Domus Acipenseris
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Posts posted by Domus Acipenseris
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Two videos about the sinking of the cruiser Moskva:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHTG6NB8b3o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHTG6NB8b3o
The first video says that the defensive systems could not engage the missiles due to minimum altitude constraints. The vid also says that the defensive systems were down. Very interesting info about the damage done by the missiles.
The 2nd video says that the systems were just left off.
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Francis Fukuyama on the conflict. (Apparently, history did not end, who could have foreseen that in 1992? Everyone except him actually)
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/preparing-for-defeat/
1. Russia will outright lose. (If they can slowly grind forward and keep any momentum they could win if they can last long enough).
2. Their collapse might be sudden and drastic, not attritional.
3. No diplomatic solution possible prior to Russian collapse (this is obviously correct).
4. UN Security Council is useless. (Who thought otherwise?)
5. No-fly zone and Polish MiGs to Ukraine would be bad decisions.
6. Massive cost to Ukraine but the only way to stop is is defeating Russia. (Or Ukraine surrenders and then Russia has to hold Ukraine against an insurgency).
7. Putin will not survive a defeat. (Correct. See Saddam's behavior in '90-'91).
8. The war has damaged populists all over the world. (Correct).
9. Lessons for China. A high-tech military with no combat experience is unreliable.
10. Taiwan needs to wake up.
11. Turkish drones will sell well. (I think all drones will sell well).
12. The spirit of 1989 will be resurgent. (Whatever dude.)
Maybe the overall military lesson from this war is that urban combat in the 21st century is almost untenable. No one has the infantry to take a fortified city. Public opinion will not tolerate siege (starvation and disease) tactics nor will it tolerate flattening cities. Neither can be hidden with new media technologies. Any army that invades an area with cities will either have to be welcomed in or it will sit outside and become the target of strikes from manned air/drones/artillery. #9 from the list is interesting. Many thought Russia would perform much better.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP479.html
Ukraine has 40 million people. If half are pro-Russian that means Russia needs to occupy 20 million people. It takes 400,000-500,000 troops to do that. They do not have that many and they cannot hold Ukraine at least according to the formula in the paper above.
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The missile used here is said to be a Polish Piorun, a missile designed to engage low flying targets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SSEjdmglFc
Apparently a Su-34 was shot down by an Osa missile as well.
I thought the Russians would begin an air campaign after their missile strikes attrited Ukraine's GBAD. However, we see Su-34's down in the engagement envelope of Osa. Why? I suppose they are trying to deliver unguided munitions from an altitude where there is some accuracy. Perhaps they have to dip below the clouds to deliver guided munitions. Either way it's farcical to see planes in that envelope in the year 2022. Especially a rare and expensive Su-34.
Analyst Justin Bronk writes about the Russian Air Force here: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
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Microfighter concepts. https://ke.kz/en/press-center/defence-industry/1393/
- CrappyHead and Scolopax
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Antonov An-225 destroyed in Ukraine conflict?
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10 hours ago, Toxn said:
I'm not sure what you're responding to here tbh.
Sorry if it was not clear. I proposed a way to store electrical energy generated by solar. My proposal does not put any moving parts in a marine environment and does not kill birds with turbine blades.
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12 hours ago, Toxn said:
I think this is a bit of a misnomer - wind turbines without any bird-scaring features (such as painting one blade black) kill plenty of birds. But far, far less than an equivalent coal power plant does.
I'd expect tidal power to kill plenty of fish and crabs and such, but again far, far less than, say any form of technology which involves jetting a huge plume of heated or briny water into the sea (ie: nuclear power or desalination plants).
Really, the biggest issue with tidal is just that it's damn hard to make anything with moving parts that doesn't degrade or get encrusted with sea life after a few years. The sea is not a happy environment for anything with moving bits that's also supposed to sit in one spot for years on end without maintenance.
