As someone who actively researches the technical aspects of nuclear weapon design, what you are saying here is grossly off base. Most of the hard part of most nuclear weapon designs is knowing what to build. Once you know that, some designs require the sort of precision machining that optical lenses need, but many designs can be done with ordinary industrial tolerances.
Modern US nuclear weapons are all of: compact, one-point safe, use insensitive high explosives, use minimum fissile material, have advanced countermeasures against improper use.
You can make compact, non-IHE, slightly more fissile material warheads much more easily, for example.
77.8 cm is "at least" twice the diameter of compact nuclear warheads that independent researchers know how to build.
Soccer balls have a 68-70 cm circumfrence (for standard sized), or a roughly 22 cm diameter. That would be smaller than any known implosion type nuclear weapon (10.75 in / 27 cm for W54 warhead). So it's not a soccer ball, it's a couple of inches more diameter than a soccer ball at least, probably a bit bigger than that if it's being done as a first design without prior testing.
"Criminals love to target students". Huh? In most cases of attacks on students these have been a result of students attack their own co-students.
Students beat each other up regularly. A bit. Rarely with any serious injury. With regularity, they date rape each other, unfortunately.
Forcible stranger rapes, murders, muggings, knifings, etc? Almost entirely off campus individuals.
I paid attention to statistics when I was in college, and my campus PD made them available.
". Semi-automatic rifles are, in many situations, less likely to hurt bystanders than shotguns." and in many/most cases the shotgun is superior because it is less likely to cause unintended damage. A rifle bullet can travel many miles and can also go through walls etc. Not a good thing in a situation where there are a lot of innocents around.
In some situations, a shotgun is safer. That doesn't include any attacker over about 60 meters away, anyone holding a hostage in front of them, etc.
Most rifle bullets don't go through walls. 5.56mm is notorious for being stopped by 2 sheets of drywall. Any professional knows this.
Yes, if fired upwards at high angles, some rifle bullets can travel a few miles. It's part of the risk and safety issues.
I smell armchair.
Blackwater is pretty handy for the forces "visiting" Iraq mainly because they are above the law and don't get hobbled by pesky military laws like US soldiers do.
Which is -
A. Completely immaterial to their police training operations in the US.
B. Completely false - the US government laws do cover Blackwater staff in Iraq, under any but the most paranoid interpretations of the law. The FBI are investigating the late 2007 big shootout and expect to be able to file charges if they find someone at fault. A defense attorney might wriggle out the legal ambiguity, but probably not. Judges aren't dumb. And Blackwater's head, and the head of the Diplomatic Security Service, asked for the law to be rewritten to clearly cover contractors for DSS.
Actually, in major mass shooting incidents, cops responding will form up pairs and go into the building after the shooter, in most departments. Forming a perimeter is so pre-Columbine...
I have to agree with the other responder - a lot of 18 and 19 year old students don't have great judgement on things like shoot / no shoot decisionmaking. And the law in the US prohibits handguns from anyone under 21 anyways, so that's 3/4 of the undergrads being unable to arm themselves anyways, unless you propose to change that law, too...
The Ohio National Guard were not a campus police force. Campus police forces have never opened fire on demonstrating students in the US, and are extremely unlikely to... if you actually talk to any officers on a campus PD anywhere, they're among the most tolerant and least likely to overreact officers on any police force in the world.
While I was at Berkeley, we had a number of riots in the city, ostensibly over UC policies (related to Peoples Park, mostly) but almost entirely carried out by non-students. We had an incident where the UC Berkeley SWAT team had to shoot and kill a crazy guy who'd shot and killed one student and was holding about 15 others hostage, forcing the women to strip and sexually abusing them. We had a local small female protester who broke into the Chancellor's house and tried to knife two police officers who were trying to get her out, which unfortunately got her shot and killed.
The same SWAT officer who shot the first named crazy in the head was the same guy I saw months later just sitting there and shaking his head a bit as Andrew Martinez, "The Naked Guy", walked by in his usual disattire, distracting a whole bunch of people from the "Make Peace Not Atoms" protest on Sproul Plaza.
