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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 4:18 pm
by Nemo
The F-35 is an abomination that should have died more than 10 years ago. That aside.

The best fix (that will never happen) is the Air Force needs to go away as a discrete armed service. It was created at a time when the talking heads thought atomic war was the future, and the bomber fleet would make armies and navies obsolete. Fold it back into the Army Air Corps and refocus it on ground support, maybe then we can get enough AC-130s and A-10s (or their equivalent replacements) to do the job.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:06 pm
by Jayngfet
The problem is designing a good replacement in this political climate. While the current administration is bellyaching over costs they sure as hell won't fund another design.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 8:06 pm
by Nemo
Well, the first question is going to be, "Why do we need a new plane?". Why spend money letting the DoD build another boondoggle?


Every admin should belly ache over costs. That's how Truman came to be President, after all. Belly aching over costs in the middle of a world war.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2017 9:09 pm
by discord
the plane the US military needs is a cold hard look at the F-16 and see how can we make this better while retaining ease of use and maintenance, then mass produce the shit out of it again, so the military actually can have enough flipping planes to be all the places it needs to be at the same time.

best plane ever? no, silver bullet? not even close but cheap(which is a silly term when applied to jet fighters, but still true) enough to get ENOUGH of the damned things.
or they could simply buy the JAS-39 Griffin from sweden, it pretty much fits the bill, with the possible exception of it being a bit short legged.

for the A-10 replacement, i would actually look at a relatively lightweight turboprop, rough field usage, ease of maintenance, multipurpose(to get rid of some specialization) and keep the flipping price down would be the points to put effort into.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 4:16 am
by icekatze
hi hi

When you're in the middle of a real war, you actually need to be concerned about opportunity costs of things, if you want to win. When you're not in the middle of a real war, you can focus on the task of making you and your business partners as rich as possible instead.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 8:00 am
by dex drako
lets be honest here people any real war would mean the end of humanity as even just 5 nukes could send the world into a "nuclear Autumn" and likely cause the end of humanity. the only wars left are the "play wars" we fight in third world countries that can't really fight back so defense contractors can milk their sponsor country for ever dime they can.

no one cares how bad the f 35 is because it was never meant to really fight a war.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 9:01 am
by Nemo
I wouldnt put much faith into the nuclear winter type scenarios. They were based on flawed computer models that never properly accounted for precipitation, among other things, and were produced by people who had a vested interest in an outcome. The people who put it together wanted to scare the world into pressuring the leadership away from nuclear war. 5 Separate nukes would start 5 separate large wild fires and spread some localized heavy metals and radiation. Nasty if you live there but not world ending. Hell, we can't even point to changes in climate records from Mt Pinatubo or Mt St Helens, and by rights there should be according to the models. Generally, the soot doesn't behave in the models as it does in reality. Beware the scientific and technological elite holding public policy captive. It was Eisenhower's next line after warning about the industrial-military complex.

When you're in the middle of a real war, you actually need to be concerned about opportunity costs of things, if you want to win. When you're not in the middle of a real war, you can focus on the task of making you and your business partners as rich as possible instead.
Mmm. Not the problem, I think. The problem is the speed of war. In the past you could let war come and mobilize afterwards in response. With today's weapons you can knock out the opponent's industrial potential within hours. As a result, you have to mobilize for war during peace while the conflict itself remains theoretical. So you dream up an imposing problem and the means to over come that. To do less would be dereliction. So they produce the "best" weapon systems, like Tigers or Panthers as opposed to Panzer 4's and Stugs. Wait! Those were made during the war! Yup, same mentality can strike in peace or war. Its not about lining the pockets of the business partners during peace, is the point.

People tend to narrow a problem's scope to make it manageable. In these problems, people narrow weapons of "war" into weapons of "engagement". Given the speed of warfare, one decisive stroke at the onset is enough to win - so win that first battle. But like discord said, we just dont have enough of these wonder weapons to station everywhere they need to be. Again, I want to point out that roughly the same total of money would be spent buying hundreds of cheaper weapons or a few dozen of the Congress approved F-35. Its not about the money (solely or mainly), its about the method. And right now, its madness.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 3:47 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Actually, we can point to climate changes from Mt. Pinatubo. We have a lot of good data on it. The year afterward saw a .5 to .7ºC cooling effect, and it also created a massive opening in the ozone layer around the event. We can also look a the rather famous "Year Without Summer," in 1816, caused in large part by the eruption of Mt. Tambora.

While there weren't any papers published on the topic of nuclear winter from the 80s to the mid 2000s, since people didn't think it was very likely to happen at the time, people are starting to take it seriously again. Recent papers with more up to date models still show a strong case for nuclear winter following a nuclear exchange. Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following regional nuclear conflict

It may be a good idea to beware the scientific and technological elite, if one is unable to understand the science. It can be hard to separate the legitimate from the quackery, and a healthy dose of skepticism is good for anyone. But at its heart, science does not require an appeal to authority to validate itself, it can stand on its own merits. People can ignore the science at their own risk.

