Where are these mythical greedy rural folks expecting handouts you talk about? Cause I've never met a one living in such places my whole life. I have however met many a person in the city living on welfare with an escalade in the driveway and using a food stamp funded cell phone.
and it may also interest you to know that Rural demographics arent that far different from city when it comes to votes. its not nearly so all red as you would like to believe. it has a bigger portion going red, granted. but if the nation avg is 50/50, and that fairly true over time, rural folks go maybe 60/40 and you the reverse in cities.
point being: you need to pack up your extra wide jumbo brush of stereotypes.
Lets say: I have a skill set. This company will pay me 1M for it, that one for 1.5M. I choose the 1.5M. I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do, but I'm worth at least 1.8M. Now two other companies are tryinig to pull me away. current company offers an increase to 2.2M to keep me because Company A offerered me the same to come to them. Company B sneaks in an off for 2.4M. Current company can't give any more currently, but offers stock options and extra benefits.
Um...you realize these pilots are not soloing right? That's not what that word means. To solo means to take your first "solo" flight. These guys already did that.
These guys have already been through over a year's worth of flight training, including actual flying, before even strapping on one of those F22s or 35s.
They dont put a guy fresh out of OCS into a sim and then right into a plane. You go through close to 6 months of ground school before you even get in a cockpit. What cockpit you ask? These days a T34 or similar. A 2seat prop trainer. Eventually, depending on career path, you move up to a T38, or similar two seat jet trainer. I believe the Air Force has them too, but I know the Marines have training squadrons setup for each type; non-combat units that exist solely to train pilots from flight school on their specific type of aircraft; particularly important for those single seat craft, before they get to a real, operational unit.
Excellent point. And lets not forget, these arent company reps and engineers working on them usually. It's airmen and sailors and Marines. A lot of us are damn good. But we're not perfect, and these complicated machines. Sometimes it may take a month to get a really ornery gripe sorted out.
"New" cobra and huey models are coming to the Marines now. Some of those are all new airframes. Others are upgrades of existing airframes...and of those, some of those were upgrades of previous airframes too!
The mystery, intermittent gripe, the way "29" always seems to need longer to get the engine started, or the way "12" always pulls to the left a bit around X airspeed. Aircraft develop idiosyncracies.
"since the vietnam war" There also hasnt been a real air war since Vietnam, and yet there's still be a few dogfight incidents. Missiles fail, missiles can be jammed/countered/evaded. What happens then? More missles? You can only carry so many. Turn and run? Not always tactically viable, and makes you a nice big target.
Sensors can be evaded, thus negating the BVR combat space, letting him get that much closer and taking you by surprise. they can be vectored in on a blind spot (we dont -always- have AWACS radar coverage), they might appear from below you (particularly zoom climb interception profiles, aircraft that were never BVR to start with). hell, that's pretty much the whole concept behind stealth: to negate the other guys detection abilities and get him by surprise. As more and more stealth planes appear, as was bound to happen, it decreases the usefulness of the BVR-only concept, once again pointing out how focusing just on BVR will bite you in the ass.
Point is, you cannot, just CANNOT, tunnelvision on just one tactic. You must remain flexible, you must not leave a backdoor wide open. And that is why to this day we still teach dogfighting tactics, perhaps even moreso than BVR combat training (because it's more complex, and less forgiving).
You cannot build a giant nearly invulnerable death machine, and then ignore the thermal exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor core, even if it is only 2 meters wide.
Internet access is the modern embodiment to Freedom of the Press, Speech, Religion, and Assembly, etc. In the internet you will find all these basic concepts of communication and association combined in one place. Access to the internet is the modern equivalent of all aspects of the First Amendment. It is very much just as important as a basic education, if not more so because it can itself be used to educate./idealistic rant off
to piggyback onto that, its only in the last 6 years or so that China has built its first nuclear subs, and they are missle boats. 5 in service, 1 still udner construction. Theya re not yet armed, Chian hasnt compelted developement of their SLBM yet. Btu the ships are in service, and we do shadow them already, much as we already shadowed some of their oldfashioned deisel/battery subs just to get a feel for what china can do. Our guys are kinda already pro at this game thanks to the last several decades.
