AdmiralTheisman

Also, since it is now established that they Rebels have bombers, does that mean they have been conducting bombing raids on First Order cities?  I want to see the Mon Calamari version of Curtis LeMay.

I saw it last night. My biggest complaint is that it needed a re-edit. Many of the scenes were quite strong, and there were a lot of complex and compelling characters, but the editing made it kind of plod along at a really slow pace that felt boring at times.
 
The beginning was atrocious, and made it hard to like the whole movie.
 
Many of the tactics and weapons didn't make sense, although that has never really been a strong point of Star Wars in general (trench run in space lol).
 
Overall, it wasn't the disaster many fans act like it was. I really, really liked a lot of the movie. But it's dragged down by pacing that made it difficult for me to get invested in the action.

https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/route-solaire-normande-electricite-51088/
 
>French ecological ministry says the Normand 1km solar roadway would produce 17,963 kW per day
>Immediately forced to backtrack and then it becomes 767 kW per day
>Actual production numbers come in and it is only 409 kW per day for 2017
>Efficiency is horrible and it would be better in the South but its vulnerable to heat and so it would literally melt
>It cost 5 million euros to build and it'll produce 2.2 million kWh throughout its expected service live of 15 years, so 2.27 euro per kWh while French electricy costs are .19 euro per kWh.
>But it gets even better, it might only last 7 years, amazingly there is "unexpected" stress and wear on the joints of solar panels on a highway
 
Don't worry, solar roadways will be working any day now!

https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/route-solaire-normande-electricite-51088/
 
>French ecological ministry says the Normand 1km solar roadway would produce 17,963 kW per day
>Immediately forced to backtrack and then it becomes 767 kW per day
>Actual production numbers come in and it is only 409 kW per day for 2017
>Efficiency is horrible and it would be better in the South but its vulnerable to heat and so it would literally melt
>It cost 5 million euros to build and it'll produce 2.2 million kWh throughout its expected service live of 15 years, so 2.27 euro per kWh while French electricy costs are .19 euro per kWh.
>But it gets even better, it might only last 7 years, amazingly there is "unexpected" stress and wear on the joints of solar panels on a highway
 
Don't worry, solar roadways will be working any day now!

Hello all,
 
Gripen here. Long-time reader, first-time poster here. I'm drinking Founder's Breakfast Stout and come bearing documents about railguns (is there a preferred method of posting/uploading documents?):
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bZeNQNqLwoOxyGORELf7H80qI0ENFJ5M
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B21XX6zvOt4fdHpxVGdvaFdpR28
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QUAUdaP_QGBmA9DTby6pWYINon8XZFn_
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B21XX6zvOt4fWHJRdHZIdGlRWDQ
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B21XX6zvOt4fQjVyYkpWaG1CRkk
 
And for the inductively minded:
 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B21XX6zvOt4fZDM3SHM3SWE5N2M
 
Did I do it right? 

SK-105 Kürassier
 
 

 

 

 

In other news, China does something that's almost satire
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-launches-worlds-first-all-electric-bulk-cargo-ship-to-supply-coal-to-power-plant
 

Can you even imagine if they ran Hillary again.

This is a good question, and I don't know the definitive answer offhand.  If I had to guess though, cooling was the biggest problem.  The HE-177 did not have a push-pull configuration, but it did have four engines with only two engine nacelles.  Each nacelle had two engines in tandem, driving a common driveshaft and propeller.
 
Cooling was evidently a problem, as the HE-177 had, according to Bill Gunston, probably the greatest propensity of any aircraft ever mass produced for catching on fire during level, cruising flight.
 
Another issue is maintenance.  WWII high-output piston engines were very maintenance intensive, and stuffing the engines together in common nacelles would have made service trickier.

For efficient propulsion you want to throw lots of mass of air backwards at lowish speed1 ([mass per second * speed it's pushed out the propeller] gives the thrust, whereas [mass per second * speed it's pushed out the propeller ^2] gives the energy used which should correlate to the fuel used). The rearward prop is pushing on air that's already moving backwards, so needs more power to get the same thrust as the front prop. Same reason high bypass turbofans are more efficient than turbojets.

