juretrn

Few more shots. 
I have some new shots to put up. 

It's a little funny to think a pair of Officers, who are now in their 70s look young. 

More young men who are now in their 70s!
I found this great site that has all kinds of info on US Navy ships and has the Cruise book for the America World Cruise, a long with others for ships dating back to pre-WWII in some cases. 
https://www.navysite.de/cruisebooks/cv66-68/000.htm
Sadly, my dad must have somehow missed making it into the VF-33 personnel roster in the book. It's ok Lt Wiest above didn't make the cruise book either.  I've spent hours reading through various cruise books, in particular the WWII carrier and battleship ones. 
 

I find this image really fascinating, I've always wondered how they kept track of the birds, and now I know. I bet its all in a computer now. 

Back to aircraft. A nice VA-85 Intruder.  I'm curious what the weird looking spike looking things on the Island are. Some kind of sensor or ECM device maybe?

I think this one is from the world cruise, but you can't see any markings that tell us what ship for sure.  It's also weird, some slides are dated, others not. Maybe they were in batches at one point but nearly 50 years bouncing around in boxes has mixed them all up. 

This one is from the world cruise. 


A pair of shots of a VA-64 A-4 about to be started, I think that's what the red hose is for.  One thing I noticed, the planes are much cleaner in all the slides than I thought they would be. 
These are from east coast workups in 69. 

And old Vigilante about to get a cat shot. I read somewhere these planes were all G limited and really old by this point. Wish I could remember the book. 

A nice shot of a Phantom cat shot. 

These images all seem like they got taken on the same day, maybe within minutes of each other.  Maybe from up on the Island?

Skywarrior going for a flight. 

The Samuel N. Moore, DD-747 a Sumner class destroyer commissioned June of 44, and only had about a year of service with the US Navy left. I'm pretty sure this is from an UNREP on the world cruise, because DD-747 was struck on 24 October of 69 and given to the Taiwan Navy on 10 December 69. She served with them until 1995.  

A beautiful sight:
A Slovenian pilot flies his Zlin Z-526 underneath the longest stone arch railroad bridge in the world- Solkan, Slovenia.
In honor of the 110th aniversary of the first flight of our aviation pioneer Edvard Rusjan.

A beautiful sight:
A Slovenian pilot flies his Zlin Z-526 underneath the longest stone arch railroad bridge in the world- Solkan, Slovenia.
In honor of the 110th aniversary of the first flight of our aviation pioneer Edvard Rusjan.

The only correct reaction

Molnibalage make several really good booklets about the air defence systems, here I try to cover them all:

S-25
S-75 family
S-200 family
S-300 family
IADS / GCI systems of the Cold War
Nike family and BOMARC
HAWK
Patriot
Air defense at the XXI. century
S-125 vs. F-117
2K11 Krug
2K12 Kub
9K33 Osa
9K331 Tor
9K37M1 Buk
9K81 / 9K81M aka S-300V / VM
9K35 Strela-10
2K22M Tunguska
ZU-23-4 Shilka

Download directory:

Download Directory @ Mediafire

This is the translation of the long Hungarian book what Molnibalage made in cooperation with other guys for ex. with Hpaps, he is well known for the SamSim.
This is the whole, in Hungarian: click here

Because these chapters (booklets) just a part of a big book are some parts in the document which refer to content of the book in other chapters. Slowly the whole book will be translated, but it could take years to finish it.

Have a good reading! 

It's happening!!!
first snow of the year

Howdy doody folks. I'm not an engineer, but I do do a lot of open source research and I stumbled across something that looks to circumstantially confirm a suspicion I've had for a while.
 
It all started with an image, Fig. 1. I came across it googling stuff about the AFTI/F-16. Squint reading lead me to believe it was describing how the F-35's flight control systems descend from AFTI/F-16's. But it was stuck behind a paywall. So I did some more digging...
 

