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Author Topic: Planes!  (Read 302401 times)

mirth

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Reply #480 on: April 28, 2019, 12:51:54 PM
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Rare siting of a US Air Force U2 Reconnaissance Aircraft in Iraq, 2018



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mirth

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Reply #481 on: April 29, 2019, 10:29:02 AM

Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


mirth

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Reply #482 on: April 29, 2019, 10:45:02 AM
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Three F-14A Tomcat aircraft as seen from the front seat of another F-14.



Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


mirth

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Reply #483 on: April 29, 2019, 12:36:07 PM

Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


bayonetbrant

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Reply #484 on: April 29, 2019, 01:34:57 PM
I think there's a topical cream available for a rash like that, isn't there?  We should check with Windi; he's probably had to use it before.

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mirth

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Reply #485 on: May 01, 2019, 02:31:23 PM

Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


mirth

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Reply #486 on: May 02, 2019, 10:09:56 AM
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Etendard IV and French aircraft carrier R99 Foch



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BanzaiCat

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Reply #487 on: May 02, 2019, 12:36:02 PM
For some reason, the part of Red Storm Rising where the Foch gets nailed by Soviet anti-ship missiles stands out to me, and the part Clancy wrote about the surviving French fighters going to afterburner, not giving a damn about fuel, to get revenge on the Backfires that did it.

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mirth

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Reply #488 on: May 02, 2019, 12:41:44 PM
For some reason, the part of Red Storm Rising where the Foch gets nailed by Soviet anti-ship missiles stands out to me, and the part Clancy wrote about the surviving French fighters going to afterburner, not giving a damn about fuel, to get revenge on the Backfires that did it.

Yeah, that's a great section. I also like how he mentions turning over the captured Sov sub crew over to the French intel guys who were in a "foul mood" after losing Foch.

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mirth

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Reply #489 on: May 03, 2019, 02:12:28 PM

Being able to Google shit better than your clients is a legit career skill.


BanzaiCat

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Reply #490 on: May 03, 2019, 02:16:47 PM
"pew pew pew" is real!

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trailrunner

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Reply #491 on: May 03, 2019, 04:30:38 PM
Getting enough energy on target isn’t always the hard part of the challenge.  Rather, integrating a system that can detect, classify or ID (depending on ROEs), and track - and packaging the power, beam control,  and thermal management system into a small, operational, turn-key system - are the hard challenges.  Each of the things I listed are still challenging, but everyone focuses (heh) on power on target.  The Navy and Army have a reasonable chance of fielding an operational system in the next decade, but IMO the AF has a long way to go. I also get the impression that the AF is investing the least in high energy lasers, but I haven’t seen their budget numbers so I might be wrong.  When I worked JSF in the 90s and 00s, they touted putting a laser on the plane but I knew that wasn’t happening for a long time.

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Staggerwing

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Reply #492 on: May 03, 2019, 07:14:37 PM
As far as the Air Force's MIC pals go, wouldn't successful airborne laser based systems seriously disrupt their very lucrative industry in developing&delivering the current and future crop of AtA and AtG smart weapons?

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trailrunner

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Reply #493 on: May 03, 2019, 08:58:47 PM
As far as the Air Force's MIC pals go, wouldn't successful airborne laser based systems seriously disrupt their very lucrative industry in developing&delivering the current and future crop of AtA and AtG smart weapons?

I don't know what "MIC" is.

A laser is not going to replace a-g weapons for a long time.  The energetics aren't close.  For a-a?  I assume in this case we're talking about fighter vs fighter, and not as a close-in defensive weapon against in inbound missile (which was what was tested in the SHIELD program).  Maybe, but now we're talking about longer propagation ranges.  That brings in another set of complications.  For a rough comparison, I'd say an ABL engaging a Scud is roughly (roughly) the same as engaging an aircraft in terms of range and target vulnerability.  ABL was housed in a 747, and the front half was beam control and fire control.  The back half of the 747 was a MW class laser (at least it was supposed to be - I don't know what power they eventually got).  Fiber lasers are currently in the 10s of kW now, so we're talking about scaling up two orders of magnitude.  I have no idea how much a MW fiber laser (including energy storage) would weigh compared to the COIL laser in ABL, but that would be a very interesting calculation.  And hopefully this illustrates that an a-a weapon isn't going to fit on a fighter.  HEL TVD's goal is 100-150 kW on an FMTV.

As far as disrupting the industry -- the companies building bombs and missiles are also for the most part the prime contractors for lasers.

Sorry to be a downer.  I first started working on high-energy lasers when I got out of grad school in 1987.  Reagan was still president, and I was working on the tail end of SDI.  Lasers were just around the corner then.   :)  Interestingly, for fun (?), I took a lunchtime engineering class offered by my company in an emerging field that was also just around the corner: hypersonics. 

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Staggerwing

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Reply #494 on: May 04, 2019, 12:03:19 AM
MIC= Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.

Thanks for the breakdown. I'd assumed that the laser tech firms were in rivalry with those that made smart munitions.



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