Why was this retired early???

$

>>28887419

Swing wing made it a hangar queen.

>>28887419
the cold war ended

>>28887419
F-15 is better

>>28887419

>Early

It was in service for at least 30 years.

>>28887538
Tornado's work just fine

Hanger whore. Needed more attention than a white girl who tucks her jeans into her boots.

>>28887608

Panavia vs Grumman might be a contributing factor.

>>28887419
Why did you end your fucking question with an exclamation mark instead of a question mark? How can you possibly begin to comprehend the complexities of military procurement when you can't even nail the basics? Holy shit, cunt.

>>28887608
The fighter/interceptor version is retired.

>>28887419
Because the F-15 is a better and more versatile aircraft, and since the Cold War is over the USN doesn't need a carrier capable interceptor.

>>28887419
Dick Cheney sucking Boeings cock for cash

>>28887608
>>28887620
Way, way less airframe hours.

No one gives their pilots as much cockpit time as the US.

>>28887419
The F15 is cheaper to maintain, and the Airforce has the budget to maintain a larger fleet. The Legacy Eagles were retired about the same time, but since the Airforce bought a lot more Eagles over a longer span of years, the legacy Eagles weren't the only Eagles, unlike the Tomcats

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>>28887419
>still in production
the F-15 is in production for export contracts, "export" being the key phrase. They are not being bought by the USAF.

Japan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and South Korea bought these.

Only Iran bought F-14s, and after Ayatollah took over and started that big shitfest, Carter slammed the brakes on that after part of the order was delivered, as well as their order for Spruance class destroyers.

>>28887905
>>28887419

The simplest and most effective answer is that the F-14 was a carrier-based fighter jet, and although it was a great performer all-around it still contained certain design compromises that made the F-15 more attractive to most people looking for a Mach 2.0+ fighter jet. And the vast majority of buyers don't care about whether or not a jet is carrier compatible because they don't even have carriers to begin with.

>>28887955
It really didn't help that they tried to game the system by putting two eventual variants that would actually be the plane they wanted in order to make it look cheaper, the B with the F100 engines, and the C with updated avionics, but Laird's reforms treated the Navy's attempt to circumvent McNamara's cronies like a red-headed step child and got it stuck with the TF30s.

>>28887955

Having a carrier-based jet for land-ops doesn't seem to be a deal breaker for most buyers though. Australia and Canada both bought hornets despite lacking carriers. I'm gonna speculate that jets purpose-built for carriers are sturdier than thus have longer service lives regardless of where they are being used?

>>28890551
Hornets are super cheap and value for money. Thats the only reason countries like mine (Malaysia) bought it.

>>28890551
Hornets ARE hardier, and carrier planes are designed for shorter takeoff and landing than ground based planes, so they're also an attractive option for countries that don't have many full size airfields. Plus, without swing wings, Hornets are far cheaper and easier to maintain than Tomcats.

However, the tradeoff is that Hornets are not particularly fast or nimble, and have pretty crappy range.

how are swing wings even that much of a maintenance headache

Like, its just one joint, right?
Replace whatever is wearing out... good as new?

Weren't the engines a continual issue?

>>28887419
Expensive. You can get higher performance cheaper out of other aircraft.

>>28891652

>one joint

Stop.

Just stop.

You dont know. And your ignorance at this phase in your life shows you dont want to know.

>one joint

Ghandi would spit on you.

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>>28891709

>You can get higher performance cheaper out of other aircraft.

I wonder who is behind this post.

Comparing AF F15 with Navy F14 wasn't the OP's question.
The primary role of the F14 was ship-killer with the Phoenix missile system. With the fall of the Soviet Union that mission kind of dropped in priority. Also the development of better ship based missiles contributed to the F14 role being diminished. A very large hanger footprint didn't help either.
The F18 is a better multi-role platform that suits the Navy's current mission.

>>28891901
>ship-killer with the Phoenix missile system

Um, the Phoenix was an anti-bomber missile. F-14s had nothing to do with antiship combat.

>>28891901
Oops, the question WAS F14 vs F15.
Different missions OP. F15 is/was a pure fighter...now retired and replaced by the F22.

>>28891917
>F15 is/was a pure fighter...now retired and replaced by the F22.

But that's wrong. All of our F-15Cs and Es are still in service. They're not set to be replaced until Gen 6 fighters are developed.

>>28891901

>F14
>ship killer

It was a carrier based interceptor for outer air battle against Russian missile spam.

Thank christ we never used it for its intended role sonce it was a hangar queen and the AIM-54 had a whopping 0% hit OR kill rate in real world use.

>>28891901
The F-14's mission was fleet defense interception, not anti-shipping. Though yes, that role did fade away with the cold war and the navy figured Super Hornets with AMRAAMs were adequate for it.

>>28891916
Crap, ýou're right...fire and forget missile, multiple targets, etc.

Too damn early...

>>28890307
>F110s*
FTFY

>>28887608
Tornados are a maintenance hog too.

The only reason they're still in service is because nobody can be fucked with funding better A2G capabilities for Typhoon

>>28887905
>Spruance class destroyers

We're talking about the Kidds, right? Or were they getting Spruances too?

>>28891953
Nope, the plan was to try to get the same engines as the F-X (Later F-15) in a later buy, which Laird squashed. It was 18 years before the first Bs with the F110, and another four for the F-14D. You're confusing the initial procurement planning models with what actually happened.

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>>28891901

>Phoenix Missile
>Ship Killer

>>28887419
Because Dick "Darth" Cheney had a murder boner for killing it.

>>28893563
Or it was the fact that keeping it running was a Sisyphean task, it leaked oil everywhere (and there was something major wrong if it wasn't leaking), and long-term the mission it was designed for was gone, and the Hornet/Super Hornet were better at multi-role use. Complete destruction of the fleet was a middle finger to Iran more than anything else.

A models were out of the hanger about a 4th of the time hornets were.

>>28887419
Many reasons.

1. Political. Iran had it, and was an enemy state. We didnt want them to get any spare parts, and they had proven resourceful enough to get spare parts.

2. Cold war ended, navy wanted a cheaper airframe. Navy has many priorities, never forget that. Not just aircraft, crew, and carriers, but boats, subs, missiles of all flavors to include nukes, comms, etc.

The F-14 was an amazing jet, and if upgraded would have continued to be an amazing jet. One thing that would not change was this. It was big, it was maintenance intensive. It required an inordinate amount of man hours, spares, and dark magic to keep it in the air. I worked with many civilians when i was stationed at edwards AFB who had hands on an F-14 when they were active duty. They were proud of it, hated the hornet, and knew the F-14 was a giant MX pig.

3. There was no mission for it or the phonenix missile, the weapon it was made to carry. The phoenix was sort of a bust.

4. Dick Cheney hated it like he loves shooting his friends in the face with a shotgun.

in closing. I am still a fan of it. I a huge F-15 fan, understandably. I think if the F-14 and F-15 programs had shared more commonality, like a shared front fuselage, stabs, radar, avionics and engines, instead of each being a special snowflake, the program might have survived.

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>>28891652
Yes, this staggeringly complex piece of machinery revolves around a single joint that can easily be replaced.

>carrier based

Nations looking for export purchases don't give a fuck about carrier capability.

>swing wing

Increased maintenance for air forces that are on a budget.

>dedicated interceptor

Smaller air forces necessitate multirole airframes.

>phoenix is a piece of shit

Fired a grand total of three times in US service, none of which were successful. First pair both had their motors fail, third experienced guidance failure and missed the target when it changed heading and speed.

>b-but muh hornet is basically identical and has plenty of export sales

The Canadians and Australians both wanted a multirole airframe from the US with two engines and the Strike Eagle didn't exist when they were looking, so they chose Hornets over Falcons or Eagles.

>>28895560
>shilelagh more successful than phoenix

Well i'll be damned. It did one thing right in the end after all.

>>28895463
Looks like a joint to me, senpai.

So basically the F14 was a specialist air superiority fighter. It was and (still is) the best plane in the world for that role. It's a big slow plane with extremely good 'eyes' and extremely good LONG RANGE weapons. It's not a dogfighter it's not a bomber it's completely optimized for the mission of shooting down aerial threats before they get in range of the carrier group.

The US essentially retired them because we no longer have any realistic fear of attack by a peer competitor (e.g. the Soviet Union) and have re-geared all around for the sort of lopsided brush wars we have been fighting instead. In that world there's really no demand for a specialized air superiority fighter - very few nations have planes that cant be dealt with using a fighter-bomber instead. So we've tended to go towards all planes being fighter-bombers, not specialized for one role and not particularly good at either, but good enough at both.

The F15 started as a fighter - a more maneuverable fighter than the F14, something that *could* dogfight. But it still came out too heavy for a true dogfighter, so the F16 was developed and took that role away.

The F15 was then developed into more of a multi-role fighter-bomber. Which is as explained above the type of plane the military is currently favoring - the F35 is very similar in that way. These planes are not the best at everything but they ARE capable of taking on a very wide range of roles and missions.

>>28895793
Looks like several thousand nuts and bolts and rivets and cables and joints and welds that all need to be individually inspected and tested during maintenance to check for metal fatigue. Yeah, swing wings are useful. No, an air force on a budget does not want to have to deal with their pilots having even fewer flight hours than they do already.

>>28892068
>Tornados are a maintenance hog too.

no

>>28895798

>It was and (still is) the best plane in the world for that role.

Not in a world where the F-22 exists.

>It's a big slow plane with extremely good 'eyes' and extremely good LONG RANGE weapons

How in the world is the F-14 "slow" if it tops out at Mach 2.3?

>>28895463
After replacing the entire wing. Let's not get into all the hydraulics and lubrication in order to move the damn thing, and all the electronics and computer programming to tell it when to move and how much.

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>>28895820
Ok, so there are screws, but the whole thing IS around one big joint. I'm right about that. I don't see why this is considered such a huge maintenance issue compared to shit like radar and fly-by-wire computers.

>>28895861
Moving parts inherently require more maintenance than electronics.

>>28895861
I sort of hate you anon. I was a former aircraft maintainer. ITs not just "BIG JOINT" its:
putting aircraft into safe for mx config.
-pulling all CBs, lock out tag out, etc.
-writing in the forms.
-depanneling, accounting for screws, fasteners, etc.
-drain hydro, get covered in hydro, bag lines.
-disco electro harnesses. bag harness
-all of these actions have documentation and computer work that needs to be done.
-lift huge ass parts on and off with multi man teams.
-careful alignment procedures
-get signed off by the engineers
-endless, fucking endless, operational checks
-shit breaks because you took it apart, a line busts, hydro is fucking everywhere, oh shit, it was overpressure and cut an electrical line and started a fire, but hey, it was only a small one.

No anon. Fixing a jet is not as simple as "do it." there is a bureaucratic and logistical dance, in its own personal hell, involving countless man hours and hurt asses. Any job you have ever done that sucks, will not ever compare to being a mechatronics/ pneudraulics guy in the navy or airforce, for one of the "premiere fighter wings"

The tiny benefit you get from variable geometry is dramatically offset by cost, and time. And in the year 2016, missiles are more accurate than ever, can be fired up, down, left, right, upside down, fucking inside out. JHMCS allows a pilot to just fart the thought, and the missile streaks off to murder whatever it was that needs murdering. Laws of physics on that one, you cant out turn a missile that is more nimble than you. The 1990s gulf war mean nothing compared to the ass pain of what exists now in terms of hit to kill ratios.

Once laser turrets are a thing, it will shake shit up again, but even then there are counters to that, or laser vs laser fights. fucking great. i look forward to that bullshit. "i blind your sensors, pew pew."

>>28891928
>Thank christ we never used it for its intended role sonce it was a hangar queen and the AIM-54 had a whopping 0% hit OR kill rate in real world use.
They had issues if they sat for an extended period of time. If they were kept flying and maintained and didn't sit they had no more complicated maintenance than the F18.
As for the aim-54, it's only been fired in combat 3 times.
The two that had the engines failed were later determined to have not had them armed by the carrier deck crews. I don't have any info about the third that failed, but it sounds as though the proximity fuse failed. It was never meant to hit the aircraft it was fired at, simply explode close by to it.

>>28895839
>the f22 is a better carrier based fighter than the f14
Dumbass.

>>28896870

>I speak out of my ass about things I have no experience with but justify my fanboying over a plane Ive never SEEN much less touched or had to be in charge of maintaining.

You are literally worse than pol pot.

Hang yourself with piano wire.

>>28895839
Yeah the F-22 is the closest equivalent BUT the naval variant was never more than vapor, it doesn't exist. Which means it literally cannot get in the door for the competition, it cannot operate from a carrier, it's not a contender for the role at all.

