Re: Military Tech / Science
Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2018 1:47 pm
So apparently the Israeli's raided Iran's nuclear program archives...
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons bring us some web forums whereupon we can gather
http://www.octopusoverlords.com/forum/
One of the two contenders for a Blackhawk replacement. The other is, I believe, a more traditional helo with counterotating rotors.
The U.S. Air Force says it will turn to Chicago-based defense giant Boeing to replace its aging fleet of UH-1N Huey helicopters, which are used to protect the U.S. military’s ground-based ballistic missiles, in a stunning upset against its Bethesda-based rival, Lockheed Martin.
The Air Force announced Monday it has awarded Boeing’s Arlington-based defense division the first phase of a $2.38 billion contract to procure 84 of Boeing’s MH-139 helicopters, the first of which is to be delivered in 2021. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson hailed the contract as a win for taxpayers, noting that initial estimates had pegged its total cost at $4.1 billion.
PD-50, a huge floating dry dock at the 82nd Repair Shipyard in Roslyakovo, Russia, accidentally sank on Oct. 29, 2018 while Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, was inside for repairs. Kuznetsov is still afloat but the dry dock could be a total loss.
While injuries and possible deaths in addition to damage to the flight deck — caused by a collapsing 70-ton crane — are noteworthy, the loss of the PD-50 could potentially ripple through the Russian navy and exacerbate its persistent problems with maintenance and modernization.
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Russia has four possible options going forward, none of which are good. Cutting its losses on PD-50 and Kuznetsov. Raising and repairing PD-50. Using limited options in Russia to upgrade Kuznetsov. Or going outside Russia to third parties such as China. If Russia proceeds with its carrier modernization, all the available options entail delays and increased costs.
The extreme space weather events of early August 1972 had significant impact on the U.S. Navy, which have not been widely reported. These effects, long buried in the Vietnam War archives, add credence to the severity of the storm: a nearly instantaneous, unintended detonation of dozens of sea mines south of Hai Phong, North Vietnam on 4 August 1972. This event occurred near the end of the Vietnam War. The U.S. Navy attributed the dramatic event to magnetic perturbations of solar storms. In researching these events we determined that the widespread electric‐ and communication‐grid disturbances that plagued North America and the disturbances in southeast Asia late on 4 August likely resulted from propagation of major eruptive activity from the Sun to the Earth.
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Tucker (2006, Chap. 15, p. 177) wrote that “… on 4 August (1972) TF‐77 aircraft reported some two dozen explosions in a minefield near Hon La over a thirty‐second time span...Ultimately the Navy concluded that the explosions had been caused by the magnetic perturbations of solar storms, the most intense in more than two decades.”
Bell is reporting critical milestones in its V-280 next-generation tiltrotor flight test program. The V-280 is a current competitor in the U.S. Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program. The aircraft made is first flight a year ago, and in the past 12 months it has flown 85 hours and completed more than 180 rotor-turn hours. During flights, the V-280 has achieved 250 knots true airspeed, performed 50-degree banked turns at 200 knots, demonstrated a climb rate of 4,500 feet per minute and sustained flight at 11,500 feet, and flown a single ferry flight of over 370 miles.
The aircraft also has successfully demonstrated in-flight transitions between cruise mode and vertical takeoff and landing and low and high-speed agility with fly-by-wire controls. In the coming months, Bell said the V-280 will continue to expand its flight test envelope including full speed in forward cruise flight and low-speed agility tests.
The U.S. Army is stepping up efforts to develop soldier-worn exoskeletons designed to relieve some of the burdensome weight that combat troops carry into battle.
In mid-December, Army researchers and soldier equipment officials held a three-day exoskeleton event at Fort Drum, New York, known as a User Touch Point event, that allowed technology vendors, requirement developers and engineers to gain soldier insights on current exoskeleton technology, such as Lockheed Martin's ONYX system.
The event came on the heels of a $6.9 million Army contract to Lockheed Martin to improve OYNX, a powered, lower-body exoskeleton designed to increase a soldier's strength and endurance.
OYNX uses electro-mechanical knee actuators, special sensors and an artificial intelligence computer to become familiar with the user's movements and apply the right torque at the right time to assist with walking up steep inclines and lifting or dragging heavy loads, according to a Nov. 29 Lockheed press release announcing the contract award.
The three-day User Touch Point event helped vendors that are developing future technology understand, from a soldier’s perspective, how exoskeletons can be used in a tactical environment, James Mingo, a senior military analyst at Training and Doctrine Command, said in an Army press release.
С Рождеством!President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia would deploy its first regiment of hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles next year, saying the move meant his country now had a new type of strategic weapon.
Putin was speaking after overseeing what the Kremlin said was a pre-deployment test of the new missile system, called Avangard.
“This test, which has just finished, ended with complete success,” Putin told a government meeting.
“From next year, 2019, Russia’s armed forces will get the new intercontinental strategic system Avangard ... It’s a big moment in the life of the armed forces and in the life of the country. Russia has obtained a new type of strategic weapon.”
Russia has said the new missile system, one of several new weapons Putin announced in March, is highly maneuverable, allowing it to easily evade missile defense systems.
Putin remotely observed Wednesday’s test from a Russian defense ministry building in Moscow. The Kremlin described the test in a statement, saying that an Avangard missile, launched from a location in south-west Russia, had successfully hit and destroyed a target in the Russian Far East.
