And what do you think a laser suited for taking down ICBMs is going to do to a 'mere' SAM?
I know the border with China could be considered secure in most circumstances, that's why I specified the launch site and distance from Seoul, as well as mentioning that if they want to hit the USA their missile is going to have to get a lot closer to areas where a plane COULD fly. Over the sea of Japan, most likely.
Now, the need to fly the plane 24/7 (more likely you'd need 6 planes to always have one in the air to intercept), is a very valid point and why I'd support also having ground based systems that use a similar technology - just scaled up because you don't need to watch the weight. It's not insurmountable to make the lasers 100X as powerful. Preferably use some of the same tricks used by ground based telescopes to get the beam on target. You might still want the plane so it can scramble when the weather isn't right for a ground based laser, but is still favorable for missile launch.
There's been quite a bit of work to 'cure' type I diabetes, type II is a bit harder to manage. Resistance is harder to fix than replacing.
A weight loss pill without side effects would help immensely. Heck, adjusting our lifestyles so we walk about an OOM more would be great. Fix our bloody addiction to high-calorie food. Really, there's lots of options, most of which simply adds up to 'match our calorie intake to expenditures better'.
I've been able to lose weight, but I call it an addiction for a reason.
It could be done, you'd just probably be looking at a short, unreliable lifespan, as you mention.
There are refrigeration units designed for this sort of work load, but you're more likely to find them in commercial food preparation and industrial areas. Assuming you found an 'old'* one of these in the shape of a fridge, it'd work pretty good. Datacenters do it all the time with huge building sized AC systems.
*Old being relative when it comes to high duty cycle industrial equipment.
Hate to say this, but I'd probably be blocking certain 'reforms' of the college loan system right now. It's my belief that college tuition is currently in a bubble, much like the home market was(and it's still inflated in some areas!). Basically, dropping loan rates to 1% wouldn't help when a home that should be worth $50k is selling for $500k. Or $100k in loans for a job earning $40k. As such, I'd be pushing for legislation to pop that bubble. And one of the ways to do that is to tighten the credit market, dry up the market of people willing to get in over their heads with debt.
Basically, I'm not going to try to keep the interest for student loans low(just let me know if you meant total amount, not just interest), in favor of trying to get college tuition rates under control.
Boeing YAL-1:the ABL achieves its design goals, it could destroy liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely be limited to 300 km, too short to be useful in many scenarios, according to a 2003 report by the American Physical Society on National Missile Defense.
Looking at a couple maps of North Korea, there are no regions 300 km away from water or foreign territory. 600 km would allow intercept for most of the country from South Korea. Looking at the launch site northwest of Pyongyang, it looks to be about 300km from Seoul.
Plus, any launch vectors that would have a hope of hitting the USA(or other countries not within range of SRBM) will rapidly leave NK territory and be within range of an appropriately positioned plane.
By 'Mark 1' I simply meant 'first generation'. I said 'wind farm' because you can literally go back to the time of the Roman Empire to get wind mills used for things like milling grain or pumping water. Individual turbines have been known for a long time. Heck, History of wind power features a wind powered generator from 1888. Going by that picture, you're still looking at over 4 people high to the bottom of the blades.
Age wise, the earliest I'd expect to see serious wind farms would be the '80s. As for the height, do you mean in total or just to the bottom of the blades? Depending on how close you were, they can mess with perspective(IE your estimates might not be accurate).
The smallest, a 200kW model, has a rotor height of 30m and a blade diameter of 38.1. That would put the bottom of the blade at 11 meters up. 2-3 people high, guessing at 2M per 'person', would be 4-6M high for the bottom of the blade. I'm assuming that any lower than that would be considered unsafe for people, so I doubt the height of the turbines you saw were really only 2-3 people high in total, the blades could easily hit somebody that low.
The possibility that they were there for some reason other than electricity generation still exists, of course. All the stuff up above amounts to 'not enough data!'.
The prospect of turbines warming the ground up a degree, even in exchange for a slight overall cooling effect, could be very useful for farms further north - which 'waste' a good part of the spring waiting for the ground to thaw enough for plants to grow. A single degree farenheight could mean an extra 3-7 days of growing season where I'm at, during a period of 16-18 hours of sunlight. 'Climate Change' is NOT always bad.