As to 'slow' I was not referring to the top speed but the handling characteristics. It's a big plane, it's slow to turn, slow to yaw, etc. in comparison to an F16 for instance it's night and day. I remember one fighter pilot after his first flight in an F14 saying it felt like driving a Winnebago. A Winnebago can haul ass down the road pretty fast, just don't try to make a quick turn with it...

although having said that 2.3 isn't really all that fast for a jet fighter these days. It's ok but a modern interceptor can get very close to mach 3 if not exceed it. The Mig25 could always outrun the tomcat handily, but it was ok, because the F14 had the sensors and long range weapons to kill him before he could lock.

>>28895463

man, the wiring on those connectors alone is a full day's work for one person.

>>28891928
>Thank christ we never used it for its intended role sonce it was a hangar queen and the AIM-54 had a whopping 0% hit OR kill rate in real world use.
The Iranians managed almost 40 kills with it, out of 50 total Tomcat kills during the Iran-Iraq war.

>>28895798
There are so many things wrong with this post I don't know where to begin.

>>28896727

And this is what the giant mech shows leave out.

The fuckton of maintenance that would be needed for them all the time.

>>28898399
Hey, 4.6% availability is breddy gud, right, sergeant?

>>28898399
Nah fuck that, people hold the 8th MS Team as the golden example of "oh look at how they're actually performing maintenance on their giant robots" but seem to completely forget that every Tomino directed Gundam series has every suit in thr hangars under constant maintenance when not in use.

>>28898465
The addition of a swing wing in a fighter jet multiplies cost per flight hour by 1.6, minimum. And that's one simple 2D joint on a major structural member.

For a mech, you're looking at 24 2D joints and 8 3D joints, all of them load bearing and G stress hardened.

Good fucking luck.

>>28898465

Honestly I want to see Gundam shows where the mechanics are major characters, not just background dudes. They're frequently in races against time just to fix the mechs enough to get them working again.

>>28898399
>>28898637
Iron-Blooded Orphans is trying with that, at least. In its third fight Barbados' performance is degraded by lack of maintenance time.

>>28891588

hornets have GREAT low-speed nose authority. i'm learning to fly F-15E's, and every one of my instructors who's fought one says "don't get slow with a hornet".

>>28900041
Best alpha in any of the US air fleets.

What do they tell you about fighting F-16s, F-15Cs, F-22s and F-35s?

>>28900041
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=335GdTqtyLs

>i wish i had the gas of a mud hen
>while you're rtb and pissing off
>im doing loops and jackin off

>i wish i had the alpha of a hornet
>when i can still pitch and roll
>that other guy's goin outta control

fun song for poking fun at/pointing out specific airframe advantages

>>28900101
>yeah, all you fuckers wish you flew the Viper
>Cause we're single-seat; Multi-Role, We can fly right up our own asshole

fuckin kek

>>28900069

>F-16s
don't go to the merge, they'll turn inside of you all day every day. your radar is so much bigger than theirs that you can shoot them and support the AMRAAM to an active state before they finish melding.

>F-15C's
haven't asked, but it's probably similar to fighting another strike eagle. less powerful motors, but lighter.

>F-22's

you die when Raptor gets tired of playing with you.

>F-35's

one day they'll let us play with them...

>>28900101

gas for days, but BFM is still a 1.0 sortie. which is fine, i like not using piddle packs.

>>28900120
>you die when Raptor gets tired of playing with you.
holy kek. is there really that much of a capability gap? I mean, you hear a bunch of shit about the F-22 and 5th gen, and about the Flags, etc, but it's hard to know what to believe.

>>28900120
>don't go to the merge, they'll turn inside of you all day every day.
So, if you don't smoke em on the way in, what? Get higher and faster and attempt to zoom and boom them? How do you fuck with them if you're stuck in the merge?

>>28900139

yeah.

>>28900150

come find me in a vault and we'll talk.

>>28900041
The viper drivers always want to 2C against us and just setting nose high while they're rating around is lol. something they never get. we're not going to fight that fight against them.

Never went up against a 15 or 22 in anything other than LFEs.

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>>28887723
This

>>28900161

yeah some of my instructors were on the Tiger's deployment to Hawaii, fighting the Navy and the Raptors.

weather canx'd friday means early beer light and stories in the bar.

>>28900156
Heh. Well thanks for the answers you can give. Always fun to hear a better informed take.

Sea operations degraded the airframe sooner.

>>28900421

cool. what was the setup? were they doing a 3k? HABFM? was it a snap? did it meet shot-kill?

>>28900429
All I remember from the story was 2 cats went up against 2 eagles, one cat had to RTB because lel engines went out, the other one proceeded to skullfuck two eagle drivers with perfect headshots in TWO 2v1 gun only engagements.

Pilot then recalled an officer coming to him and demanding all footage of the simulated dogfight to be destroyed, to avoid any potential problems with the politics surrounding the F-14 and it's goodbye.

He saved a snap tho

>>28900454

so in other words, it's a bar story told by a long-retired graybeard.

"So there I was, in the skies over Hanoi in my brand spanking new Tomcat. My wingman had dropped out because his port motor had a stall stag..."

>>28900478
eagle driver detected, google joe hoser satrapa

>>28900496

Yeah no shit. I fly the mud hen.

>>28900496
And yup. Don't you know fighter pilot stories only have to be 10% true and start with "No shit, there I was..."?

>>28900478
Wouldn't surprise me if it was at all true though, or at least the part about the mysterious officer showing up and wanting any evidence of the soon to be retired F-14 being disappeared.

I've always thought military politics were stupid, the one place where merit should be the deciding factor it's instead replaced by money interests and political bullshit.

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>>28900139
I've always felt people never really got a clue just how big the capability gap is. That one youtube video where an F-22 got 'shot down' during a training exercise against a Rafale? You have to keep in mind that F-22 had its stealth disabled by mounting an external device, and on top of that, start out the dogfight in a defensive position rather than on equal terms. Even then, it's like watching the guy try to get a bead on an X-Wing or something. Pic somewhat related. When the Raptor doesn't have any restrictions, it's a total curbstomp. From what I understand, the very most they get is "there's something, somewhere over in that general direction", but usually get a contact popping up out of nowhere with missiles heading their way and with less than a few seconds to react. And, like a real monster, vanishes before the missiles even close in. It's like something out of a horror movie, but in broad daylight. I can only imagine how high strung they are knowing F-22s are out there somewhere in the exercises. My impression is that their resentment and respect for it is the same in intensity.

>>28901011
Well, when an F-15E driver tells me
>>28900120
>you die when Raptor gets tired of playing with you.
That tells me a good bit. F-15Es certainly aren't any A2A slouches.

Speaking of which, another question for >>28900041
>>28900120
What do your instructors/the scuttlebutt say about fighting Typhoons and Rafales in exercises?

>>28901050

haven't heard much about the Typhoon or Rafale. i'll ask the dudes who were at LN. i'm expecting that they're pretty capable jets.

and let's just say that against most modern air to air threats, going to the merge in a mudhen is going to get you an extra long debrief in WIC with a DFP on your stupid gameplan.

>>28900101

>We can fly right up our own asshole

My fucking sides

>>28901050
>That tells me a good bit. F-15Es certainly aren't any A2A slouches.
The bit in Revolt of the Majors where senior, experienced Israeli Mirage III pilots went up against rookies in F-15s was particularly interesting. The rookies made several mistakes that would've been lethal in older planes, but the Mirage pilots were still hopelessly outmatched and lost in every sortie.

>>28901076
kek. I guess maximizing your advantages are paramount in any airframe.

>>28901102
This. In the F-35's case, like the F-22, the ideal is hit and fade, killing without ever being detected. In the merge, if it happens, it's like the Hornet where you leverage the high alpha and, ideally, HOBS missiles, to beat your opponent before they can leverage E-M, assuming they move like an F-16.

>>28887419
1. Better shit was out there.
2. Iran. They have F-14s, and now no 3rd party parts.

>>28887612
I think I heard somewhere that if a carrier could keep 10 of them going then they had a REALLY on point maintenance team, which I take it meant that they basically slept on or near the things and spent every waking hour doing maintenance and appeasing the machine spirits.

>>28891588
>Hornets are not particularly fast or nimble
If the Blue Angels are anything to go by, they are pretty nimble.

>>28897987

Yeah, no kidding. I'm not even a mechanic and I know that is some Lovecraftian existential horrorshow shit.

You wonder if the Navy had guys just mentally break from that experience.

> Dude shows up for training
> sees gigantic fucking hinge setup that will doubtlessly consume his entire career day in and day out for years, possibly decades
> just loses his shit and jumps into the nearest running turbine while screaming "IN HIS DEAD CITY HE SLEEPS, HE DREEEEAAAMMMSSSS!!!!!!!!!"

>>28887419
Because the Strike Eagle is a better Air to Ground platform than any other fighter aircraft currently in the US inventory and the F-14 was insanely maintenance heavy. Also the F-15E is updated and is not really comparable to the 1970s F-15 except the basic airframe.

>>28901837
>Because the Strike Eagle is a better Air to Ground platform
Can it land on carriers?

Nope, now compare ground pounding abilities of the cat and bug seeing that they fill separate roles from the eagle.

The cat had many advantages on the bug when it came to multi rolling, and it goes beyond raw numbers such as payload and whatnot. Things like speed, range, time, are all relevant.

The cat would have handled many sorties that required inflight refueling without the need to do so itself.

>>28887419
The F-14 wasn't really much better than the Super Hornet the navy had, I'd say it was better and with improvements could have been an amazing fighter, the costs of the tomcat were very high and we barely used them, they barely even had a presence in any of the wars we've been in, and the navy decided that the super hornet was really all the needed.

Contrast, the F-15 was heavily used and very well proven in combat, and was not nearly as expensive as the F-14, and the USAF did not see a reason to remove them all to keep F-16s only.

>>28901914

you do realize the Strike Eagle is vastly different from the C model, right? uttering the word "bomb" in a C model squadron meant you owed money, whereas in the Strike Eagle, the whole point is to carry three times the gas and twice the bomb load of a Fighting Falcon while maintaining a 2x2 loadout for self protect/fighting your way in/out.

>>28901949
I'm aware, but that's an extra airframe for the sake of doing so.

I just don't feel as if the existence of 1 was mutually exclusive from the other, they were similar but had distinct mission differences and places that could have coexisted. Especially when you consider how unexceptional the bug is, and it isn't even that cheap.

>>28901984

just saying, the F-15E is an extremely capable air to ground platform. there are a few bombs that only it can carry. it has lots of gas and goes forever and can still shoot an AMRAAM in your face if needed.

>>28887723
Pretty much. Navy showed interest in an updated F-14 using late production airframes when it became clear the would never be a navalised F-22, and suddenly all the F-14s at Davis Mothan were ordered scrapped, to prevent them from endangering Lockheed *ahem* to ensure they would not fall into enemy hands.

>>28902008
This. I'm an Air Force Weapons troop and I load on Strike Eagles, there's no better fighter based Air to Ground Platform in existence.

>>28898228

Yes, because if we go by those numbers they've killed the Iraqi air force like three times over.

The only casualty reports even more hilarious than Iran-Iraq are Pakistani-Indian ones.

>>28901949
And the Strike Eagle has only once scored an air to air kill. On an Iraqi Hind. With a 2000lbs laser-guided bomb.

>>28897675
>I speak out of my ass about things I have no experience with but justify my fanboying over a plane Ive never SEEN much less touched or had to be in charge of maintaining.
Yes because my fatherwho worked on the damned things for twelve years is not a credible source, god damn, you sure got me

>>28902105

Yeah, but the F-15E still has very similar kinematic performance to the F-15, right? As well as all the proper electronics needed for A2A? It's not like the F-15E can't do A2A, it just doesn't usually do it for doctrinal reasons.

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>>28902057

Best fighter ever. Only fighter to shoot down a motherfunkin' satellite.

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>>28901803
It's a gradual thing.

>show up for training
>OH NEAT F-14!!!
>months and months of dealing with Grumman's shenanigans
>go home for some leave
>oh hey, new movie "top gun"
>has F-14 in it
>mfw flashbacks from operational checks
>paperwork aaaaaa
>everyone leaves theater, talks about how cool navy is, etc
>"what did you think of the movie... uhh.. are you okay?"
>...

>no

>>28902178
Anti-sat warfare is the dumbest fucking thing anyone has ever decided to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

>>28902064
Those are the downgraded, actually confirmed kills. Many recent books have come out lately using actual Iraqi documents and tracking Bu. Numbers of the aircraft involved, like Murray and Woods' The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History. There are no serious sources that suggest the F-14 had fewer than 48 kills, and that Phoenix missiles did not comprise at least 2/3 of those kills.

