Month: December 2010

It’s the Fuzzy Aircraft Photo Home Game

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Click for full size


Note the Insignia


Note the lack of insignia


A ¾ rear view


A frac34; front view


PLAAF (Chinese) Insignia


Soviet Era Insignia


Current Russian Insignia

So, the late Ted Stevens’ “Series of Tubes” is abuzz with what purports to be fuzzy photographs of a Chinese stealth aircraft.

I don’t think that these are raw photos, and that some photo-shopping has been done, most notably the oversize tail insignia, which is most assuredly NOT a PLAAF symbol, as Stephen Trimble observes.

Some other oddities, to my (very) untrained eye:

  • The wing has anhedral, and the canard dihedral, which would be a no-no in stealth design, you would want the surfaces more or less parallel.
  • The same goes for the drooping wing tips, which are absent on the front view but present in the rear view.
  • Pictures 1 and 3 of the aircraft appear to be with the power and the hydraulics unpowered, but there is no gravity caused droop in what are supposed to be axisymmetric thrust vectoring nozzles.  (They pretty much have to be with the small tail size).
  • On the top picture, it appears that the observers in the rear are about 1½ feet taller than the ones around the front of the aircraft.

While I think that it is clear that the Chinese are looking at developing some sort of stealthy fighter or attack aircraft, I really don’t think that it has gotten to the point where a 70 foot long demonstrator of some sort is flying.

It’s possible that the pictures are real, though there appears to be at least a bit of  digital wizardry involved.

Least Surprising News of the Year

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After a few years of being treated like crap by their employers because we have been our worst recession since the great depression, now that there is a perception that things are looking up, employees are looking to ditch their current employers:

Employers watch out: Your workers can’t wait to quit.

According to a recent survey by job-placement firm Manpower, 84% of employees plan to look for a new position in 2011. That’s up from just 60% last year.

Most employees have sat tight through the recession, not even considering other jobs because so few firms were hiring. For the past few years, the Labor Department’s quits rate, which serves as a barometer of workers’ ability to change jobs, has hovered near an all-time low.

But after years of increased work and frozen compensation, “a lot of people will be looking because they’re disappointed with their current jobs,” said Paul Bernard, a veteran executive coach and career management advisor who runs his own firm.

As I’ve said before, people have never been too fond of their bosses, but after years of cheap labor economics and employers using loyalty as a resource to be strip mined, they hate their employers too.

If healthcare reform ever really works, one of the things that will happen is that there will no longer be the threat of losing one’s insurance to keep employees from looking, and at that point, it’s going to get ugly for employers.

F136 Alternate Engine Included in Stopgap Spending Measure

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So the alternate engine for the JSF is funded through March.

Some people see this as meaningless pork, but I remember the issues with Pratt and Whitney as the soul source supplier for F-15s and F-16s in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it was ugly, so I am inclined to support the engine as a 2nd best alternative, with the first best alternative to be cancellation of the JSF.

Another Day, Another VTOL Concept

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Nice try

It’s a fan in wing concept, with 4 fans and 2 thrusters, (Videos at link) better known as a bunch of complex moving equipment that can fail at an inopportune time.

Remember, you don’t just have the fans,. you 6 fans, and their associated transmissions, plus shutters and vanes for control in VTOL mode, as well as thick low aspect ration wings which don’t have space to carry things like fuel, because they have the fans.

Call me a cynic, but I do not see success here.

Well, The Next Time I Ask What the F%$# He is Smoking, I’ll Know the Answer

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Everyone’s favorite hypocritical and corrupt televangelist cum politician, Pat Robertson has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana:

For a second it looked as if someone had mischievously switched teleprompter scripts on Pat Robertson, the tele-evangelist and founding member of the Christian Coalition. There he was on The 700 Club, a religious affairs TV talk show talking breezily about why America should legalise marijuana.

But this is the season for compassion and Mr Robertson – who usually makes waves nowadays only when he finds celestial or satanic cause for assorted disasters like the Haiti earthquake (a pact with the Devil to eject the French two centuries ago) or Hurricane Katrina (legalised abortion) – seemed to be serious. He said incarcerating people for taking “a couple of puffs” of pot might not be effective public or social policy.

Here’s a surprise, he’s significantly to the left of Barack Obama on this, probably because he’s at a point in his life where good government policy trumps electoral success.

Theatrical Run Review

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Well, it’s Christmas, and we are Jewish, so that means Chinese food and a movie.

We got the (Kosher) Chinese food yesterday, in addition to the stir fry that I made (with hearts of palm instead of bamboo shoots), and we went to see a movie in the theater.

We was the latest Jack Black vehicle, Gulliver’s Travels.