There's not a whole lot of surviving documentation on WWI aircraft, but supposing the Fokker Dr.1 represents engine horsepower (at 110HP as one source cites) of WWI aviation engines in general, I'd guess the biggest issue would be cooling. Advances in engine design, engineering processes, and material technology allowed rated power on engines to soar by the time we reached WWII. While it's possible to dump more fuel and air at once into larger and more numerous cylinders, thermodynamics aren't on vacation and you need to dump the waste heat overboard if you don't want your pistons to take a forever break. The Wright 1820 which saw use on B17s developed something like 700 rated HP depending on your model. I'm not sure waste heat scales linearly to HP but it seems intuitive to say it should, and at any rate that's a lot more waste heat than you saw in WWI planes in which could probably get by on a single cooling intake for both engines without a huge increase in front profile. So the issue for me seems to be that you just need more space in your frontal profile for cooling, which is made easy by having a full pod for each engine. There are some ways to mitigate cylinder heat, like running rich of peak and having oil coolers, but you can only mess with your F/A ratio so much before your engine can't burn fuel anymore, and oil coolers still take up some of your front profile so you're still canceling out some of your lift to cool the oil.
 
Some other things could have had an impact as well; assuming your design doesn't have the crank running through the rear of the engine so that both propellers are powered by the same engine (which means you've lost the HP of an extra engine), you need more engines, and more cylinders means the engines need more cooling air. You could run ducting for ram air into the nacelle , but that means a bigger nacelle, which probably already got bigger when you stuffed the second engine into it. Push engines in push pull configurations already lose some efficiency from operating in the disturbed airstream from the puller props, and the efficiency you gained by losing an engine pod is rapidly being reclaimed by the inescapable tendency of this world to hate fun. I'm not sure where the lines cross and whether you've gained or lost efficiency, but I'd guess the complexity you add to the system makes it easier, if not more efficient to just make the thing with four nacelles after the previous downsides have already been added up.
 
A few other possibilities; a lot of WWII bombers were conventional geared and their props already came fairly close to the ground; with the pusher props located behind the pullers, there could have been some risk for prop strikes, which would probably be the easiest engineering hurdle to fix. The mounting points would have had to have been reinforced to probably slightly less than twice their original strength to hold the new engine and all of its accessories, which may have been too much put at one location on a spar with WWII engineering (decent chance that this is bullshit!). 
 
Of course the easiest answer is that push pulls were unconventional and they may not have wanted to push something untested into production when the convention was already well tested.

Love it.....You've read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy at a guess? 
 

A whole load of stuff on this: link includes further links to a load of previously secret docs.
 
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB443/
 
Also features: people being buttmad because Skylab astronauts photographed some places they shouldn't have.

Recruiting film for the Super Gripen PMC Peacekeeping Force, or something;
 

I wrote a little piece on the rb 04E based on the SFI's. Figured people might be interested.
Robot 04E (with "robot", abbreviated "rb", being military Swedish for "missile") was the AJ 37 Viggen's signature weapon: a radar-guided, sea-skimming anti-ship missile, developed from the rb 04C which had originally entered service in the 1961 on the A 32 Lansen. The E version entered service in 1975, with 315 missiles produced. Let's have a look at how it works.

Rb 04C or D on a A 32 Lansen.

Missiles on the assembly line at the air force's Central Aircraft Workshops in Arboga.
First, some background on the doctrine and use case that shaped the design of the missile. The Swedish armed forces expected the Warsaw Pact to attempt to secure a beachhead on the Swedish coast with a D-Day style invasion: a massive fleet of hundreds of ships with surface combatant screens protecting a core of various landing craft. The AJ 37's raison d'être was to attack a fleet like this. The rb 04E was mainly intended to be used against the screening combat ships, since if their AA was silenced the Viggens would be able to go to town on the vulnerable landing craft with less expensive weapons like bombs, autocannons and unguided rockets. In order to achieve saturation of the defenses and a reasonable chance to actually sink mutually supporting surface combatants, the plan was to deploy at least four but preferably six or more full squadrons in each attack wave (one squadron in the air was two flights of four aircraft, so six squadrons would be 48 aircraft). Since the plan involved launching up to close to a hundred missiles at the same time (or slightly less - some aircraft would be carrying countermeasures instead of missiles), getting the missiles to spread themselves out between different targets and not collide with each other or lock on each other was a very real concern, which will be apparent when we get into discussing the seeker.
Onwards to the technical details!