For those actually interested and not just shitposting, dig around a little. There's a lot of good, new, primary source history coming out about the Iran-Iraq conflict, which is probably the largest most ignored conflict of the 1980's in Western history texts.

>>28902178
One of my squadron's Strike Eagles Killed a Hind in Desert Storm by dropping a bomb on it while the helicopter was airborne. If that's not fucking badass I don't know what is.

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>>28887419

Serious question: was the F-16 a mistake?

Is there any reason why the US couldn't have just boughten more F-15's and gotten the same results?

Looking back, can we agree that the Hi-Lo mix, created as an appeasement to Pierre-Sprey types, has just caused more trouble than it was worth? Now we have so many lightweight fighters with shitty range and people get mad when we try to replace them with decently ranged counterparts.

The F14 was too perfect for this world

>god just took it home

>>28902236
http://www.f-15e.info/joomla/stories/182-tim-bennetts-war

This guy? Badass. It's an awesome story.

>>28902239
With the F-22 proving itself an extremely competent Air-to-Air fighter and the 35 in development I think that the F-16 is quickly becoming obsolete

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>>28902224

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Did you actually read this? It clearly states that even in the worst case scenario, there would still be plenty of real estate up there, just not in low-earth-orbit. For launches going past LEO, it essentially doesn't matter.

Then again, it is Wikipedia so who knows if any part of the article is true or not.

>>28902260
Yup, I've loaded munitions on that plane, shit I was just working on it this week.

>>28902239
>Is there any reason why the US couldn't have just boughten more F-15's and gotten the same results?
The F-15 cost more than twice as much and the USAF still needed aircraft to update the air national guard and reserve wings which were still flying F-106s, F-4s and even F-105s as late as 1984.

By buying the F-16, they got to keep the absolutely exclusive air to air mission of the F-15A, spend less to have overall 4 more fighter wings in the force (having more numbers in the air is obviously a good thing), have a NATO standard fighter to simplify logistics with and get their entire Reserve and National Guard wings updated through the 80's with excellent fighters.

The F-16 was a fantastic call.

>>28902183

> have a freak out in Top Gun
> people think you're some sort of pilot who saw heavy shit in a Tomcat
> never tell them the true horror was working on the fuckers

>>28902304
>see pilots doing stupid shit in top gun
>all you can think about is the poor fucking maintenance crew that had to fix the jets when they inevitably came back Code 3

>>28902268
Sure, it we're talking about clear orbits. Manned and unmanned vehicles still have to fly THROUGH LEO to get there, though, and a single screw or rivet passing through an orbital transfer path at the wrong orbital angle (say, head on) means that your whole mission just did nothing but contribute more debris and possibly kill some highly trained people.

An excessive LEO debris count would effectively barricade us from higher orbits if the density became high enough, and the density only increases exponentially as pieces collide, break apart and become tens of pieces. It takes very little mass at those velocities to kaboom a space vehicle, especially a manned one.

>>28902322
>Did you see that asshole Maverick just buzz the tower and pull an 8G loop?
Um.
>Isn't that your bird, Chief?
Um.
>Hey, bud. Are you ok?
BANG

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>>28902278
Can you draw a penis on it for us?

>>28902356
Someone fund an Apocalypse Now or Come and See style horror of war flick about the maintainers during the events of the film Top Gun. Shit would be fucking hilarious.

>>28902364
My shop talks about making a trailer park boys style documentary about the flightline sometimes, if we released it we'd probably all go to jail though. Between the shit we talk about and general cowboy maintenance we'd all be in deep shit.

>>28902385
But you'd still be fucking legends.

Might be worth it.

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>>28901803
>>28902183
>>28902322
>>28902356
>>28902364

This entire string of comments is golden.

>>28887419
it was made by grumman

and its fucking titanium

and it was a coldwar meme "Look, we put this overpriced computer in it, so we can shoot missiles 9001 missiles from 200 miles away

>>28902385
>>28902395
Shit, if you did it well enough and stayed off any truly "this aircraft is going to crash and it's totally my fucking fault" type shit, you boys might find yourselves another MOS within the USAF. Public affairs making Jackass/TPB style shit to keep the grunts happy sounds like a pretty good gig.

>>28902399
Man you don't even know the things I've seen signed off and flown. If you ever want to fly on a plane again you probably don't WANT to know.

>>28902434
Reason #3,451 for the following life creed:
Always be polite to people handling and making your food, and never, ever piss off your aircraft maintainers or forget to buy them beer on Fridays.

That is the number one life lesson my pop taught me that I remember today.

>>28902422
Honestly that's what's wrong with public affairs in the first place, they're a bunch of fucking nonners. With decent editing we could make something pretty enjoyable. If our supervision saw it they probably wouldn't be happy though.

>>28902434

Were you a real Tomcat mechanic? Was >>28902183 a real-life experience? Oh man.....

>>28902465
That's not my post, I'm an F-15 maintainer.

>>28902454
The military in general needs to be ok with taking more risk in internal training films and media. Kind of like Red Flag - communicate the way you want to run your shop bull sessions and people will actually pay attention, the risks of pissing people off are worth it.

But that would require upper management having a sense of humor willing to not take itself so fucking seriously.

>>28902485
Speaking of Red Flag, boy I'm glad it's over today.

>>28902501
I've heard/read about other "Flags" (most recently in the Revolt of the Majors). Do you boys get your own Flag exercises to work on high tempo maintainability/readiness or is that all folded into Red Flag?

Also, is Red Flag even remotely cool for you the way it is for the Pilots, PJs, SAM/AA crews, etc? Or does it just mean a fuck ton more work and no sleep?

>>28902501

Who won?

>>28902322

What's code 3?

>>28902583
The state of the aircraft after post flight evaluations and checks. A Code 1 means it's in perfect working order. Code 2 means it needs work but can fly. Code 3 means it needs major work and cannot return to the flight line until addressed.

So if a jackass goes out and over Gs a targeting pod or even worse his airframe (popped rivets, ripped skin, etc) then that pod or airframe is Code 3 until full checks/repair.

>>28902501
Reading about Red Flags and looking at pretty pictures. Came across this:

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/these-are-the-amazing-planes-of-this-years-red-flag-aer-1692329388
>Also, an electronic and cyber warfare aggressor unit plays havoc with allied radio communications and data-link systems. One F-15 pilot told me the first time he crewed up for a Red Flag mission he tried to radio his flight before taxiing and all he could hear was the Russian national anthem blaring in his headset on every frequency.

Fucking kek. It's gotta be the best job ever to play aggressor force at Nellis.

>>28901679
I seem to remember the original hornet needing 3x less maintenance hours than the tomcat.

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>>28902643
>"back in my day, you could just fly the plane through the enemy's wing with no problem, take the same bird out the next morning with nothing but fuel and ammo replaced"

>>28902743
Yeah, but Grampa I drop turds at more velocity than you flew back then.

>>28902761
why did you have to bring up papa's rapidly declining mental cognition sonny?

>>28902465
It was a real-life experience, but it's not mine.

My uncle hated every fucking second aboard the Kitty Hawk. To this day if you mention the F-14 he will fly off into a tangent about fixing it and then a few minutes later bitch about F-4s too.

>>28902643
What code was that F-15 that pulled 15G?

>>28902800
What was wrong with the F-4?

>>28902805
Code FUKT. Seriously, it was probably Code 3 for months if not written off. I would be surprised if there were not frame members cracked all the way through.

>>28902820
From what I remember, it was so bent out of shape that they made it a gate guardian or whatever you call those planes they park in front of airfields.

>>28902799
I'm sick of his incontinent ass constantly pointing out that he got to shoot down Japs and now all I do is truck fucking bombs with my fighter. And tell him to stop pulling out his wrinkly old sack, no one wants to see that shit.

>>28902828
Goddamn. What was the story on that over G, anyway? Spacial disorientation?

>>28902831
your balls sag when they're big, its not his fault you didnt get the good genes and have a sack that hit the back of your knees

>>28902813
Apparently McDonnell Douglas skipped some stuff here and there, and did things contrary to what my uncle wanted. i.e. it broke and he had to fix it and that pissed him off.

I really don't know because I'd just ask him about Tomcats a lot and he'd fucking blow a gasket every time. I didn't actually care what he said lmao

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>>28902800

So is this interview pretty much a lie then?

>>28902841
Here we go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-adcRA3u8Q
Sounds downright painful.

>>28902881
I can't say for sure about any of that but I'm pretty sure if I showed my uncle that he probably wouldn't appreciate reading that.

I remember his biggest complaints were the engines rather than the hinge assembly though, apparently they just stopped working all the time. I asked him, "well why wouldn't the navy just replace the engines?" and he turned and looked at me like I just loudly declared that I love sucking dog dick. His only words were a long, frustrated stare before going back to watching football.

>>28902953
Jesus Shitfire. Thunder Chicken is one hell of a jet.

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Navy helo mechanic here. Everything anybody has anecdotally shared regarding working on aircraft in the military is true. I thought helicopters were always a pain in the ass from day 1 when I started working on them.

Then I went to sea for 10 months.

There were days when I would wake up in my rack and lie there for 15 minutes mentally getting my shit together for another 14 hour work day in the Persian gulf. Still, the food wasn't half bad though. Steak and lobster twice a week.

>>28902970
I think me and your uncle would have a fine time shooting the shit with a couple brews.

>>28902881

It's written by a pilot, he never spent a day working on aircraft. Of fucking course he would say that to boost his own ego

>>28902993
Did you chase down any of that actual certified female deployment snatch I hear you USN carrier boys take with you on deployment now?

>>28902993
so is this what happens when you have bad karma? you get reincarnated as an aero mechanic innadesert

>>28902970

Wasn't one of the biggest issues with the Tomcat was that it was originally fitted with underpowered F-111 engines because the Navy was eager to get their new plane as fast as possible so they just used what they had available from the failed F-111B project? The engines just weren't powerful enough to handle the F-14's heavy frame and so sometimes they choked out.

>>28903015
All you wrench jockeys in the thread, as someone whose sun is working toward a pilot slot in the USN, does it matter to you guys if a pilot makes an effort to get his hands dirty, spending time working beside you occasionally to understand better what each task involves, or is it just some asshole getting in the way?

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>>28903024
Or worse, you end up like me on a carrier. I'd rather have been on land for a year.

>>28903017
It was in plentiful supply, but I abstained. There were more than a few females who I could have gotten to know in the biblical sense but they were married and I figured I'd already accrued enough negative karma. Now Australian women, on the other hand...

>>28903057
>Australian women, on the other hand...
Aussie women abroad confirmed for best women. Hands down, no questions asked, fucking laid back party animals. Goddamn glorious walkabout Aussies.

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>>28903035

I suppose it depends on a lot of things. Generally it just gets in The way and slows things down. Plus it makes us all self conscious since we have to tone down our usually obscene banter and shit talking to each other. Most officers usually only do it once and never try it again, so what's the point?

Now if we were busy and an officer asked if we needed help, we'd usually politely decline. The best move the officer could make in that situation would be to come back with food and energy drinks for us. Super bonus points

>>28902997
I doubt that, he's... well, he has his problems and is just generally kind of a shitty guy.

>>28903026
I guess. I don't actually know to be honest, I do rockets.

>>28902993
>>28903057
>>28903092

Wow. That doesn't look appealing at all.

>>28903100

What kind of rockets?

AMRAAM's? Mavericks? Harpoons? Sidewinders? Tridents? Minutemen?

>>28903026
Yep, the TF30s. It was actually a plan to fake the F-14 being supercheap under the McNamara DoD. Their real goal was to get a few early F-14A with the TF30, then do the majority of real purchases with the F-X (Later F-15) F100 in the F-14B and a final model with upgraded avionics in the F-14C. When Laird took over the DoD he saw it as gaming the system to fake it being cheaper, which it was, and immediately canceled the B and C models from their procurement. It took 18 years for the Navy to get the F110 engine that made it awesome in a new B model, and for a new advanced glass cockpit model F-14D another 4 years after that..

>>28903212
I used to work for Thiokol and now I work for ATK.

>>28902881
>come out of retirement to get the plane flying again. unequivocal "yes"

Astounding. Who in their right mind would trade retirement with a pension to go back to sweating their ass off with a high chance of physical injury just to make an aircraft fly.

Pilots really have no clue what's involved in the daily maintenance requirements for a modern aircraft. On dinosaurs like the 14 it must have been a feat out of dantes inferno just to prep for maintenance

>>28903092
Thank you. I will pass that along. See if my little shitbag can keep his head on straight and not only get his pilot spot but keep his humanity while he does it. I feel pretty good about his chances, but ya never know.

>>28903291

But anon! It's an "earned privilege"!