Yes, incidents happen. But for the most part, students get away with pretty much anything short of assaulting each other or destroying campus property. And for every legit police abuse case that came up while I was in school, there were multiple cases of "The officer saved our asses"... from a multiple rapist, from a band of teenagers who were randomly attacking students with 2x4s, from muggers who'd knifed someone a couple of months ago...
If I'd ever seen a legitimate case of an officer oppressing someone, I'd pay more attention to your and the article writers' fears. But I haven't. And I've seen the stuff they actually did do to protect people.
Your right to feel secure in your paranoia doesn't extend as far as disarming or removing those who legitimately help save students lives and safety.
1. Police departments on campus getting more firearms, including semiautomatic rifles and pistols.
This is just dumb, for several reasons.
A. Students may not see it that way, but the reason that campus police have guns is to protect the students. Criminals love to target students. Better armed criminals argues for better armed campus police. Happy peaceful unarmed campus police equals soft target. And there are always some nuts out there. Campus police may seem intimidating to students, and part of their job is to keep students from rioting and burning campuses down during periodic fits of dissention, but their primary job is to go get the people who come from outside to prey on students.
B. 99% of police in the US now use semi-automatic pistols - they're just a better choice for officers than revolvers.
C. Semi-automatic rifles are, in many situations, less likely to hurt bystanders than shotguns, the more common shoulder arm police use. Police also have had some long-range issues (snipers, mass murders, etc) which rifles are needed to counter.
2. Blackwater as an example in the privatization
Blackwater has for a long long time been a police and security training company. They also got into private security in Iraq, yes, but what they do in the US is nearly entirely provide tactical and skills training to police officers. Do you want more professional, better trained police? Most people do... Doctors and Paramedics need continuing training, so should Police. Some departments are big enough to do most of their own training, but most aren't. Training is good.
The most important thing to realize about the IT management position is that the job role is a people job, not a technology job. You need to find out what people outside IT (your direct management, others in the company) think about IT and need from IT, and interface your group out to them to provide them services and success.
It's not an easy jump for technology people to make. Many fail miserably, or don't have any fun doing it.
If you're already a leader on the IT team - asked for advice, inside and outside the group; someone that the team look up to; etc - then you have a good chance at succeeding.
If you find yourself wanting to get back on system console and not wanting to email people and talk to them in person several times a day, not doing management-by-walking-around, then it may not be the job for you.
Yield strength of 160,000 PSI and ultimate tensile strength of 170,000 PSI for that temper condition of Ti-6Al-4V, and there are better Titanium alloys out there.
Yes, some of the really high strength maraging steels get better than twice that strength. But their use is even more restricted than Titanium is, because they're exotic to work and require the aging process after fabrication to attain the high strength. Few steels with more than about 150,000 PSI strength are in wide use. A vast majority of steels used widely have ultimate tensile strength less than 100,000 PSI. The exceptions are mostly T-1 / A514 for structural steel and 4130, 4140, and 4340 for machinery and aircraft parts.
The part that NASA is (purportedly, I haven't seen the contracts / specs yet) making open is the avionics architecture, the control computers, attitude and position sensors (GPS, Inertial navigation gyros, etc), and the software and physical network interconnects.
This isn't the rocket motors or physical stages. They want people to be able to propose upgraded computer systems, gyros, GPS units, etc. without having to rebuild the whole guidance system from scratch. So you make it modular, you use a technology like Avionics Full-Duplex Ethernet as the networking PHY and Datalink layers, you specify a realtime IP stack and the higher level protocols to use for transmitting status and position and control codes, etc.
Having to maintain 40-year-old computer and navigation equipment designs for the Space Shuttle has made everyone open to the idea of modular, upgradable, scalable, etc...
I personally would like to see the open source T2 re-released with the PCI-X and 10 gig ethernet, as Sun hints they will do once licensing is fixed:
Note - OpenSPARC T2 currently does not include PCI-Express and 10Gigabit Ethernet design implementation due to current legal restrictions. Equivalent models may be available in the subsequent releases of OpenSPARC T2.
