itself.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:03
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Sperglord posted:A Mach 3 non-afterburning engine with 1,000 nm and a stealthy airframe becomes a hugely appealing first strike weapon. Against a modern IADS, I'm not so sure. A monolithic airbreather at mach 3 is nothing to sneeze at, but it's also been within the bailiwick of SAMs for a long time. It's no mach 20 warhead hiding in a forest of penaids.
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Nov 28, 2016 03:26
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Murgos posted:I thought THAAD had hit exo-atmospheric targets? I thought the hard problem was considered to be endo-atmospheric intercepts. Basically they're all hard problems on top of hard problems. Kimematic reach is just the base layer to start thinking about other problems. Also as a general debbie downer, for those of you actually doing this professionally, be mindful of OPSEC here.
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Nov 29, 2016 20:10
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There was a a question here not too long ago about a kind of obscure minor topic where I was literally the one guy in government who was responsible for that particular thing (I'm not anymore), but of course I had to just let it go. I imagine it's much the same with a pretty huge number of people in this thread, except with more interesting subjects (both to curious Americans and FIS OSINT collectors, sadly).
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Dec 1, 2016 02:17
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Platystemon posted:I’m interested, specifically, in his likelihood to agree to launch ze missiles. The military promotion structure, borked as it is, is more or less specifically designed not to promote the kind of person who goes off the reservation, at all, ever. Much less the kind of person with the clinical derangement required to push the button in anything other than a "nukes inbound" scenario.
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Dec 3, 2016 00:52
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Dead Reckoning posted:Counterpoint: Thomas Sarsfield Power True, but for better and/or worse the promotion process today is very, very different in process, philosophy, and results than it was in the 50s.
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Dec 3, 2016 02:18
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Effective-Disorder posted:What happens if POTUS and SecDef are out? Is it just two guys on the TACAMO, or whatever battle staff is on Nightwatch? I haven't watched By Dawn's Early Light in a while, so I'm not up on what constitutes authority in that scenario. Re earlier chat, I'm pretty sure the answer to this is printed on pages with an orange coversheet.
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Dec 3, 2016 04:58
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Effective-Disorder posted:Otherwise, just tell me when to start digging a hole in the ground. AIRPOWER/Cold War Thread: Alas, Babylon
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Dec 3, 2016 05:46
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean more specifically, like, what if a KGB agent was leaking US OPSEC stuff. So someone in this thread asks a question that can't be answered except in at best the vaguest way, but Yuri is like "Yeah it's like this, that, that, and like it's over there like so." Generally speaking the whole point of protecting U.S. information is to hide it from the Russians (or whoever), so if the Russians (or whoever) reveal that our hiding was unsuccessful it's basically a win for us. It would give our CI folks an opportunity to discover their sources and methods, and a chance to mitigate the loss. Movies make it seem like stamping something TOP SECRET is just a way to hide the nefarious activities of the military and three-letter agencies from the good townsfolk of Hawkins Indiana, but in fact in virtually no case is classified (or sensitive unclassified) information sensitive for reasons other than exploitation by foreign militaries and/or nonstate violent actors. If you know that we just found OBL and are about to whack him, no problem in theory. If OBL finds out, not so great.
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Dec 3, 2016 20:26
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Having been on the inside, I can tell you with certainty what will actually happen within the trenches of the U.S. civil service in response to this (or any) election - nothing whatsoever. The civil service has roughly the inertia of a tectonic plate.
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Dec 5, 2016 04:43
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Arglebargle III posted:Indeed, the legislature and executive have no power over the civil service. Oh wait oops that's the opposite of reality. State government is not the federal civil service. If there's a measurable change in the federal employee attrition rate, it would be a first. It's not as if nobody has tried; Bush 43 tried a relatively modest civil service reform with congressional support, and it totally failed.
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Dec 5, 2016 13:19
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