>>28903236
>Their real goal was to get a few early F-14A with the TF30, then do the majority of real purchases with the F-X (Later F-15) F100 in the F-14B
Honestly, looking back, it's probably better they ended up with the F110-GE rather than the F100-PW, considering the huge ball of fuckery that was the early F100 program, and the USAF-PW contracts.

The F-110 was a better engine anyway for most of the 80's and early 90's.

>>28903291
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/absolute-youngest-marine-in-the-f-35-test-force-shares-1716981177

Well, we do now have publicly available info from someone who's worked 4th and 5th gen jets now, and the F-35 is actually built around the fact somebody's going to be maintaining it instead of going straight from the engineer to prototyping to service.

>>28900156
What was your commissioning source, just for shits and giggles.

Flight training source? UPT, ENJJTP?

Spread of ROTC, Academy, etc. in pilot training?

>>28903314
Well, the F100 could be mostly great, in the F-16 it was a minor engineering tweak that prevented the biggest issue in the F-15 by intentionally splitting the intake air a bit to cool the outside of the engine. Though it developed its own issues there.

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>>28897987

Maybe for an amateur. I do that every single day here in Seattle =)

>>28903344
One of the biggest problems was the PW contract, though, that left them with no fiscal responsibility and little motivation to fix the issues with the F100, incurring more cost (on top of all the F-16 and F-15 Class As) during a time period when both Congress and the President were squeezing the balls out of O&M budgets across all services. That's part of why availability for the F-15 averaged in the 30-40% range for the first 5 years of service. Not because the aircraft was particularly difficult to maintain, they just didn't have money for the parts and the USAF especially was forced to choose modernization (newer, better tech platforms) over O&M funding to stay competitive with the Soviets.

>>28903368
Seems like there'd be a fuck ton more room to work inside the wing or avionics bay of a 737 than in something like an F-14. Am I wrong in assuming this?

>>28903376

Nope, but they had access panels for just that purpose.

>I worked on the cats before switching to C-2's and E-2's, then ultimately the 737 in the civilian world.

>>28903371
Well, the original AF contract was fantastic, but P&W managed to weasel so many concessions that the AF was left holding their limp dicks wondering why they felt so fucked.

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>>28887419
>tfw never ever

>>28903426

Is there any way that swing wings could be easier to maintain with modern technology?

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>>28901011
>From what I understand

Well, you don't understand a lot.

>>28903322

Straight up marketing move by the marines. Not even being facetious, that's a blatant PR piece if I've ever read it.

I do concede that the aircraft has been made easier to maintain. I know people who have seen it first hand and there is some amazing technology that will make it easier for wrench turners to do their job.

>>28903438
Not by much. With non-looped electro-hydrodynamic actuators like on the F-35 you take off the hydro loops, but it's still essentially an independent set on components on a bigass hinge that introduce a ton of extra points of failure. It's also basically impossible to build a stealth variable geometry plane.

>>28901011
No one fears the F-22 in dogfights.

Too heavy, too much energy bleeding through the TVC, no helmet targeting capacities, for the longest time no support of the newest sidewinder.

>>28903494
It's marketing because someone who has hands-on maintainer time loves it, right.

>>28903494
>PR piece
>from a marine now out of the service and not even working in the Aviation industry

ok.

>>28903485
>>28903503
F-22 fanboys are the worst.

>>28903485
What does that hunchback have to do with it?

>>28903510

>MiG-29
>F-22

WUT

>>28899923
IBO has done nothing right. Even when Okada and Nagai managed to shit out what looked like the start of a good idea in the early episodes, it fell flat and was never mention again or never expanded upon.

Mechanic work in IBO amounts to them running low on fuel once to serve the plot or having the software settings a little fucked up once. It could have been great considering the point of Barbatos was to be a suit they couldn't maintenance so they had to Frankenstein with other mobile suit parts. Good idea! But then they get weaboo company's harem buddy very early on and it gets fixed up to perfect shape (which displayed none of the difficulty of making armor unique to a 300 year old mecha, involving nano-laminate cover, etc etc because it was all done aboard a ship in short order). And then nothing, really. Now they're going to get a shitty upgrade to Barbatos to add on more Graze parts. Now we can have our ninth fucking Graze of the series! Yay!

IBO, despite removing beam weapons, has really unrealistic combat for a Gundam series. The concept started out as something that /m/ loved (and the staff made it seem like it would be a funny train wreck of DRAMA) and something /k/ could appreciate: Child soldiers, no beam weapons (it began with a MACE, even), against-the-world lifestyle, scavenging and on-the-fly fixes, comradery, and possibly a little combined arms tactics. But it fell apart and threw away everything to focus on muh FAMILY, muh OPPRESSION, muh REVOLUTION, and that's going very poorly. There's a lot wrong with IBO and depiction of maintenance is one of them. I'll sage for ranting.

>>28903816
Mechfags. Spending this much time and energy getting ANGRY, so, so ANGRY over the question of how realistic the latest depiction of their 100 ton anthropomorphic spaceship fighting robot with sword and extremely short range firearms is. Boggles the fucking mind.

I mean, I grew up with Gundam and Macross, but not fucking once was I dumb enough to stop and think, "you know? They really fucked up the realism here."

>>28903816
To be fair, I haven't been watching more than a few episodes at a time. Watching Farscape has been more interesting.

>>28903057
we don't like to associate with your kind

>>28904194
Found the angry male koala.

>>28904216
ill make sure to root a few yank girls next time im deployed americuck

>>28904226
Have fun. Wear a rubber.

Oh, wait, are you implying upside down military? Kek.

>>28904235
>the hamburger actually thinks there's an up and down in the universe, AND HE'S ON TOP OF IT!

>>28904256
You're the one with the toilets that swirl the wrong way, oh wise wallaby.

>>28895798
>So basically the F14 was a specialist air superiority fighter. It was and (still is) the best plane in the world for that role.

No, no, no. The F14 was built to intercept and destroy Soviet bombers at long ranges in order to protect the carrier group. It never was intended as an air-superiority fighter, and it certainly isn't a top one today with the F22 around.

> It's a big slow plane

It was extremely fast in its day, and still is more than respectable. It had to take off from a carrier and intercept incoming bombers, hopefully before they got in effective range for their antiship missiles.

>But it still came out too heavy for a true dogfighter, so the F16 was developed and took that role away.

You seriously think the F16 was developed to be a dogfighter because the F15 wasn't so great in that role? Seriously?

>The F15 was then developed into more of a multi-role fighter-bomber.

The platform was expanded into a multirole variant because the basic design could carry a lot of weight. A new version with the right electronics, weapons, and crew training could be a pretty good fighter-bomber. And it was, and it is.

>>28897741
if the mig 25 hit mach 3 its engines were in runaway mode and were seld destructing and would have to be replaced upon landing

>>28898637
heavy object, look into it

>>28902239

>boughten

>>28904364
Is the Tomcat the fastest ever carrier launched aircraft? It's a bit faster than the F-4, 5% faster than the Su-33, and significantly faster than the A-5. I can't think of anything else that might be a contender.

>>28902326
>Manned and unmanned vehicles still have to fly THROUGH LEO to get there
Yes, and there's a massive difference between the ~1 hour they need to spend in a LEO holding orbit on their way to transfer, and the literal YEARS AND YEARS that LEO satellites remain in LEO.

So no, you're wrong.

>>28902268
5/10 troll

>>28904577
>debris collision risk, even what would seem small in engineering failure rate terms, is acceptable in space missions

Anon. Jesus. Do you have any clue at all how our space program works? A 2% failure chance is enough to scrub a launch, for Christ sake. Don't be a dumbass. LEO self-expanding debris clouds would be an incredible impediment to human manned spaceflight. It would also triple-quintuple the cost of any launch because of the necessary fuel fractions to get significant mass to higher orbits.

>>28904605
We're talking far less than 2% chance. We're talking less than 0.1% chance.

And on top of the time aspect, it's also worth noting that holding orbits are ALREADY normally below what is generally regarded as a stable low orbit, since less propellant is consumed this way (Oberth effect and all that). Due to atmospheric drag, only large objects with high ballistic coefficients can orbit here; debris at these altitudes promptly falls from orbit and reenters.

And as for the cost/delta-V issue, it's certainly more pressing but even so you don't have to go all the way to geostationary orbit to get above the debris cloud. A modest medium orbit 500-1000 miles up would be sufficient to get well beyond the brunt of debris.

>>28904648
>A modest medium orbit 500-1000 miles up would be sufficient to get well beyond the brunt of debris.
So four times the cost of current manned missions, on top of having to rebuild all current manned infrastructure up there like the ISS. Sure. No big deal.

You clearly haven't thought this out, and now you're just throwing bullshit out to try and cover the fact that you showed your ass on the internet.

>>28904648
>We're talking far less than 2% chance. We're talking less than 0.1% chance.
Oh, and that's not the absolute chance of failure, but additive on EVERY SINGLE SUCCESSIVE MISSION for decades after the initiation of the cascade event. So, you're taking that much more risk on top of what is already a risky endeavor.

This is not insignificant, as much as you would love to hand wave it away.

>>28904677
>500-mile medium orbit
>Still sticking by "four times the cost" like we're talking about GEO
Nigger, it's just 500 m/s more delta-V. Fuck outta here.

>>28902477
Hey sorry to derail the thread, but /meg/ doesn't seem to have any AF dudes in at the moment. I'm shooting for avionics tech right now, and i wanted to know what i'm in for. Is it worth it?

>>28902813
>>>28902800
>What was wrong with the F-4?

the modified manhole cover? the proof that with enough thrust anything will fly? the lead sled? they had to cant the wings and tail to make up for engineering mistakes... sooooo many screws in the turtle back if you had to gain access to fuel tank sensors

>>28904721
Not even that anon, but are you stupid? There's no one in the world in any way connected with a space program that thinks a Kessler Syndrome situation is no big deal. No one.

First of all, LEO extends to 1,243mi altitude (not "500-1000 miles up" as you suggested here >>28904648, which would still be right smack dab in the middle of the shitstorm in a Kessler scenario). Even if the majority of the debris is concentrated in the 150-300mi altitude range, significant portions of the debris cloud will have migrated to higher orbits as energy is transferred in collisions. This has been modeled by NASA as early as 1982.

Secondly, dV to get to MEO is an extra 2.3km/s over LEO, or 11.8km/s total dV. Now, junior, run that through a fuel fraction calculation and tell me what you see. I guarantee it's not "just" anything. It is substantial. Ask old Tsiolkovsky and see what he tells you about almost a quarter more velocity.

>>28904721
>>28904904
I was typing a response and then I saw this. I think I'll just sit back and watch now.

>>28904721
>the only manned space flights that have left LEO by more than 60 miles altitude were the Apollo missions
>no big whup if we can't use LEO any more

anon...

>>28904364
>The F14 was built to intercept and destroy Soviet bombers at long ranges in order to protect the carrier group.

Not just the bombers, but also their escorts.

As to 'slow' again think turning speed. It has a respectable straight-away speed but it turns very slowly compared to say an F16 or even an F15.

>You seriously think the F16 was developed to be a dogfighter because the F15 wasn't so great in that role? Seriously?

I think the fighter mafia guys pushed what became the F16 because *they* didn't think the F15 was a good dogfighter, yes.

Whether they were correct or not is another argument entirely, but that much is simple historical fact.

All it would result in would be a year or two of ground based lasers burning up the debris, and needing to armor things a bit more

Overall this would be a good thing because it would force governments to build higher Isp nuclear engines

>>28902953
>Narrated by Dana Carvey as "The Church Lady"

>>28905023
This has to be bait. No one this marginally informed about space travel can also be this stupid.

>>28902167

with no CFT's and 6x2 loadout, 120D's and 9X's and JHMCS and the APG-82, it'll destroy just about anything short of the Raptor.

that will never happen though.

>>28903092

honestly if it's fighter aircrew, go ahead and cuss away.

the only real experience i had was taking a case of beer into the maintainer's break room when i managed to break off an antenna (which was really a 10 minute fix), and when i peeked my nugget into the underbelly of a F-15E as they were removing/replacing the frame that holds the AMADs and CGB. got to actually see a PTO shaft. that was a cool moment.

>>28903338

OTS. UCT, i wear smash bug. still drive it super (when in a warning area >15nm from land and >10,000 MSL) on occasion though.

there's tons of academy dudes at UPT. then ROTC, then OTS.

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>>28900069
>>28900120

>>28905124
Nuclear pulse propulsion is the future
Not faggy chemical engines

>>28903503

you don't need to pull the AOA to invoke the full thrust vector logic. i don't want to go to the merge with a F-22. 9X integration has been going slow. the 120D is just trickling down to F-15E's, and we're still not giving our pilots JHMCS until they go to their ops squadron.

