Posted on 10/20/2019 10:52:08 AM PDT by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
Fairchild rationalized that since the guy in the back wasn't flying the aircraft, the titanium tub wouldn't have to be enlarged to protect him. Some people in the West German contingent thought that was BS. Probably the back-seaters.
Big Guy needs a big cockpit, and the A10 fit perfectly.
Lucky he had skills, fighter pilot skills, that pointed him to the Hog.
Didn’t know him personally but did know pilots that knew him. All said he was a stand up guy. He was offered by the Air Force to go to Cowboys once graduated, but he said “I have an obligation to pay back, first.”
This thread is made for a Navy man.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3787816/posts
Grin.
Good story.
That would also be anyone who had anything to do with the A-10’s spiritual progenitor, the IL-2 Shturmovik. Early two seat IL-2s had the same idea - armor for pilot, none for backseater. Let’s just say this turned out to be a horrible idea and that nobody who saw the results was at all inclined to try that again. And in the 70s, there were still people in the West German government who had fought on the Eastern Front of the ETO who had seen the results of that idea first hand. Neither the Russians nor Germans were interested in repeating that.
But yes, titanium is a fungible material these days, if a bit expensive - but most of the expense these days is due to how hard the stuff is to work and form and not rarity of availability. I mean, they even make gearshift knobs and, er, ‘adult toys’ from the stuff now.
Because the US is attempting a salvage for a diplomatic document on the Empress of Ireland wreck in the St. Lawrence seaway, a state of tension exists between the Canadian and US governments. A Canadian destroyer is close to the salvage ship when a fog comes in. At the same time, another vessel is observed on radar approaching, ignoring calls from the Canadian destroyer and eventually coming to a stop between the salvage vessel and the destroyer.
By this time, the Captain of the destroyer is extemely angry, demanding over the radio that the unknown vessel identify itself and depart the area. Finally, he transmits, "To the ship off my port stern: this is the HMCS destroyer, HURON. If you do not identify yourself immediately, we shall open fire and blow you out of the water."
The book continues:
"Perhaps five seconds passed, and then a voice rasped out of the bridge speaker in a pronounced Texas drawl:
"This is the US guided-missile cruiser PHOENIX. Draw when you're ready, pardner ..."."
Open die forging has matured as well - they’re forging titanium bridge parts with that technique as well these days - those parts dwarf the entire A-10, let alone the armor bathtub.
And terrifying.
Infra-red targeting means you can’t hide anywhere.
Nothing is invisible to it.
Except for something hiding behind window glass. Most IR cannot penetrate or see glass.
:)I’m glad they could save it.I had a really good picture but it was getty.
A lot of good points.
Just one note: We don’t show all of our cards in these exercises. The other sides go all out because a win vs. the US is a big pride point. It’s ego. But we keep a lot back.
There are too many people here that are like the Germans towards the end of WW2 - believing that their armed forces haven’t been gutted, that there’s some wonder weapon that will overcome their deficits and win the conflict. Just look at all the people who claimed and still claim that the US Navy hitting two merchant vessels in the Pacific were the victims of some hacking or some plot when it really was incompetence.
People really can’t believe just how badly our military has been gutted, how much we sat on our laurels - and how much potential enemies have caught up or even surpassed us. Look at all the time and money we dumped into the nearly useless LCS, then look at how hastily our Navy is now having to buy in a frigate design from other nations to fix the mistake.
In many of these exercises, we’re not holding anything back. It’s painfully clear to those who are not blind that we have some ugly deficits and that we’ve relied on some of our systems far too much. Syria has finally driven home that the Russian and Israeli APS for tanks actually work and that Russian ATGMs really are every bit as destructive against NATO front line composite armor as claimed, forcing the Army to hastily order Israeli APS to retrofit to our Abrams. Multiple friendly exercises against domestic NATO systems and friendly high-grade export Russian aircraft have shown really bad gaps in our capability once we lose AWACS coverage. Our enemies have not been idle in the 40 years since AWACS was conceived and the 30 years since it was deployed.
Once we lose AWACS, our aircraft are at a disadvantage to an enemy supported by a ground radar network, and/or with aircraft carrying the Infrared Search and Track systems that we neglected until recently. The MiG-29 and SU-27 (and subsequent developments) have had IRST systems installed since the 70s, with continuous developments since. The latest versions of the SU-27, for example, can see a US fighter at 80-100km, well enough to get an IR missile lock and fire with no warning. Our F-22 has NO IRST system and it was only hastily added to the F-35 before finalization. NONE of our USAF F-15s or F-16s have it (though the ones made for foreign countries do, we have until recent exercises decided we didn’t need it), and the integration into the F-35 has been problematic at best. Our off-bore missile capability is limited compared to the current Russian and Chinese capability, as we were late to the party there too. We assumed that nobody would be able to reach the AWACS aircraft - and the Russians designed, built, tested and demonstrated AWACS killer missiles.
The vulnerability of US aircraft once AWACS is removed is not a matter of “hiding our cards” - our aircraft visibly do not have the capabilities of other nations, and our exercises against them on their home turf have been tending to show this more and more of late.
Thanks to Obama, Bush 2 and Clinton, plus several feckless Congresses, we are more than a decade behind in many critical technical areas. This is something clearly demonstrable in most cases, and to believe we have some super wonder weapon that will save us in event of a real war and that we don’t need to scramble to catch up and pass potential adversaries is to be an idiot. Worse, it remove support from the few crash development programs to address the gap.
lol
So if I had a craft made of some of this shape shifting metal foam thats been developed and I covered it in a layer of glass, not plates but something like little mushrooms embedded at differing heights, then I could have an aircraft that converts to a sub that is invisible to IR?
Hmmm.....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.