This is a first for me, I am quoting a cell phone and a software program:
May I say that it is a defect in Dragon Dictate for iPhone that it regularly interprets ‘Tim Geithner’ as ‘team nightmare’?
—— Reported by J. Bradford Delong, who discovered the subversive nature of Dragon Dictate for the iPhone.
FRMV (Recovery & Maintenance Vehicle)
NLOS=C (Cannon)
NLOS-M (Mortar)
ICV (Infantry Carrier/Combat Vehicle)
MCS (Mounted Combat System, AKA “Light Tank”)
RSV (Reconnaissance and Surveillance Vehicle)
MV-E /T(Medical Vehicle, Evacuation/Treatment)
OK, so I was on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS, and there was a discussion of the first flight of the Airbus A400M, the subject of its merits vs. the C-130 came up, and I noted that it has twice the size and carrying capacity of the C-130, so it can do things that the C-130 can’t like transporting medium combat vehicles in a relatively straightforward manner.
Someone asked if it might not just be easier to design a vehicle to the C-130, and I unleashed a stream of consciousness torrent on transporting an armored fighting vehicle on a C-130 born of my 3 years working on the (now canceled) Future Combat Systems manned ground vehicle program (FCS-MGV).
I got some attaboys, so I figured that it needed to be shared and I thought that it needed to be shared, with some minor cleanup and added footnotes ……… lots ……… and lots ……… and lots of footnotes:
I spent 3 years trying to get the now-canceled “20-ton class” (about 30T when I left)* Future Combat Systems Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle (FRMV) into a f%$#ing C-130.
It rolled off the aircraft with the combat utility of a Hummvee with about 5 gallons of fuel in it.†
On a brand new vehicle, specifically designed to fit on the C-130, you had to pull off all the armor, the antennas and communications boxes‡, the guns§, squat the suspension, and even then you had to use 3 sortees to transport 2 vehicles…Only the real number for vehicles was likely closer to 5 when you count consumables like fuel and a load of ammunition, AND you get a range (assuming no fuel on the far end) of about 200 miles.¥
The Stryker barely fits in a C-130, and has to be reassembled on the other end (though to a slightly lesser degree), and it really cannot carry the advertised amount of troops, unless you are fielding the midget anorexic brigade.Ø
For a medium (17T<x<35T empty weight without ammunition or fuel) vehicle, you can’t get it on a C-130 without taking the motherf%$#er apart.
The C-130 can do a lot of things, but it was never designed to transport anything much larger than a 2-1/2 ton military truck.
Jeebus….I had forgotten how much the bulls%$# specifications for that pissed me off, even 3 years later.
I worked with some really top notch people, and no one beneath the senior management types thought that it could be made to work. The joke was ……… OK, my joke was ……… that if you could convert cynicism into fuel, we could power the state of Pennsylvania.
The program was doomed from the start, even without the clusterf%$# that was the lead system integrator (LSI) model of development and procurement.
*The recovery vehicle had to be at least as heavy as the heaviest variant, because otherwise it could not reliably winch that vehicle out of a ditch.
†One of the central ideas between operating the FCS-MGV was that the FRMV would be the first in, because it had a crane, which you needed to put the f%$#ing vehicles back together again, so you would be the first into a potentially hot LZ, without gun, a little 25mm grenade launcher, or armor.
‡Remember, the core idea of the Future Combat Systems is that the network is so capable that you can use information awareness to defeat the enemy with lighter vehicles, only you roll off the C-130 blind, deaf, and dumb.
§In our case, the little pop up 25mm grenade launcher, for the howitzer version, and the anti-tank gun version, the guns stayed on.
¥It might have been 300 miles, I’m working from memory, and the army used the numbers that Lockheed Martin gave out for the aircraft, but he USAF maintained that you could not operate the aircraft at those weights, so it was a clusterf%$# from the start anyway. That being said, even using the Army’s/Lockheed’s numbers, it was faster to drive a unit of actionß that distance than it was to dissemble the vehicles, ship them there, and reassemble them after the requisite few hundred sorties were completed.
ßYeah, as part of this, they felt it was necessary to rename the “brigade” and call it a “unit of action”, I guess because it sounded snazzy, and it would impress the budget weenies.
ØIt should be noted that tracked vehicles are actually slightly more space efficient than an equivalent wheeled vehicle though, since you need more clearance around the wheels in order to accommodate their range of motion when steering, something that you don’t need with a tracked vehicle, which steers by differential speeds between the treads, the troop variant, the Infantry Carrier Vehicle (ICV), actually carried a crew of 2 and 9 troops, which compared favorably to the 3+6 carried by the Bradley IFV.€
€Of course, if you put a completely remote controlled turret on a Bradley, and there are at least a half dozen of them on the market, and eliminated the gunner, you could get a full 9 man squad, just the the ICV.
