Category: technology

OK…….Count Me Dubious

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Slat Armor


TARIAN


RPG-30


RPG-30 in Action

There are a number of systems to deal with RPGs and similar threats, such as the US and Israeli active protection systems that shoot down incoming rounds, the slat armor used to predetonate HEAT rounds (shown, top), the cloth based TARIAN armor also used to predetonate armor (shown, Bottom), and now Textron has come up with the Tactical Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) Airbag Protection System (TRAPS), which uses sensors to detect an incoming round, and than uses an airbag to detonate the warhead far enough away from the hull to minimize damage. (no pictures, sorry)

There are a number of reasons that I am dubious.

The first is that it combines all the disadvantages of a passive system (single use) with those of an active system (expensive sensors), and also because it would appear to be particularly vulnerable to the tandem round system used in the RPG-30. (bottom 2 pictures)

I would also note that it does seem to suffer the same problem as all such systems developed under the Aegis* of the Pentagon:

The progress of TRAPS has not been as fast as one might expect. It was first unveiled at an Army trade show back in October 2006, after spending $3.5 million in Pentagon cash the previous year. Phase II testing is still to take place, and an operational system will be some way down the line. Janes notes the timing of the latest tests –- Textron is bidding to be part of the Army’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program.

It’s running late, and it appears to be over budget.

LCS-2 Breaks 50 MPH

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Say what you will about the LCS, and I agree with a lot of them, over priced, behind schedule, under-armed for their displacement, and under-crewed, but when you stomp the throttle, they go like a scorched cat:

The Navy’s need for speed is being answered by a pair of warships that have reached freeway speeds during testing at sea.

Independence, a 418-foot warship built in Alabama, boasts a top speed in excess of 45 knots, or about 52 mph, and sustained 44 knots for four hours during builder trials that wrapped up this month off the Gulf Coast. The 378-foot Freedom, a ship built in Wisconsin by a competing defense contractor, has put up similar numbers.

I have no clue as to their endurance when going this fast, but my guess is that they would need to refuel if they wanted to cross the Pacific at this speed.

Video from an builder’s trials after break:


Son of FCS Infantry Combat Vehicle to Be Unveiled

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And it looks a lot like the old FCS-ICV, coming in a bit heavier, 30+ tons, with a greater reliance on armor than the FCS, where the concept, as laughable as it now seems in the days of the IED, was that the network was the armor.

So the army has gone old school:

The major departure from the FCS vehicle design in the new vehicle effort will be “integral survivability,” said Mark Signorelli, BAE vice president for new combat vehicles. The FCS vehicles were supposed to rely on situational awareness provided by electronic sensors and speed to survive on the battlefield and were not heavily armored for close combat.

The Army now says networking and sensor technology can improve a vehicle’s survivability, but real survivability must be inherent in the vehicle, he said. In other words, the vehicle must be able to take and survive a hit. MRAP-like survivability doesn’t get you combat survivability, which means the ability to survive kinetic hits from auto– and larger cannon, Signorelli said. For that you need heavy armor.

As for weapons systems, to fit both a turret bustle, such as that on BAE’s Bradley fighting vehicle, and a squad into a vehicle, would require a very large vehicle. That may push industry into going with an unmanned turret, Signorelli said. The most likely weapon is an auto-cannon and coaxial machine gun, and probably anti-armor missiles.

It appears that the vehicle will, “be required to have the mobility of a Bradley, the sustainability of a Stryker and the lethality of a Bradley,” which makes one wonder, why not just upgrade the Bradley?

There are unmanned turrets that would allow a Bradley to carry a full 9 man squad by freeing up interior space, such as the CTA International 40mm telescoped round auto-cannon.

As to getting the sustainability to that of the Stryker, I’m not sure that this would be possible on a tracked vehicle, tracks require more maintenance than wheels, and at over 30 tons, I see mobility issues with a wheeled vehicle.

An all new vehicle might be cheaper and more fuel efficient than an upgraded Bradley, but it will undoubtedly also be more expensive than a new-build Bradley, and much more expensive than an refurbished Bradley.

It just does not make sense to develop a new vehicle.

Delay for Boeing, Airbus Next Gen 100 Seaters

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We now have reports that both Airbus and Boeing are looking at engine upgrades to the A320 and B-737 so as to delay the introduction of new models.

When you look at where things right now, with Boeing having outsourced its knowledge to the point that the 787 and 747-8, and Airbus still behind schedule on A380 deliveries and up to its hips in getting the A350 into development,* it is far from surprising that they putting off new development.

Airbus is in a better situation here, since the 737 has had clearance with its engines ever since it went to high bypass ratio turbofans with the -300, and because Boeing seems to be incapable of finding its ass with both hands.

Boeing went all outsource everything starting in the late 1990s, while Airbus didn’t, and as a result, they seem to be lacking basic skill-sets to actually get a plane into service.

Part of this is the difference between the two cultures: In America a skilled work force is seen as a cost, rather than an asset, as it is in Europe, and part of it is European politics, which makes it much more difficult for EADS to ship jobs from Hamburg or Toulouse.