The missile's about four and a half meters long (14 ft 9 in), weighs around 625 kg total (1378 lbs), has a shaped charge warhead that weighs about 200 kg (441 lbs) and is powered by a solid rocket motor that produces a nominal thrust of 195 kp (1.9 kN, 430 lbf) for a nominal burn time of 65.5 seconds (can vary between 60 and 75 seconds depending on propellant temperature). The control surfaces are pneumatically actuated. The seeker is a frequency hopping monopulse radar with a parabolic receiver antenna located under the radome in the front of the missile (the text "TRYCK EJ HÄR" on the radome means "do not press here"). The antenna sweeps horizontally only, 28 degrees to each side. The missile cruises at an altitude of 10 meters above sea level, which it maintains by the use of a radar altimeter.
The AJ 37 can carry two rb 04E's on the inner underwing pylons. When pre-flighting the missile, the mechanic had a panel with five switches and a knob available to him for programming the missile - there really isn't much the pilot can configure from the cockpit. The panel looks like this:

The switches are intentionally only labeled with numbers for opsec reasons - the seeker electronics were highly classified and conscripts were not allowed to know much about how it worked. Switch 1 ("balkläge") is the missile's position on the aircraft; V (vänster, left), C (center) or H (höger, right). The centerline pylon © was initially planned as a possible launch position on the AJ 37 but the electronics to actually launch the missile from there were never implemented. The rest of the switches we'll cover when we get to the functionality they affect.
The missiles can be launched one by one or both together - in the latter case there's an automatic delay of about two seconds between the two, to avoid collisions. Targeting is simple: the pilot simply points the entire aircraft at the desired target, guided by the head-down radar screen, on which either a PPI or a B-scope is presented together with a wind-compensated aiming line (wind speed is taken from the aircraft computer, where it is either doppler calculated by the radar altimeter system or taken from the weather forecast as input during pre-flight procedures). The presentation looks like this:

B-scope and PPI, respectively.
The number 60 shown in the bottom right means that the range of the display is set to 60 km. The two short, curved lines on the PPI represent the ranges 12 and 24 km respectively, while the line marked "raktframlinje" is the wind-compensated aiming line. Originally, the 12 and 24 km lines represented minimum and maximum firing ranges for the missile, but at some point the procedure was improved to calculate the engagement envelope dynamically based on air pressure, temperature and speed of the launching aircraft (later manuals recommend a max launch range of about 20 km). The pilot can select if the missile's seeker should be in single ("ENKEL") or group ("GRUPP") targeting mode. In single target mode, the missile will simply lock on the first detected target. In group mode, the target selection process is more involved and we'll get back to it in a little bit. The missile can be launched at altitudes between 50 and 425 meters above sea level and airspeeds between Mach 0.7 and 0.92. The aircraft's radar does not need to be radiating to launch the missile, since the targeting is done just by pointing the aircraft the right way. In fact, the missile can be launched completely "blind" - this was particularly desirable on the Lansen, which did not have a radar in every aircraft. The flight lead could do the radar thing and the rest of the flight just launched when he did - a tactic that was also technically usable on the AJ 37. Once launched, the missile is completely autonomous and can no longer be controlled in any way by the launching aircraft.
When the launch signal is given, the missile activates its internal batteries, releases its gyro from being slaved to the aircraft's attitude gyros, unlocks and pressurizes the aileron actuators, and when the batteries have reached full power (after about 0.6 seconds), it separates from the aircraft. 0.7 seconds after separation, the elevators and rudders are pressurized and the missile immediately starts diving at an angle of about 7 degrees. About 1.1 seconds after separation, the missile starts yawing either 2.5 or 7.5 degrees to either the left or the right - which direction and by how much is determined by the position of the knob (marked 6, "kurstillskott") on the switch panel on the missile. After 8 seconds, the missile returns to the launch course. The reason for this is to separate the missiles horizontally.
When the missile's radar altimeter detects that the missile has had an altitude under 120 meters above sea level for more than 100 milliseconds, the automatic 7 degree dive stops and the missile instead follows a descent profile that takes around 10 seconds to reach its cruise altitude of 10 meters. Missiles launched from the right pylon ignite their rocket engine when descending below 130 meters, while missiles launched from the left pylon ignite it upon reaching the cruise altitude, to further separate them in time and in altitude.

When the cruise altitude is reached, the seeker starts scanning for targets; the scan area (and lock envelope) is shown above. When a possible target is detected, the seeker activates a function called "three-view logic", which means that the ranging function continues seeking forward about 80 meters. Then, the antenna sweep is reversed and the ranging seeks about 250 meters backwards, then the sweep is reversed again and the ranging seeks about 300 meters forwards. If the seeker gets a return again during the first or second reversed sweep, the target is considered valid. If no return is received during the first or second reversed sweeps, the target search continues. On the other hand, if the seeker gets another return immediately after the first indication, caused by the size of the target, the three-view logic function is blocked and the seeker accepts the target immediately.
When the seeker has locked on a target, the range to the target is monitored. The range should be decreasing, since the missile is approaching it. If the closing speed is too low, for example because the seeker has locked on another missile flying in the same direction, the missile releases the lock and starts a new search. The seeker will not lock on targets that are located such that the missile cannot be maneuvered to hit them, either.
In group targeting mode, the seeker will assume that the target ships are traveling in columns, and can be programmed to lock on a target in the first, second or third row as seen from the attacking aircraft, using the target selection switch (marked 5, "målval") on the switch panel on the missile. In order for the missile to lock in group mode, two or more targets have to be detected in the same range sweep, and they have to be a maximum of 2700 meters from each other (this number looks arbitrary, but it's just about one and a half nautical miles). In order to allow for at least some flexibility in the line up, the seeker performs a fictional widening of the antenna lobe by copying detected targets and considering them for the next range sweep as well. This is all perhaps best explained with a picture:

