151–156 of 156 posts
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What happened to the girl? Did you marry her? That was a good, thoughtful gift.
It's one of those "it's complicated" things. She had a boyfriend at the time etc., then she moved cities and we lost touch. Shame - she was a really good friend too, and we used to talk about planes and Formula 1 racing for hours.
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The U-2 was developed in 18 months with COTS goods and requires a finesse to fly that I think would be tough to replicate with computers. And Russian SAMs can easily take out a U-2, so I'm not sure what the author is trying to say there, to be honest with you.
The U-2 is so difficult to fly that it requires external sensors to land. AKA another pilot racing down the runway in a chase car radioing instructions to the pilot in the plane. https://jalopnik.com/5537629/the-140-mph-chase-cars-of-the-u...
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> The Soviets had childish, despicable politics of their own going on, with important rocket engineers like Korolev being accused by his colleague Glushko of treason, sending Korolev to the gulag for Glushko's professional advantage.[1] It went both ways, Glushko consisered Korolev to be irresponsibly cavalier and autocratic with anything outside of [Korolev's] specialities, which included Glushko's (liquid-fueld roc…
We could debate the merits of either's designs, but Korolev was the first to (1) develop an ICBM (2) put a satellite in orbkt, and (3) impact and orbit a payload on the moon
One of the most amazing fact I'd learned was that invisibility to radars was not mostly due to the absorbing material but rather a specific geometry of the plane! The materials certainly enhanced it but it was still like 25% or so contribution. Even more amazing fact was that this possibility was first discussed in a Russian research paper but that was never followed through because it was too complex to compute such…
>because it was too complex to compute such shape and no one believed it would actually work I don't want to put down your enthusiasm, but this is not very exact info. Stealth design never makes the plane invisible, it just increases the detection distance or the power requirement of the radar. You get relatively long way by simply avoiding corner reflectors. There are rumors that Avro Vulcan used to disappear from f…
i highly recommend reading this guy's hunt for the wrecked A-12 (the CIA's early variant of the SR-71): http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...
He has a number of great pieces on his site. I'd also recommend "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans" http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...
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Probably because: - The U2 uses old parts that aren't wildly/cheaply available anymore. - The Global Hawk doesn't have a person in it. So they can send them into more dangerous situations without worrying. Which means they likely want a cheaper robot version. (Though, before RnD costs which skyrocketed, the price appeared to be only about 10mil cheaper.) - New sensor modules have a different footprint that the shell…
I'm struggling to find it now, but there's a saying attributed to some well known military figure (paraphrasing slightly): There are two stages to any defence procurement project - too soon to tell, and too late to stop. EDIT: Found it. A Ernest Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's First Law: "There are only two phases of a program. The first is 'It's too early to tell.' The second: 'It's too late to stop.'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/23/a...
Where it says he's been the most hated man in the Air Force for two decades. So, this guy was/has basically been telling us how things are since the late 60's. And we still haven't learned a thing / integrated this into our public common sense / knowledge. (Like how >90% of people know not to mess with the inside of electronics without experience, or how most people think the government/banks/big-oil/etc is corrupt. That's community knowledge.)