51–60 of 137 posts
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Ah I got there 1/93 so may have missed. I remember going to "fundies", getting called "pinger", etc. Good times.
Nobody can understand our fear of washing out and moving to the other side of the dorm to become a food handler and serving your former avionics classmates breakfast. This happened a lot while I was there.
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Go back, it's so worth it. I stood under those six massive turbojets and looked up in absolute awe. It's a miracle that they didn't cut it up for scrap and left a really fabulous museum piece when the project ended.
Because we're not the British or Canadians who felt they had to make their military R&D decisions irreversible by destroying all the evidence (e.g. TSR2, Avro Arrow, etc).
The good old days.
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Because we're not the British or Canadians who felt they had to make their military R&D decisions irreversible by destroying all the evidence (e.g. TSR2, Avro Arrow, etc).
In fact there is a TSR-2 at the Imperial War Museum Duxford.
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked o…
I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?
Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked o…
Which sounds good, but the B-52 planes used eight very old jet engines each that are complex to maintain.
Rolls Royce offered to replace these with four modern turbofan engines but were turned down.
They finally relented and there’s a new program that will run to the end of the 2030s(!) to replace the eight engines with… eight engines.
This doesn’t sound simple, or cheap.
I keep pointing out to people that if a real world war broke out, every country with a commercial wide body fleet will immediately convert them to bombers. Far cheaper, far simpler to maintain, and with much faster turnaround times / lower maintenance hours per flight hour.
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked o…
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked o…
"Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy." That's what worries me about a lot of the shiny, super high tech, super expensive weapons systems of the US. These are fine against an overmatched enemy when you can fly back to a safe place for doing the necessary maintenance. This may change when there is a war against a capable enemy that can strike closer to home. The US has always had the advantage that th…
One of the long standing problems with US defense procurement is that they build a batch of something, then cut off all orders and dismantle the production line in order to free up funds to develop a successor model. This is tremendously risky because it leaves a gap of many years when it's impossible to replace attrition losses. If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21.
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too. It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy. I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked o…
I don't know anything about B-52s, but I work on a project where we are essentially replacing a 40 year old weapon system with a new one. The new one should of course do the same things, preferably better, and do additional new things. The old system started out simple, but has since had most of its internals swapped both hardware and software wise a number of times. We have full access to all the documentation of the old system, but let's say there has been periods throughout these 40 years where this aspect hasn't exactly been top priority.
It doesn't come as a surprise to me that projects like JSF end up a complete clusterfuck. Everyone tends to underestimate the complexity of the system they operate/produce after a while because most of it is always there and just works.
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I agree with you, but the issue afaik is that B-52 was more flexible whereas the B-70 was basically single purpose and basically obsoleted by ICBMs. B-52s were able to pivot to new roles so have stayed around. I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". Who would have guessed..
> I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". That guy may have been me. I was pretty bummed, but quickly learned about its awesomeness (avionics-wise, anyway).
I had a really tough time resisting the urge to tell them the "cargo" came out the bottom.