Update: Talked with a flightline guy. His quoted weight for an ACES II ejection seat, fully loaded, was '700 pounds'. That includes survival kit, life support supplies, etc... I'm sure he's rounding. Forgot to ask if that included the pilot.;)
Do you happen to have a quote on the weight? The closest I could find is 496 pounds for an ACES, 450lb(205kg) for an ancient Russian K-36 which should be within the design tolernances of a cockpit originally designed for three, at least for limited use. (Note: the K-36D may have gained weight, it was listed as 'noticeably heavier than the ACES II')
Heck, that site says that a lightweight model suitable for trainers was developed - don't need to deal with significant slip-stream or ejection speeds over 510kts(727 cruise is 521kt)? 110lb with the K-36LT-3-5. Need that extra bit of speed capability? The K-36D-3.5 only ups that to 156lb giving you safe ejection up to 595 kt.
As for the rockets disfiguring the hole, that's why I said 'appropriately sized'. He's not going to be mangled if he's already OUT of the plane by the time the rockets mangle the exit with their exhaust.
Per the RAF and 'limited number of ejections' comment, well, my research shows that ejection seats have drastically improved from the '80s. I was thinking something modern, like an ACES II, would be used. The ACES II seat keeps maximum ejection forces between 12 and 14 G, a far cry from the 25+ seen with early seats which often seriously injured the one using it, sometimes even killing them.
After all that, I'll note that in retrospect I'll agree with most of the other posters-an actual ejection seat was unlikely to have been used. At this point the logistics of fitting a 727 with an actual functioning ejection seat is more an interesting mental exercise.
People who buy ad space to have their logos on something typically don't like to see them deliberately destroyed; even with NASCAR it's a calculated risk.
And if this was mythbusters this would be precisely the reason they'd go with the ejection seat.;)
As for 'extensive modifications', my understanding is that, at this point, an ejection seat simply needs an appropriately sized hole to go through(admittedly bigger than what just a person would need), and two rails to guide it. The rest of the unit is self contained and zero-zero units would easily clear the tail.
But you're right, to my sadness rockets would also tend to scorch the avionics area too much. It's not like in this case that they couldn't simply have the pilot put it in automatic level flight for a few minutes to get out before the remote operation people set it to crash.
50' of room for shock absorption? That's a third of the length of a 727! I take it you're counting everybody before the wings as expendable? Also, planes don't always lawn dart, for a belly collision you have about 5'. I said 'about' because I knew it wasn't exactly 10X. Depending on the accident mode, a plane could be traveling faster than design.
Don't forget newton. Twice the velocity means four times the energy. At over 8 times the velocity of our 65mph car, you're looking at having to disperse 77 times the energy.
I figure that the ejection was due to the regulations and cost making a pure remote flight impractical.
As for the ejection from the 727, assuming it was from an actual ejection seat I'd assume that it was installed custom, commercial planes don't come with ejection equipment by default. As such, it'd be 'however the engineers decided to install this one-off system'.
I'd probably go with a custom installed hatch in top with explosive bolts, with a fairly standard ejection chair installed on appropriate rails.
On the other hand, going down, like how B52 ejection works, might actually make more sense - with a 727 you have engines mounted high and to the back; you really, really want to avoid being anywhere near those when you eject. Remember, they're sucking air during operation. There's also the big tail to consider.
Still, you're looking at a lot more length than a fighter and a nice big rocket engine should give you plenty of clearance.
Better to spend time and money doing specific stress tests.
When it comes to planes, it's more along the lines of doing specific stress tests to make sure that component failures don't cause a crash in the first place. Cars barely make crashes at 65mph survivable. Survivable crashes at around 10 times that speed just aren't achievable.
We've been converting planes into remote controlled drones since around WWII. It's a bit more complicated than converting a car to remote control, like what mythbusters does in a couple days all the time, but it's fairly straightforward with the right people today.
On the other hand, maybe the pilot was because operating a drone over occupied land requires permits, inspections, and certifications that were more hassle than having a pilot take it up until it was over the target area before bailing.
Add to that it just needs to fly once. This massively lowers the cost and requirements of being able to do this. Discovery probably even got given one, and they probably didn't bank roll the entire thing on their own either, there's a lot of interest parties that would front up cash for such an opportunity to gather data.
I figure they probably ended up paying somewhere between one and five million for the plane, but recovered at least 90% of the cost between grants, sponsorships, and selling research space. There's good odds they made a little money, even before you figure in the profits from the show.