No, it is settled and not because I looked up a word in a dictionary. Though, they arent called ballistic for the hell of it.
But I am purposely keeping it simple because this is/. and still most of these people cant tell the difference between a ballistic munition and a guided one. But since you want to be an obtuse arse, ok:
The first classes of ballistic missles went up and went down.
The next stage of developement was the MIRV. The Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle. One missile instead of having 1 big warhead actually carried several smaller warheads, each independently targeted. That is the answer to "problem" you brought up. After breaching the atmospehere the MIRV relases its individual warheads, and each orients on its own target.
This is the only aiming/steering that modern ballistic ICBMs perform after launch, and its purpose is to give it a different incoming trajectory than just its launch would suggest or predict. This is a huge reason why defense against ballistic missles is tricky, and just observing the launch path isnt enough, though it does narrow the potential targets (the RV's cannot perform total 180's and reverse direction for example).
However, once each RV reenters the atmosphere, that's it. It is back to being a purely ballistic path again. And again, anything on a ballistic path can be predicted with near total certainty.
The key is, and will remain, reaction time. IE, speed of detection and observation. A MIRV gives you roughly half the available time an older single warhead ICBM gives for detection and plotting. That has always been the main advantage an ICBM brings to the table: speed. From launch to strike can take as little as 20 minutes, even for targets on the opposite of the Earth. That's the main reason that even if you can predict where it going to hit, it almost didnt matter before.
But once detected, and observed, the math is and will remain, trivial. The only hard part has been designing systems able to detect, react, and intercept the incoming warhead fast enough.
Like said. They dont call them ballistic for the hell of it.
Even more frustraiting is the large number of/. commentors on here who dont know the difference beween ballistic and guided missiles, nor the difference between a missile defense system and CIWS type defense system.
They are conflating the terms and coming to all sorts of wrong conclusions.
Iron Dome is a defense against ballistic munitions. Artillery shells and rockets and ballistic missiles (short range, SCUD type). As such, yes you can calculate the mass of any object on a ballistic path.
Wrong. There are two types of missile to defend against: guided and ballistic.
Of those, the only one you need to ask "will it hit its target", ie, where its even a question, is ballistic. And in the case of ballistic, it's an easy to solve question. The ballistic arc is nearly 100% predictable; it's basic physics, trivial physics. Your comments about Flight profile, radar signature, etc, all are meaningless. If you can get close enough to be a threat, you are a threat, and thus will be intercepted. There is no grey area. The incoming warhead either is or isnt. A decoy that "gets close enough" isnt a decoy (and if you launched a decoy that "Gets close enough" and carries no payload, the more fool you are).
A guided missle on the other hand is actually even easier to intercept. It's not a ballistic trajectory, but it is flying far far slower. We have had defense against them (not typically called "missile defense") for decades now. However the best defense aginst guided missiles remains stopping them frm even launching in the first place, which is quite simple really because unlike ballistic missiles, they dont come from the opposite side of the planet. A plane or ship has to launch them, and getting enough launchers in place to theoretically overwhelm the defenses is a logistcal nightmare. Even assuming you did get enough into place, you've not created a huge target for us, easily detected, and rather than use the defenses we just wipe out hte launchers.
For a ballistic missle, yes. That's why its a ballistic missle. They arent steered. They are aimed. They go where pointed and no where else.
Once again, certain individuals prove they are speaking without knowledge of the subject at hand. The author also proves lack of knowledge by talking about ballistic missile threats to ships at sea. That is essentially a non-issue.
Guided missiles are a whole nother beast to start with, for which we already have close in defense systems, and even then that's only a last resort. The best way to stop a guided munition is to never let it get launched in the first place. IE, take out hte plane or ship that tries to launch it. The number of attackers required to overwhelm the close in defense systems in such a scenario is so large that it is simply, again, a non-issue. They would never get the chance to even launch in such numbers.