>>28887419
I think the advancing of fly-by wire tech had a lot to do with it.

we dont really need complicated maintenance heavy swing-wings anymore if we are capable of making a brick fly and make turns like some aerial ballerina.

>>28895463
no the white wire with the red loom around it

so another thought - if you're clever and watch the bandit and how they place their LV relative to the POM and how the nose tracks, you can figure out their energy state pretty easily.

however, if you're fighting a F-14... you just have to watch their wing sweep and that'll tell you everything you want to know.

>>28903978
If realism was a problem for me then I wouldn't be watching mecha at all. IBO just has no effort or life in it. Depicting details like that with care is a way of showing that the universe is more than what happens on the screen at any given moment. A frame system that allows mecha 300 years apart to swap massive pieces of the structure doesn't make sense. Giant robots smacking swords in space doesn't make sense. But it's the WAY that it is depicted that matters. IBO just doesn't give a shit and it shows.

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>>28887582

>>28901704

I think the Blue Angels have different considerations. If it was just nimbleness, they would have flown Skyhawks instead of F-4s.

bump for info

>>28905023
>>28905516
Hi, >>28903282 here. Since I'm probably the only one in the thread who has anything resembling the expertise on this subject let me just say one thing: you're an idiot.

One, firing a laser powerful enough to incinerate (I'm assuming that's what you mean) debris in LEO would need to exceed a few terawatts in power, just ballpark estimate here. Either way we're talking about the entire electrical power generation of the United States put into a single installation and even then you have issues of tracking, acquisition, and all sorts of other problems I'm not even going to think about.

Secondly, you don't just "put more armor on it" because that's stupid. Spacecraft are already ridiculously armored, you could park a machine gun and fire .50BMG at any crewed vehicle today and it would shrug it all off without a single worry. A single fleck of paint a couple millimeters in diameter traveling at orbital velocities has the same kinetic energy that comes out of a M1 Garand at the muzzle. (napkin math here, not going to be the most accurate because I'm in a hurry)

Thirdly, what the fuck are you? The ghost of Fritz Zwicky? Nuclear pulse propulsion is stupid, it was a dumb idea when it was thought up back in the 60's and it's a dumb idea now. If you want to use nuclear fission (or fusion) for a rocket then use something that doesn't rely on fucking shock absorbers to prevent the vehicle from being tore apart by a few kiloton nuclear detonation.

You know, like nuclear thermal rockets. Something that's actually been on the table for a viable long-range propulsion method. Or even better, fission fragment propulsion.

I know it's hard being young, but you do have tools like Google and Wikipedia so you do not have any excuse to be this unbelievably ignorant.

>>28909370
Clarification: that comment about .50BMGs and crewed vehicles wasn't serious. That was hyperbole.

I feel like the world is going to shit since I need to actually explain that.

>>28909370
nuclear pulse propulsion is an order of magnitude more efficient than nuclear thermal rockets.

What makes you think shock absorbers would not work? There is nothing about the system that would require new technologies, or new materials.
It could be done today, if it was needed/wanted.

>>28909444
It uses nuclear fucking detonations to propel the spacecraft. Much like how we do not use dynamite to propel cars (dynamite is, per pound, more efficient than gasoline after all) it would be as equally ridiculous to toss a small nuke out the back and hope for the best.

If you're seriously that deluded that anyone would willingly fly up nuclear bombs to use as single-shot boosts for this dumb fictional spacecraft then likely nothing I say will make sense to you.

Shock absorbers won't work because unless you have tens of meters of movement the spacecraft is still going to be hit with some thirty to forty g and then all those squishy people inside will be killed. If you do have that amount of travel for the absorbers then the efficiency of the detonation is going to be basically completely wasted. So no, we're back to the actually practical and efficient nuclear thermal rockets, fission fragment, ion thrusters, or hell, even solar sails. Since you're worried about research only one of those methods actually hasn't been played with in a lab, and nuclear thermal rockets are perfectly viable with our current technology.

>>28909567
I don't think you understand anything about physics
Fission fragments are just theoretical, nuclear thermal rockets are mostly theoretical
Ion is not suitable for launching from earth, and lower Isp anyways.

Gasoline also has higher energy density than dynamite, so your point on that is also moot.

The reason for nuclear pulse propulsion is because internal confinement of these energies is for the moment, technically impossible.

>>28903368

Got me. I just sold 'em, rarely had to put the things together myself.

>>28902800

> be at an Air Show at XYZ AFB
> there's cotton candy, hot dogs, ice cream, little kids just shitting themselves all over anything with a turbine
> it is a beautiful day
> then, an old Navy aircraft mechanic shows up
> he wears his old ship's cover and a jacket... people are saluting him and thanking him for his service
> but he hears none of it
> he weaves drunkenly through the throng of autists and children, occasionally taking swigs from the mouthwash bottle he smuggled in under his jacket
> and then, he sees her: the target of his hatred, the receptacle for the combined angst of decades..... an F14 Tomcat
> weaving drunk but surprisingly spry, the old man climbs up the side of the enormous flying machine amidst the gasps of the gathered crowd
> once on top of the hulking jet, he begins screaming indistinct profanity and kicking the canopy
> "WHORE! FUCKING WHORE! YOU DESTROYED MY LIIIIIIFEEE!" he screams as he pulls down his pants and shits atop the canopy
> suddenly, a pop and an electric sizzle and the old man convulsed and fell from the jet, taser darts protruding from his back
> before he can collect himself, he is cuffed and bound and carried away cursing and raving by Security Forces
> the announcer speaks into the PA system with dulcet tones: "And on the north runway, one of the last flying F4 Phantoms in existence
> the old man screams "CUUUUUUUUUUNT!" over the sound of the PA system and is carried into a side building
> two Security Forces troops remaining outside look to each other and one says "Every year, man. Every goddamned year."

>>28909719
>nuclear thermal rockets are mostly theoretical

As opposed to the wildly mechanically complex nuclear pulse propulsion? Nuclear thermal rockets are precisely this:
Take coolant loop of a normal nuclear reactor then...
Vent into space!
Congratulations, you have thrust. Sure you could get more efficiency out of it by adding in a reheater loop to superheat the liquid into dry steam but that's just fine tuning an already simple system. Hell, you wouldn't even need a conventional reactor, you could use a chunk of radioisotope (plutonium from those stupid propulsion nukes you love would work great) and pump whatever working fluid you want over it.

>Ion is not suitable for launching from earth

Oh so you're going to be putting rockets up into orbit using nukes now? Holy shit. No. Shut the fuck up, nothing we're describing is suitable for SSTO at all but nuclear pulse propulsion most of all.

Unless you goal is to piss off literally the entire world while simultaneously polluting our planet with radiation. You should have just stuck to talking about efficiency rather than revealing you're completely off your goddamn rocker.

>Gasoline also has higher energy density than dynamite, so your point on that is also moot.

True, but you know why I brought that up? Gasoline is much, much easier to utilize than dynamite explosions. Rather than having a complicated mess of shock absorbers, blast shielding, radiation shielding, and a method to load a nuclear device into the "combustion chamber" which all has to be launched from the surface of the earth into MEO (remember, you're the idiot who's trying to clear LEO of debris using lasers so it's going to be fucked for awhile) and then assembled you could always just use something that weighs less and is less prone to complete destruction.

>The reason for nuclear pulse propulsion is because internal confinement of these energies is for the moment, technically impossible

Nobody will develop them either, it's a stupid idea.

>>28910718
>wildly mechanically complex nuclear pulse propulsion?
?
It's literally an external nuclear detonation, which is absorbed by a pusher plate, which uses shocks to spread the acceleration out to a manageaable level
Nothing new, nothing COMPLEX.

The nuclear thermal rockets that were produced had Isp in the 800 range. Whereas NPP would be 10x that or more.

>Unless you goal is to piss off literally the entire world while simultaneously polluting our planet with radiation.
Yes because everyone in the world died when they tested 2000+ nukes during the 50's and 60's, right? Clean nuclear blasts produce negligible radiation. Certainly nothing compared to regular industrial pollution.

>Gasoline is much, much easier to utilize than dynamite explosions.
Perhaps you don't understand physics. "Combustion" is just an explosion, whether it is confined in a chamber or not, its still an explosion.
When it comes to nuclear, you rapidly run into material & physical limits on what you can confine.
Hence making the explosion external, which still allows you to absorb most of the energy.

>you could always just use something that weighs less and is less prone to complete destruction.
Shitty chemical rockets that are 90%+ fuel by weight? That's what we're already doing.

>>28910978
>Nothing new, nothing COMPLEX.
Confirmed for never having done any serious engineering work in your life.

You want a ship with literally hundreds shock absorption devices, actuated by a mechanism that will in a short time make them completely impossible to service or repair by the crew due to radiological isotope contamination (which would already be very difficult due to cosmic and solar radiation outside of the Van Allen belt), yet each and every one of which has to operate at extremely close to equal efficiency or uneven loads would crack and warp the entire shield assembly. Best case scenario, you end up with an uncontrollable space vehicle which, at every impulse, adds more and more spin. Worst case, the shield cracks through and kaboom.

Furthermore, you're so scientifically and politically illiterate that you believe nuclear explosions, or nuclear propulsion to orbit in any fashion, is a viable earth to orbit system through the atmosphere.

Fucking child. Go read a book instead of inflicting your autism on us.

>>28911054
>We can't do this because the same liberal politicians that want to destroy the west are scared of the big bad nuclear boogey man

kk

>>28910978
>It's literally an external nuclear detonation, which is absorbed by a pusher plate, which uses shocks to spread the acceleration out to a manageaable level
Your pusher plate needs to somehow absorb 4.184×1012 J of energy that's released over a period of what, ~15ms? This plate's shock absorbers would have to have an absurdly long travel length for one, for two they'd need to be built very sturdy and thus be very heavy even with using some magical theoretical materials, and for three after all is said and done you've lost most of that detonation's energy anyway. Plus this is the most minimum yield possible, one kiloton, there is no way to throttle it any lower so you're stuck with flinging the spacecraft violently in one direction which is not at all useful.

>Clean nuclear blasts produce negligible radiation. Certainly nothing compared to regular industrial pollution.
Yes, because CO2 emissions are comparable to ejecting radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Riiiight. One, we're back to the violent acceleration problem again, two, we're back to pissing away most of the detonation's energy in the shock absorbers (who are designed to attenuate and dissipate energy, not store it) which means you're back to using a tried and true method of reaching orbit. I keep telling you that your idea is stupid and won't work and explaining to you why in simple terms, but you're still too fucking thick to get it.

>Perhaps you don't understand physics.
Much, much more than you do. Even if I didn't, I understand PRACTICALITY which is something that's apparently beyond you.

>"Combustion" is just an explosion, whether it is confined in a chamber or not, its still an explosion.
Yes, thank you captain obvious, I am well aware of how an internal combustion engine works. Here's what you're not understanding: not all explosions are created equal. Your kiloton detonation is much, much harder to harness and utilize than any internal combustion engine.

Oops, I got snipped off, here's part 2:

>>28910978
Which means that the analogy of dynamite to gasoline fits when compared to nuclear detonations to any other rocket propulsion method used.

>Hence making the explosion external, which still allows you to absorb most of the energy.
Energy that, AGAIN, is far too much at once to use which means most of it needs to be done away with. You're not understanding this, flashes of terajoules of energy need to be disposed of quickly to keep the spacecraft from looking like a tin can that fought and lost a boot or from turning the occupants into pulp. You're essentially arguing that using a sledgehammer is a perfectly viable method of pressing the buttons on your television remote as long as you have adequate shock absorption. It's a stupid idea. You're going to break everything.

>Shitty chemical rockets that are 90%+ fuel by weight? That's what we're already doing.
Yes. Just because something is old doesn't mean it isn't the best method. Sure you could technically launch stuff in space if you pack a nuke underneath it but again, radioactive isotopes (ALL nuclear detonations release fallout. There's a reason why nuclear tests were conducted in remote areas by the way) and the fact that you're wasting most of the energy trying not to break the launch vehicle or destroy the payload. We don't use guns to launch stuff in space either, despite the fact that light gas guns could do it cheaply and efficiently because of other limitations.

>>28911085
>We can't do this because the same liberal politicians that want to destroy the west are scared of the big bad nuclear boogey man

No, it's called common fucking sense. >>28911054 is spot-on and clearly has real-world experience and a greater grip on basic mechanical theory than you do.

By the way, since you keep accusing everyone of apparently being uneducated I want you to present evidence of your education. I'll post mine if you're more educated than I am.

>>28910978
>>28911085
So, you want to fuel a long range spacecraft in the most expensive way possible (literally having to refine plutonium and build nuclear bombs for it just for locomotion), make it politically impossible to launch from earth's surface under power (because it's far, far too heavy to launch in pieces and assemble in orbit), and make it several orders of magnitude more mechanically complex than ANY alternative nuclear space propulsion system.