*As well as the clusterf$#@ that is the A400M military transport, but that is technically a separate division, so it’s in the footnotes.

Neat Tech That Won’t Be Going Into Aviatiion

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Dyson, the company that uses a centrifugal separator in its vacuum cleaner, has another piece of neat tech, a Bladeless fan that works on the Coanda effect.

It’s a really interesting concept, if you don’t mind spending $299.99 for a 10″ freaking table top fan.

In any case, Bill Sweetman notes that this technology might have application for a VTOL aircraft, though, as he notes this concept is very close to the ejector lift concept that has failed abysmally when it has been tried.

For quieting a fan, it might work, for generating lots of thrust for VTOL, I’d wait for more tests.

Thrust-Vectoring EJ200 for Typhoon

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So it looks like Eurojet is looking at getting into the thrust vectoring game.

It also looks like they will be selling it on improved economics, based on the use of lower thrust settings for takeoff and landing, and improved straight-line performance through reduced trim drag, rather than any massive increase in agility.

This is not surprising: At the speeds at which combat generally occurs, aerodynamic surfaces just work better.

For all the play over airshow maneuvers like the Cobra, etc., you have to be out of energy and very slow for them to work, which mirrors Colonel Fornof’s talks on dealing with the thrust vectoring F-22 and Su-30MKI, where he says that using thrust vectoring creates opportunities for the opposing aircraft to shoot you down.

Sounds like the old truism of air combat, “Speed is life,” remains true.

Video:

Signs of the Apocalypse: EADS Edition

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Dr. Peter Venkman: This aircraft is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

So there you have it, actual photographic evidence of the EADS A400M military transport with actual flight worthy engines on the wing, and they are now claiming that we should expect a first flight in December.

Personally, I expect that when the aircraft hits the runway for its first flight, we will see rains of frogs, burning pitch, daffodils, and Amway salesmen.

GD Pitches Stryker for FCS Replacement

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I think that the idea of an upgraded an uparmored Stryker to replace the now-canceled FCS is a very bad idea.

The problem is that Strykers, which now tip the scales at less than 25 tons when extra armor is added on, but it looks like an upgraded Stryker would weigh somewhere between 30 and 35 tons, and when considering that the original vehicle, the LAV, weighed about 15 tons, I think that it would be just too heavy.

Simply replacing the manned turret on the Bradley IFV with an unmanned one, and using the space that is opened up for more troops gets you there, and there is probably some space left over for the communications gear that was developed along with the FCS.

Comments

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OK, I dropped Haloscan/JS-Kit because it created a hit on loading time, and went back to blogger comments, which killed my old comments, and that could not do trackbacks,or edit my comments, which I do occasionally to correct my spelling.

Well, it appears that the removal of the old haloscan comments, and the reinstallation from JS-Kit, as opposed to the old Haloscan, restored everything, and eliminated the performance hit.

HTML magic of some kind, I guess, or perhaps it’s just because the JS-Kit folks were not upgrading the old Haloscan servers, or the hand-off between Haloscan and JS-Kit was slow, or maybe just some old code.

I don’t know, and I don’t care, but for now, at least, Haloscan is back, and so are all the old comments.

Sorry for any confusion.

I am a Complete Moron

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I spent 2 hours today trying to get a video of my daughter off a DVD that my neighbor, Michelle took of Natalie singing when she was at North Bay camp with her middle school class last year.

I kept getting parity and read errors, I tried a dozen utilities, with no luck….Then it hit me.

How about Cleaning the Fracking DVD?????

After about 30 seconds with a cloth for cleaning eyeglasses, the videos were on my hard drive.

As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.”

Unsure as to Whether this is Brilliant, or Whacked

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But it appears that the Raytheon is working on an underwater surface to air missile based on the AIM-9X.

It appears that they are looking at autonomous operation of the missile after launch from a sub, as opposed the the German IDAS system which maintains a fiber optic link to the missile.

There are a number of reasons that I am dubious of such a system, the ability of a submarine to get targeting data regarding an airborne threat and the fact that the AIM-9X has pretty poor kinematics compared to other IR AAMS, because its motor is based on a 50 year old airframe.

On the other hand, this weapon is just about perfect for terrorists: Drop the canister off the end of a boat, and shoot down a passenger plane coming into land at a seaside airport.

Hypersonic Engine Pr0n

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Lockheed Martin and P&W’s Rocketdyne division are working on a hybrid propulsion system for hypersonic flight, (paid subscription required) which uses a turbojet to take off and accelerate to Mach 2+, with a dual mode ramjet (DMRJ), it does supersonic combustion at higher speeds, taking over beyond that, with the turbojet being cocooned.

It’s kind of a “Son of Blackswift.”

As it currently stands, wind tunnel tests are proceeding on the DMRJ (phase 1), with a system integrating both the turbojet and ramjet being testing together in phase 2, and eventually testing of the system in flight.

End of Stealth?

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Bistatic Radar


Typical RCS

So, Joint Force Quarterly has an article on the end of stealth (PDF link for article)

Certainly, the air forces of the world have been trying to make Giulio Douhet’s vision of strategic bombing vision reality for many years, and stealth technology had the potential of reducing the costs of striking a target to something approaching the Italian general’s original vision.

Of course, even in the case of air supremacy over the target, WWII over Germany and Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and both Iraq wars, it turns out that air power, at least without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been an abject failure at winning wars.

While I do agree with the basic thesis of the article, that improvements in processing technology, particularly in processing power available in compact packages,which allow for intermittent signals from disparate platforms to be fused into a coherent picture.

The author Arend Westra, places a high degree of value on what he calls “bistatic’ and “passive” radars, where the receiver is well removed from the transmitter, and, in some cases, the transmitter is something like a civilian TV or radio facility.

I am far more dubious of the capabilities of such systems for a number of reasons:

  • They have multiple points of failure.
  • For the United States in particular, civilian broadcasting infrastructure, because of its ability to transmit civil defense instructions and “enemy propaganda”, these are considered militarily significant infrastructure whose locations are well known, and are hit early in any war.
    • As an interesting philosophical aside, by the standards of the United States, the World Trade Center towers were legitimate military targets, because they were festooned with civilian radio and television transmitters.
  • I think that using processing will be cheaper than new technology.

This is not to say that I think that these sorts of systems won’t be deployed, as there is already an existing civilian infrastructure to piggyback on, but that they will be a part, and for anyone with half a brain a small part of a total system.

I think that as we move to the future, that any sort of strike package heading into an integrated air defense system will do with the Israelis did, where the idea of somehow blocking or flooding the network used to integrate the various sensors will become the most significant part of any mission planning.

I think that the biggest impact will be in the arms market, where nations concerned about air attacks may very turn toward increasingly sophisticated Russian air defense systems.

Well, That Trashed a Paint Job

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What you see below is a video of the USAF’s Advanced Tactical Laser doing its thing on a pick up truck.

I really don’t see a whole bunch of utility here. It’s a chemical laser, which means an extensive, expensive, and environmentally hazardous logistical tail, and things like sheet metal on trucks are much easier to heat that people, which have a lot of water in them, so it, “as a way to target individual insurgents,” seems to me to be somewhat dubious.

The advances in electrically powered lasers, particularly against things like mortars and Kyatusha rocketsIn any case, here is bonus Bond video, with the best Bond line ever™, from Mr. Goldfinger, not Sean Connery, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Another Stealth Aircraft Done in by Rain

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This time it’s the F-22 where the rain and humidity in Guam is causing shorts in its avionics.

This is the sort of sh$# that should have been handled in qualification, particularly for a plane that costs about $200 million.

I will say, however, that the last ‘graph is a classic:

The fighters’ maintenance issues had “no impact” on the strategic posture at Guam and did not put the island’s defense in jeopardy, Thomas said. The aircraft will continue to deploy to Guam and other parts of the Pacific, he said.

Because, I guess those folks in Palau and Ujelang are constantly threatening to invade.

Potential Successor to NLOS Cannon Shown

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Looks like the Son of MLRS

Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is showing its Donar 155 mm howitzer at the AUSA convention.

Based on a cursory read of Bill Sweetman’s blog post, and my knowledge of MLRS, I spent some time crawling over the vehicles when I was at Lockheed-Martin Missiles & Fire Control* in Grand Prairie, TX, it looks to me an awful lot like they modified the platform and chassis of the M270 MLRS, replacing the turret for the rockets with a (one would assume significantly beefed up to handle recoil) howitzer turret.

Of note, since the automated turret and loading systems are completely removed from the crewed area, there appears to be a significant reduction in weight, since the turret does not need the same level of armor if it is not in crewed space.

Additionally, there should be some cost savings involved in using an existing platform.

On the downside, as compared to the now defunct NLOS-C, this is never going to fit in a C-130, though it KMW is claiming that it will fit in an EADS A-400.

*Yeah, I worked there too. I didn’t work on MLRS, but on a British derivative, the LIMAWS-R, which required me to look at the vehicles regularly.

The Generator’s Gone

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An amusing story about network management, right out of John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing.*

It appears that there was a small bit of civil unrest, and a client lost connectivity, and they were unable to contact the client for some time.

When they finally managed to get an engineer over to reboot the network, the network was gone…as in GONE…the copper taken by looters, stripped right out of the walls.

The pertinent quote from the movie:

Garry: The generator’s gone.
MacReady: Any way we can we fix it?
Garry: It’s “gone”, MacReady.

Just go read it, it’s funny.

*Except, of course for that whole human replica producing alien thing, of course.

So, We Have Another Reason to Take off a Brassiere

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You know, if I were single, and a teenager, I’d be tempted to ask my date* to remove her bra because I expected a gas attack.

Whatever motivated someone to patent a bra that converts into two gas masks, I’ll never know, but it won them an Ig Nobel prize.

*Just so you know, I really did not have much of a social life in high school, so the prospect of just seeing a bra then was a big deal.