The entire article and half the poeople posting are completely clueless.
addendum: this reminds me of people inherently misunderstanding the system in question. a question i come across commonly of "why doesnt the radar pick up all the birds, and trees, and dust, and...". the answer is: it does pick all those things up, its just been designed to ignore them.
No the point is that attrition works, but the writer stupidly called it "math" when it is no such thing. The interceptor math is a solved problem, easy enough to do on the back of a napkin. The only problems have been designing/engineering a system to sufficient tolerance to carry it out, but that isnt math either. Target ID is already an inherent part of the design.
And if such a tactic were used, it would be readily/quickly seen, and rather than waste anti-missle interceptors, we would just find the enemy "cheap" launchers and take them out.
No, attrition is numbes. Math is numbers, but numbers are not math. Math is using numbers to get another number. Simply having more numbers isnt "math". The article is retarded, as is the writer for thinking he's discovered anything new. This has already long been an aspect of interceptor design.
I didnt specify the Edison one as I knew he wasnt the first to do it, simply the first to do it well. So i left it as simply teh concept of the light bulb, using electricy and essentially a resistor (before the concept was known as such) as being fundamentally different from combustion based light sources (candles, gas lamps, etc) that preceded it.
Many times inventions are like that...someone does it first, but its crude or not practical or otherwise ignored, then someone else says "well lets just tweak this one thing..." and boom! It takes off. The steam engine is another example of that. Watts gets all the credit, perhaps rightly, for a revolutionary new device. Even though he did all he could to hinder innovation and his version frankly, sucked compared to what actually became known as the steam engine. It wasnt until his patent expired that people could modify it, solving efficiency and safety problems along the way, into the practical device that triggered the industrial revolution.
Which is fundamentally different from a piece of cotton soaked in a fuel and ignited. Ergo, different physics, different science. Revolution vs evolution. The light bulb was a revolution. The iphone is evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
actually not a bad choice
you have no appreciation for explosions
People disagree with me about movies!
They're all idiots to not agree with my clearly superior intelligence!
Where are these mythical greedy rural folks expecting handouts you talk about? Cause I've never met a one living in such places my whole life.
I have however met many a person in the city living on welfare with an escalade in the driveway and using a food stamp funded cell phone.
and it may also interest you to know that Rural demographics arent that far different from city when it comes to votes. its not nearly so all red as you would like to believe. it has a bigger portion going red, granted. but if the nation avg is 50/50, and that fairly true over time, rural folks go maybe 60/40 and you the reverse in cities.
point being: you need to pack up your extra wide jumbo brush of stereotypes.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Lets say:
I have a skill set. This company will pay me 1M for it, that one for 1.5M. I choose the 1.5M. I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do, but I'm worth at least 1.8M. Now two other companies are tryinig to pull me away. current company offers an increase to 2.2M to keep me because Company A offerered me the same to come to them. Company B sneaks in an off for 2.4M. Current company can't give any more currently, but offers stock options and extra benefits.
These are the very definitions of market forces.
Um...you realize these pilots are not soloing right? That's not what that word means. To solo means to take your first "solo" flight. These guys already did that.
These guys have already been through over a year's worth of flight training, including actual flying, before even strapping on one of those F22s or 35s.
They dont put a guy fresh out of OCS into a sim and then right into a plane. You go through close to 6 months of ground school before you even get in a cockpit. What cockpit you ask? These days a T34 or similar. A 2seat prop trainer. Eventually, depending on career path, you move up to a T38, or similar two seat jet trainer. I believe the Air Force has them too, but I know the Marines have training squadrons setup for each type; non-combat units that exist solely to train pilots from flight school on their specific type of aircraft; particularly important for those single seat craft, before they get to a real, operational unit.
Excellent point. And lets not forget, these arent company reps and engineers working on them usually. It's airmen and sailors and Marines. A lot of us are damn good. But we're not perfect, and these complicated machines. Sometimes it may take a month to get a really ornery gripe sorted out.
"New" cobra and huey models are coming to the Marines now. Some of those are all new airframes. Others are upgrades of existing airframes...and of those, some of those were upgrades of previous airframes too!