And it has to be this way just because your special kind of autism demands that NUCLEAR BOMBS just have to be the centerpiece of your ideal super-awesome spaceship.

Right.

>The nuclear thermal rockets that were produced had Isp in the 800 range. Whereas NPP would be 10x that or more.
This isn't remotely accurate.

>Clean nuclear blasts produce negligible radiation.
It's not about the radiation, dipshit, it's the radiological isotope contamination.

>Hence making the explosion external, which still allows you to absorb most of the energy.
This isn't even remotely accurate. According to Newton's third law, which if you'd actually had a high school education you'd understand, you're only getting just under 50% of the energy output (theoretical maximum at 100% energy transfer efficiency to desired direction motion) due to the fact that the explosion radiates in a SPHERE. After efficiency loss due to a number of factors, largest of which would be varying levels of absorption/reflection of thermal energy in your blast shield, you get even less than 49.999999% of the energy. Nuclear thermal rockets are a far, far more efficient use of nuclear fuel in their ability to properly direct thrust.

And then there's the horrifically mechanically complex impulse absorption mechanism, which will destroy the ability to even direct the ship in a desired direction, much less not blow it up if just one portion of it fails.

Stop and think about the shit you say.

>>28902385
Film it now and release it when you're retired

>>28910978
>>28911085
>>28911260
Oh, and one more thing. Nuclear explosions are far, far less efficient at transferring energy in the absence of an atmosphere or other energy transfer medium (just look at the destructive differences between airburst and underwater burst against ships in the Operation Crossroads tests), so you take a huge efficiency hit there too.

>>28911260
Oh, I had forgotten about the sphere aspect of the explosion, for some odd reason I was imagining it differently. My bad.

You're spot-on though, aside from the eventual depletion of working fluid in a nuclear thermal rocket they're still far, far more useful than fucking nuclear detonations. Plus your second post: >>28911284 describing the loss of efficiency in a vacuum is another good point, but I avoided bringing that up because it seemed too far beyond him.

I suppose it doesn't matter anyway, he's apparently under the impression that "the liberals" are holding back this totally neato idea that couldn't possibly have any downsides at all!

>>28910978
>The nuclear thermal rockets that were produced had Isp in the 800 range. Whereas NPP would be 10x that or more.
At the cost of massive and constantly recurring fuel costs. You're literally trading energy density for exponentially increased dollars per dV unit. But you'll just hand wave the cost of producing hundreds of nuclear bombs just for propulsion, I'm sure.

>>28911341
I have to admit I'm a sucker for the idea of fission fragment propulsion, even if it's never been tested or wouldn't be economically viable. Looking at it from a napkin math perspective the idea has merit, use fissile material in a sort of "open-ended" reactor that just sprays the high-energy particles out of a magnetic nozzle to generate thrust. For me it's always seemed like some neat sci-fi method of propulsion, too bad it wouldn't glow Chernekov blue...

I think we can all agree it would be less of a ridiculous venture than using a bomb to push against a plate with this clockwork mechanism of shock absorbers and blast shields to protect a spacecraft that would likely reach a few hundred feet off the ground. Then more bombs, then more violent jolts... I mean sure, you'd need to use a conventional rocket to put the fission fragment vehicle into orbit but it was never intended to be used as a SSTO vehicle.

Plus all those bombs would weigh a lot, what would be the point when you could ditch all of the complicated absorbers, plates, shields, bombs, storage for bombs, and then just use a simple ion thruster with a tank of xenon for probably a thousandth of the cost and a hundredth of the weight?

>>28892068
Until now.

Typhoon upgrades begin this year to final fuck the Tornado off.

>>28911416
>I think we can all agree it would be less of a ridiculous venture than using a bomb to push against a plate
No argument there. At least FFP has the possible capability of being space refueled given the proper fissionable materials being present outside of a significant gravity well. NPP can't even say that unless we're budgeting mass for a literal bomb factory and breeder reactor.

>>28911478
I wonder if a dust-type reactor could use thorium for the fissile material, if so all that would be needed is a robotic drone with a crushing mechanism and a centrifuge for the actual processing of fuel.

>>28911554
Something to consider for unmanned propulsion if we're ever going to send unmanned probes out to trans-Uranian orbit to have a field day really studying different bodies in the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt. Not so much for a long time as far as manned space flight, but those are the sorts of developments which are direct mission efficiency multipliers for manned missions. Just giving a manned spacecraft two such drones for scientific sample collection would be huge, much less by the time we get to the point where space missions become partially self sustaining.

>>28911240
>Yes, because CO2 emissions are comparable to ejecting radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere.
You mean literally what all coal power plants have been doing for decades?

>>28911255
>and the fact that you're wasting most of the energy trying not to break the launch vehicle or destroy the payload.
Since nuclear has a million times more energy than chemical, you can "waste" a bit.

Rocket launches are also conducted in remote areas.

>light gas guns could do it cheaply and efficiently because of other limitations.
No gas gun has ever gotten close to orbital velocity.

>>28911260
>in the most expensive way possible
Cheaper per joule than anything else.

>make it politically impossible to launch from earth's surface under power
Peaceful usage of nuclear bombs has been talked about and experimented with, its not "politically impossible".

>because it's far, far too heavy to launch in pieces and assemble in orbit
Higher Isp than anything else, so it would be lighter in orbit than any conventional rocket.

>and make it several orders of magnitude more mechanically complex than ANY alternative nuclear space propulsion system.

No alternative nuclear space propulsion systems are even FEASIBLE with current technologies, so how can you compare them?

>Nuclear thermal rockets are a far, far more efficient use of nuclear fuel in their ability to properly direct thrust.
This is completely nonsense, and shows you have no fucking clue what you are talking about. We've talked before haven't we? You are the autist who gets triggered over the "waste" of potential nuclear energy with nuclear pulse propulsion.

Must kill you to think of the "waste" involved with the fucking sun, huh!

>>28911341
Plutonium & nuclear bombs are really not that expensive to produce.
Cheaper than any nuclear thermal rocket, thats for sure.

What do you mean handwave? Nukes are cheap, this is why the US and USSR built tens of thousands of them, and then signed treaties to limit their numbers.

>>28911416
>What would be the point of using a practical form of propulsion, for this unpractical and totally theoretical rocket

uh huh.

ITT: Autists argue autismally about autism.

>>28911640
>No gas gun has ever gotten close to orbital velocity.
not that guy, but did you ever hear about that bigass electromagnetic slingshot they had out in the SW US desert? Looks like a traditional 6 with the circle being something like 14km in diameter.

was supposed to retire the NASA program. But just like the Arab who discovered how to launch nano-energy particles to detect lava movement, they black-ops'd it after they found out it also works for mapping manmade tunnels and natural-made caves in Afganistan.

>>28911708
>Cheaper per joule than anything else.
Not after vacuum and unfocused energy expenditure losses.

>Peaceful usage of nuclear bombs has been talked about and experimented with, its not "politically impossible".
You're an idiot. There's literally a series of international treaties banning such usage. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is literally the reason the Orion Project was initially shelved, and the lack of any engineering virtue is why it remains that way.

>No alternative nuclear space propulsion systems are even FEASIBLE with current technologies, so how can you compare them?
Electrostatic Ion Thruster, Hall Effect Thruster are both flight proven; Field Emission Electric Propulsion is flight qualified; Pulsed Plasma Thruster and Magnetoplasmadynamic thruster are protoype demoed in space. All of these technologies are far more likely in terms of engineering, cost and political necessity.

NPP has been around since the 50's, and was never even prototyped. And you're claiming it's a legitimate current technology.

>This is completely nonsense, and shows you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.
No rational response to the argument.

>We've talked before haven't we? You are the autist who gets triggered over the "waste" of potential nuclear energy with nuclear pulse propulsion.
Aaaaaaand now into ad hominem. Congratulations. You mad. By the way, I have no clue who you're talking about. But it is hilarious that you're so autistic you cannot conceive of the concept that people keep telling you your idea sucks because it might actually suck.

>>28911792
>Plutonium & nuclear bombs are really not that expensive to produce.
And there's the hand wave I predicted, in the face of all real world evidence.

>Cheaper than any nuclear thermal rocket, thats for sure.
Certainly not in any terms of recurring fuel cost, and almost certainly not in terms of initial build cost once the massive shock absorber plate is accounted for.

>>28911792
>What do you mean handwave? Nukes are cheap, this is why the US and USSR built tens of thousands of them, and then signed treaties to limit their numbers.
Someone hasn't been paying attention to the fact that the US didn't even have the facilities to produce Plutonium 238 for RTGs for the last 25 years (it just got restarted), much less Pu-239 for thermonuclear warheads.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150756-to-the-stars-after-a-25-year-hiatus-nasa-restarts-plutonium-production

>>28911708
>Cheaper per joule than anything else.
ANY form of Ion propulsion beats it handily in this metric, anon. Just saying.

>>28911640
>Rocket launches are also conducted in remote areas.

Yeah, but you don't have to completely abandon them and build a brand new one every time you launch something. Yet more cost.

Also, has anyone noticed how this anon has stopped claiming the Kessler Syndrome is "no big deal" and put his goalposts on wheels to misdirect us to NPP stupidity?

>>28912118
All civilian nuclear power plants produce large amounts of PU-239 as a byproduct of their operation.
They deliberately leave the fuel rods in for long periods of time to contaminate them with PU-240, ignoring the fact that you can build nuclear bombs with PU-240.

It's difficult for them to make new PU-238 due to funding limits and not wanting to produce fissile material.

>>28912138
They have terrible thrust to weight, are pointless except for really long range missions, and still will have lower Isp than nuclear pulse propulsion would.

>>28912179
yes because the cities of nagasaki and hiroshima were completely abandoned, right?

>>28912293
>All civilian nuclear power plants produce large amounts of PU-239 as a byproduct of their operation.
Literally less than half a percent by weight in a spent civilian pressurized water reactor, and Pu-240 is present in one quarter of one percent quantities. It would cost less to build a breeder reactor facility than it would to process those rods for usable amounts of Pu-239.

Why do you go on the internet just to lie?

>They have terrible thrust to weight, are pointless except for really long range missions, and still will have lower Isp than nuclear pulse propulsion would.
They cost far less, are actually mechanically feasible in manned spacecraft and have actually been tested or even used in mature designs. You're talking out of your ass about a design that was never even prototyped.

>yes because the cities of nagasaki and hiroshima were completely abandoned, right?
So airburst produces the same level of ground contamination that the ground launch of something like Orion would? Are you fucking retarded?

>>28912293
You're still completely ignoring the design-breaking mechanical engineering challenges in maintainability and failure serviceability here >>28911054
>You want a ship with literally hundreds shock absorption devices, actuated by a mechanism that will in a short time make them completely impossible to service or repair by the crew due to radiological isotope contamination (which would already be very difficult due to cosmic and solar radiation outside of the Van Allen belt), yet each and every one of which has to operate at extremely close to equal efficiency or uneven loads would crack and warp the entire shield assembly. Best case scenario, you end up with an uncontrollable space vehicle which, at every impulse, adds more and more spin. Worst case, the shield cracks through and kaboom.
and here >>28911260
>And then there's the horrifically mechanically complex impulse absorption mechanism, which will destroy the ability to even direct the ship in a desired direction, much less not blow it up if just one portion of it fails.
because you can't handle the fact that in the real world, your idea is beyond retarded.

>>28912083
>And there's the hand wave I predicted, in the face of all real world evidence.

Real world evidence is that it's very cheap to bulk manufacture small fission bombs.

Electric thrusters are proven largely useless, theres a reason noone uses them for sending missions to the moon, nearby asteroids, or mars.

NPP does not require any magical leaps in material sciences, technologies, or decades of development.
Unlike all other nuclear propulsion methods.

>>28912377
>Why do you go on the internet just to lie?
So you agreed with me, then claimed I lied?

>They cost far less
Well no, they cost more, when considering the thrust they provide, and are useless for short missions.

>So airburst produces the same level of ground contamination that the ground launch of something like Orion would?
Conventional explosives could kick the orion craft off the ground to begin with. Radioactive contamination would be negligible compared to shit like Radon in your home.

>>28912444
>Real world evidence is that it's very cheap to bulk manufacture small fission bombs.
http://fpif.org/much-nuclear-weapon-actually-cost/
1.8 million per warhead. And you need hundreds for your ship. And you can't even modulate your propulsion for any kind of fine maneuvering or course correction.

You're the fucking dumbest smart kid I've ever seen in my life. Read a book, figure out how to into common sense and get some therapy for that autism.

>>28912444
>Electric thrusters are proven largely useless, theres a reason noone uses them for sending missions to the moon, nearby asteroids, or mars.
Which is why they are constantly being funded and researched in Universities across the world and JPL currently, amirite? Idiot.

>NPP does not require any magical leaps in material sciences, technologies, or decades of development.
Yet it's never been so much as prototyped. Why is that? Shit, no one's even bothered to work out the material science on a shield for it.

>Unlike all other nuclear propulsion methods.
Nuclear thermal rockets require no theoretical technological leaps. At all. Stop talking out of your ass.

>So you agreed with me, then claimed I lied?
Less than half a percent is >>28912293
>large amounts of PU-239
?
Ok, kid.

>Well no, they cost more, when considering the thrust they provide, and are useless for short missions.
More claims, while you don't even know what a modern nuclear warhead costs to produce. While something like the Orion project was never even cost analyzed. While all these other systems are actually being flight tested or are in operation.

Does your asshole ever get tired from the amount of pulling you do?

>Conventional explosives could kick the orion craft off the ground to begin with.
Oh, so more design changes? More hand waving? More variables? Sounds brilliant for a system which you claim is cheaper and more efficient, in spite of never even getting cost analysis, much less a workable design or anything close to a prototype.

Get the fuck out of here with this weak ass bullshit.

>>28902322
>see that f-14 crash and sink in top gun
>first pump the air wildly because you won't have to be running maintenance on the fucker when it gets back

>>28912409
>literally hundreds shock absorption devices
Thats his opinion, not reality. These would be engineering challenges, not impossibilities.

>>28912486
You didn't even read your own article
>Over the unit price three decades ago of $354,000 in 2014 dollars.
A single nuclear pulse launch would increase 10 fold the total payload lifted to orbit, so spending 1 billion dollars on its fuel for single stage to mars, or the moon, is cheap.

How many billions will NASA spend on SLS before they cancel it?

>And you can't even modulate your propulsion for any kind of fine maneuvering or course correction.

Except you can..... each pulse unit would be a relatively small amount of impulse, for especially fine tuning you don't use your main drive anyways.

>>28911600
Have you ever played Homeworld? I've always liked the idea of a spacecraft large enough (assembled in orbit) to be capable of assembling smaller craft to carry out additional functions. Of course building something as large as the Kushan mothership would be nearly impossible from a purely financial perspective but something around the size of the ISS in total square area? Yes, that could be done over a period of several years with heavy-lift launch vehicles.

>>28911640
>You mean literally what all coal power plants have been doing for decades?
Radon gas and radium are not comparable to Cesium-137 and other longer-lived isotopes found in even the cleanest nuclear detonations. By the way, that's a gamma-emitter and has a half-life of about thirty years, so it's a serious issue and the reason why fallout contamination of soil is a serious issue of nuclear detonations.

>Since nuclear has a million times more energy than chemical, you can "waste" a bit.
No.. no you can't, if you're going to claim that then you don't care about efficiency (and never did, given how hard you're arguing for this retarded idea) and thus we're back to less-efficient and far more practical methods of propulsion.

>Rocket launches are also conducted in remote areas.
Yes, because it's dangerous to put hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel and oxidizer in a metal can that uses those dangerous chemicals to propel it up into the fucking sky. Difference being the ground isn't forever contaminated if something goes wrong, at the most it's just burned everything and is a financial loss rather than an environmental disaster.

>>28911708
>Cheaper per joule than anything else.
[citation needed] on this weapons-grade bullshit.

>Peaceful usage of nuclear bombs has been talked about and experimented with, its not "politically impossible".
... and found to be wildly impractical and more of an environmental nightmare than the original 50's-era predictions had outlined.

1/2

>>28898439
>sergeant
>Navy

>>28911708
2/2
>No alternative nuclear space propulsion systems are even FEASIBLE with current technologies, so how can you compare them?
... Except nuclear thermal rockets, ion thrusters, chemical rockets, laser propulsion, I mean I could keep going on and on here. On paper alone fission fragment propulsion is a better alternative.

>We've talked before haven't we? You are the autist who gets triggered over the "waste" of potential nuclear energy with nuclear pulse propulsion.
No that would be me. The guy who's worked for Thiokol and now works for the successor corporation. You're the one slinging accusations that everyone else is an idiot, so again: present evidence of your academic credentials because you're arguing with a literal rocket scientist and the guy you're replying to is probably a mechanical engineer or something on that order.

>>28911792
>Plutonium & nuclear bombs are really not that expensive to produce.
Really? [citation needed] on that too, because it smells like bullshit!

>Cheaper than any nuclear thermal rocket, thats for sure.
Cheaper than a chunk of Pu-238 that's immersed in liquid nitrogen and then cycled to expel the boil-off gas? That's the absolute simplest nuclear thermal rocket you can produce, present some numbers for the production of a 1kt nuclear device versus that.

>>28911792
>What do you mean handwave? Nukes are cheap, this is why the US and USSR built tens of thousands of them, and then signed treaties to limit their numbers.
"I don't understand geopolitics because I'm a dumb asshole."

>>28912444
>NPP does not require any magical leaps in material sciences, technologies, or decades of development.
Yes it does you idiot, it wasn't even prototyped.

>Unlike all other nuclear propulsion methods.
I've already demonstrated how nuclear thermal rockets are already viable above, and that's just using the natural decay of a chunk of fissile material, an actual reactor would be even better.

>>28912556
>Which is why they are constantly being funded and researched in Universities across the world and JPL currently
Unless you are going very far, or are content to go very slowly, electric ion engines are pointless.
For the purposes of manned space missions, they are useless.

>Yet it's never been so much as prototyped. Why is that?
Because everything with Nuclear in it turns into a fucking boondoggle

>Nuclear thermal rockets require no theoretical technological leaps
Solid core NTR's don't, but they suck & wouldn't work for launching from earth.

>Ok, kid.
Literally hundreds of tons of plutonium sitting there in fuel rods.

>More claims, while you don't even know what a modern nuclear warhead costs to produce.
We're not talking fusion bombs, we're not talking weapons grade plutonium.
Noone is building new nuclear bombs anyways, and accurate info on costs is hard to find.

They were ready to build a prototype in the 60's, however it was classified at the time and the apollo program ate all the funding.

>>28912602
>Thats his opinion, not reality. These would be engineering challenges, not impossibilities.
Every single Project Orion concept drawing included dozens of primary stage shock absorbers to balance the load inside the backing of the blast plate, plus the minimum 6 secondary towers holding the plate. If a single one of those fuses/locks up/bends/overheats/develops a crack, the spaceship at best no longer can be propelled in controlled flight due to warping of the blast plate. At worst, the blast plate cracks due to asymmetrical load distribution and blows up the craft.

This is engineering fact.

The fact that you weren't even aware of the shock absorber arrangement in the concept drawings tells me that you don't have any fucking clue on a real level how this would work, much less have any sort of technical or research standing to form any sort of opinion on how feasible it all is.

You're a retarded child playing with concepts that you cannot hope to understand without an actual education and research. Go away.

>>28912771
Dozens is a far cry from hundreds
And this was designs in the 50's, before they had computer modelling or small yield nuclear bombs, things would be far better today.

And yes, thats the nature of space craft, if something breaks the whole thing explodes.

>>28912602
>>Over the unit price three decades ago of $354,000 in 2014 dollars.
Because going back in time and using then-year dollars is totally a good plan.

>A single nuclear pulse launch would increase 10 fold the total payload lifted to orbit, so spending 1 billion dollars on its fuel for single stage to mars, or the moon, is cheap.
Nice source. You keep throwing out words like "10-fold" about a project without any extant prototype or even proof of concept, completely without any kind of source.

>How many billions will NASA spend on SLS before they cancel it?
Implying such decisions are not almost exclusively political and budget driven, which would go 50 billion times worse for a project which proposes to use fucking NUCLEAR BOMBS for propulsion from earth to orbit.

>Except you can..... each pulse unit would be a relatively small amount of impulse, for especially fine tuning you don't use your main drive anyways.
There's that word again, "would be", from someone without an actual understanding of the concept drawings about a project which never even had a working prototype proposal.

>>28912735
>Yes, that could be done over a period of several years with heavy-lift launch vehicles.
It's conceptually sound and efficient, but it requires the right mission to realize benefits. For a manned Mars mission, which is likely the next big step? Not so much. For a manned asteroid resource collection mission to test how easily resources can be collected and utilized in space? It would be huge, but much further out in the timeline.

>>28912742
I think he was USAF, anon (F-111/F-15 maintainer). Or I'm confused in reading through the thread.

>>28912760
>For the purposes of manned space missions, they are useless.
I suppose mashing your astronauts into fine pulp from a sudden, violent acceleration is much more practical than a slow and steady rate of acceleration that is essentially only limited by power consumption (hello useful application of fissile material) and a gas that can be ionized and then accelerated.

>Because everything with Nuclear in it turns into a fucking boondoggle
Rightfully so because radioactive material is serious fucking business.

>>28912760
>Solid core NTR's don't, but they suck & wouldn't work for launching from earth.
Again, you are never, ever, ever, ever, EVER going to get approval from anyone ever to launch anything into space using a nuclear fucking bomb.

>>28912760
>We're not talking fusion bombs, we're not talking weapons grade plutonium.
YES. YOU. ARE. That's what the "pulse" is! It's a nuclear bomb! You do need weapons-grade nuclear material for this.
>>28912760
>Noone is building new nuclear bombs anyways, and accurate info on costs is hard to find.
I bet this just burns your ass, doesn't it?

>>28912760
>They were ready to build a prototype in the 60's, however it was classified at the time and the apollo program ate all the funding.
So geopolitical dickwaving was a more practical use of billions of dollars that pissing around with nuclear explosions to try and put shit into orbit? Wow! Who would have thought?

>>28912847
Depending on the mission of the vehicle I'd say some sort of round-trip transporter to Mars would be appropriate as well. All you'd need to do then is launch the lander/cargo module and load (plug?) it on the spacecraft who would then use it's high-efficiency engines to move it to Mars. Hell, this might even enable Martian colonists to return if they could put things into their own orbit.

The question is the financial incentive to do this, a company investing in the future of Earth-Mars trade would be wise to build a vessel like that.

>>28902292
>still flying F-106s, F-4s and even F-105s as late as 1984
Hell, we had a couple of F-4s on the Coral Sea in 1981 and a stripped down F-8 for recon

>>28912939
Really didn't intend to quote the same post that many times.

>>28912871
That's how I read it too.

>>28912760
>Unless you are going very far, or are content to go very slowly, electric ion engines are pointless.
Just keep repeating that, in spite of the obvious fact that the funding, the actual scientists in JPL and universities and NASA all disagree with you.

>For the purposes of manned space missions, they are useless.
The tested and used various Ion/Electrical propulsion thrusters on both US and Soviet/Russian manned spacecraft and continue to do so.

>Because everything with Nuclear in it turns into a fucking boondoggle
So we're now admitting that it's a political impossibility? Or is this just more cognitive dissonance?

>Solid core NTR's don't, but they suck & wouldn't work for launching from earth.
Only for almost all the same reasons NPP wouldnt. The difference is that NTRs are small and modular enough to be assembled in orbit economically.

>Literally hundreds of tons of plutonium sitting there in fuel rods.
Roughly 430.6964 metric tons, according to
http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/On-Site-Storage-of-Nuclear-Waste
and the .58% average number. All of it far, far more expensive to process and extract than new production Pu-239. But don't let cost of extraction and processing and other real world facts distract you. Also, you implied that the shit was literally falling out of civilian reactors, not a trace by-product which is almost impossible and completely uneconomical to attempt to extract.

>We're not talking fusion bombs, we're not talking weapons grade plutonium.
So yet more efficiency loss? Why would you not make it as efficient as possible when you have to build the fuel/bomb production facilities from the ground up and pay 1.8 Million for every fucking propulsion pulse?

>Noone is building new nuclear bombs anyways, and accurate info on costs is hard to find.
And this makes them somehow cheap to build? Are you retarded?

>>28912760
>They were ready to build a prototype in the 60's, however it was classified at the time and the apollo program ate all the funding.
There is no evidence the program ever advance beyond simple artist's concept drawings. There are certainly no extant prototype plans. Provide a source.

>>28912813
>or even proof of concept
They did do proof of concepts, a small model launched into the air with repeated conventional explosives.
Experiments showing steel balls could survive very close nuclear blasts
And operation plumbbob

The next step is to actually build one, which they didn't get funding for.

>>28912939
>you are never, ever, ever, ever, EVER going to get approval from anyone ever to launch anything into space using a nuclear fucking bomb.
Not in todays political climate, no.

>YES. YOU. ARE.
The military requires weapons grade/super grade plutonium because the bombs are going to sit around for years, and they don't want to poison the people working near them with radiation.