Cool!
Since air becomes ionized, and by definition charged, during re-entry, the Russians are looking at using a magnetic heat shield as an adjunct to physical heat resisting techniques.
Basically, by generating a magnetic field, it can deflect the hotter air away from the spacecraft:
The flight test would use a Russian Volna rocket, which is able to launch a 650kg (1,430lb) payload. The Volan capsule will be the payload for the flight test. It will re-enter the atmosphere at up to Mach 21, and design work is under way to fit the super conducting coil system within its internal volume.
Other issues to be tackled include the ability of the coil to withstand the launch and flight environment; trajectory modification to compensate for the increased drag caused by the atmospheric gas deflection; and telemetry data recovery, when radio signal blocking ionised gases form around the vehicle.
Yes, Airbus has revealed its plans for the first flight of the A400M military transport.
In fact they are anticipating that the the first flight will be sometime this week.
That’s one humongous sh%$ load of fairy dust.
I didn’t expect them to make it to serious taxi trials before January.
At the Dubai air show, which finished up a few days before the Dubai meltdown, the developers of supersonic business jets were optimistic as to their prospects.
I’m inclined to disagree. One of the things that drove the adoption of the jet airliner, in addition to speed, was that, when you considered the reduction in crew cost per segment and the profoundly lower maintenance costs of jets versus pistons, they were cheaper to operate.
This is not the case of any form of SST, whether civil, or business/personal.
That’s why optimism by SSBJ companies like Aerion (shown) making comments like. “We are in active discussions with more than one OEM and should have an agreement concluded by the second half of next year if things don’t get any worse in the world economy,” are more an indication of delusion than of viability.
They have this real cool design, but no one willing to make it….
But the picture of the is cool.
So, the latest selling point for the F-35 JSF is the fact that you might, at some ill defined point in the distant future, be able to put a laser on it:
The Lightning II may eventually be fitted with lasers able to shoot down attacking missiles. The head of Lockheed Martin’s Lightning program and former test pilot, Tom Burbage, said in Canberra the company was looking at special applications including an anti-missile laser system.
”They are lethal countermeasures in that with a laser you could actually destroy something that’s coming at the aircraft,” Mr Burbage said.
The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, “Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde.” (If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.)
Certainly, with the transmission for the STOVL lift fan being able to handle something on the order of 25,000 KW, but it’s clear than any aircraft purchased today will never have that capability.
The JSF remains obscenely over priced as it has been sold, over budget compared to that price, and well behind schedule, and no amount of Ronco™ style, “But wait there’s more,” revelations will change this.
I am not one of the people who thinks that building a gazillion F-22s at a cost per Troy ounce approaching that of gold before its recent run-up† is a good idea, but the F-35 JSF is an exorbitantly expensive pig, even before you have “Frikken laser beams attached to their heads.”
*Actually Mike Meyers missed a joke here. Dr. Evil, having been frozen in the 1960s, would never have heard of the “Sea Bass”, it’s a marketing term. If he had known about them at all, he would have know them as a “Patagonian toothfish”, which lends itself to confusion, and all sorts of puns, and a number of humorous asides….I’m just saying.
†Empty weight, 43,430 lb, 12 Troy ounces to a pound, and $200 million price tag, gives a cost per Troy ounce of $383.76, which is very close to where gold was 5 years ago. (click graph for full size)‡
‡Yeah, I know the whine, “But if we buy more, the unit cost would go down!” Listen, 187 were bought, for a cost of $62 billion, which gives a cost of $331½ million each, and even the USAF’s (bogus numbers put the marginal costs well over a hundred million, and that’s not including the modifications that any new production would need because the parts are not made any more….And let’s not go into thee fact that it’s as expensive expensive as hell to just plain fly too.
It looks like Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp are working together to attempt to create a walled garden around his so-called news:
Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.
However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.
There are a number of assumptions here, on both sides, which I think will kill the deal:
This is one of those things that will get a lot of ink, because, of course, the newspapers want it to work, but it won’t get much beyond that.
The 800 pound gorilla in the room is, and continues to be, that the major news outlets are driven by the demands from Wall Street to hit their numbers, which, when juxtaposed with stupid debt deals on shiny new headquarters, they have consistently made their products less attractive.
The problem is that when you cut journalism out of newspapers, all you have left is advertisements, and like I said, Craigslist® is better as a pure advertising play.
H/t Atrios.
