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How To Make 96,000lbs of WWII Machinery Into High-Tech Research Platform
coondoggie writes "The US Naval Research Laboratory is taking a 96,000-pound piece of World War II-era machinery and turning it into a test-bed for leading edge communications and radar applications. The equipment was originally known as a three-axis tilting platform designed to simulate the movements of a large ship at sea. It was built by Westinghouse in 1943 as a gun platform requiring only primitive motion in roll, pitch and yaw, according to the Navy Lab. Specifically it was used as a mechanically operated deck with a heavy machine gun director and a machine gun mount installed. Gun crews and director operators could be trained on the platform under conditions that approximated the movements of a vessel at sea."
In 1943 it probably cost a few hundred thousand $ to build - if that.
Today's "updates" will cost $4.3 billion, be obsolete 6 months before completed, take 6 years, be the subject of multiple disciplinary hearings, congressional investigations and DOJ corruption probes, won't work, then ultimately will be outsourced to China for completion prior to being abandoned for a new technology.
headline? goofball?
This type of reuse of ex-military kit quite often happens, although not normally so long after it was originally used. I'm not sure if it's still running on the same engines but I know that the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank (UK), at one time the largest movable dish telescope, originally had a lot of parts cannibalised from engines taken from two battleships. Lovell, the maker of the telescope, had also previously been using quite a lot of reclaimed military kit for his astronomical observations before the actual radio telescope was built.
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Isn't it about time a technical site such as slashdot started using metric units , eg kilos? You know, for the rest of the world outside the USA who has no clue what the hell 96,000 lbs means? Even in the UK hardly anyone under the age of 60 uses lbs as a measurement any more.
...is that yacht builder Sea Ray and several Mercedes Benz dealers will see a significant boost in revenue.
So it was used back then as a platform to simulate movement at sea, and that's exactly what they are going to use it for now (after a few upgrades).
The F-16 jets were created in the 70s and are still upgraded to this day. I don't see how this is that different.
Ahh, American Ingenuity! Your average American's tax dollars hard at work... father's tax dollars.... grandfather's tax dollars?
Just marked your comment as spam.
Also you are a racist. Just because our family has the habit of giving each family member the same name we shouldn't be belittled. We are the Coward family. It all started with Grandpa Anonymous. He liked his name so much he gave the name to his daughter. Now it's a Coward family tradition. Can you imagine 50 family members all named Anonymous? It's stressful enough. Thank you.
I don't know if this mischievous boy of a nephew Anonymous caused trouble again. Sorry on behalf of the Coward family.
Yours Miss Anonymous Coward.
My grandfather served in the Aleutian Islands during the Korean War. They found a floating crane had been sunk in the bay. They pulled it up out of the water, repaired it, and actually got it working again. So the people at Grandpa's navy base proudly told the Pentagon what they'd accomplished. The Pentagon's reply? They were ordered to sink it back into the bay. Otherwise it would cut into sales of newly-manufactured floating cranes.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
I'm one of those Americans that HAS traveled abroad and I cordially invite you to create your own *technical* site with whatever units of measurement you see fit. The fact that you're even able to complain about this 'problem' is due to DARPA. You know them, they're the US agency responsible for the development of the internet.
Everyone wants to bitch about our units of measurement, but nobody seems to have any trouble accepting our units of currency.
(name withheld by request)
Works out to some 42000 Kg. But the picture shows the platform was getting its three degrees of freedom by very heavy gimbals. Though the whole apparatus is very heavy but the payload is not likely to more than any modern aircraft simulation platforms. Modern designs would use six hydraulic jacks and electronics to get not just three rotational degrees of freedom, but also limited degrees of freedom in translation. So wondering why someone would go through the trouble of rescuing that relic. The inertia of the gimbals is so high compared to the payload, upgrading the motors and electronics is going to be so expensive, it is probably cheaper to build a platform of similar capability using modern technology.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They should print US currency on soft rolls of paper. Then people can't say it isn't worth a crap!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Was disappointed.
I'm in the US and I guesstimate a kilo to be just under a half pound. So divide the number of pounds in half, then you have a rough value for the conversion.
So 1000 kilograms is around 500 lbs. Just don't use it as a conversion of a woman's weight. You may well feel the pain of that "rounding" error.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So they have a device to mimic the sea in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland which is next to the sea. It seems to me they could be better served by simply taking a boat out and training with the real thing. This is like having sex with a blow up doll while your wife is in the bed next to you.
There, fixed that for you.
When I encounter an unfamiliar measurement, I familiarize myself with it. Or I use Google or some other service to convert it into a measurement I *am* familiar with. What I don't do is insist that other people alter their behavior to suit me.
Eperlecques (near Watten, France) V2 launcher bunker: 120000 cubic meter of concrete
I guess the bombing campaign by the Allies ("Crossbow") was also a record.
The bunker remained intact but the oxygen compressors were too much of an explosion hasard during the earth quakes caused by the "tallboy"-bombs so that the V2 launching got postponed until the end of the war happened.
No.
There are 3 rough categories of people in the world:
1) Those who are not free
2) Those who live in the USA
3) Those who should be thankful or the USA.
Wouldn't want to be the guy to wire that one up.
It has been said that 63% of all statistics are made up
I thought the metric system was a decimal system. Who knew it was divided in to parts of 50,25,10,5 and 1 like the US currency system. Learn something new every day.
Great for parties.
If you poke a hole in your wife while trying something new, she does not just make a whistling sound and fly away. (Ok, maybe- depending on the location of the hole.)
the point is experimentation without the disaster involved with failure when tested at sea.
"chief, the turret bolts failed, and it slid off the platform."
Option A: "get the crane and put it back on."
Option B: "get a diving crew, survey the wreckage, and determine if recovery is feasible. Notify supply to start the build on a replacement just in case."
...is that the Death Star was made from obsolete Star Destroyers?
Nuff Said
It seems everyone is a coward these days ;)
Signed by,
Anonymous
I know exactly where this is. It overlooks the bay. A lot of really old crap on that base.