221–228 of 228 posts
Northrop Grumman announced in September that they would unveil the B-21 at Palmdale this week [0]. The location was not a secret. 0. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/09/20/251965...
Twitter thread said the same thing, or am I missing something?
There's a few highly suspect details in the way the author got the 34-35 degree estimate. Maybe he was just really lucky and the errors cancelled out, but don't count on using his method to produce similar results. Polaris is about .8 degrees away from the celestial North pole, so using it alone can give a reading off by .8 degrees, and the orientation in the photo is actually nearing the worst case. The horizon does…
I'm sure you're correct, as the whole thing reads like "look how smart I am". 1. Extraneous details about satellites not being overhead at night -- as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites. 2. Mentions things like them not scrubbing the EXIF data was a "mistake". How could it be a mistake if this was public information? 3. Says at the end "(thi…
Not to pile on, but the government releases info by mistake all the time. Even simple things like doing a crappy job redacting court filings. It's just people doing this stuff, and people make mistakes all.the.time.
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Do they’re trying to scare Russian with an airplane that can only be taxied around? I wonder if it’s made out of proper material and not just some clay concept
Russia military is a pitiful shell of the former Soviet glory. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have effectively demilitarized them. They squandered their inheritance of Soviet equipment like an 18 year old in Vegas. Their nuclear force is a giant question mark. Their three legs of the nuclear triad are quite shaky. In the event of a MAD exchange; Their boomers won’t get a missile off due to the fast attacks that keep them…
And yet the war is ~8 months long and counting. "The other guy's military is trash." propaganda happens in every war, and on both sides, if you've studied even a few. We just cleared the sale of 116 Abrams tanks to Poland: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/12/07/us-state-dept-cl...
From the article:
>Polish defense officials have said the acquisition will enable the country’s military to counter Russia’s flagship T-14 Armata tank. The procurement will also allow Warsaw to replace its outdated Soviet-designed T-72 and PT-91 tanks with a new tracked vehicle platform.
The people on the ground conducting the war don't seem to think they've been "effectively demilitarized".
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This is objectively false though. We could take a deep dive into the relevance of the Serbian shoot down but it’s kind of irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, stealth technology means that an aircraft needs to be significantly closer to a radar for it to be detected compared to a normal aircraft. That also means it has to be closer still for a threat radar to develop a weapons quality track. Theres not really any k…
So in the next 10-20 years we wont have any significant advances in detection technology or methodologies? Even if, for arguments sake, the aircraft is at the moment leaps and bounds ahead of the nearest peer competitor military there is going to be limit to how effective a new coat of paint will be for the B-21 in 10 years time. To get your monies worth from this thing you'd want a lot greater effective service life…
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Exactly, whereas stars shown in the image are just data, you don't need the exif data to see them.
But the time the photo was taken was extracted from the exif which is what OP was referring to stripping
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Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?
No. There are no drones which can reliably penetrate a modern integrated air defense system and strike a hardened target with large bunker buster bombs. The B-21 is supposed to be able to operate as a drone (optionally manned) but in a conflict with a near-peer adversary which can degrade the satellite communications necessary for remote piloting there will need to be humans in the cockpit.
!!!
That's the point! There are a hell of a lot of "unhardened" targets and using a full scale aircraft as a drone is missing the point about cost. I mean, there's not just the news from Ukraine, but also this:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-...
...and it looks like a classic case of "disruptive technology" syndrome, where the incumbents dismiss the upstart as inadequate for their sophisticated customers - justifiably as far as it goes - until all of a sudden the tsunami arrives because the new tech has been iterating until it can address the high end.
I read the original book defining the phenomenon in my university library around the time it came out, and it's interesting how describing the problem manifestly hasn't created a solution:
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ICBMs still use a mix of stellar and inertial navigation. They can't rely on satellite navigation because in a major conflict those may be destroyed or jammed. Some modern ICBMs might also have some limited terminal guidance capacity but there's not much public information on that subject.
With SLBMs, GPS (and the predecessors to GPS e.g. NAVSAT) are/were used to determine where exactly they were being launched from. The ballistic missile submarine would determine its precise location before launch using these satellite geolocating systems and use that position to calculate the flight path which inertial guidance in the missile would follow. This was useful because inertial navigation in the submarines…
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Ahem, not to be that person… but I think you mean Admiral Kirk :) Either way, it’s a perfect reference.
You sir, are correct. Thank you for the correction! Please be that person. Btw, my wife and I were able to visit the Monterrey Bay aquarium for the first time this past November -- and I would just not shut up with the references. My wife loved them, but also was a bit over them by the end.