The key problem with this article was that it took Judd Bagley's claims as accurate and failed to look into any possible misbehavior that he may have committed that would have justified his permanent exclusion from the site.
Yes, Bagley has made some valid points about Wikipedia failures and follies in the past. I can't think of any critic (internal or external) who has simply gone ape and not had any valid points at all ever.
However, Bagley also has taken extreme measures in repeated attempts to libel, harrass, and stalk Wikipedia people. He's tried to find people's home IP addresses by sending emails with embedded images pulling from a webserver he controlled and could check the access log on. He's called and harrassed people, including threatening phone calls. He maintains a blog and website which has made exceptional threats against WP people.
He got banninated because he's behaving really, really dangerously around people.
When journalists take his word about the crimes committed against him as revealed truth, without bothering to see if perhaps he might have caused them by misbehaving himself, it folds and spindles and mutilates the truth and sticks it away in a sad little corner.
Regarding Dan Tobias' comment on cliqueishness, there is some truth to this. But it cuts both ways. There is an "insiders club" of admins who are longstanding well known and work well together - I probably fall in this category - but very little happens in the club that's not out in public (wikien-l mailing list, or on the wiki). There are also critics who see any suspicious activity of the club as evidence for a malign cabal. I think Dan falls on that side but not to excess.
Wikipedia is not perfect, and probably never will be. But it is almost entirely open (access to info and ability to participate) - very few things are private or excluded, including participation in articles or internal policy and administration. Unless you vandalize or attack people on the site, anybody in the world can come participate. The barrier to entry to starting to participate in the policy and administration is a couple of week's worth of experience and coming up to speed if you focus on it.
who's to say the author of the wikipedia entry didn't actually copy his or her own work in to the wikipedia verbatim?
The issue is being pursued by Wikipedia user "Ydorb", who wrote the original material in question into Wikipedia. He appears not to be George Orwel, the book's author, based on him commenting that he thinks that the book stole his material.
People do contribute stuff they've written elsewhere to Wikipedia. They rarely if ever then attack themselves for copyright violation for having done so.
http://www.fit-pc.com/shipping-cost.htm/ says that the shipping cost is $40 first unit in North America, $20 in Israel, $60 in Europe, and $80 in other locations, plus $10/15/5/20 per additional unit in the same categories.
The article greatly oversimplified the compute HW setup. Nvidia has a many-thousand-node computational grid with servers across a wide variety of size tiers for different job types (mostly chip design/validation). Stuff is tested pretty extensively prior to mass purchase, and what's running a given size tier depends a lot on combinations of demand scheduling and HW vendor model rollout scheduling, both in CPUs and the boxes they sit in.
I call bullshit. I've never seen or heard of a composite part failing in the manner you described, carbon fiber, or one of the intrinsically more brittle ceramic fiber composites.
There are plenty of broken pieces of carbon fiber around to look at, from test labs, car accidents, the occational aircraft accident, broken golf clubs and tennis rackets, etc. Anyone with half a clue can go see CF that failed as it was intended to if overstressed.
There are two reasons that wings are typically tested out to destruction.
1. If you bend the wings to the 150% required load, you as a rule have caused enough damage that it will never be safe to fly or otherwise use again, even if it hasn't failed completely. Jetliners are routinely (every few years) scrapped due to overstressing them. With the test wing, there's nothing lost by testing it the extra few percent to complete destruction.
2. Some wings are designed with extra margin, or hoped to have some extra margin, so that a heavier or larger version of the airplane can be done later. Knowing where the current wing actually fails lets you set the maximum gross weight increase before you have to strengthen the wing.
The US Navy could hypothetically have manufactured a 560 foot long, 42 foot diameter fake ballistic missile submarine with a cool looking but fake prop on the back, and stuck it out where a satellite could see it just to fool the Chinese and Russians about our sub propellors.
