31–40 of 219 posts
Never occurred to me that torpedoes can be battery powered. Any idea what kind of cells they have? I got confused by the dual units here: > 65cm torpedoes have enough fuel to travel in excess of 100 kilometers at 50 knots for just over an hour. Turns out 1 knot/hr is nearly 2km/h so that checks out. Weird nautical units.
Probably some form of lithium primary cell as they have high energy densities and good shelf life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why there's a guy in the plane at all at this point. Doesn't it severely limit the maneuverability of the aircraft to have a liquid-fueled brain piloting it around rather than some remotely controlled semi-autonomous solid-state electronics?
You are thinking from a technical perspective. You will always need a guy in the cockpit that can refuse an order. Not the same thing if it's a room of drone pilots, a drone pilot will just get fired and replaced on the spot. Imagine being given an order to kill a terrorist, but you notice the place he is at is actually a wedding. A fighter pilot has final authority on the strike, he can make decisions about collater…
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Wow, I read your comment just as the movie top gun started on my TV. I really wonder what air-to-air unmanned dog fight would look like. Are drone swarms a thing yet? a sky filled with drones would be terrifying. I would hope modern jets deploy drone like missiles manned by ground crew for dogfights,but if I learned anything about F22 and F35, they spend trillions to basically let middle parties steal the money and t…
The weapons and tactics you describe might be possible in a few years but today they're science fiction.
“A torpedo cannot be ‘command-detonated’ as seen in the movie Hunt for Red October.” Why is this so? The wire controls seem sufficient.
Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types. So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun! So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always wondered why there's a guy in the plane at all at this point. Doesn't it severely limit the maneuverability of the aircraft to have a liquid-fueled brain piloting it around rather than some remotely controlled semi-autonomous solid-state electronics?
You are thinking from a technical perspective. You will always need a guy in the cockpit that can refuse an order. Not the same thing if it's a room of drone pilots, a drone pilot will just get fired and replaced on the spot. Imagine being given an order to kill a terrorist, but you notice the place he is at is actually a wedding. A fighter pilot has final authority on the strike, he can make decisions about collater…
If you compare say the Battle of River Plate (1939) vs. say the North Atlantic convoy run or the siege of malta (1942), there's a dramatic difference in how war was conducted and the types of weapon systems that were most effective. River Plate was almost gentlemanly: while commerce-raiding, the Graf Spee would first hail the merchantmen she was taking prisoner, identify them as belligerents, give them the opportunity to surrender, and then take crews on board before sinking them. When she was engaged and damaged, the ship took refuge in Montevideo, released the prisoners, and then there was elaborate diplomatic maneuvering to avoid violating Uruguayan neutrality. The ship was scuttled without further loss of life - other than Captain Langsdorff, who committed suicide. Several of his British adversaries attended the funeral.
By 1942, nobody cared about any of that. The most effective weapons were submarines and aircraft, and they shot to kill on sight.
We're at peace right now, despite a state of perpetual war that mostly exists for propaganda and business purposes. If it ever came to an existential conflict, human judgment would likely become a liability. Humans generally don't want to kill; in a state of total warfare that hesitation could be lethal.
Never occurred to me that torpedoes can be battery powered. Any idea what kind of cells they have? I got confused by the dual units here: > 65cm torpedoes have enough fuel to travel in excess of 100 kilometers at 50 knots for just over an hour. Turns out 1 knot/hr is nearly 2km/h so that checks out. Weird nautical units.
Has any ship been torpedoed by a submarine since the Admiral Belgrano in 1982?
That was after 69 rounds from a 127 mm deck gun on the USS David R. Ray couldn't sink it.
But against subs I'm surprised there aren't plans for a drone-net that surrounds a fleet or high value ship that can detect incoming underwater threats via some mesh networking.
Never occurred to me that torpedoes can be battery powered. Any idea what kind of cells they have? I got confused by the dual units here: > 65cm torpedoes have enough fuel to travel in excess of 100 kilometers at 50 knots for just over an hour. Turns out 1 knot/hr is nearly 2km/h so that checks out. Weird nautical units.
This is also why you can rough 1knot:2km; you're dividing those 10,000,000 old-world-meters by 5400 (90°*60').