Category: technology

Aero Diesel Video Pr0n

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Avweb produced two videos on the operation and description on Diamond’s Austro AE300 engines.

The nickel tour is that they are heavier than Thielert’s engines, but are promised to be much more durable.

A typical design decision is that the Austro has a heavier cast iron block, but this allows for the engine to be rebuilt.

I’m wondering why they didn’t sleeve an aluminum block. That would appear to me to give the best of both worlds, though my experience with sleeved engines is locomotive engines, which are sleeved iron blocks, I might be missing something.

They are promising a 1000 hour TBO, and hope to extend that significantly as Diamond gets information from the field on the first engines..

Engine Analysis

Flight Evaluation

USAF adds IRST to F-15s

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They will be using a variant of the ANS-42 Ifra-Red Search and Track system originally deployed on the F-14D (replacing the TCS used on earlier models) and subsequently installed on the front half of an F-18 drop tank (probably because the under-wing environment was too vibration prone).

It seems like a sound move, though with the USAF shoving F-15s and F-16s out the door as quickly as possible so as not to compete with the F-35 JSF, I’m a bit dubious.

My earlier posts on this are here and here.

The Israelis are not the Only Ones With Systems Integration Issues with the JSF

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It looks like the UK JSFs will be unable to carry 4 AIM-132 ASRAAMS internally, as opposed to the original 4, so a loadout of 4 will require external pylons, but the stealthy pylons which had been previously promised have not been funded.

The ASRAAM is significant, because it has lock after launch and much better kinematics (though inferior very short range agility) than the AIM-9X, allowing a modicum of BVR capability.

Is it just me, or is the entire JSF program beginning to sound a lot like what some are facetiously calling the “iFascism” that emanates from Steve Jobs and Apple Computer:

One thing that fascinates me is the way that Apple continues to maintain a cool/benevolent/almost counter-culture reputation, while actually being an incredibly aggressive, ruthless, arguably monopolistic company (the way they are cornering the music and phone businesses, and the way they so carefully guard applications on the iphone). Compare this to Microsoft, which has a more fascist ambiance around it.

Obviously, the consequences of an intensely closed platform in a PC and media player are of less consequence than for a front line fighter, but Apple has already has filed for a patent to automatically deactivate your devices if you use them in a non-approved manner, and the US Air Force, and Lockheed-Martin seem to have a similar goal with the JSF: making it extremely difficult for non-US weapons to be used, and I do think that there is a remote off switch in there.

If I were looking at buying a fighter, I would therefore be very concerned about the degree of control that the Pentagon, and perhaps LM would have over the operation of the aircraft.

When Technology Works For You

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I give you the Spike missile, the version from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD) at China Lake, not the rather more expensive ATGM produced by the Israeli company Rafael.

This Spike is a small (25″), light weight (2.5 kg) and very inexpensive (about 5000 lbs) that can be effective out to about 3200 m against relatively lightly armored targets. (The warhead weighs 1 pound)

It’s not fast, being decidedly subsonic, and it leaves launch tube at around 100 mpg, which means no backblast.

What makes this missile different is that it was designed using technology to meet a cost goal, so the seeker is, basically a camcorder bolted to the front of a rocket motor, and it can launch at low speed because it relies on COTS processor for flight controls, which do not require high initial speed.

It locks on the target image, and so is fire and forget, a capability that has been in the US arsenal since the 1970s with the Maverick missile.

Another advantage of this system is that it can easily be carried by a UAV when targeting things like insurgents, with a much lower cost, and a much higher number of rounds on existing UAVs that carry Hellfires, or it could be mounted on much smaller UAVs.

It just goes to show that technology can be used to create a reasonably effective weapon at a very reasonable price.

Some PDF with more details are here and here.

People Who You Cannot Trust

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Are They Selling Your Child’s Data to Junk Food Makers or a Child Sex Ring?

The publishers of the software known as nannyware:

A software product sold to protect children from predators, cyberbullying, and visiting inappropriate Web sites is also collecting information about what the kids are saying, and its publisher is selling that data–in aggregate form–to other companies for marketing purposes.

In an interview, Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene said that the company doesn’t collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children. “We never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it. In fact, we don’t have any information about the individual child,” he said.

Yeah, sure, as has been noted with Netflix, bits apparently innocuous data frequently make it trivial to identify a user.

In the case of Netflix, by knowing a couple of their video likes and dislikes, you could extract their entire video rental history with a probability of 28 standard deviations (99.87% probability, or a bout 1 in 800)

You know, if this were video rental data from adults, as opposed to conversations online by children, this would be illegal.

