41–50 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.
> Actual underwater combat occurs silently with very little reaction time to fend off an impending attack.
Does it occur? Do we have any examples of "actual underwater combat" occurring? I don't believe we have any real life examples of nations withs submarine capabilities in combat. War games probably don't count...
“A torpedo cannot be ‘command-detonated’ as seen in the movie Hunt for Red October.” Why is this so? The wire controls seem sufficient.
Has any ship been torpedoed by a submarine since the Admiral Belgrano in 1982?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
6th-Gen fighter concepts include drone "wingmen" under partial control of fighter pilots in their own fighters. e.g. Japan's I3 Fighter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_fighter ed.: and yes, the F-22 and F-35 are 5th generation and decade-old tech. There is unfortunately a lot of lead time on fighter development. I think the F-15 was relatively speedy at 9 years from selection to roll-out (1967 - 76).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo
Or how in the movies they don't run in circles and sink the submarine that launched them ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_18_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tang_(SS-306)
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…
We've used beyond line of sight weapon systems on massive scale for at least 40 years, and weapons like the Tomahawk and JSOW have taken things completely out of the realm where such an argument can be taken seriously.
The decisions you talk about are probably valid doing close air support in something like a helicopter where the aircraft actually operates at an altitude where the pilot can actually distinguish targets on the ground.
There's a whole vast world of aviation delivered ordnance that has nothing to do with that world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well. The Vietnamese pilots were using Soviet tactics, mainly Ground Control vectors. Most Vietnamese pilots were rookies, but they did have some aces who would dogfight, like Colonel Toon, who was shot down by Randy Cunningham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham But largely the tactics were to surprise the Americans with first MiG-17's, then have a MiG-21 at high speed do an ambush pass from the clouds th…
He told me he didn’t have a lot of confidence in the Sparrow. They eventually got some aircraft with guns but never used them; despite Top Gun school something like 90% Of his flights were ground attack missions.
The Sparrow had its own challenges from what I've read. Specifically issues with the acquisition radar being able to track a fast moving target and the missiles ability to receive the reflected signal and apply the right amount of correction. Got to remember that the time when these missiles were being developed it was to target slow moving bombers - not tight turning bandits.