In this case, it’s the liquid cooled 120° V-6 Adept aviation engine Adept 320T avgas/mogas engine.
I’m dubious on market success, given that it has to use gasoline, though it is automotive fuel (mogas) compatible.
The cost, and relative unavailability of the fuel is what is driving people toward small turbine and diesel engines.
I came across their web site in a strange way, they were mentioned in an ad for Autodesk® CAD products on the back cover of the ASME magazine, Mechanical Engineering, and looked at their technology.
The basic features of the engine are:
There is a relatively uneventful video of an engine run at the bottom of this post.
The shape of anti-stealth
The USAF is expanding a massively parallel supercomputer. It is made from 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and its purpose is deriving more resolution from radar imagery:
The U.S. Air Force is looking to buy 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to built out a research supercomputer, according to an document posted on the federal government’s procurement Web site.
The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.
The Air Force will use the system to “to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications,” including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.
The Air Force has used the cluster to test a method of processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and “neuromorphic computing,” or building computers with brain-like properties.
The thing to note is that the PS/3 costs about $250 online, so the cost of buying all these boxes is under ½ a million dollars.
That’s less than most missiles out there, and by fusing the data, you can get a much more accurate picture of position and heading, probably close enough for a targeting solution.
If you assume that each one of the data centers costs about $1 million, even a relatively poor nation could deploy dozens of centers around the country, and use them to detect stealthy attack.
Heck, with a size of 12.8″(W) x 3.8″(H) x 10.8″(L), 0.304 you could fit 2200 PS3s in a box 8¾ feet on a side, so, if you assume that putting them and a rack and cabling them together increases the required volume by a factor of 5, you can fit the system on about 4 flatracks (picture).
If you were just to buy the boxes, and extract the electronics, you might be able to fit this in one flatrack, though at that point, power and cooling get iffy.
Still, the technology for ganging the PS3’s cell processors into a massively parallel supercomputer is very much public knowledge, with most of the requisite software being GPLed open source.
Models at the Paris Airshow
With an associated “space tug”
Escape tower system
Orbital module separation
Full size mockup
Lifting body configuration
Configuration:
1-Reentry capsule; 2-Docking section; 3-Docking port; 4-Service module
Mat Rodina, aka Stanislav Mishin, generally posts on issues of Russian diplomacy and economics, with a generally nationalist bent.
I find it a good read, because I think that helps one understand some of the Russian concerns out there, though I frequently disagree.
Well, this Tuesday, he went looked at space technology, and posted about eh Kliper spacecraft, which has been proposed to replace the Soyuz. (see also the wiki)
Given the experience of the space shuttle, where the juxtaposition of solid boosters and a cryogenic fuel tank in parallel to the vehicle have led to disaster, the fact that the configuration sits atop, as opposed to astride, the tankage, much like the Dyna-Soar concept is probably a good thing.
On the other hand, the fact that it also has a cargo capacity of roughly 1000 kg is to my mind a mistake. The shuttle showed that mixing manned and payload functions in a single launch is uneconomical.
It’s propulsion includes a service module which is not returned from orbit, much like the current Soyuz or the Apollo capsules.
The Kliper has had a number of different concepts over the years, winged, lifting body, and something called a “hybrid version”, according to Buran-Energia.
Pictures are from the Wiki, or Buran-Energia.
Click image for full size, with swear word.
H/t driftglass.
He was an overpriced rookie flameout with the brain of a turnip* then, and he’s an overpriced rookie flameout with the brain of a turnip* now.
So, big pharma is trying to get a bill through Congress for draconian exclusivity periods for so called “biologics” drugs. It’s 12 years, but with minor changes, snipping a hydroxyl, or adding a time released variant, they could drug companies could extend their government granted monopolies virtually infinitely. (also here, both from Jane Hamshire)
Well, in response to Jane’s push against these provisions, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) turned on their lobbyists, and wrote statements that 42 Congressmen read into the record, almost verbatim.
The kicker is that there were two versions of their talking points, a Republican version and a Democratic version, so depending on party, they were using different cheat sheets….Except, of course for Heath Shuler (DINO-Loser Land), who somehow or other managed to use the Republican version of the talking points.
As a Washington Redskin’s fan, this wanker has been bedeviling me since 1994…..Please, make it stop!!!
Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch after the break.
*My apologies to anyone who fancies turnips.†
†Like this guy.