The "angle jump" function, which can be enabled on the switch panel using the switch marked 4 ("vinkelhopp") makes the missile skip the first possible target it sees and lock on the next one instead, if one is found before the antenna sweep reaches the end position and turns around.
The missile also has an additional targeting mode, called "active + passive", which can be selected on the switch panel (switch marked 3, "följemod"). When this is selected, the missile is basically home-on-jam - if it detects it is being jammed, it will lock on the jammer after one full horizontal sweep. While locked on the jammer (passive targeting mode), the antenna is kept pointed at the signal source and the missile tracks the bearing to it. The range search stays active during the passive target tracking and if a target is detected in the jammer's direction, the missile will lock on that. If the jammer stops transmitting, the missile will keep going "blind" for two seconds; after that it resumes active targeting.

Rb 04E seeker unit.
The seeker keeps the missile pointed straight at the target until it is less than 4000 meters away, at which point the missile starts accounting for the target's speed and leads it. The seeker keeps tracking the target until it has closed to 250 meters, then the missile flies blind the last distance. If the warhead does not detonate when the target is passed, the missile re-starts targeting and simply locks on the first thing it sees (disregarding the single/group target selection and any previous considerations).
At 250 meters from the target, the missile arms its fuzes. The missile is not intended to actually hit the target - the warhead is a shaped charge that is focused downwards, so it is supposed to be detonated above the target. There are three different proximity fuzes - one magnetic, one temperature-sensitive and one based on the radar altimeter, which detects a sudden altitude change when passing over the target. There are two proximity fuze modes, selected with the switch marked 2 ("zonrör") on the switch panel - in mode 1, only the radar altimeter is active, while in mode 2, any two fuzes both giving the detonation signal is required. Additionally, there is also a contact fuze in the nose of the missile, which detonates it after a small delay if it should hit the target directly.

In summary, I find the group mode to of questionable utility since it requires the targets to line up almost perfectly, but I guess they did what they could to try to get the missile to be able to work against large ship formations. In the single target mode though the missile seems to be a pretty nasty piece of business for 1975, especially considering the radio silent mass usage doctrine and the fact that very few aircraft needed to actually radiate to enable a launch. The main weakness was probably that there were so few missiles purchased - about two missiles per AJ 37, total.

Clearly we just need to know whether the students can understand Rick and Morty to determine if they are part if the underclass.

That's only fair, we've had to deal with Turkey being "on our side", now maybe Russia will have that burden.

So, given that, what would a reasonable quantitative metric for the strategic effectiveness of generals be?
 
Oh, and please word your explanation in such a way that someone who is largely ignorant of sabermetrics can understand it, but also in such a way that it loses no technical precision so I don't walk away with any dumb misconceptions, because if I do acquire any of those I'll blame you.  Also, make your explanation so compelling that I immediately start using it myself without crediting you and even begin to think of your idea as my own as I instinctively act on the programming you put in my head.
 
(I'm trying to train you to be a killer lobbyist)

An update on Saudi Arabia's favorite son;
 

A staggering 21 Tigers lost in one battle during the Proskurovskaya-Chernovitskaya offensive, mysteriously absent from Tiger battalion records.

Proof that Tigers can stand up to modern AFVs
 

The short answer is no. The long answer is kind of, but not really.
 
In 1940, Canada was starting up its own tank brigade, and a decision was made to arm it with domestically produced tanks. Producing the Cruiser Tank Mk.VI at Canadian factories was impossible, so a decision was made to use the American Medium Tank M3 chassis to build a tank that isn't shit. At this point, the Somua S35 was actually considered for production (among many other designs from other nations), but ultimately rejected. The result of this process was the Ram tank, a cast hull on the M3's riveted chassis. The Canadians actually ended up hiring one of the French guys who worked on the S35 to help with setting up casting production.
 
Some historians argue that the Ram influenced the Sherman, but that is rather unlikely. The Ram entered production first, but the Medium Tank T6 was already completed by the time a sample arrived at Aberdeen. 

See, that's just the sort of attitude that would have held you back in the Imperial Japanese Army.