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Also, I suspect that if General Dynamics spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on politicians and key army personnel so that we could build thousands of tanks that do nothing but collect dust in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a war, there would be accusations of war profiteering. Instead these kinds of things, that actually happen now, are considered politics as usual.

On the other side of the coin, you can look at the case of German flak artillery in WW2. The central authorities wanted lots and lots of flak, even though it was only marginally effective at shooting down allied bombers. They ignored the advice of their generals who realized that the opportunity cost of producing massive quantities of radio proximity fuses for flak shells was leading to a serious shortage of radio equipment on the eastern front.

When you're not in the middle of a war, you can take huge campaign contributions and say, "Well, we don't want to gamble on national security, do we? We'd be fools NOT to throw a bunch of money at this." And not see immediate drawbacks.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 7:54 pm
by Nemo
I suspect if GD built thousands of tanks that sat in a desert during a war, Congress would be calling in SecDef and JCS to question why they aren't at the front. Not GD.




Well lets check things in a bit more detail. Science is all about predicting the future, not explaining the past.

https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1992/19 ... 00800v.pdf
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Looking at Hansen's paper predicting the effects of the eruption they indicate a change in temperature of ~0.6 Celsius, a three sigma event which should happen only once in a thousand years.
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Oh dear, I seem to have cut off the years on the graph! Can someone help me, I seem to have misplaced my volcano? Where was it... point it out if you see it. (The two graphs feature a dissimilar X-axis, not my doing!) More seriously, according to Gistemp we saw a slight drop of about ~0.2 during the time frame in question, which matches up with numerous other temperature fluctuations and is within margins of error for instrumentation and variability.




https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/4/1217/ ... 7-2004.pdf

Looks at incoming wm² and albedo. Total energy has an observed affect at around 2 wm² in the outgoing shortwave band for a period after the eruption, which is also coupled to an El Nino event. Combined, they still dont overwhelm other observed variances in OSR, despite the fact that the observed effect reaches as high as 10 wm² at the target mid latitudes.
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Curiously, the paper also notes there are unexplained (ie not modeled) variances in observations during the mission. The short of it, unaccounted for changes in cloud cover in the tropics. Note this the mission extends well past just Pinatubo - just a nice oddity to bring up on a tangent.



I'm going to have to spend some time dissecting this latest paper on nuclear boogeymen, but on a skim reading they're hyping the damage as the "lowest temperatures in a 1,000 years"! Citation Mann et al., 1999. Heh. Every piece of their math could be right, but they're still going to hobble themselves by overstating their results attaching it to a manufactured outcome paper. Why? Because of the intent. The demanded mantra and Truth™. So initial impression is not favorable, but I'll try to set that to the side.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2017 10:53 pm
by icekatze
hi hi
The global mean OSR anomaly shows great variations reaching values of 4 Wm^-2, above or below the 14-year mean value. During the 1991–1992 period, a large increase in the reflected OSR flux is found, which can be attributed to Mount-Pinatubo eruption in 1991.
- Long-term global distribution of Earth's shortwave radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere, N. Hatzaianastassiou, et al.

Looking at both of the papers linked, they both indicate a noticed change, not the lack of a noticed change. The fact that Pinatubo happened during an El Nino event, and still produced a noticed cooling effect is noteworthy, because El Nino tends to create a contrary warming effect.

Also, it is my understanding that top of the atmosphere shortwave radiation data gathered from satellites, cannot by itself, provide an accurate measurement of surface budgets without the addition of cloud optical thickness inputs from separate sources.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2017 2:29 am
by discord
nuclear winter is extremely overhyped, why? dunno, but it is.
where do i get the balls to call something so commonly accepted bullshit? simple math, physics and history.

#1 energy, mount tambor(the volcanic eruption that caused the previously mentioned year without summer) chugged out a rough estimate for the 1815 event is ~1.4 x 10^20 joules of energy(hint, US+russian nuclear arsenal MIGHT equal that, but according to wikipedia on the subject the total throw weight of the two countries is around 9000 megatons, which is a bit short of 33000.)
<edit> might be wrong about the numbers, half asleep as i write this. </edit>

#2 dirt, that explosion happened underground throwing literaly square km of rock and ash into the atmosphere, modern nukes are airburst, to maximise destruction on the surface, incidentally this also minimises the particulate thrown into the air and following spread of irradiated matter...

which leads me to the conclusion nuclear war would probably give us a environmental hickup, might even 'skip' a summer at the most even if highly unlikely, but the decades long 'nuclear winter' is utter bullshit.
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on the subject of destruction of industry and infrastructure, the only thing around that could do it in 'hours' is a nuclear first strike, not enough bombs or delivery systems to do it with conventional bombs....not that it would be a fun ride even with conventional bombs, but not a industrial knockout in a few hours, or even weeks if the will to fight is there, but still i shall leave with the age old maxim "As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time" this perticular iteration of it comes from Donald Rumsfeld, and he might have been a douchebag but he's got a point there, probably a few he never thought of aswell.