Jack Black … Lemuel Gulliver
Jason Segel … Horatio
Emily Blunt … Princess Mary
Amanda Peet … Darcy Silverman
Billy Connolly … King Theodore
Chris O’Dowd … General Edward
T.J. Miller … Dan
James Corden … Jinks
Catherine Tate … Queen Isabelle

It’s pretty much a piece of fluff, with Jack Black playing Jack Black, but Jack Black is amusing.

The plot bears a reasonable relationship first two parts of the book, though it lacks the social and political satire that John Swift put in, but considering that the original was written in 1726, this is unsurprising.

While a Jack Black vehicle, the best performance is actually by Chris O’Dowd, who is the heavy in the film.

Additionally, Amanda Peet gives a good performance, and is just plain hawt in this, though without showing any skin.

A special shout out to the send up of giant robots.

It’s interesting to see the effect of CGI here, because one of the old school, and rather convincing, techniques used in such films, forced perspective, would have helped to make it more realistic.

It was a fun movie, but I would have preferred to see it on pay per view for about ⅕ the price.

Click on the pictures for full size.

This Has Fiasco Written All Over It

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Well, it’s not quite this bad


We have the Army Tilt-Rotor


and the USAF STOVL Hoover

So, the USAF wants a STOL cargo aircraft with greater capabilities than the C-130, while the Army wants a VTOL cargo aircraft with roughly the carrying capacity of the C-130.

Well, it appears that they are looking at a common airframe intended to do both.

So a jack of no trades and a master of none, because when you combine these disparate needs, and requirements, you end up with something that just does not work.

See the cancelled Naval F-111B, for instance.

I’m with Bill Sweetman on this, “The people promoting these abominations are secretly working for Airbus Military.”

Navy Demonstrates a 33 MJ Railgun

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Some notes on the video below

The US Navy Surface Warfare division has set a new record for “muzzle” energy from an electromagnetic railgun. (see also here).

You really cannot determine the mass or size of the projectile accurately from the video, but given an energy of 33MJ, and its size appearing near to that of a 5″ naval round, one could assume a mass of the round of somewhere between 10 and 32 kg. (The latter is the weight of the current 5″ round)

This would give a velocity of somewhere around 1500 to 2500 m/s (5000 – 9000 km/h, 3000-5500 mph, or Mach 4-9.5).

By way of comparison, the 16 inch guns on the Iowa class have a muzzle energy of about 410 MJ, 1225 kg at 820 m/s, but velocity here can translate into a lot more range, something well in excess of 200 km, and this technology is in its early stages, so achieving an order of magnitude improvement in energy is certainly possible.

A note, based on comments with people who have used capacitors to use an arc to generate hypersonic shock waves for high speed simulations.

First, the power cables are almost certainly coaxial to minimize impedance, and the sheath on the outside is doubtless very heavy, because the high current generates forces that would otherwise blow the conducting jacket off. (in the wind tunnel case, the capacitor room looked “like a porcupine turned inside out”, I wish that I had been there for that.)

Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) Tested

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The US Navy has conducted its first successful test of the EMALS electric catapult at its Lakehurst, NJ air field.

The navy is doubtless heaving a sigh of relief, as the Ford class carriers were designed to mount these catapults, and retrofitting steam catapults would be very involved.

The British are probably even more relieved, as their carrier(s) have gas turbine propulsion, and so have no steam available, so without this, they would just be big floating anvils.

It’s a similar technology the Navy’s recently tested railgun, but the energy storage is mechanical (flywheels) on the catapult, and solid state (capacitors) on the railgun.

Given the state of the art in capacitors, it probably makes sense, since the rail gun is much higher power (a few orders of magnitude), and lower energy (by around a factor of 5) than the catapult.

I Really Hate Fanboi!

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And BooMan is definitely a fanboi, or he does not understand that SDNWOTN* when he says, “At this point in his presidency I think it is fair to say that Obama is already in the conversation as best president since Abraham Lincoln.“

Considering his prior record, I do not think that it is sarcasm.

<facepalm>

*Sarcasm Does Not Work On The Net.

Here’s a Shocker…

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It turns out that all those studies showing Americans to be the most church going and religious people in the industrialized world, don’t show this.

They just show that Americans are the most likely to lie to pollsters about their religiosity:

Two in five Americans say they regularly attend religious services. Upward of 90 percent of all Americans believe in God, pollsters report, and more than 70 percent have absolutely no doubt that God exists. The patron saint of Christmas, Americans insist, is the emaciated hero on the Cross, not the obese fellow in the overstuffed costume.

There is only one conclusion to draw from these numbers: Americans are significantly more religious than the citizens of other industrialized nations.

Except they are not.

Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

If this is true, then the only surprise is that I am apparently more religiously observant than the average America, which buggers the mind.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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Yes, someone at the CIA has a sense of humor.

They have assigned a group to look at the fallout from Wikileaks cable releases, and they are calling it the Wikileaks Task Force, generally abbreviated as WTF:

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.

“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”

Heh.