(Fig 1.) source https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2018-3368
 
Lockmart came to the rescue, hosting the document for free, for some reason. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/eo/documents/webt/F-35_Air_Vehicle_Technology_Overview.pdf
 
Here's the image in a size you can read: 

Now, why is this interesting. After a quick skim it occurred to me that the description was of all the infrastructure to take advantage of a DFCS, excepting the computer inputs. There was no substantial mention of AFTI/F-16's DFCS in the paper, which seemed a little weird because that's what it's known for.
 
So, this leads me to a circumstantial conclusion: The F-35 is quite possibly either already, or may potentially be capable of functioning with decoupled flight controls. What's that mean? I'll let NASA explain.
 


https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19840012524.pdf
 
More reading on DFCS at http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a135870.pdf
 
EDIT: by chance stumbled across this on the NMUSAF's website

 

Kanye West is now an expert in hydrogen powered air transport, proposes to ditch Air Force One for "Apple-made" iPlane One.
Yes, this is for real.
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/11/kanyes-apple-iplane-1-for-trump-was-designed-by-someone-else.html
 
 

Kanye West is now an expert in hydrogen powered air transport, proposes to ditch Air Force One for "Apple-made" iPlane One.
Yes, this is for real.
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/11/kanyes-apple-iplane-1-for-trump-was-designed-by-someone-else.html
 
 

I can't believe people still claim A and B variant are "handicapped" because of B's lift fan. Is googling "F-35 variants" so flipping hard?!
I mean, it may have been a funny meme once upon a time, but by god has it overstayed its welcome.
 
edit:
I've decided to make this and leave it here, maybe someone might find it useful.

Paralay has made a comparison of the frontal areas of various fifth-generation jet fighters.  Sadly, no J-20:



This is probably approximately correct.  Paralay's photo-manip skills are pretty solid.
 
This picture helps emphasize some of the questions about the SU-57's aerodynamics and design.  What exactly is Sukhoi doing here?

The SU-57's vertical stabilizers are much, much smaller than the F-22's, and also much smaller than the SU-27's.  On top of that, it lacks the SU-27's ventral fins.  This is intriguing; even the J-20's designers didn't feel comfortable ditching ventral fins.  What exactly is the SU-57's alpha limit, and how much control does it have near that limit?  The answer is not obvious at all to me.  The fact that the inlets are not blended into the fuselage, instead forming a large "trough" does add some directional stability (I had speculated that this is the case earlier in this thread and have since found a textbook on fighter design saying that this is the case).  But the SU-27 also has semi-podded intakes, and it still requires enormous vertical stabs and ventral fins.
 
The LEVCONs surely add some additional control, but from everything I've read differential deflection of canards provides only very weak roll authority, and it's not obvious to me that LEVCONs would work any better in this role.
 
It's also worth noting that the common conceit, that the SU-57 is designed more for speed than other fifth gens, is not necessarily obvious from its shape.  While the F-22 looks blockier, the F-22 and F-35's shape minimizes wetted area, which reduces subsonic drag.  The SU-57 has a visually sleeker shape, but all of the exposed surface area from the podded engines and SRAAM canoes will increase the subsonic drag coefficient of the aircraft.
 
The fuselage of the SU-57 is clearly designed with lift generation in mind, but this design feature is also frequently misunderstood.  Generating lift with the fuselage is not automatically a good idea.  Engineers already figured out optimized lift-generating surfaces.  They're called wings and they're wing-shaped.  A fuselage, even a very flat one, does not make a particularly efficient wing because of its extremely low aspect ratio, which leads to high induced drag and a low lift to drag ratio.
 
That said, there are reasons why the designers might want the fuselage to act as a lift-generating surface.  A long, airfoil-shaped fuselage forebody (which the SU-57 clearly has) can be useful for reducing the shaking of the aircraft when it is flying fast at low altitude.  The unpredictable gusts of wind that trouble aircraft flying at low level can flow cleanly and with less disturbance around a lenticular cross section than they can a round one.
 