Or they could have spent weeks taking a sub out of service, taking the real prop off, putting a fake on, hanging that out for people to see, and then putting the real one back on under cover of darkness / a shed. They are only a multibillion dollar national asset, part of our critical nuclear deterrent force, and only have 2 crews of 155 people each assigned, so it's not that big a deal to take it out of service for a couple of months to play a giant prank...
I know Derek (from online, for years, but not in real life), and he's been there and done that.
The general shape is not news; it's the same general shape as on a bunch of US attack sub prop pictures which have been public for 10+ years.
The photo reveals the blade advance ratio for that particular prop design, though, which is useful to adversaries, and is different than the attack sub props.
As far as I know, and I have a naval architecture degree and have followed sub and naval ship design reasonably well for 30+ years, enough details to determine blade advance ratio on Ohio SSBN props have never been public. It was widely known that they were skew / scythe props. But "It's of that general type" and "Oh, look, that's what speed it's designed for" are two different things. A smart hydrodynamicist or naval architect can use that and tell roughly how fast an Ohio can reasonably be expected to go at top end speed, and things about how much cavitation noise it will make accellerating in a sprint. Also, it can help map propellor RPM to speed.
It's important, and the blade advance angle there is very different than the previously widely known ones on attack sub props, and that will tell bad guys something.
Yes, these are just scythe/skew props. Pictures of similar props on attack subs have been out there for a while, and in trade publications for longer.
The blade advance angle of the Ohio prop can be determined from the sun angle and blade profiles, though, and that gives an adversary something useful...
Our propellers are more advanced than the other guy's.
They are.
A 2-D snap from a satellite is going to reveal significant details.
It did.
The propeller is real and was revealed by "accident".
It almost certainly is real; it's too similar to other known quiet props, with some interesting variations that the 2-D satellite image did in fact usefully reveal (blade advance angle), from the sun angle and shadows.
Those in fact tell a professional in the field something useful about the operating capabilities of the sub, in terms of its relative optimization for different types of operations.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who actively researches the technical aspects of nuclear weapon design, what you are saying here is grossly off base. Most of the hard part of most nuclear weapon designs is knowing what to build. Once you know that, some designs require the sort of precision machining that optical lenses need, but many designs can be done with ordinary industrial tolerances.
Modern US nuclear weapons are all of: compact, one-point safe, use insensitive high explosives, use minimum fissile material, have advanced countermeasures against improper use.
You can make compact, non-IHE, slightly more fissile material warheads much more easily, for example.
77.8 cm is "at least" twice the diameter of compact nuclear warheads that independent researchers know how to build.
Soccer balls have a 68-70 cm circumfrence (for standard sized), or a roughly 22 cm diameter. That would be smaller than any known implosion type nuclear weapon (10.75 in / 27 cm for W54 warhead). So it's not a soccer ball, it's a couple of inches more diameter than a soccer ball at least, probably a bit bigger than that if it's being done as a first design without prior testing.
South Africa spent about $160 million on their nuclear program, which successfully produced a number of weapons.
Billions is a gross overstatement...
It's a conspiracy by gate manufacturers to get everyone so sick of it that we stop using it.
Gate-gate!
I don't know, but I smell one now.
Students beat each other up regularly. A bit. Rarely with any serious injury. With regularity, they date rape each other, unfortunately.
Forcible stranger rapes, murders, muggings, knifings, etc? Almost entirely off campus individuals.
I paid attention to statistics when I was in college, and my campus PD made them available.
In some situations, a shotgun is safer. That doesn't include any attacker over about 60 meters away, anyone holding a hostage in front of them, etc.
Most rifle bullets don't go through walls. 5.56mm is notorious for being stopped by 2 sheets of drywall. Any professional knows this.
Yes, if fired upwards at high angles, some rifle bullets can travel a few miles. It's part of the risk and safety issues.
I smell armchair.
Which is -
A. Completely immaterial to their police training operations in the US.
B. Completely false - the US government laws do cover Blackwater staff in Iraq, under any but the most paranoid interpretations of the law. The FBI are investigating the late 2007 big shootout and expect to be able to file charges if they find someone at fault. A defense attorney might wriggle out the legal ambiguity, but probably not. Judges aren't dumb. And Blackwater's head, and the head of the Diplomatic Security Service, asked for the law to be rewritten to clearly cover contractors for DSS.