Even a non-flight worthy plane is worth almost a million. And as you say, there's a big difference between a plane with a useful amount of service life left, one that can still take passengers, and one that only needs to make a couple flights with limited flight crews. I figure 1 flight to the airport where the modifications are made, and 1 to the crash. They probably kept it ready to make a landing 'just in case' something went wrong and it wasn't a good day for the crash.
I know that. Why do you think that I specified installing one? Just because it's not standard equipment doesn't mean that there aren't companies out there perfectly capable of putting one in. Heck, they've installed ones in cars before.
I agree, he might not have actually ejected via an ejection seat, but then again, he might of. Something to watch the documentary for?
Indeed. Let's say the cost getting the plane and refurbishing it for this cost $6M. A 727-100C could carry 94 passengers, and/or ~17k kg of cargo. So you charge $64k per 'seat' for experiment space or $353 per kg of experiment, which ever is greater. The actual research could be extremely wide - testing new airline seat's crash-worthiness, validating the current crash models, crash dummies in general, cabin air samples during/after a crash, etc...
You get a grant from various governments for the environmental study involving the clean up of the crash site, have the ejection seat installed by one of the companies that do such things for research/advertising purposes, etc...
Being interested in 'just' making the documentary, they're providing a rare opportunity for research at a good discount without stepping on the toes of various research organizations that couldn't cooperate on their own to get this done.
It's not a 747, it's a 727. A quick search of www.aviatorsale.com shows you can get one for ~$5M, not $800M. Some prices are less than a million, but I figure those are for non-operational planes. Production stopped in 1984, so you know they didn't bust up a new one. I figure they used a plane equivalent to the junker cars mythbusters and such destroy regularly.
Then you turn around and contact various agencies to get them to 'sponsor' the crash, allowing them to place scientific experiments(like the crash test dummies) on board for a share of the overall cost.
Done right, Discover could have gotten it's cost of the documentary down to the cost of the film crews.
Slashdot Mirror
And what do you think a laser suited for taking down ICBMs is going to do to a 'mere' SAM?
I know the border with China could be considered secure in most circumstances, that's why I specified the launch site and distance from Seoul, as well as mentioning that if they want to hit the USA their missile is going to have to get a lot closer to areas where a plane COULD fly. Over the sea of Japan, most likely.
Now, the need to fly the plane 24/7 (more likely you'd need 6 planes to always have one in the air to intercept), is a very valid point and why I'd support also having ground based systems that use a similar technology - just scaled up because you don't need to watch the weight. It's not insurmountable to make the lasers 100X as powerful. Preferably use some of the same tricks used by ground based telescopes to get the beam on target. You might still want the plane so it can scramble when the weather isn't right for a ground based laser, but is still favorable for missile launch.
Interesting... Learn something every day.
There's been quite a bit of work to 'cure' type I diabetes, type II is a bit harder to manage. Resistance is harder to fix than replacing.
A weight loss pill without side effects would help immensely. Heck, adjusting our lifestyles so we walk about an OOM more would be great. Fix our bloody addiction to high-calorie food. Really, there's lots of options, most of which simply adds up to 'match our calorie intake to expenditures better'.
I've been able to lose weight, but I call it an addiction for a reason.
Unless you have some idea on how to fix the system without screwing somebody, in many ways it's only going to get worse the longer we wait.
It could be done, you'd just probably be looking at a short, unreliable lifespan, as you mention.
There are refrigeration units designed for this sort of work load, but you're more likely to find them in commercial food preparation and industrial areas. Assuming you found an 'old'* one of these in the shape of a fridge, it'd work pretty good. Datacenters do it all the time with huge building sized AC systems.
*Old being relative when it comes to high duty cycle industrial equipment.
Hate to say this, but I'd probably be blocking certain 'reforms' of the college loan system right now. It's my belief that college tuition is currently in a bubble, much like the home market was(and it's still inflated in some areas!). Basically, dropping loan rates to 1% wouldn't help when a home that should be worth $50k is selling for $500k. Or $100k in loans for a job earning $40k. As such, I'd be pushing for legislation to pop that bubble. And one of the ways to do that is to tighten the credit market, dry up the market of people willing to get in over their heads with debt.
Basically, I'm not going to try to keep the interest for student loans low(just let me know if you meant total amount, not just interest), in favor of trying to get college tuition rates under control.
Boeing YAL-1:the ABL achieves its design goals, it could destroy liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely be limited to 300 km, too short to be useful in many scenarios, according to a 2003 report by the American Physical Society on National Missile Defense.