 
In addition, long fuselage chines help reduce the center of gravity shift that occurs when the aircraft breaks the sound barrier.  I could not tell you why in the fuck this is, because it makes no sense to me, but it definitely is true.  The YF-12 and SR-71 had a measurable difference in supersonic pitch stiffness because the SR-71 had more extenstive chines than the YF-12.
 
Finally, the energy-robbing vortices created by the fuselage can be used to some benefit if they re-energize flow around other surfaces like the wings or tail.  This could be part of how the SU-57 manages high alpha control; the entire fuselage acts like a gigantic canard, and allows the wings and small vertical stabilizer to maintain much better lift and control authority than they would otherwise.  But again, this would imply some cost to the drag polar.
 
In aircraft design, everything is trade-offs.

CGI video of a danger close interception from either a Type 730 or Type 1130 30x165mm CIWS taking out multiple targets.
 
Hard to tell, the video runs so fast I have trouble counting the amount of fucking barrels.
 

SpudmanWP of f-16.net uses the powers of FOIA to get a 2017 report on concurrency cost of the F-35:
http://www.f-16.net/forum/download/file.php?id=26535

Welcome to SH!  I dig the username.
 
The F-35 is more agile than the F-16, at least in some respects.  We know, for instance, that the F-35 has at least double the AOA limit of the F-16, and airshow footage suggests that its roll rate is a little better as well.  On the other hand, the F-16 probably beats the F-35 in sustained turn rate and transonic acceleration.
 
Bottom line is that fighter agility has a lot of different parameters, and design choices that favor certain parameters of agility harm other parameters.  A tailless delta will favor instantaneous turn rate and roll rate at the expense of sustained turn rate and cruise efficiency, for instance.  Getting the best possible agility isn't just an issue of cost, it's a trade off with other performance parameters.
 
We have a thread about these tradeoffs, at least in the context of WWII fighter design.
 
My take on the F-35A's performance is:

+Very good high AOA performance and AOA limit; comparable, possibly better than the super hornet based on leaked reports and soforth.
+Very good instantaneous turn rate as a result of the excellent high AOA performance.
+Very good roll rate as a result of wing planform and good software harmonization of the control surfaces.
+Absolutely bonkers fuel capacity.  The F-35A carries more fuel than a Tomcat.  That's not relatively more fuel than a Tomcat, that's more gallons of fuel.
+The advanced flight control software and good airflow at high AOA allow the F-35A to perform screwy new maneuvers like the J-hook.  How useful this will be in actual combat is debatable.
-Transonic acceleration doesn't sound so hot, although a fourth generation fighter would have to be carrying a very modest air to air load to actually best the F-35, since the F-35 is always clean.
-Sustained turn performance doesn't sound so hot, but again, a fourth generation fighter would need a fairly modest load to actually exploit this.
-Top speed is rather low, but top speed with heavy air to surface loads is probably unmatched (except maybe by the SU-57 or J-20).  External stores are very draggy.

If you're ever in my locale, go to Turracher Hohe or Bad Kleinkirchheim - Bad features a really dope world cup downhill run!
 
What are your skis?
I bought these just last week
https://shop.atomic.com/en/products/redster-x7-xt-12-aa2718.html

You can come and have a look at the inside of a "Una" class submarine in Slovenia's Park of military history:

TOW-2 of tanknet linked an article on the M247 York written by a retired USAF helicopter pilot.
 

Lassie GavinDefense returns!
This time:
why the M1A2 SEPv2 is inferior to the Chinese Type 96!
 
EDIT: I am sorry if the video gives you cancer, I promise to not post any more Gavin's stuff here.
 

You can come and have a look at the inside of a "Una" class submarine in Slovenia's Park of military history:

1

The Arabs are getting turned on by the turkey F-35:
https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/dubai-air-show/2017/11/12/uae-undertakes-air-force-restructuring-plan/
 
Everyone's favourite country is also interested:
 
Death spirals and all that.