141–150 of 358 posts
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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.
You can get close enough to touch (but you mustn’t touch) the SR71 at the Udvar-Hazy center of the Smithsonian!
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Even more impressive seeing it sweat fuel onto the apron in the afternoon sun for a few hours then engine ignition with Chevy V8 start cart, takeoff followed by low level transonic flyby. Fairford IAT 1989.
What kinda specialised monster engines is that plane running, holy hell.
At least, that's what I remember.
I'm going to replay this from memory without googling it, just to keep the late 20th century air of some people swapping unverifiable facts in a pub: There was an old friend of my mother's, now deceased, who was a retired engineer. He claimed to be the guy who invented the 2-part tuna can, and was known for handing out end chunks of titanium castings left over from some business he ran. At any rate, he had a couple o…
My father worked on the guidance system for the Trident nuclear missile at Singer-Kearfott for many years and this is mostly accurate. There was a lot of geometry involved. They used to test launch the missiles back during the cold war from submarines off of California. The missile would cross the continental US and land in the water off Florida. The Soviets would invariably send "fishing" boats to measure the tests…
I did a toy implementation of a star camera: https://nickp.svbtle.com/star-cameras
> 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…
The Japanese war plan was strategically inept from the outset - hit the US really hard, then sue for peace from a position of strength. But even if they got the carriers at Pearl Harbor, it was only a matter of time before US industrial output buried them and they failed to account for an enemy committed to total war. The turning point happened at Midway but the specific time and place don't really matter - it was inevitable. For Japan to win the war they would have had to walk an improbable golden path from victory to decisive victory while suffering no irreplaceable losses.
By the way, Germany displayed similar strategic ineptitude. Even if Germany won the Battle of Britain, they would not have been able to supply any invasion force they managed to land on Britain. They had no surface fleet, and they were staring down the largest navy in the world! All the Royal Navy needs to do is contest the Channel for a critical week or two and you've just lost your entire invasion force. As it happens they lost the BoB. Unable to finish the war against a globe-spanning empire, they proceeded to send their entire army into the USSR...
...and while US lend-lease certainly helped, the Soviet counteroffensive at the end of 1941 already inflicted such damage on the Wehrmacht that they started suffering shortages of men and equipment. The unsuccessful German offensive in 1942, Case Blue, was more limited in scope than Barbarossa because of these shortages - attacking in the southern USSR rather than the entire front as in 1941. Case Blue started the same month as the Battle of Midway - the outcome of the two could hardly be linked. With or without lend-lease, by end of '42 they are knee-deep in Russia with no prospect of further advance, while Britain blockades them on the other side.
Interesting that it’s not confirmed if the SR-71 flew in the Southern Hemisphere. Would be a very bold design if it didn’t and the system wasn’t designed for it.
[1] https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/NAS-14...
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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…
It astounds me that this is still a problem in 2023. 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,…
I'm going to replay this from memory without googling it, just to keep the late 20th century air of some people swapping unverifiable facts in a pub: There was an old friend of my mother's, now deceased, who was a retired engineer. He claimed to be the guy who invented the 2-part tuna can, and was known for handing out end chunks of titanium castings left over from some business he ran. At any rate, he had a couple o…