Looking at a couple maps of North Korea, there are no regions 300 km away from water or foreign territory. 600 km would allow intercept for most of the country from South Korea. Looking at the launch site northwest of Pyongyang, it looks to be about 300km from Seoul.
Plus, any launch vectors that would have a hope of hitting the USA(or other countries not within range of SRBM) will rapidly leave NK territory and be within range of an appropriately positioned plane.
By 'Mark 1' I simply meant 'first generation'. I said 'wind farm' because you can literally go back to the time of the Roman Empire to get wind mills used for things like milling grain or pumping water. Individual turbines have been known for a long time. Heck, History of wind power features a wind powered generator from 1888. Going by that picture, you're still looking at over 4 people high to the bottom of the blades.
Age wise, the earliest I'd expect to see serious wind farms would be the '80s. As for the height, do you mean in total or just to the bottom of the blades? Depending on how close you were, they can mess with perspective(IE your estimates might not be accurate).
Hmmm... Here's a chart of NASA/DOE Prototypes.
The smallest, a 200kW model, has a rotor height of 30m and a blade diameter of 38.1. That would put the bottom of the blade at 11 meters up. 2-3 people high, guessing at 2M per 'person', would be 4-6M high for the bottom of the blade. I'm assuming that any lower than that would be considered unsafe for people, so I doubt the height of the turbines you saw were really only 2-3 people high in total, the blades could easily hit somebody that low.
The possibility that they were there for some reason other than electricity generation still exists, of course. All the stuff up above amounts to 'not enough data!'.
The prospect of turbines warming the ground up a degree, even in exchange for a slight overall cooling effect, could be very useful for farms further north - which 'waste' a good part of the spring waiting for the ground to thaw enough for plants to grow. A single degree farenheight could mean an extra 3-7 days of growing season where I'm at, during a period of 16-18 hours of sunlight. 'Climate Change' is NOT always bad.
Update: Talked with a flightline guy. His quoted weight for an ACES II ejection seat, fully loaded, was '700 pounds'. That includes survival kit, life support supplies, etc... I'm sure he's rounding. Forgot to ask if that included the pilot. ;)
Do you happen to have a quote on the weight? The closest I could find is 496 pounds for an ACES, 450lb(205kg) for an ancient Russian K-36 which should be within the design tolernances of a cockpit originally designed for three, at least for limited use. (Note: the K-36D may have gained weight, it was listed as 'noticeably heavier than the ACES II')
Heck, that site says that a lightweight model suitable for trainers was developed - don't need to deal with significant slip-stream or ejection speeds over 510kts(727 cruise is 521kt)? 110lb with the K-36LT-3-5. Need that extra bit of speed capability? The K-36D-3.5 only ups that to 156lb giving you safe ejection up to 595 kt.
As for the rockets disfiguring the hole, that's why I said 'appropriately sized'. He's not going to be mangled if he's already OUT of the plane by the time the rockets mangle the exit with their exhaust.
Per the RAF and 'limited number of ejections' comment, well, my research shows that ejection seats have drastically improved from the '80s. I was thinking something modern, like an ACES II, would be used. The ACES II seat keeps maximum ejection forces between 12 and 14 G, a far cry from the 25+ seen with early seats which often seriously injured the one using it, sometimes even killing them.
After all that, I'll note that in retrospect I'll agree with most of the other posters-an actual ejection seat was unlikely to have been used. At this point the logistics of fitting a 727 with an actual functioning ejection seat is more an interesting mental exercise.
It could just be a Mark 1 wind farm. Individual turbines have gotten a lot bigger and taller over the years.
People who buy ad space to have their logos on something typically don't like to see them deliberately destroyed; even with NASCAR it's a calculated risk.
awesome-yet-nonsense
And if this was mythbusters this would be precisely the reason they'd go with the ejection seat. ;)
As for 'extensive modifications', my understanding is that, at this point, an ejection seat simply needs an appropriately sized hole to go through(admittedly bigger than what just a person would need), and two rails to guide it. The rest of the unit is self contained and zero-zero units would easily clear the tail.
But you're right, to my sadness rockets would also tend to scorch the avionics area too much. It's not like in this case that they couldn't simply have the pilot put it in automatic level flight for a few minutes to get out before the remote operation people set it to crash.