Actually, in major mass shooting incidents, cops responding will form up pairs and go into the building after the shooter, in most departments. Forming a perimeter is so pre-Columbine...
I have to agree with the other responder - a lot of 18 and 19 year old students don't have great judgement on things like shoot / no shoot decisionmaking. And the law in the US prohibits handguns from anyone under 21 anyways, so that's 3/4 of the undergrads being unable to arm themselves anyways, unless you propose to change that law, too...
The Ohio National Guard were not a campus police force. Campus police forces have never opened fire on demonstrating students in the US, and are extremely unlikely to... if you actually talk to any officers on a campus PD anywhere, they're among the most tolerant and least likely to overreact officers on any police force in the world.
While I was at Berkeley, we had a number of riots in the city, ostensibly over UC policies (related to Peoples Park, mostly) but almost entirely carried out by non-students. We had an incident where the UC Berkeley SWAT team had to shoot and kill a crazy guy who'd shot and killed one student and was holding about 15 others hostage, forcing the women to strip and sexually abusing them. We had a local small female protester who broke into the Chancellor's house and tried to knife two police officers who were trying to get her out, which unfortunately got her shot and killed.
The same SWAT officer who shot the first named crazy in the head was the same guy I saw months later just sitting there and shaking his head a bit as Andrew Martinez, "The Naked Guy", walked by in his usual disattire, distracting a whole bunch of people from the "Make Peace Not Atoms" protest on Sproul Plaza.
Yes, incidents happen. But for the most part, students get away with pretty much anything short of assaulting each other or destroying campus property. And for every legit police abuse case that came up while I was in school, there were multiple cases of "The officer saved our asses"... from a multiple rapist, from a band of teenagers who were randomly attacking students with 2x4s, from muggers who'd knifed someone a couple of months ago...
If I'd ever seen a legitimate case of an officer oppressing someone, I'd pay more attention to your and the article writers' fears. But I haven't. And I've seen the stuff they actually did do to protect people.
Your right to feel secure in your paranoia doesn't extend as far as disarming or removing those who legitimately help save students lives and safety.
Two issues out of the article -
1. Police departments on campus getting more firearms, including semiautomatic rifles and pistols.
This is just dumb, for several reasons.
A. Students may not see it that way, but the reason that campus police have guns is to protect the students. Criminals love to target students. Better armed criminals argues for better armed campus police. Happy peaceful unarmed campus police equals soft target. And there are always some nuts out there. Campus police may seem intimidating to students, and part of their job is to keep students from rioting and burning campuses down during periodic fits of dissention, but their primary job is to go get the people who come from outside to prey on students.
B. 99% of police in the US now use semi-automatic pistols - they're just a better choice for officers than revolvers.
C. Semi-automatic rifles are, in many situations, less likely to hurt bystanders than shotguns, the more common shoulder arm police use. Police also have had some long-range issues (snipers, mass murders, etc) which rifles are needed to counter.
2. Blackwater as an example in the privatization
Blackwater has for a long long time been a police and security training company. They also got into private security in Iraq, yes, but what they do in the US is nearly entirely provide tactical and skills training to police officers. Do you want more professional, better trained police? Most people do... Doctors and Paramedics need continuing training, so should Police. Some departments are big enough to do most of their own training, but most aren't. Training is good.
The most important thing to realize about the IT management position is that the job role is a people job, not a technology job. You need to find out what people outside IT (your direct management, others in the company) think about IT and need from IT, and interface your group out to them to provide them services and success.
It's not an easy jump for technology people to make. Many fail miserably, or don't have any fun doing it.
If you're already a leader on the IT team - asked for advice, inside and outside the group; someone that the team look up to; etc - then you have a good chance at succeeding.
If you find yourself wanting to get back on system console and not wanting to email people and talk to them in person several times a day, not doing management-by-walking-around, then it may not be the job for you.
Good luck!