Germany’s aerospace research center, DLR, is looking at a capillary system using water for cooling on a civilian high speed sub orbital transport
Obviously, you have the weight of the water to deal with, but with the specific heat of water being more than double that of kerosene (4.19 vs 2.01 kJ/kg K), the greater density of water ( 1000 vs. 817.15 kg/m3), and the much greater heat of vaporization (2257 vs 108 kJ/kg), there are weight savings with the associated pumps, tankage, and tubing:
An orbiter sub-scale wing leading edge section made of carbonfibre-reinforced carbon (known as carbon-carbon and developed for use in the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as Space Shuttle leading edges) will be water cooled. In theory the temperature of the orbiter’s wing leading edges could reach up to 2,500 Kelvin (2,227°C).
“With water you can use small amounts because it takes so much energy for a phase state change [from liquid to gas]. The leading edge will cool to the temperature of the boiling water and natural capillary action will constantly draw the fluid through the material to the surface at the rate we need,” says DLR space launcher systems analysis group research engineer Arnold Van Foreest.
Of course, the real problem here is not cooling, it’s the economics of such a transport, where the costs of transporting payload/passengers will likely be in excess of €10/kg in a best case situation, mitigate against this becoming reality.
The trust vectoring system in the video resembles that of the X-31
Stephen Trijble came across this video of Japans for developing their own stealthy fighter.
It appears to be similar to the F-22 in configuration, and it looks like they are looking for stealth and supercruise, though the slab sides on the side of the fuselage (at about 0:25) look to my very untrained eye to be an issue, and given that it is much smaller than the F-22, to my eye less than 1/2 the weight, I’m not sure how much it would be able to carry internally.
It also looks like they have a 3-D thrust vectoring system on the the video (2:30)is very similar to that of the X-31 Enhanced Fighter Maneuverability test bed (shown in bottom picture).
It’s a wicked neat video, and the translation, while sometimes clumsy, is sufficient.
One of those friends that I’ve never met in meat space, Bill Volk of the mobile device software company Playscreen was at the AdTech converence in New York city. His ovservation (along with his pic on the right):
The AdTech conference in NYC is JAMMED. The line to get badges for pre-registered attendees was over 1000 people long with a one hour wait.
Advertising can be a leading indicator.
He lives in California, and noted that he had the first real bagel since the last time he was in NYC.
You can get them here, in Baltimore, Goldbergs Bakery, where you can sometimes watch them boil the bagels before baking.
Anyone know where real bagels can be found in Southern California?
Future Stealthy Korean UCAV
Video of Concepts, H/t The DEW Line
KAI showed off its latest UCAV concept at the Seoul air show last month.
It looks pretty much like just about every stealthy UAV out there, mostly because the way that air flows, and the way that radar bounces off of objects, works the same regardless of country of origin.
One of the dirty secrets of stealth is that not only are the basic principles public, but they have been since the beginning, having first been publicized in a Soviet unclassified scientific journal.
I think that we will see a lot of these systems, particularly in an anti-ship capacity, where deterring US aircraft carriers has a lot of value on the international arms market.
Click for Humongous Picture of IRIS-T SL Launch
MIM-72 Chaparral
Diehl BGT Defense has developed a ground launched derivative of its short range AAM IRIS-T.
The idea is that this system, IRIS-T SL, would be to the IRIS-T, as the Chaparral was to the Sidewinder.
One obvious difference here is that the IRIS-T has a lock after launch capability, and so does not need a trainable launcher, with the resulting savings in weight and complexity.
Additionally, the missile appears to be modified more than in the Chaparral, where the missile was basically a standard AIM-9D Sidewinder, while the IRIS-T SL uses a booster motor to get the missile out of the tube and up to speed, as well as an a shroud to protect it during the launch phase.
I’m kind of surprised that it’s not a vertical launch, but that may be a trade off of coverage versus complexity of the launcher.
Blah, blah, blah!
Stephen Trimble has come across a very nice illustration the process of assembling the center fuselage of the F-35 JSF.
What is interesting here is the size of the final assemblies that are mated. It implies a pretty tight control of manufacturing tolerances.
It’s called the “Saber Warrior”, and the 15 ton class twin boom design hearkens back to the P-38 Lightning.
It can carry 2 JDAMS, 4 AMRAAMs, or 20 SDBs, and it could potentially have a cockpit grafted to it (why?).
In any case, here is your video pr0n:
H/t The DEW Line
Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket
From the report, we are not talking about Orion, or direct thrust from nuclear heating, but rather some sort of electric propulsion system using electricity from a reactor for a proposed mission to Mars.
Something like ion drive, or plasma drive would likely cut transit time by at least ¾ for a manned trip to Mars, and if a ground base were established, a nuclear power supply would handle the reduced solar energy levels there.
I’d take this with a grain of salt, because the cost quoted for this is a bit over US $¾ billion, which sounds like a quote from Never Land.