The mystery, intermittent gripe, the way "29" always seems to need longer to get the engine started, or the way "12" always pulls to the left a bit around X airspeed. Aircraft develop idiosyncracies.
"since the vietnam war"
There also hasnt been a real air war since Vietnam, and yet there's still be a few dogfight incidents.
Missiles fail, missiles can be jammed/countered/evaded. What happens then? More missles? You can only carry so many. Turn and run? Not always tactically viable, and makes you a nice big target.
Sensors can be evaded, thus negating the BVR combat space, letting him get that much closer and taking you by surprise. they can be vectored in on a blind spot (we dont -always- have AWACS radar coverage), they might appear from below you (particularly zoom climb interception profiles, aircraft that were never BVR to start with). hell, that's pretty much the whole concept behind stealth: to negate the other guys detection abilities and get him by surprise. As more and more stealth planes appear, as was bound to happen, it decreases the usefulness of the BVR-only concept, once again pointing out how focusing just on BVR will bite you in the ass.
Point is, you cannot, just CANNOT, tunnelvision on just one tactic. You must remain flexible, you must not leave a backdoor wide open. And that is why to this day we still teach dogfighting tactics, perhaps even moreso than BVR combat training (because it's more complex, and less forgiving).
You cannot build a giant nearly invulnerable death machine, and then ignore the thermal exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor core, even if it is only 2 meters wide.
BVR combat is great when it works...but every time any air force has focused on it to the detriment of its opposite, it's bitten them in the ass.
Internet access is the modern embodiment to Freedom of the Press, Speech, Religion, and Assembly, etc. /idealistic rant off
In the internet you will find all these basic concepts of communication and association combined in one place.
Access to the internet is the modern equivalent of all aspects of the First Amendment.
It is very much just as important as a basic education, if not more so because it can itself be used to educate.
to piggyback onto that, its only in the last 6 years or so that China has built its first nuclear subs, and they are missle boats. 5 in service, 1 still udner construction. Theya re not yet armed, Chian hasnt compelted developement of their SLBM yet. Btu the ships are in service, and we do shadow them already, much as we already shadowed some of their oldfashioned deisel/battery subs just to get a feel for what china can do. Our guys are kinda already pro at this game thanks to the last several decades.
No, it is settled and not because I looked up a word in a dictionary.
Though, they arent called ballistic for the hell of it.
But I am purposely keeping it simple because this is /. and still most of these people cant tell the difference between a ballistic munition and a guided one. But since you want to be an obtuse arse, ok:
The first classes of ballistic missles went up and went down.
The next stage of developement was the MIRV. The Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle. One missile instead of having 1 big warhead actually carried several smaller warheads, each independently targeted. That is the answer to "problem" you brought up. After breaching the atmospehere the MIRV relases its individual warheads, and each orients on its own target.
This is the only aiming/steering that modern ballistic ICBMs perform after launch, and its purpose is to give it a different incoming trajectory than just its launch would suggest or predict. This is a huge reason why defense against ballistic missles is tricky, and just observing the launch path isnt enough, though it does narrow the potential targets (the RV's cannot perform total 180's and reverse direction for example).
However, once each RV reenters the atmosphere, that's it. It is back to being a purely ballistic path again. And again, anything on a ballistic path can be predicted with near total certainty.
The key is, and will remain, reaction time. IE, speed of detection and observation. A MIRV gives you roughly half the available time an older single warhead ICBM gives for detection and plotting. That has always been the main advantage an ICBM brings to the table: speed. From launch to strike can take as little as 20 minutes, even for targets on the opposite of the Earth. That's the main reason that even if you can predict where it going to hit, it almost didnt matter before.
But once detected, and observed, the math is and will remain, trivial.
The only hard part has been designing systems able to detect, react, and intercept the incoming warhead fast enough.
Like said. They dont call them ballistic for the hell of it.
The article is very stupid.
Even more frustraiting is the large number of /. commentors on here who dont know the difference beween ballistic and guided missiles, nor the difference between a missile defense system and CIWS type defense system.
They are conflating the terms and coming to all sorts of wrong conclusions.
