Slashdot Mirror

Reason why VAB was built and Pad 39A and 39B three miles away and using the crawler transporter was based on Saturn V rocket and its assembly and launch complex, all had to be ready in less than a decade. If they had to do it all over again with Space Shuttle, it would be done differently. But wait, it was! At least for Vandenberg AFB which was another Shuttle launch facility on west coast for polar orbits, see these pics at http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/3981.html and you can see overall was done very differently. Regarding Florida, they decide to reuse same facilities instead of scrapping and rebuilding from scratch for the Shuttle. VAFB was abandoned in later 1980s. For the Constellation program, they were to reuse the VAB, Pad39, and crawler (after all Constellation and SLS is Apollo on steroids).

Once this design flaw was identified, the powder was changed, the barrel was lined with chrome, and troops were given instructions and tools to clean the weapons. Afterward, they became much more reliable in jungle conditions.

Yep, except that they aren't being used in jungle conditions today - and guess what?..

Maybe, before they make more new shiny $25K toys for the infantry, they should take care of the basics first. The only countries using AR family of guns other than US are those which are able to purchase it from US for cheap or free. And no other infantry rifle in military use around the world uses direct impingement gas system.

I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).

What I find interesting is that you guys spend absolutely insane amount of money on big shiny toys like F-22, but your basic Army stuff - like the standard infantry rifle - still has known problems compared to most other designs in service of other countries, and, despite those problems being well known for a while now, and several attempts to do something about it, there is still no fix in sight.

It's almost as if big military projects are primarily about what you call "pork barrel spending", rather than about making your soldiers safer...

Not killing civilians. The whole issue is that Hamas has the sympathy of the people because of what Israel does, if Israel would oppress and kill Palestina people on a regular basis Hamas would have very little ground to stand on. You seem to have a problem understanding that in a cycle of violence there isn't a single guilty party, the action of party A are directly caused by party B and vice a versa. If you retaliate after every problem you can continue that cycle for a long long time.

Lol.. You must be ignoring things on purpose. You see, Hamas does A, Israel responds with B. Hamas won't stop A because of X, Y, or Z or anything else they have tried. Israel has to resort to B or live with Rockets and mortars spreading havoc on their cities causing property damage and loss of life.

If there is a problem here, it is that Hamas continues to do A. Israel won't stop B until Hamas stop's A. B is the result of A therefore A needs to be taken care of so B can go away. The problem as you see it is one of communication. You don't seem to get that B is a result of A, it is an attempt to stop A. If A went away, B would stop. If it looked like B was going to stop for good, X and Y would most likely go away too. The idea that Israel is killing civilians is only because the Cowardly Hamas is hiding in them and doing A, essentially putting them in danger. The UN "aid" truck that was hit had fertilizers and components for the rockets that were banned in the area, the head master at one of the schools hit was a lead Hamas Rocket engineer and was killed outside one loading rockets onto a truck, the other school was hit by the weapons cache and not the tank SABO round that targeted the hamas operatives. It was actually their ordinances that caused the damage to the school. But Hamas has some help in their slanting of the activities.

If you want to do something, they could have installed some Phalanx anti-missile units.

Well, maybe you were thinking of the Phalanx CIWS or this and this

My understanding is that there simply aren't enough of these that can be deployed as of yet. I'm not even sure that we are selling them to Israel but we are deploying them in our two wars as fast as they can be built. You would need quite a few of them because you would need to protect the entire Gaza border. Those do great jobs protecting a ship or a small base (Multiple units can link together and protect larger areas). I believe the Australians have a modified version for their navy ships that use 50cal ammo instead of the 20mm which isn't nearly as effective. I can't find any data on it's success rates but I think they got most of the bugs out. Ideally, Hamas could be convinced to stop fireing rockets. But they can't be, they are the KKK of the middle east and won't stop until either they are dead or the jews are. It looks like they are on the losing end of that. Maybe this system can be installed in teh future and make the rockets and mortars of Hamas pointless and obsolete.

Oh I see from googling around what you're talking about. That's a clever idea. The US Army version of the Phalanx system uses something called HEIT-SD rounds ("High Explosive Incendiary Tracer - Self Destruct") which self-destruct upon burnout of the tracer.

Wow you have some balls. First you provide us with some potentially good piece of statistics which the xls file by the Defense Manpower Data Center would be and then you just pile up the bullshit with that idiotic graph from the blog post. Anyway I thank you for that first piece of information which by the way shows that Bill Clinton lost 4 soldiers to hostile action during his term in office while George W. Bush lost 2600 so far for the same reason.

The statistic is odd in that it doesn't seem to count deaths due to terrorist action during Mr. Bushes term in office. Even if you count them as hostile action Mr. Clinton is still short by two orders of magnitude.