What if we built massive amounts of solar thermal and used the "waste" heat to desalinate seawater? Pump the water in the daytime and let the water flow through turbines on its way to its destination in the night. Excess heat can make hydrogen. Hydrogen can react with carbon dioxide to make synthesis gas. Synthesis gas can go into the Fischer-Tropsch process. Other hydrogen can make ammonia, eliminating the need for natural gas to make ammonia.
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"The interesting contrast is, I wouldn't say the same about the fighter aircraft of 1940 even with all the hindsight in the world. I think they were about as good as you could hope for."
I've wondered about this. How many good fighters are there vs how many good tanks? It seems as if to make a good fighter required mainly a good wing and a good engine. The good tank required so much more. Is it that standards for rating fighters are lower, is it easier to design a fighter than a tank or is it the relative quality of the designers?
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This video shows what appears to be a 3D CAD of the French Model 1897 artillery piece. It shows how the mechanisms on the cannon work. The channel has torpedoes and other arms as well.
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Elements of Tank Design (Page 35)
- Lord_James and Collimatrix
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7 hours ago, Dragonstriker said:
Most damaged aircraft of GW1, according to that site. How many sorties did they fly to earn this dubious distinction?
How does that rate compare to F-16 or F-15E which aren’t forced to operate wholly within the trashfire envelope?
To be fair, what is the figure of merit here? I propose damagedone/damage received. Should logistical requirements of the aircraft factor in as well?
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I found this article that attempts to change the reputation of the F-104.
http://www.916-starfighter.de/Joy of High Tech.htm
Without the electronics to tell the pilot he's being engaged by SAMs I do not see the 104 being able to fight in Vietnam.
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Apparently the Boeing X-32 was lighter when it was changed to a conventional tail. The actuators for the V-tail were heavy.
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I think the way to "win" this contest is to develop the most expensive platform possible that sits in the heart of the trashfire envelope. Make it more expensive by giving it armor and hardening the airframe. Make it more expensive by equipping it with a cannon that cannot take out tanks, the purported target of the platform. Upgrade the platform with systems that let it "standoff" even though the platform is aerodynamically constrained to be in or near the trashfire envelope always. Also, make sure the platform is optimized for CAS instead of the more efficient BAI. Then put out to the media how the platform can take hits from trashfire that could not even reach other platforms. Declare that CAS must be performed in the trashfire envelope instead of outside it. Therefore, the platform in question is "superior" at CAS compared to platforms optimized for BAI/interdiction/strategic.
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I think Fisher was too far ahead of his time. His ideas were almost all correct and have been borne out over the past century. However, ideal like the Dardanelles op, "large light cruisers" and super battlecruisers with 18" main and 3" belts were mistakes. Tech had to catch up to his vision.
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Point taken on Pennsylvania vs QE. I'll amend the statement to most powerful RN ships. Would we like to start a debate on 14 vs 15 vs 16" main armament? I do not know enough to contribute much but would be an eager reader of that debate.
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There is a myth I've seen online and had plenty of arguments about. The myth says that Beatty was a superior admiral to Jellicoe. Absurd to anyone in the know but it persists. I believe it persists because some people see their own personality in Beatty and therefore stick up for him.
Where to start? Jellicoe was involved in the building up of the technical side of the RN in WW1. He knew that the RN AP shells did not work and that he had a powerful but flawed instrument under him. Jellicoe knew that the RN was doing as much as it could against the Central Powers with blockade and amphibious warfare and that destroying the German fleet won the Allies nothing. At Jutland Jellicoe had 0 scouting data from Beatty and therefore had to make decisions based upon instinct, hunches, and reasoning about what effect his choices would have given what the enemy might be doing. He chose right and crossed the T, letting his superior weight of shell tell.
Beatty did not fire his signals officer for personal reasons, costing him battles given the fact that his flagship could not give orders in battle. At Jutland he went charging after the enemy, leaving the 4 most powerful ships in the world behind due to the lower speed of those ships (Queen Elizabeth class) and once again, poor signals. The magnitude of this error is clear when one realizes that Hipper had 5 ships to Beatty's 6. Beatty could have had 10, 4 with 15 inch guns, had he wanted them. Instead he left them behind. Beatty's main task was to inform Jellicoe of German positions which he did not do.