Given the age, it's quite possible that it was a metal fatigue issue. And swing-wing aircraft are notoriously high-stress aircraft with the possibility of a lot of problems.“A Tu-22M3 bomber crashlanded in a blizzard after a routine training flight,” TASS quoted the Ministry of Defence as saying. The plane, which was not carrying weapons, fell apart on impact with the runway.
“Two crew members died,” the ministry said.
Two other crew members were taken to hospital, but one later died, TASS reported.
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The Tupolev Tu-22M (NATO reporting name: Backfire) is a variable-sweep wing, long-range strategic and maritime bomber originally developed in the 1960s. A crew of four operates the aircraft.
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The crashed plane was produced in 1986 and underwent a major overhaul in 2012, TASS reported Tupolev as saying.
Looks like it came down WAY too fast. I don't have any landmarks to check, but my Mk I eyeball says that's well in excess of 200 knots and a HUGE sink-rate that simply snapped the fuselage in half.
Long, but worth the read and well-visualized.The collision of the vessels was the Navy’s worst accident at sea in four decades. Seven sailors drowned. Scores were physically and psychologically wounded. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, broke that grim mark when it collided with another cargo vessel, leaving 10 more sailors dead.
The successive incidents raised an unavoidable question: How could two $1.8 billion Navy destroyers, protected by one of the most advanced defense systems on the planet, fail to detect oncoming cargo ships broadcasting their locations to a worldwide navigational network?
The failures of basic seamanship deeply embarrassed the Navy. Both warships belonged to the vaunted 7th Fleet — the most powerful armada in the world and one of the most important commands in the defense of the United States from nuclear attack.
ProPublica reconstructed the Fitzgerald’s journey, relying on more than 13,000 pages of confidential Navy investigative records, public reports, and interviews with scores of Fitzgerald crew members, current and former senior Navy officers, and maritime experts.
The review revealed neglect by Navy leadership, serious mistakes by officers — and extraordinary acts of valor and endurance by the crew.
On Feb. 13, the Navy awarded Boeing a $43 million contract to produce four of the 51-foot Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs) that are capable of traveling some 6,500 nautical miles unaided, the U.S. Naval Institute reported.
According to USNI, the Navy could potentially deploy the Orcas from existing vessels to conduct "mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, electronic warfare and strike missions."
But as Popular Mechanics points out , the Orca's modular design and relatively inexpensive price tag make the robo-subs a potential game-changer for a Navy that's struggling to grow to 335 hulls:
Orca could even pack a Mk. 46 lightweight torpedo to take a shot at an enemy sub itself. It could also carry heavier Mk. 48 heavyweight torpedoes to attack surface ships, or even conceivably anti-ship missiles. Orca could drop off cargos on the seabed, detect, or even lay mines. The modular hardware payload system and open architecture software ensures Orca could be rapidly configured based on need.
This sort of versatility in a single, low-cost package is fairly unheard of in military spending. The nearest rough equivalent is the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, which costs $584 million each and has a crew of 40. While LCS is faster, has the benefit of an onboard crew, and carries a larger payload, Orca is autonomous—and cheaper by orders of magnitude.
The U.S. Air Force has revealed that a ground-based surrogate for a laser weapon system that could protect American fighter jets and other aircraft from incoming threats in the future has successfully shot down multiple air-launched missiles in a test. The service's publicly stated goal is to have a podded prototype system ready for actual flight tests by 2021 and an actual operational capability by the end of the decade.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) conducted the test on Apr. 23, 2019, at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, together with defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which is developing the laser. Lockheed Martin first received the contract to build the directed energy weapon in 2017 as part of AFRL's Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) Advanced Technology Demonstration (ATD) program. The laser component, or Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments (LANCE), is just one part of the SHiELD effort. Work on a turreted mount and a self-contained pod to attach the complete system to a fighter jet-sized aircraft are separate as part of the SHiELD Turret Research in Aero Effects (STRAFE) and Laser Pod Research & Development (LPRD) projects, respectively.
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There's a lot we still don't know about this test, including any sort of details on the basic parameters, such as whether or not the operators manning the laser knew when and where the missiles above would get launched and at what altitude and under what atmospheric conditions. The Air Force also did not say what kind of missiles it had used and whether it intended them to be representative of any particular real-world threat. Still, demonstrating the ability of the laser to spot, track, engage, and destroy multiple aerial targets is still a very important step forward in SHiELD's development.
A French researcher has developed upon existing military-grade hearing protection so it can identify the direction of incoming fire- and the U.S. Army is all ears.
Known as the Tactical Communication and Protective System (TCAPS), the earplugs have built-in microphones that allow soldiers to protect their hearing without sacrificing situational awareness.
While electronic hearing protection is nothing new, a French researcher has kicked it up a notch by rigging TCAPS to use an enemy shooter’s acoustic information to give soldiers real-time shot direction on a smartphone.
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Using the four microphones on TCAPS (which provide a near-360-degree soundscape), the new system uses the sound input to detect the distance and direction of the enemy shooter.
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With a decent smartphone (i.e., processing power), the direction and distance of the shooter are relayed to the phone and the Soldier within half a second.
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The technology is scheduled to be deployed as early as 2021.
The A-10 will continue to fly in support of America’s ground forces, thanks to the quick passing of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.
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The spending plan will include money for new wings, as well as other upgrades.
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According to The Aviation Geek Club, the A-10 will serve well into the 2030s.
Due to the defunct status of the original manufacturer, Fairchild Republic, the aircraft is now supported as a legacy platform comprised of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.