A poor volume to strength ratio?
http://asm.matweb.com/search/SpecificMaterial.asp?bassnum=MTP642
Yield strength of 160,000 PSI and ultimate tensile strength of 170,000 PSI for that temper condition of Ti-6Al-4V, and there are better Titanium alloys out there.
Yes, some of the really high strength maraging steels get better than twice that strength. But their use is even more restricted than Titanium is, because they're exotic to work and require the aging process after fabrication to attain the high strength. Few steels with more than about 150,000 PSI strength are in wide use. A vast majority of steels used widely have ultimate tensile strength less than 100,000 PSI. The exceptions are mostly T-1 / A514 for structural steel and 4130, 4140, and 4340 for machinery and aircraft parts.
The part that NASA is (purportedly, I haven't seen the contracts / specs yet) making open is the avionics architecture, the control computers, attitude and position sensors (GPS, Inertial navigation gyros, etc), and the software and physical network interconnects.
This isn't the rocket motors or physical stages. They want people to be able to propose upgraded computer systems, gyros, GPS units, etc. without having to rebuild the whole guidance system from scratch. So you make it modular, you use a technology like Avionics Full-Duplex Ethernet as the networking PHY and Datalink layers, you specify a realtime IP stack and the higher level protocols to use for transmitting status and position and control codes, etc.
Having to maintain 40-year-old computer and navigation equipment designs for the Space Shuttle has made everyone open to the idea of modular, upgradable, scalable, etc...
See http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/datasheet.pdf
Not clear what the interconnect model is yet.
I personally would like to see the open source T2 re-released with the PCI-X and 10 gig ethernet, as Sun hints they will do once licensing is fixed:
http://opensparc-t2.sunsource.net/specs/OpenSPARCT2_Core_Micro_Arch.pdf pp 1-3
The RTL code (Verilog) is GPLed:
http://www.opensparc.net/faqs/licensing/
Other people have built and are shipping product with the prior T1 version, the SimpleRISC folks:
http://www.srisc.com/?s1
The licensing pretty much says "Here, have it, have fun!"
(Disclaimer - I am a Wikipedia administrator)
The key problem with this article was that it took Judd Bagley's claims as accurate and failed to look into any possible misbehavior that he may have committed that would have justified his permanent exclusion from the site.
Yes, Bagley has made some valid points about Wikipedia failures and follies in the past. I can't think of any critic (internal or external) who has simply gone ape and not had any valid points at all ever.
However, Bagley also has taken extreme measures in repeated attempts to libel, harrass, and stalk Wikipedia people. He's tried to find people's home IP addresses by sending emails with embedded images pulling from a webserver he controlled and could check the access log on. He's called and harrassed people, including threatening phone calls. He maintains a blog and website which has made exceptional threats against WP people.
He got banninated because he's behaving really, really dangerously around people.
When journalists take his word about the crimes committed against him as revealed truth, without bothering to see if perhaps he might have caused them by misbehaving himself, it folds and spindles and mutilates the truth and sticks it away in a sad little corner.
Regarding Dan Tobias' comment on cliqueishness, there is some truth to this. But it cuts both ways. There is an "insiders club" of admins who are longstanding well known and work well together - I probably fall in this category - but very little happens in the club that's not out in public (wikien-l mailing list, or on the wiki). There are also critics who see any suspicious activity of the club as evidence for a malign cabal. I think Dan falls on that side but not to excess.
Wikipedia is not perfect, and probably never will be. But it is almost entirely open (access to info and ability to participate) - very few things are private or excluded, including participation in articles or internal policy and administration. Unless you vandalize or attack people on the site, anybody in the world can come participate. The barrier to entry to starting to participate in the policy and administration is a couple of week's worth of experience and coming up to speed if you focus on it.
The issue is being pursued by Wikipedia user "Ydorb", who wrote the original material in question into Wikipedia. He appears not to be George Orwel, the book's author, based on him commenting that he thinks that the book stole his material.