>So geopolitical dickwaving was a more practical use of billions of dollars that pissing around with nuclear explosions to try and put shit into orbit?
So you are of the opinion that putting payload in space has no practical purpose?

Noone is even considering any ion propelled manned vehicles, because they would be too goddamn slow. Maybe one day they will have enough impulse to be worthwhile.

>>28912801
>before small yield nuclear bombs
How as it not immediately clear how retarded this statement is when you wrote it?

>things would be far better today.
More assertion without even a theoretical solution, much less source of actual work.

>And yes, thats the nature of space craft, if something breaks the whole thing explodes.
Sure. Modern machine travel of ANY kind never worries about things like redundancy, safety margin, maintainability, reliability, etc. These things are never real concerns.

Jackass.

>>28913010
>and pay 1.8 Million for every fucking propulsion pulse?
Did you not read the article you posted
That is the annual budget per nuclear bomb, which is mostly spent taking care of old radioactive facilities & other infrastructure shit.
aka, nothing related to the cost of the bomb.

No, they do not use ion thrusters to TRAVEL anywhere, they use them to maintain orbits, or for unmanned satellites to move around(taking months of time).

>>28913054
>How as it not immediately clear how retarded this statement is when you wrote it?
?

1) The Soviet Union collapsed, so the tomcat was not NEEDED for the navy to meet its goals anymore.

2) The tomcats were all at this point very very high hour airframes. This is the reason the tomcat = hanger queen meme exists. Many of them were like 30 years old at this point. Some of them had airframes so tweaked from hard ACM that the access panels wouldnt close without work.

3) There was now no money to keep the F-14s flying anymore, and congress and the pentagon shot down the idea of building upgraded new airframes. There may or may not have been a conspiracy with dick cheny killing grumman and allowing Northrup to eat them. Look what he did with the A-6...

3) Congress, the pentagon, and Cheny wanted to go with the cheaper multirole hornets. The hornets would be able to do the post cold war job adequately, at reduced cost. You dont need bombcats to drop jdams on farmers.

4) Supposedly the hornets and superhornets were just intended to be a stopgap until the F-22 based NATF was built. One of the congressmen in charge of selecting the YF-22 over the YF-23 did so because he said the naval F-22 was going to be better.

Now, let me address more of the tomcat's myths.

> It wasnt a dogfighter

It was built instead of the F-111 specifically because it was designed to be able to dogfight. The F-111 was in reality a better AIM-54 slinger than the tomcat. Problem was, it sucked shit at ACM.

>Tomcat was slow

During testing it went mach 2.43 and it was still accelerating. This is with the TF-30s too. The tomcat was EXTREMELY aerodynamically slick, and it also carried weapons in the tunnel, which massively reduced the drag. A tomcat with 4 bombs in the tunnel was almost as fast as a clean tomcat, though the lift produced was now reduced a great bit.

>Tomcat had crappy wing loading

Again, thanks to the tunnel area between the engines, the tomcat had a large amount of lift. You will notice the soviets copied this for their flankers and fulcrums.

>>28902993
>Steak and lobster twice a week.
We only got that once a month and we were grateful for it

>>28887419
Shady contractors sold them to kebab countries, so production was ended. No more F-14s being made means no more parts being made, no more parts being made means kebab can't into repairs.

>>28913035
>They did do proof of concepts, a small model launched into the air with repeated conventional explosives.
>Experiments showing steel balls could survive very close nuclear blasts
>And operation plumbbob
Not a single test of which even confirmed the shock absorber concept to protect and keep operational even simple electronics, much less actual people.
>The next step is to actually build one, which they didn't get funding for.
Nope. The next step was to actually design any sort of actual shock absorption arrangement which would allow anything but solid chunks of metal to survive the impulse. Surprise, they never succeeded in even conceptually designing such a system before the program was cancelled and defunded.

>Not in todays political climate, no.
So let's just pretend the real world doesn't exist, and hasn't since 1963?

>The military requires weapons grade/super grade plutonium because the bombs are going to sit around for years, and they don't want to poison the people working near them with radiation.
Nuclear bombs don't require weapons grade fuels, then? Ok. Also, what makes you think the astronauts wouldn't have to live and work around the shit fucking fueling their spacecraft, dipshit? Or that it would have to be produced, handled and stockpiled before being loaded into such a craft?

>Noone is even considering any ion propelled manned vehicles
You keep saying that in spite of the fact that JPL is already doing it. Do you think if you keep insisting it is true that it will become true?

Israel has proven that the 15 platform can be used as an effective ground strike aircraft, and the new Silent Eagle promises to be a useful strike fighter.

>>28913084
>That is the annual budget per nuclear bomb, which is mostly spent taking care of old radioactive facilities & other infrastructure shit.
And you believe that building brand new facilities to build hundreds of new ones will be, what, magically cheaper? When that's just the cost to MAINTAIN the facilities and weapons already in place? Are you stupid?

>No, they do not use ion thrusters to TRAVEL anywhere, they use them to maintain orbits, or for unmanned satellites to move around(taking months of time).
More talking out of your ass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Solar_Technology_Application_Readiness
>The NSTAR ion thruster was first used on the Deep Space 1 (DS1) spacecraft, launched on 24 October 1998.[7] The Deep Space mission carried out a flyby of asteroid 9969 Braille and Comet Borrelly. It produced 2.3 kW and was the primary propulsion for the probe.[4]

>The second interplanetary mission using NSTAR engine was the Dawn spacecraft, with three redundant units[8] with a 30 cm diameter each.[9][10] Dawn is the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion to enter and leave more than one orbit.[11]

>NASA engineers state that NSTAR engines, in the 5-kilowatt and 0.04 pound-thrust range, are candidates for propelling spacecraft to Europa, Pluto, and other small bodies in deep space.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Missions
>The Japanese space agency's Hayabusa, which was launched in 2003 and successfully rendezvoused with the asteroid 25143 Itokawa and remained in close proximity for many months to collect samples and information, was powered by four xenon ion engines.

>The European Space Agency's satellite SMART-1, launched in 2003, used a Snecma PPS-1350-G Hall thruster to get from GTO to lunar orbit. This satellite completed its mission on September 3, 2006, in a controlled collision on the Moon's surface, after a trajectory deviation so scientists could see the 3 meter crater the impact created on the side of the moon.

>>28913035
>Not in todays political climate, no.
Yeah, those fucking hippies and that goddamn EPA and those motherfucking scientists caring about the environment! Those cocksuckers are just holding this idea back!

Do you see everything in WH40k memes or what?

>The military requires weapons grade/super grade plutonium because the bombs are going to sit around for years, and they don't want to poison the people working near them with radiation.
Oh, so it's okay if workers die as long as we're launching shit up in space? Got it. By the way what medications are you on?

>So you are of the opinion that putting payload in space has no practical purpose?
No, I'm of the opinion that your stupid dead-end idea is stupid.

>aka, nothing related to the cost of the bomb.
So actually provide some real numbers then, because unless you're just magically producing these bombs out of thin air you will need to put them somewhere. Especially since you're apparently going to use the dirtiest possible fissile material because hey, we can "waste" some energy because there's just so much to spare! You said that here: >>28911640

>No, they do not use ion thrusters to TRAVEL anywhere, they use them to maintain orbits, or for unmanned satellites to move around(taking months of time).
No, they don't take months to burn that's retarded, they would have to have such a low thrust that it would be easier to just use bottled astronaut farts. NASA does actually use them to TRAVEL places by the way, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is currently in orbit around Ceres and was launched in 2007, and even with it's piddly amount of power (1300W with full sunlight) it's still capable of going beyond our orbit so you are COMPLETELY fucking wrong.

Just more proof that you don't know your own ass from a hole in the ground. Again, provide proof of your academic credentials, I'm curious as to how educated you truly are.

>>28913105
cont.

> the tomcat couldnt pull more than 6.5 g

Grumman aerospace built the tomcat to pull 9 g operationally, and be structurally sound for 1.5 times that amount. But the navy wanted the tomcat to last them 100 years so they dropped the max allowed g to 7.5, and later in its life 6.5 g.

In combat Dale Snodgrass pulled 11g IIRC over Iraq, dodging an SA-2.

>tomcat was an interceptor, it was just designed to kill bombers, it was a worse dogfighter than X

Lobbing phoenixs at badgers and backfires may have been one of its main missions, but it was designed as a naval air superiority fighter, period. It could dogfight favorably with anything the soviet union had up until maybe the flanker and fulcrum came out. And even then, my money would be on the better trained USN crews in Tomcats.

See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTsKANmFLDE

>Tomcat couldnt turn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJV_bo6oJrM

Go ahead and count how long it takes them to do a 360 there, and compare it to an eagle, or even a viper.

There were regimes of flight where an F-14 could actually pull more g than either. The wings in the forward position gave it HUGE lift, its only downfall was the TF-30s. With GE engines the F-14 was a freakshow in a dogfight. The tomcat could climb and drop the nose like literally nothing else.

I will admit that it had subpar rolling ability.

>>28913084
>>28913207
>No, they do not use ion thrusters to TRAVEL anywhere, they use them to maintain orbits, or for unmanned satellites to move around(taking months of time).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Missions
>ESA will launch the BepiColombo mission to Mercury in 2017. It uses ion thrusters in combination with swing-bys to get to Mercury, where a chemical rocket will be fired for orbit insertion.

>LISA Pathfinder is an ESA spacecraft launched in 2015. It does not use ion thrusters as its primary propulsion system, but uses both colloid thrusters and FEEP for very precise attitude control — the low thrusts of these propulsion devices make it possible to move the spacecraft incremental distances very accurately. It is a test for the possible LISA mission.

>As of March 2011, a future launch of an Ad Astra VF-200 200 kW VASIMR electromagnetic thruster was being considered for placement and testing on the International Space Station.[74][75] The VF-200 is a flight version of the VX-200.[76][77] Since the available power from the ISS is less than 200 kW, the ISS VASIMR will include a trickle-charged battery system allowing for 15 min pulses of thrust.
Oh, look. A manned application for something as massive as the fucking ISS. Who would have thought.

>In June 2011, NASA launched a request-for-proposals[78] for a test mission (from context probably using the NEXT engine) capable of being extended to 300 kW electrical power; this was awarded to Northrop Grumman in February 2012.[79]

>The Mars Array of Ionospheric Research Satellites Using the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (MARS-CAT) mission is a two 6U CubeSat mission to study the ionosphere of Mars. The Mars transit proposed is piggy back with Mars2020 using a CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT) burn for Mars orbit insertion and station keeping.

>>28913123
>Shady contractors sold them to kebab countries
Sure, if by this you mean the President of the United States set the sale up before the 1979 revolution and Iran went batshit, along with things like Spruance destroyers which didn't get delivered before the revolution, sure.

>>28904515
>boughten
That's a perfectly cromulent word

>>28913196
The F-15E is already the best tactical strike platform in the USAF, anon. What are you trying to say?

>>28913105
>>28913219
cont.

>the AIM-54 sucked, it couldnt hit fighters

The phoenix was designed to be able to hit targets maneuvering at 8G IIRC. I dont know of many TU-95s that can pull half that. It was designed to kill threats to the CBG, no matter what they were.

Further, there exists almost nothing that can sustain 8 g for any length of time at altitude. With a few AIM-54s inbound, good luck timing your defensive pull to the right moment Ivan.

The AIM-54 was also very old at the point it was actually fired in anger by the USN.
One failed to fire its rocket motor, another did the same ( rumored to not have been armed properly), and the 3rd missed a MiG-25. That shot was taken at long range, and there are many reasons it could have missed. It is likely that it simply wasnt fired within the missile's no escape zone, and the foxbat simply turned and ran.

>>28909946
Beautiful

>anon insists stupid shit is true
>anon gets curbstomped by a couple of reasonably educated anons
>anon keeps insisting it is true
>anon gets dismembered by educated anons
>anon quietly slinks away

bets on how long before hes back on here again with same dumbass ORION IS REALLY FEASIBLE GUIZE shit? I've got 10 bucks on two days.

>>28913337
>retard misrepresents the annual budget of nuke maintenance to somehow be the cost to produce a nuclear bomb
>can't admit his mistake

Hard to argue with autists who claim engineering challenges are physical impossibilities, then start talking about things that literally cannot be done with current material sciences.

>>28913359
>Hard to argue with autists who claim engineering challenges are physical impossibilities, then start talking about things that literally cannot be done with current material sciences.
Oh, so you've totally got that source to back your claim that building a few hundred nuclear weapons to fuel a spacecraft and then a massive shock absorbed shield is totally cheaper than NTR propulsion. Right, anon? Don't let me down, anon. Surely you've got something as simple as that, which was central to your argument!