AIDS Vaccine Achieves 1/3 Protection

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They have been testing an AIDS vaccine, actually a combination of 2 failed AIDS vaccines in Thailand, and it appears that it has a 32% effectiveness rate.

That may not seem like much, but typically, you start to see reductions in outbreaks once you hit this level, and this is the first vaccine that has shown any effect ever.

Of course, we can now expect the vaccine manufacturers to price it at a high enough price so that people in Thailand won’t be able to afford the vaccine.

Lessons of the 787 and GM’s Opel Division

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Well, the first lesson is that airframers are running away from all composite aircraft, with Mitsubishi going from a composite wing to an aluminum one on its MRJ commuter jet, they say that this will make it easier to make changes to the wing to accommodate for things like stretched model. (See also here)

This is particularly noteworthy because Mitsubishi is already making the all composite wing for Boeing’s 787, so they are very familiar with the structural problems of the 787 (see here, here. and here)

The thing is, that their assessment on this situation is probably more valid than Boeing’s, because they understand the issues involved with composites more than Boeing does.

Boeing’s policy of outsourcing major design and engineering decisions, along with risk, on the 787 has placed it in a situation rather similar to where GM is right now with regard to its suppliers:

Magna’s planned acquisition of Opel is proof that carmakers have lost the upper hand in the industry by outsourcing development work to suppliers and relying on them for technological knowhow, a top GM executive said.

…

“We all had the vision that the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) should just assemble bits and pieces, do a little bit of marketing, a little bit of design and all the rest would be done by suppliers,” he said.

“That was a nice vision. It sounds very lean, but the profit making opportunity is also shifting to the ones that have the technological knowhow. That is in very many cases now the supplier industry,” the GM Europe president told the dinner.

The situation is not as straightforward with commercial aircraft, because certifying an aircraft is far more difficult than getting regulatory approval on a car, but as we can see, Mitsubishi is already on top of that process with its MRJ, and certifying a 70-100 seat aircraft is not appreciably more difficult from certifying a 400 seat aircraft.

This may be a situation where the political tensions in Airbus, which has limited them farming out technologies and design expertise, may serve them well in the future.

What’s more, unlike an auto manufacturer there is no need to build a dealer network, which is a huge hill to climb.

Boeing’s methods on the 787 may be a suicide pact for its commercial aircraft business.

About Bloody Time!!!!

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If you own a licensed version of MicroFlaccid’s Windows operating system, you have no doubt encountered the nagware program on Windows Genuine Advantage, which serves no purpose but to prevent unauthorized copies of the operating from being installed.

It should be noted that it also frequently locks people out with proper licenses, after they do things like replace a motherboard of a hard drive, and the installation of the upgrade is deceptive, saying that it provides system security, when what it really provides Microsoft with is revenue protection.

Well now, after discovering that the software phones home, a lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft as a purveyor of spyware:

A US lawsuit has alleged that Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft’s controversial anti-piracy software, is little better than spyware.

A lawsuit (which seeks class-action status) filed in Washington district court last week also cries foul over false advertising as well as allegations of privacy law violations, Electronista reports. More specifically, the suit alleges that the XP version of WGA was offered to users as a security update rather than as an anti-counterfeiting technology.

WGA phones home to Microsoft daily with IP address and other information on users. The latest lawsuit, like others against WGA before it, takes exception to this behaviour.

The case here is pretty easy to understand, so let’s look at what the program is and does, and compare it to spyware:

What WGA Does Is it Spyware
Does it install on your system without notifying you of what it does? Yes, it calls itself a security upgrade 
                               
Does it contact the “mother-ship” regularly and without your approval? Yes, it does.   
  
                                                            
Does the Removal of the program require extraordinary measures? Yes, the only removal mechanism is reformat and reinstall the system
Does the program have interfere with the system function? Is this intentional? Yes
Yes
 

Dude, you’ve got spyware!

Neat Tech: Nutating Engine

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Nutation is what a coin does toward the end of its motion when you spin it, when it wobbles around the edge, and rotates at the same time.

The Nutating engine is similar to a Wankel rotary, only instead of having a triangular rotor that orbits and spins around the crankshaft, it has a disk that wobbles as it rotates (bottom pic for animation).

The military is funding the development of an aluminum prototype, which promises to double (or more)the power to weight ratio for small engines, where turbines lose much of their advantage.

Right now, they are looking at a power to weight ratio of 1.6:1 or so, which is a pretty remarkable number.

A NASA study (PDF) is also available.

