Are you sure about those being vls ticos in red storm? I seem to recall reading his discription of the twin swingarm launcher pulling and slewing over and over again... flight two ticos were late 80s, weren’t they?

That’s one thing that always bothered me about Tom Clancy’s Red October chapter, Dance of the Vampires. There was no allowance for electronic warfare. The Foch, the Nimitz, and the lead Tico were capable of a wall of EM that should have absolutely roasted the terminal guidance radar of the inbound ASMs. The Tico even…

My numbers were specific to corral sea and midway. All nimitz boats should have a pair of octuple box launchers now carrying up to 32 essms per launcher as well as 4 ciws stations with 16 cell RAM launchers. They also have some exceptionally strong jamming capabilities both in the EM and IR bands. With the usual…

I will say this, if you don’t want to get shot, stay away from the drug trade and the gangs that run with it. Following that one rule in life will reduce your chances of high velocity lead poisoning by over 66%. Your neighbor with the gun hoard is less dangerous to you than driving back and forth to work, walking down…

Please don’t take my reply personally, there is very poor discussion threading in kinja and I intended the reply to be for the whole thread, not just you. I have lots of respect for your field which is still not an exact science.

Cooperation has improved greatly, as has information sharing for investigative purposes. That being said, the complete story on each incident is still considered priviledged information to protect intelligence and methodology sources. Its a very complex dance that the agencies have to do to protect individual…

After the refit, Midway had just a pair of ciws and a pair of 8cell sea sparrow ABLs. A realistic capability of handling three leakers a minute for about 5 minutes.

Big guns are fun and all, but large caliber guns for air defense didn’t really survive the jet and high speed cruise missile age. There are navies that still attempt to use mid caliber autocannon under computer control, but they are subject to target saturation.

Information about anti terrorist operations is quite compartmentalized. There is a lot that goes on with over a dozen different agencies having an active and direct role in stopping it all. Is there waste? You betcha. It is, however, effective.

Supercells like the ones that were on the prowl the other night are NOT static fixtures. They are very much living, breathing animals that are constantly changing and evolving. The flight aware track covers quite a bit of time, but the weather overlay is a point in time snapshot. His (or her) original flight path…

Having a job that puts me in the front lines of the US’s domestic anti-terrorism program, I can tell you that the threat is absolutely real, is pervasive, is growing in intensity, creativity, and lethality every year, and is more than you could ever realize. I’ve seen some truly disturbing things that we’ve thwarted,…

We’ve improved hot section casting techniques and the quality of the alloys used there-in quite a bit since the engines on the sr-71 & the xb-70 were designed and constructed. We can support greater high pressure turbine pressures and temperatures, markedly higher. We have better computer fluid dynamics modeling…

Are the soldiers in a recruiting station patroling the streets? I was under the impression that they spent much of their time pushing a desk and kying to kids about posting choice and specialist rating availability.

Or, I don’t know, use bullet proof glass on the public side windows like most bank drive up windows are and allow the people inside that are professional soldiers to actually carry their firearms?

From the reading that i’ve done on the subject, it’s possible to tune an airframe shape to direct a majority of the initial sound energy perpendicular to a single axis. So, with that in mind, the proposed flight profile makes sense. Also, as for the “trailing wave” that follows the plane, assuming that they are…

I didn’t say that it wasn’t well articulated, just that down here, in the great state of Louisiana, where we have the finest politicians that money can buy, we wouldn’t dare let them manage such a diverse pot of money lest they squander it all. As for aging infrastructure, you’re preaching to the choir. Here in the…

Those milspec vehicles likely came from the DOD at pennies on the dollar originally.

This is for the entire thread...

Hmm, you learn something new every day. Dad never mentioned that, granted, he spent most of his time wrenching on the engines and less of his time carrying around a big metal target to help the electronics guys do calibration work. He did tell me that they had cooling issues though, and that after running the set for…

That was more a function of the number of tubes required to make it work, multiplied by the average failure rate for tubes in that era, especially in poorly ventilated, high vibration environments; not a specific design limitation.