50' of room for shock absorption? That's a third of the length of a 727! I take it you're counting everybody before the wings as expendable? Also, planes don't always lawn dart, for a belly collision you have about 5'. I said 'about' because I knew it wasn't exactly 10X. Depending on the accident mode, a plane could be traveling faster than design.
Don't forget newton. Twice the velocity means four times the energy. At over 8 times the velocity of our 65mph car, you're looking at having to disperse 77 times the energy.
I figure that the ejection was due to the regulations and cost making a pure remote flight impractical.
As for the ejection from the 727, assuming it was from an actual ejection seat I'd assume that it was installed custom, commercial planes don't come with ejection equipment by default. As such, it'd be 'however the engineers decided to install this one-off system'.
I'd probably go with a custom installed hatch in top with explosive bolts, with a fairly standard ejection chair installed on appropriate rails.
On the other hand, going down, like how B52 ejection works, might actually make more sense - with a 727 you have engines mounted high and to the back; you really, really want to avoid being anywhere near those when you eject. Remember, they're sucking air during operation. There's also the big tail to consider.
Still, you're looking at a lot more length than a fighter and a nice big rocket engine should give you plenty of clearance.
Better to spend time and money doing specific stress tests.
When it comes to planes, it's more along the lines of doing specific stress tests to make sure that component failures don't cause a crash in the first place. Cars barely make crashes at 65mph survivable. Survivable crashes at around 10 times that speed just aren't achievable.
Plenty of crash test footage for cars out there.
We've been converting planes into remote controlled drones since around WWII. It's a bit more complicated than converting a car to remote control, like what mythbusters does in a couple days all the time, but it's fairly straightforward with the right people today.
On the other hand, maybe the pilot was because operating a drone over occupied land requires permits, inspections, and certifications that were more hassle than having a pilot take it up until it was over the target area before bailing.
Add to that it just needs to fly once. This massively lowers the cost and requirements of being able to do this. Discovery probably even got given one, and they probably didn't bank roll the entire thing on their own either, there's a lot of interest parties that would front up cash for such an opportunity to gather data.
I figure they probably ended up paying somewhere between one and five million for the plane, but recovered at least 90% of the cost between grants, sponsorships, and selling research space. There's good odds they made a little money, even before you figure in the profits from the show.
Even a non-flight worthy plane is worth almost a million. And as you say, there's a big difference between a plane with a useful amount of service life left, one that can still take passengers, and one that only needs to make a couple flights with limited flight crews. I figure 1 flight to the airport where the modifications are made, and 1 to the crash. They probably kept it ready to make a landing 'just in case' something went wrong and it wasn't a good day for the crash.
Oh yeah, and at least my Discover card doesn't come with an annual fee.
727s don't have ejection seats.
I know that. Why do you think that I specified installing one? Just because it's not standard equipment doesn't mean that there aren't companies out there perfectly capable of putting one in. Heck, they've installed ones in cars before.
I agree, he might not have actually ejected via an ejection seat, but then again, he might of. Something to watch the documentary for?
Or as simple as a single letter typo. I consider myself lucky to have only one per post.
Technically you said 800,000,000 million. Or 800 Trillion. Even in pennies that's rather high. ;)
Indeed.
Let's say the cost getting the plane and refurbishing it for this cost $6M. A 727-100C could carry 94 passengers, and/or ~17k kg of cargo. So you charge $64k per 'seat' for experiment space or $353 per kg of experiment, which ever is greater. The actual research could be extremely wide - testing new airline seat's crash-worthiness, validating the current crash models, crash dummies in general, cabin air samples during/after a crash, etc...
You get a grant from various governments for the environmental study involving the clean up of the crash site, have the ejection seat installed by one of the companies that do such things for research/advertising purposes, etc...
Being interested in 'just' making the documentary, they're providing a rare opportunity for research at a good discount without stepping on the toes of various research organizations that couldn't cooperate on their own to get this done.
It's not a 747, it's a 727. A quick search of www.aviatorsale.com shows you can get one for ~$5M, not $800M. Some prices are less than a million, but I figure those are for non-operational planes. Production stopped in 1984, so you know they didn't bust up a new one. I figure they used a plane equivalent to the junker cars mythbusters and such destroy regularly.
Then you turn around and contact various agencies to get them to 'sponsor' the crash, allowing them to place scientific experiments(like the crash test dummies) on board for a share of the overall cost.
Done right, Discover could have gotten it's cost of the documentary down to the cost of the film crews.