NASA Looking at Inflatable Module for ISS

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It looks like NASA is looking again at using the inflatable module technology that it first proposed as “TransHab” in the 1990s. on the International Space Station. (top pic)

Bigelo Aerospace has been working with the concept, and NASA’s basic technology, to develop a tourist destination in orbit (bottom Pic), and it has successfully launched two prototypes populated with insects, and with this success, NASA is again considering adding an inflatable module to the ISS.

The concept was originally developed to provide for living quarters for a manned Mars Mission.

I May Have Been an Optimist on eBay

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4 Months ago, I posted a rather waggishly titled, “Ebay Discovered to Have Socially Redeeming Value,” citing an investigation in Archeology magazine that suggested that the explosion in counterfeits was actually driving real (stolen) antiquities from the market, because manufacturing frauds was more profitable.

Well, a collector of such objects, and a frequent purchaser on eBay, one Bill Stelzer, disputes this in the letters section (scroll down to Cheaper by the Millions).

He says that eBay aggressively monitors and vets such sales, and as a result, there is very little, if any fraud in this area.

Personally, I have no clue as to where the truth is, but when someone says that, “The eBay sites that auction antiquities are among the most vetted sites on the Internet,” my bullsh%$ meter spikes to 11.

I have had good luck on eBay, but what I tend to purchase are things like toner cartridges from stores with addresses and phone numbers, and I verify both before purchases.

The output of pot hunters being “vetted” sounds a bit strange, but I am speaking from a position of profound ignorance here, so YMMV.

Have Glass Equivalent Stealth Mods on Su-27 Series Fighters

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Sukhoi in RCS Test

The Russians are looking at some significant radar cross section (RCS) reductions on their Su-27 series fighters.

This is not full up stealth, you need to start at the drawing board to do that, but this is more along the line of the “Have Glass” mods done on F-16s, which involved shrouding the mechanicals of the radar systems with radar absorbent materials (RAM), using a metalized canopy to keep radar from reflecting off the cockpit contents, and some minor shaping and coatings on the engine inlets.

It’s more about making active jamming more effective, particularly in the shorter wavelengths, than it is about making an aircraft “invisible”.
The measures appear to be:

  • Masking the actuators of the radar.
  • Possible plasma cloaking of the radar.
    • This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Using plasma to cloak a complete airframe in a moving airstream is a big deal, using it under the radome, and turning it on and off to accommodate radar scans, seems more reasonable.
  • Coating the first stage fan with RAM.
  • A metalized cockpit canopy.
  • Spray on RAM on the external stores.

Afghanistan Conditions Lead to Resurgence in Active Rotor Blade Research

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Boeing SMART Rotor


H-60 Rotor with Individual Blade Control (IBC)


DARPA Concept: Potential Settings for Active Rotor

One of the differences between rotor blades and modern aircraft wings is the relative lack of sophistication of the rotor blades. While wings have had flaps and/or slats for years, and have actively changed the shape of the wing with the benefit of fly-by-wire controls since the 1970s, the F-16 being a prime example, rotor blades have remained a single fixed airfoil with no leading or trailing edge devices.

The extreme conditions in Afghanistan, where it can be hot, and it’s always high, have led to new research into leading and trailing edge devices for helicopter rotors.

Sikorsky is testing a control system with individual blade control, a departure from the current swash plate setup used in helicopters (middle picture) in addition to testing a system with actively blade flaps, and Boeing is testing a rotor with piezoelectrically driven flaps. (top picture)

Additionally, Sikorsky is looking at some more involved, and potentially fieldable concepts:

As part of the 30-month active rotor program with AATD, Sikorsky will also study active blade slats, adaptive flight controls and a dual-frequency rotor head-mounted vibration suppression system. The study will produce the conceptual design for an H-60 [Blackhawk & Seahawk] size active rotor.

DARPA is in on this too, with its Mission Adaptive Rotor program. (the mission adaptive wing program of the early 1970s led to much of what we have now on fixed wing aircraft).

They anticipate increases in payload and range of 30-40%, reducing noise by 50%, and reducing vibration by 90%.

Tekhomirov NIIP AESA radar unveiled for PAK-FA – The DEW Line

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So the Russians have now pulled the wraps off the Tikhomirov NIIP AESA radar intended for their next generation PAK-FA (see also
here)

The video says that it’s 2m in diameter, which would make it a big AESA array, but in the video, the model appears to be somewhere between 1 and 1.5 meters.

This appears to be a bit bigger than the APG-77 radar, which might be a way to improve performance relative to that radar.

Also note that the video shows some pitch and yaw on the array, which means that performance off bore sight should be pretty good.

It should do a pretty good job, even if the tech of the T/R modules is not as good, because antenna size tends to count for a lot.

Video pr0n for those of you who speak Russian: