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The Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened
An anonymous reader writes There have been many US military machines of war that seemed to be revolutionary, but never make it out of the prototype stage. As Robert Farley explains: "Sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough." A weapon can seem like an amazing invention, but it still has to adapt to all sorts of conditions--budgetary, politics, and people's plain bias. Here's a look at a few of the best weapons of war that couldn't win under these "battlefield" conditions.
You mean the rifled musket?
Jeez...
It's a good thing that some of those weapons were brought to the prototype stage, but not to production. Today, there's a strong tendency to have only one program underway for major aircraft, leading to production of marginal aircraft like the F-35.
There are many smaller weapons, such as the XM8 assault rifle, which made it to prototype but were then cancelled. Guided ammo for small arms has been demonstrated, but it's still some ways from being miitarily useful.
Laser weapons are in the same state - there are working demos, but they're not worth the trouble yet. Diode laser powered weapons are now up to 10KW (big array of 10W or so diodes), and can shoot down small rockets and artillery shells in demos. Current thinking is that, at 50KW-100KW, they'll be militarily useful.
Well, having been in an (German) Army Helicopter unit the "tight interaction" between ground troops and flying units requires stuff that fixed-wing aircrafts are not really good at. They can't stand still in the air, the cant land vertically in tight spaces (without burning people with jet exhaust like a VTOL jet would) , etc...
Basically anything fast/long-range/big is usually handled by the air force planes (or helicopters), while slow/agile/close coordination with ground troops is handled by the army air corps. Usually with helicopters, although some planes are used by armies, like the Britten-Norman Defender by the British army.
Granted, it sounds a tad like an episode from Thunderbirds, but it's real: Project Pluto was a nuclear powered Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (SLAM). The idea was to drive the reactor into critical state and superheat the inflowing air, efficiently creating a nuclear powered scamjet. Downside: because the reactor was almost unshielded, all controls had to be designed to withstand extreme radiation and heat (they had to work in white heat conditions). The project was canceled in the 60s, but they actually built and powered up the engines.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
I heard that the army uses helicopters not because they want to but because they have to (Air Force having jurisdiction over planes existing since late 40s as a seperate branch) and that in many missions they use helicopters planes would actually be superior.
Is this true?
The Key West Agreement that formed the Air Force had a stipulation that the Army would not have any armed aircraft. Lather that was re-interpreted as no armed FIXED-WING aircraft.
Side note on the Cheyenne, the helicopter that was to be the scout helicopter for the Cheyenne attack aircraft evolved into the AH-1 Cobra. IIRC, the original scout helicopter for the Cobra was the OH-6, later replaced by the OH-58.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
From the Stranger-than Strangelove dept:
http://jalopnik.com/the-flying-crowbar-the-insane-doomsday-weapon-america-1435286216/
Essentially a flying, unshielded nuclear reactor that flies around pissing out fission products, and crapping hydrogen warheads.
All to defend freedom and democracy,. of course...
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Government control over production and mass media isn't a left wing concept? You should coulda fooled me!
If you travel far enough to the left or to the right, you end up in the same place.
AVRO CF-105 Arrow, killed by the Diefenbaker government, all blueprints and airframes destroyed... (rumors say one might have survived)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Brings a new meaning to Black Friday :(
MACH 1.98 *official* speed, that's for the Mark1 with Pratt & Whitney J75 Turbojets, could have been even faster with Iroquois engines (that was in 1959), it tested faster than that on its first flight even with the J75s, but was lowered down to 1.98 because they wanted to sell the Iroquois engines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Could even replace the F-35 with lower costs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
A really nice documentary was made in 1996 starring Dan Aykroyd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Build it at a smaller size, with modern weaponry and avionics, kinda like the Dassault Mirage...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I worked Crusader for a while. I seem to recall that it was designed for Cold War, specifically a REFORGER scenario.
The collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and specifically the fall of the Soviet Union kind of made it useless, because it was too heavy to fight anywhere else.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Here's the list using the Wikipedia pages, so that you don't have to click through the tedious article and follow the links to various crappy websites that don't even have pictures:
AH-56 Cheyenne
B-70 Valkyrie
A-12 Avenger
Future Combat Systems
Sea Control Ship
and was totally opposed to all of those things
And yet was still big into state welfare/education/health and control of the populous. Just like the Left, but without Collectivism.
Heck, it didn't *need* collectivism, since it had power over the ownership class.
And why does the American Right keep complaining about people playing the Race Card, and then quoting Hitler like they uncritically believe him?
I don't recall the American Right (maybe the Faaaaar Right, but I don't pay attention to them) quoting Hitler on a regular basis, and when they do, it's in the vein of, Hitler said he was going to do X, and the Western Intelligentsia didn't believe him, but then he went and did it anyway. Thus, the world can't afford to ignore the rantings of crazy dictators with lots of money.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The US attempted to build a version of the British "Grand Slam" bomb. Fixing some of the aerodynamic issues and making assorted other "improvements", they ended up with a 44,000 lb. conventional unguided bomb. The Tallboy/Grand Slam series of bombs worked on a very simple principle - you send a gigantic shockwave through the ground as a result of an impact very close to mach 1, and a second shockwave through the ground as a result of a shaped charge.
