111–120 of 358 posts
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> even though all of the U.S. is one one side of it Guam would beg to differ. :)
We didn't have Guam in our list of territories as I don't think our customers had sales offices there or if they did they already knew who was going to serve it.
Kidding, people!
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Weren’t those big blocks on the starter cart Buicks?
They were initially Buicks, then Chevy later on [1] [1] https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Engines/starting-t...
You can see one of these up close - both the device, and the airplane! - at the Evergreen Aerospace Museum in McMinnville, OR. They also have on display another Blackbird payload labeled DEF-H. It’s a nondescript white box which you are allowed to look at, but not allowed to know what it does. XD
There are a lot of these on display it seems. The one we saw was on display was at the SAC museum outside of Omaha.
Quantum navigation systems could also determines position from quasi-stable astral signal sources FWIU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222625
Sunstone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)
Amplituhedra and cost of calculation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron
App: https://www.celestialprogramming.com/apps/celestialfix/sexta...
Talk (with very low audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kAqcZYmWjA&t=5s
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You can get close enough to touch (but you mustn’t touch) the SR71 at the Udvar-Hazy center of the Smithsonian!
You can also get close to an SR-71 at the Robins Air Force Base museum in Georgia, and if you touched it probably nobody would notice
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The International Date Line and the 180-degree line of longitude have bitten a _lot_ of folks who don't think to test at the boundaries.
We had a great example of this in a recent Geomob London talk: ask Google Maps to route from Wairiki, Fiji (-16.8048, 179.9893) to Welagi, Fiji (-16.7349, -179.9439), two villages on the coastal road of the same island and about 10km apart, but as you can see from the coordinates on opposite sides of the anti-meridian. You get "Sorry, we could not calculate driving directions from "Wairiki, Fiji" to "Welagi, Fiji" ht…
I company I coded for surveyed the entire Fiji region in 1997, drafting aircraft at 80m ground clearance in long lines across both sides of the 180 longitude line.
Every single bit of commercial US GIS software available at the time was garbage and failed to correctly compute line lengths that straddled the 180 longitude line, areas of rectangles that did the same, correctly polygon mask etc.
Fortuneately we had in house software (that had the same flaws, considering it originated from Sunnydale, California) and source code so this became Yet Another Patch I had to write in on the fly in the midst of everything else to move forward.
I wrote issue tickets on this to ArcView | ESRI (of the day), the open GIS groups of the day, and raised it with anybody on relevant IRC boards | early reddit who was talking about their aircraft control software, etc.
I haven't thought about that for 14 odd years now .. but I really thought the base libraries in Google Maps would correctly handle geodesic geometry by now.
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I got to see an SR-71 on display in New York several years ago. What really struck me was how BIG it was, seeing pictures of it doesn't really give you sense of scale, it was a massive plane.
There's an A-12, the CIA version of the Blackbird, on the deck of the USS Intrepid, in New York. It is indeed a very large aircraft! (I was also impressed by how many aircraft could fit on an aircraft carrier. There was also a Concorde!)
You can see one of these up close - both the device, and the airplane! - at the Evergreen Aerospace Museum in McMinnville, OR. They also have on display another Blackbird payload labeled DEF-H. It’s a nondescript white box which you are allowed to look at, but not allowed to know what it does. XD
Come on, everyone knows what the DEF-H was. It was the replacement for the DEF-F. (The real question being, of course, what is the DEF-G ?)
There aren’t many details but it’s some kind of electronic countermeasures/data collection system.
See the museum exhibit here:
[it] was so powerful that it could see the stars even in daylight
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html
> the flight plan was recorded on a punched tape that told the aircraft where to go, when to turn, and when to turn the sensors on and off. This is equally fascinating to me. Before each flight, someone had to generate a flight plan and punch it onto a physical tape, then load it into the plan. T No mid-flight "re-calculating route" if stuff goes wrong. One of the most interesting and under-appreciated aspects of ear…
America was not critical defeating Germany. The soviets did this one.
Without American equipment, the USSR would not have had the supplies to push the Germans west. Without a Russian front, the UK and the USA might not have been able to dislodge Germany from Europe, and the UK may have fallen [4]. Without Britain in allied hands, it would have been vastly more difficult for the USA to stage D-Day, and they certainly would not have been able to provide the fuel for their logistical needs via the Pluto pipeline [5].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_Conference_(1945)