People do contribute stuff they've written elsewhere to Wikipedia. They rarely if ever then attack themselves for copyright violation for having done so.
http://www.fit-pc.com/shipping-cost.htm/ says that the shipping cost is $40 first unit in North America, $20 in Israel, $60 in Europe, and $80 in other locations, plus $10/15/5/20 per additional unit in the same categories.
Where did you get $95 from?
The article greatly oversimplified the compute HW setup. Nvidia has a many-thousand-node computational grid with servers across a wide variety of size tiers for different job types (mostly chip design/validation). Stuff is tested pretty extensively prior to mass purchase, and what's running a given size tier depends a lot on combinations of demand scheduling and HW vendor model rollout scheduling, both in CPUs and the boxes they sit in.
I call bullshit. I've never seen or heard of a composite part failing in the manner you described, carbon fiber, or one of the intrinsically more brittle ceramic fiber composites.
There are plenty of broken pieces of carbon fiber around to look at, from test labs, car accidents, the occational aircraft accident, broken golf clubs and tennis rackets, etc. Anyone with half a clue can go see CF that failed as it was intended to if overstressed.
There are two reasons that wings are typically tested out to destruction.
1. If you bend the wings to the 150% required load, you as a rule have caused enough damage that it will never be safe to fly or otherwise use again, even if it hasn't failed completely. Jetliners are routinely (every few years) scrapped due to overstressing them. With the test wing, there's nothing lost by testing it the extra few percent to complete destruction.
2. Some wings are designed with extra margin, or hoped to have some extra margin, so that a heavier or larger version of the airplane can be done later. Knowing where the current wing actually fails lets you set the maximum gross weight increase before you have to strengthen the wing.
Sybase IQ / IQ-M, not basic Sybase.
Sybase has two completely different code base DB systems. "Sybase", the row-store RDBMS, and "Sybase IQ", the column-store data warehousing RDBMS.
We can still hear their subs miles away. And the Russians and Chinese aren't as effective at keeping their props under cover.
Yes, sure.
The US Navy could hypothetically have manufactured a 560 foot long, 42 foot diameter fake ballistic missile submarine with a cool looking but fake prop on the back, and stuck it out where a satellite could see it just to fool the Chinese and Russians about our sub propellors.
Or they could have spent weeks taking a sub out of service, taking the real prop off, putting a fake on, hanging that out for people to see, and then putting the real one back on under cover of darkness / a shed. They are only a multibillion dollar national asset, part of our critical nuclear deterrent force, and only have 2 crews of 155 people each assigned, so it's not that big a deal to take it out of service for a couple of months to play a giant prank...
Anything's possible.
Likely?
I know Derek (from online, for years, but not in real life), and he's been there and done that.
The general shape is not news; it's the same general shape as on a bunch of US attack sub prop pictures which have been public for 10+ years.
The photo reveals the blade advance ratio for that particular prop design, though, which is useful to adversaries, and is different than the attack sub props.
As far as I know, and I have a naval architecture degree and have followed sub and naval ship design reasonably well for 30+ years, enough details to determine blade advance ratio on Ohio SSBN props have never been public. It was widely known that they were skew / scythe props. But "It's of that general type" and "Oh, look, that's what speed it's designed for" are two different things. A smart hydrodynamicist or naval architect can use that and tell roughly how fast an Ohio can reasonably be expected to go at top end speed, and things about how much cavitation noise it will make accellerating in a sprint. Also, it can help map propellor RPM to speed.
It's important, and the blade advance angle there is very different than the previously widely known ones on attack sub props, and that will tell bad guys something.
Hi Derek...
Yes, these are just scythe/skew props. Pictures of similar props on attack subs have been out there for a while, and in trade publications for longer.
The blade advance angle of the Ohio prop can be determined from the sun angle and blade profiles, though, and that gives an adversary something useful...
They are.
It did.
It almost certainly is real; it's too similar to other known quiet props, with some interesting variations that the 2-D satellite image did in fact usefully reveal (blade advance angle), from the sun angle and shadows.
Those in fact tell a professional in the field something useful about the operating capabilities of the sub, in terms of its relative optimization for different types of operations.