191–200 of 358 posts
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
Anyone know if modern military aircraft have something similar? I imagine it would be even cheaper and easier to do these days given the processors and cameras we now have. Seems like a good backup to have.
Former military aerospace engineer here. In my opinion it would only be worth it on long range strategic bombers such as the B-52. Fighters don't have the legs to fly far enough that celestial navigation becomes worth the added complexity. For other air mobility platforms like the C-130 or C-17 in my experience they do not include these features, as GPS, INS, and regular old "ask ATC for a vector" are usually good en…
You are probably right that this went away sometime in the 1970s.
Damn, now I'm feeling old. I miss the stars.
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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…
It's not just analog tech: it's actual engineering. The hardware we have is amazing, most of our software royally sucks. But software done right is also most impressive.
I don't think they used enough rivets. https://theaviationgeekclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/S...
That’s basically the law in aviation — rivet everything. My college roommate was studying to be a pilot, and I swear half his first year he did nothing but rivet.
Why, was he studying to build his own planes from scratch too?
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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!)
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Your software was written in the Buffyverse?
Fair point - the original core version from the mid 80s(?) was written by TerraSense Inc. of Sunnyvale, California. In the above I was recollecting a code header from ~ 26 years ago, I'm Australian and got a single letter wrong in a district name of country I don't live in. You okay with that or are you just here to nitpick?
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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…
And how many potential users does this affect? Enough for Google to spend 10 seconds worrying about it?
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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!)
Don't forget the Space Shuttle Enterprise complete with its own separate pavilion; aircraft carriers are indeed ginormous, and that's just an ancient WWII model: https://www.intrepidmuseum.org/Space_Shuttle_Pavilion.aspx
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America was not critical defeating Germany. The soviets did this one.
Get over yourself, they did it together. The allieds invaded France. Russia would've been made a vassal state of Germany if it wasn't for the US.
And Italy. After fighting in North Africa, which tied up German resources and scrubs like, oh, one Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