I also find the constantly high number of deaths through accident striking.

This whole thing seems to have been discussed before by the way. Thanks for spreading the idiocy to slashdot.
http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/004581.html

You could have convinced me that there might be a good reason to be in Iraq, but this is just disgusting.

"Or the Apache killing these unarmed men in a farmers field, working on a tractor."

I notice you selected the SNIPPED version. Here's a link to the full version.
Watch old boy play "hide the SA7", using his buddies and their equipment as cover. Note the whole interaction between the people, including the initial conversation by the car and the rapid ditching of the weapon in the field. I contemptuously defy anyone to link these behaviors to tractor repair. I work on ag equipment and tractors, and there is nothing among my parts stash or tool collection that is the size and shape of a handheld SAM tube. That is no grain drill section (note the dangling end cap when he runs), PTO shaft, or similar.

http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/001763.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wdJo-eoLxI (search 'helicopter kills" and compare versions)

"Or executing a wounded Iraqi"

How would/do/have YOU act/acted when you suspect(ed) an enemy fighter may be "playing possum"?

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/U.S._Navy_finds_soldie r_shot_wounded_Iraqi_at_Fallujah_in_self_defense

"A known tactic of anti-Iraqi forces (AIF) is to feign injury or death, and the marine could reasonably claim they were still a threat."

"Blowing up Mosque's doesn't look so good either."

Nor does using them for military purposes, which removes their protected status under the GC.

"Or this apparent murder of civilians driving by in their cars."

All we have is a "stovepiped" view from a cam, with no overall context as to what actions were taking place nearby. Note the cameraman, "Doc" comments that no unarmed people were harmed, and he would probably have been in a position to view the cleanup. Those vehicles could have done a driveby or similar off-camera, but we don't know either way.

"The famous "Awe Dude" air-strike on a crowd of civilians."

Post-strike assertions go both ways, but the ground controller called it in during the ground battle.
What did he see that we didn't?
All we see from the video is a group of people moving purposefully in one general direction.

Ideology-based conjecture is not proof.

BTW, you can read: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007810.php [windsofchange.net] and http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/003045.html [murdoconline.net] if you still have illusions about US aircrafts.

3. Current stealth technologies (ALL of them) only protect from certain radio wavelength. For example, F117 can be detected using one-meter-wavelength radars (as it was demonstrated during the last Balkan war). But you need a fairly large antenna to transmit at such wavelengths, so fighter jets need to use either passive radar system or phased arrays.
1. So what? It has incremental improvements in engines and armaments. After all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_launch_vehicle is still used today (though it was designed back in 60-s.

I'm sorry but I have to keep correcting your ignorance. You cannot install passive radar systems in fighter aircraft. Passive radar systems are huge and heavy and most are composed of multiple geographicly spaced platforms. Again your use of the term phased array is naive. A phased array is merely a trivial way of feeding antenna elements - there are millions of types of antennas which are phased arrays. The idea of phased array has nothing whatsoever to do with countering stealth per-se.

Nor has anyone claimed, righly so, that stealth makes aircraft undetectable. They merely reduce the radar cross section to a certain extent - and such reduction is indeed variable upon frequency as you pointed out. However VHF-radars, which have been used to detect stealth aircraft are slow, innaccurate and highpower (indeed because of the long wavelenght) and thus vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles and other countermeasures. They are ancient technology. The incident in the Balkan war was an exception that proves the rule. The enemy was incapable of threathing the air-supremacy of NATO and its operations, for all aircraft with or without stealth, because of the wide use of electronic warfare and planning of air-corridors. Stealth merely allows one to use such air-corridores more effectively.

As for Soyuz, nobody is suggesting that we should abandon the wheel because JSF is going to replace all our technology. We are going to see aircraft such as F16s, F18s, B52s flying well into the next decade and beyong because they are useful and econmical platforms. The JSF offers new capabilities, in addition to all the tech we have now and will only be produced in quantity that is required to meet these new special missions.

BTW, you can read: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007810.php and http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/003045.html if you still have illusions about US aircrafts.

3. Current stealth technologies (ALL of them) only protect from certain radio wavelength. For example, F117 can be detected using one-meter-wavelength radars (as it was demonstrated during the last Balkan war). But you need a fairly large antenna to transmit at such wavelengths, so fighter jets need to use either passive radar system or phased arrays.
2. And guess what was the first fighter to have it?
1. So what? It has incremental improvements in engines and armaments. After all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_launch_vehicle is still used today (though it was designed back in 60-s.

BTW, you can read:
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007810.php and http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/003045.html if you still have illusions about US aircrafts.