I'm not sure why this is even a myth but I wanted to help bust it here.
The best book I've read on WW1 naval combat is Robert K Massie's Castles of Steel. Very entertaining as well as informative.
Trigger warning: I really hate link rot so I spammed this paper on Jutland.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-229X.12241
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99759/1/Jutland.PreReview.pdf
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This paper is on the systems engineering of the A-10. Lots of history. I posted the same doc with 2 different links to combat link rot.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA530838.pdf
The real shocking thing in the paper is that the YA-10 beat the A-7D in a flyoff. That seems inconceivable. The A-7 had one of the best nav-attack systems and could carry a large load to a long range. It was faster and much more survivable. Why did the Air Force try and build the A-7F instead of more A-10s a few years later? I would like more details on the flyoff but I believe the books were cooked by having pilots compare CAS iron bomb and cannon use in a benign air defense environment in clear weather. In any other role the A-7 wins easily.
An answer to the question of whether or not an A-10 has ever destroyed an enemy tank using its cannon: "While the gun was considered effective, the number of gun “kills” was unclear due to conservative rules for performing Bomb Damage Assessment during and after the war."
Typical bureaucratese. If I had to translate I'd say the answer is 0.
70 A-10s were damaged in the Gulf War, 20 significantly. The paper says they were easily repaired in theater but does not say how long the repairs took or how many personnel were involved. 6 were lost, a significant proportion of all Coalition losses. The "reference" the paper gives to show how easy it was to repair an A-10 is 2 pics of damaged A-10s.
The paper compares the A-10 to the A-16 in an absurd way. The ability of the A-16 to use its cannon is contrasted to the A-10's superior cannon use. This ignores the fact that cannon fire achieved little in the war. Given the fact that PGMs were used for the first time in war to major effect this seems absurd.
Added link here: RAND Corp says A-10 cannot function if the bad guys are even basically competent:
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Again, link broken now but I read that CAS is the least efficient use of sorties. BAI is much more efficient. If that is correct there should be 0 CAS in big war scenarios.
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24 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:
I would like to introduce the idea of the A-10 Threshold:
This is a concept to determine what technological threshold the A-10 Thunderbolt II occupies. We have determined that it's clearly worse than an A-4, arguably worse than an F-100D, and probably worse than an A-26 Invader.
Discussions are ongoing as to whether it's inferior to the SBD Dauntless.Is it around the level of the A-1? The AX program originated when the A-1 was in use but the end of the line for the A-1 was in sight. The SBD can dive for accurate delivery. Can the A-10 do that?
The link is broken but I saw a claim that the expected life of the A-10 was 2 missions on the Central Front.
Youtube general?
in Fiction & Entertainment
Posted
This video is an interview with an author who has written a book about the influence of the fighter mafia on the F-15 and F-16. Tl/dr: The fighter mafia were romantics who thought that real manly men in austere planes could defeat clunky tech because, you know, The Right Stuff and all that. the author is more charitable than many of us are with respect to the fighter mafia. He points out that the fighter mafia thought that everyone would turn their radars OFF when entering air to air combat because of radar warning receivers. I read the 2 Boyd biographies that came out about 20 years ago and what made me change my mind about the mafia was reading that they used to have eating contests where they would try to eat more steaks than the other guy. Yeah, that was their leisure activity. Macho one upmanship. The sort of guy who can eat the most steaks can fly a Blitzfighter and take out a dozen Soviet tanks per sortie while the wimpy men have to use Mavericks from safe standoff distance. The guy who can eat the most in one sitting can withstand unlimited g and outfly a squadron of more sophisticated planes. Where the mafia really broke the rules was in going public to try and pressure the DOD. We saw something similar 10 years ago with Key aviation forum and other places posting all their garbage against the F-35, citing the F-117 loss over Serbia s proof that "stealth" doe not work etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA0HZ__qO8I