This type of bomb destroys pretty much anything at the boundary between two different materials. So if you dropped one of these bombs on a reinforced concrete bunker, you'd pulverize the inside of the bunker without having to actually punch a hole right the way through. They were superb at taking out dams, far better than the bouncing bomb (Barnes Wallis designed both), because you didn't have to hit the dam at all. The interface between dam and valley was a weakpoint that, if shredded, would achieve exactly the same effect the bouncing bomb did - far more reliably and without the vulnerability.
The British version worked brilliantly. If, by "brilliantly", you mean removing all the armour, defences and bomb bay doors from a Lancaster bomber. Ok, to be fair, it did exactly what was intended. It destroyed ships, dams and factories in a way that no bomb before could.
So, what did the US version do?
What it should have done is make a mess of bunkers with 22' of reinforced concrete or less, and severely disrupt heavier bunkers than that.
What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.
What it did next was also nothing. The US abandoned all further work on it, as tactical nuclear weapons would have had more punch at a lighter weight.
Would it have changed warfare? It might have reduced the number of survivors from Tora Bora by a small amount, but the US had gas/incindiary bombs and air pressure bombs that could reach into the deepest caves there. An earthquake bomb might have reduced the time needed, but that's it. It might also have changed the Iraq invasion. A bomb that could pulverize deep bunkers would have made it much harder for neocons to claim WMDs were being stored in such bunkers. If you can target them directly, conventionally and reliably, your obvious next question is to ask where these bunkers are. Since US intelligence knew of no such bunkers, it would have had no positions to give.
Would it change the dynamics with Iran? The Iranians have placed their nuclear technology in bunkers with walls too thick for most conventional bombs and smaller tactical nukes. The concrete also uses a recipe that was, when last demonstrated in a technology exhibition in the US, around a hundred times stronger than the reinforced concrete used by the US military. However, strength doesn't matter here. The whole idea of sending a shockwave is that a hard, consistent medium delivers the shockwave that much better to the other side. And modern explosives are rather better than torpex. Having said that, there is still no US bomber capable of carrying such a weapon and there's no guarantee such a bomb would do anything worthwhile.
The next US project was also a variant of a Barnes Wallis design. They built a variant of the bouncing bomb. Originally, the bomb was never intended to attack things like dams, it was intended to lift ships out of the water. Military ships, especially, are not self-supporting structures. Lifted, even briefly and by a small amount, would be sufficient to break the back of a ship. Even if that didn't work, placing a bomb directly under a ship would likely crack the hull anyway. It would then sink almost immediately. Sinking at that speed would also pretty much guarantee no survivors. Barnes Wallis was incredibly sensitive to human cost, but his military inventions (only a small fraction of all the work he actually did) were designed to perform a specific task extremely well.
In this case, he was off by a bit. The bouncin
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's amazing, how the weapons of war, develop out of the fear from the idea, that one side has something the other does not. Take the XB-70. It wasn't a "black" project, and even if it was, soviet spies were in the USA watching as much as they could. Once Moscow got wind of the XB-70, they started on a project of their own. They needed something fast, that could intercept the XB-70. They came up with the Mig-25 Foxbat. A VERY fast plane. After the XB-70 was canceled, they kept on with the design, since it could out run, out climb anything in the west. I believe it was a Foxbat that pretty much walked away from a F-4 phantom sometime in the late 60's that spooked the USAF and they got McDonnell Douglas working on an interceptor that could match/beat the Foxbat. They came up with the F-15 Eagle (I still think it could be modded to outdo most anything today). The F-15 is a beast, beat the time to climb record too. In the mid 70's? someone defected in Japan with a Mig-25, almost crashing into a commercial jet at the Tokyo airport. Well of course the USAF pretty much went over it with a fine tooth comb before returning it. They found out the environmental system sucked, the build quality suffered greatly, and the engines were prone to needing replacement after a few missions. In other words, other than speed, it kind of sucked. But if you look back at history, the Mig-15 made the USAF develop the F-86, The Mig-21 was followed up by the F-4 phantom, the Mig-25 got the F-15 going, the F-16 got the Su-27, and on and on and on, just to one up the other guy. Lots of money, wasted, to some extent, if you look at all the rusted out hulks in the former soviet union, and the mothballed ones sitting in the dessert just outside Phoenix, AZ.
What you're thinking of is the result of the Key West Agreement which basically says the Army can have air assets with a reconnaissance or medical evacuation role. If they have a need for a fixed wing aircraft, blimp, helicopter or whatever within those roles, they can have them. Combat aviation machines remain the purview of the Air Force, so the A-10 tank buster and the AC-130 gunship whose primary mission is a ground support role are NOT Army assets, but Air Force. In practical terms, this has limited the Army to "low and slow" unarmed fixed wing recon platforms and helos for medivac duties. However, after the Viet Nam War, the Army was able to expand on those roles and start using smaller turboprop and light jet fixed wing craft for cargo transport and armed helicopters such as the Apache.
The Navy (and Marines) was able to keep its own combat aircraft for several reasons. My own summary of those reasons are a) Navy often operates too far away from Airforce bases for the usual type of cross-service support and b) The navy had done an excellent job of proving in the recently ended WWII of how effective carrier based aircraft are. A capability the Navy was not going to give up without a serious fight...
*It is generally accepted in military circles that special/covert operations units are exempt from the agreement, but because of the nature and scope of their missions, they are usually limited to choppers and transport craft anyway.
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Obviously you've never seen an A10 really working it, when they pop up above treetop level and your a badguy, your in for a world of whoop-ass.
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