interestingly enough as of 2016 there have been about equal numbers of F-35's and JAS 39 gripen(griffin) built, about 160 each. one of those projects cost 100 times the other, admittedly the unit cost is a bit closer at only 3x.(according to wiki) but the per hour costs brings it back up at about 10x difference, and if they spent the development cost of the f-35 on gripens they would have gotten about 30000 of'em.

yep, instead of mass producing the shit out of one model, which would be logical, they keep exploring more 'prototypes' and 'specialized models'.... morons, work horses wins wars not silver bullets.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2017 4:07 am
by dex drako
discord wrote:nuclear winter is extremely overhyped, why? dunno, but it is.
where do i get the balls to call something so commonly accepted bullshit? simple math, physics and history.
or the more logical answer you're an arm chair quarterback who's cherry picking facts while knowing or caring little about the whole picture. let me guess you also don't believe in climate change either.... plants love CO2 right....

the simple fact is even with out a nuclear winter the effect of even a small scale nuclear war would cause the collapse of the world economy. no country controls all infrastructure, knowledge or resources needed to maintain the world we live in today.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2017 4:36 pm
by discord
dex: climate change is a thing, it is happening, and it is man made.... how bad is it? that I am not so sure about but not good is a pretty safe assumption though, and yes plants love co2, since oxygen is basically an inedible byproduct for them, humans and most animals however do not like more than small traces of co2 at all, at around 5-6% humanity and most animals would just be dead, thankfully we are currently around 0.04% and things would be really bad if it ever got to 1%, it has risen by a dramatic 0.02 from the previous low some 20000 years ago(normal values flow between 0.02 and 0.03, so yes we are a whole 0.01 above normal), so my guess would be that this trend will go on for a while longer, we are working on it, will probably top out at 0.05-6 which will cause some rather noticeable changes in weather patterns(which is bad enough, it fucks over farming for one, and great big honking unpredictable storms can be a nuisance), but not much else.
the one thing that might happen and would be REALLY bad(at least for me) would be the gulf stream seizing up, that would turn scandinavia into siberia.... but probably not in my lifetime though.

and on 'nuclear war is not horribad' all I really said was that none of the major countries can destroy any others industry(as in capacity to wage war) inside a day without resorting to nuclear arms, and lots of them.
fallout is a thing, and bad enough even with airbursts, however destroyed infrastructure and the collapse of transportation(and social order) thereof will probably kill more people than the actual bombs though.

am I a armchair general/scientist? probably, but I do try to not be such a bad one.

but yes, nuclear winter is pretty much bullshit, the only major difference that could possibly make up for the difference in ejected particulates(which is what caused the cooling effect in the cases of volcanoes) would be some sort of ionization of the atmosphere which would act as a radiation shield....and that sounds pretty much like technobabble to me.

if you do not believe me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY visualizes it pretty well, and if that is true..... why are we not in the middle of a 'nuclear winter' right now? answer? neither enough particulates nor enough energy released.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2017 6:23 am
by Absalom
discord wrote:dex: climate change is a thing, it is happening, and it is man made.... how bad is it? that I am not so sure about but not good is a pretty safe assumption though, and yes plants love co2, since oxygen is basically an inedible byproduct for them,
Actually, plants use oxygen at night, which makes sense when you think about it. Read about it a few months ago.
discord wrote:the one thing that might happen and would be REALLY bad(at least for me) would be the gulf stream seizing up, that would turn scandinavia into siberia.... but probably not in my lifetime though.
Not likely, but never vote against it decisively: keep that passport updated.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:22 am
by Arioch
I'd like to congratulate Elon Musk and SpaceX and celebrate the successful test launch of the Falcon Heavy.


Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:52 am
by icekatze
hi hi

You can color me impressed. I'm generally relatively skeptical about SpaceX, but that is a very big achievement. I tip my cap to all the people who worked on making it work.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:30 am
by Mr Bojangles
Everyone and everything at my workplace just stopped so we could all watch the FH launch. Seriously impressive accomplishment; my jaw went slack at the simultaneous side booster landings.

Kudos to everyone at SpaceX. :D

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:44 am
by Username
It's a great day for Space !

They say it's gonna be playing music the whole time but I have't seen anywhere about a power source beyond the car battery. Makes me wonder if they have a couple solar cells rigged up or something.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:47 am
by Mr Bojangles
Username wrote:It's a great day for Space !

They say it's gonna be playing music the whole time but I have't seen anywhere about a power source beyond the car battery. Makes me wonder if they have a couple solar cells rigged up or something.
The whole way to Mars? I hadn't heard that, I only thought it was being powered by the booster stage's batteries.

Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2018 6:52 am
by Arioch
Musk said in the press conference that the battery would run out in about 16 hours. Not sure specifically what he was referring to, but they definitely didn't rig up solar panels or anything like that.