Iron Dome is a defense against ballistic munitions. Artillery shells and rockets and ballistic missiles (short range, SCUD type).
As such, yes you can calculate the mass of any object on a ballistic path.
Wrong. There are two types of missile to defend against: guided and ballistic.
Of those, the only one you need to ask "will it hit its target", ie, where its even a question, is ballistic. And in the case of ballistic, it's an easy to solve question. The ballistic arc is nearly 100% predictable; it's basic physics, trivial physics. Your comments about Flight profile, radar signature, etc, all are meaningless. If you can get close enough to be a threat, you are a threat, and thus will be intercepted. There is no grey area. The incoming warhead either is or isnt. A decoy that "gets close enough" isnt a decoy (and if you launched a decoy that "Gets close enough" and carries no payload, the more fool you are).
A guided missle on the other hand is actually even easier to intercept. It's not a ballistic trajectory, but it is flying far far slower. We have had defense against them (not typically called "missile defense") for decades now. However the best defense aginst guided missiles remains stopping them frm even launching in the first place, which is quite simple really because unlike ballistic missiles, they dont come from the opposite side of the planet. A plane or ship has to launch them, and getting enough launchers in place to theoretically overwhelm the defenses is a logistcal nightmare. Even assuming you did get enough into place, you've not created a huge target for us, easily detected, and rather than use the defenses we just wipe out hte launchers.
For a ballistic missle, yes. That's why its a ballistic missle.
They arent steered. They are aimed. They go where pointed and no where else.
Once again, certain individuals prove they are speaking without knowledge of the subject at hand.
The author also proves lack of knowledge by talking about ballistic missile threats to ships at sea. That is essentially a non-issue.
Guided missiles are a whole nother beast to start with, for which we already have close in defense systems, and even then that's only a last resort. The best way to stop a guided munition is to never let it get launched in the first place. IE, take out hte plane or ship that tries to launch it. The number of attackers required to overwhelm the close in defense systems in such a scenario is so large that it is simply, again, a non-issue. They would never get the chance to even launch in such numbers.
The entire article and half the poeople posting are completely clueless.
Ballistic missles do not change course.
Hence the "ballistic".
addendum: this reminds me of people inherently misunderstanding the system in question. a question i come across commonly of "why doesnt the radar pick up all the birds, and trees, and dust, and ...". the answer is: it does pick all those things up, its just been designed to ignore them.
No the point is that attrition works, but the writer stupidly called it "math" when it is no such thing.
The interceptor math is a solved problem, easy enough to do on the back of a napkin.
The only problems have been designing/engineering a system to sufficient tolerance to carry it out, but that isnt math either.
Target ID is already an inherent part of the design.
And if such a tactic were used, it would be readily/quickly seen, and rather than waste anti-missle interceptors, we would just find the enemy "cheap" launchers and take them out.
No, attrition is numbes. Math is numbers, but numbers are not math.
Math is using numbers to get another number.
Simply having more numbers isnt "math".
The article is retarded, as is the writer for thinking he's discovered anything new. This has already long been an aspect of interceptor design.
Which is why people posted pointing out his failure to consider that regular joes dont go.
I didnt specify the Edison one as I knew he wasnt the first to do it, simply the first to do it well. So i left it as simply teh concept of the light bulb, using electricy and essentially a resistor (before the concept was known as such) as being fundamentally different from combustion based light sources (candles, gas lamps, etc) that preceded it.
Many times inventions are like that...someone does it first, but its crude or not practical or otherwise ignored, then someone else says "well lets just tweak this one thing..." and boom! It takes off. The steam engine is another example of that. Watts gets all the credit, perhaps rightly, for a revolutionary new device. Even though he did all he could to hinder innovation and his version frankly, sucked compared to what actually became known as the steam engine. It wasnt until his patent expired that people could modify it, solving efficiency and safety problems along the way, into the practical device that triggered the industrial revolution.
Which is fundamentally different from a piece of cotton soaked in a fuel and ignited. Ergo, different physics, different science. Revolution vs evolution. The light bulb was a revolution. The iphone is evolution.
Love that movie