The Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened 133
An anonymous reader writes There have been many US military machines of war that seemed to be revolutionary, but never make it out of the prototype stage. As Robert Farley explains: "Sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough." A weapon can seem like an amazing invention, but it still has to adapt to all sorts of conditions--budgetary, politics, and people's plain bias. Here's a look at a few of the best weapons of war that couldn't win under these "battlefield" conditions.
Revolutionary American weapons... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the rifled musket?
Re:Revolutionary American weapons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah I was hoping for some steampunk goodness as well, a la Brisco County Jr.
In other news you cannot, cannot have an article about wacky war machines without prolific pictures, it contravenes no less than six seperate articles of the Internet Convention on Clickbait Guidelines.
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I was thinking Wild Wild West sorta contraptions. Brisco County Jr. is too newfangled.
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Wouldn't the Wild Wild West stuff actually be steampunk?
I seem to remember all sorts of steam and brass and the like.
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No, how can something be steampunk before steampunk? Maybe the Wild Wild West started the trend that became steampunk?
Yup, lots of brass but unusual contraptions to say the least.
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That sounds remarkably like the Avrocar, which was a stupendous failure because it was impossible to control - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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Or was he talking about the Vought V-173 [wikipedia.org]? The Wikipedia article is somewhat lacking though...e.g. any reason why they decided not to manufacture it.
Near the end:
In 131.8 hours of flying over 190 flights, Zimmerman's theory of a near-vertical takeoff- and landing-capable fighter had been proven.
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I would have loved to have seen what it would do with a couple of merlins but it was designed at a time when it looked like the closest the Navy would get to a carrier was slapping some planks on a merchantman and by the time it was done they were ass deep in carriers.
Umm...according to the wiki page [wikipedia.org], the U.S. had at least one operational carrier since 1922. I'm not sure if you mean it was assigned to the Air Force or Marines or something so it wasn't a "Navy carrier?" By the time the war broke out in Europe, the U.S. had six...and the V-173 proposal looks like it was given to the Navy in 1939.
If you're referring to the BI-1 [wikipedia.org] as the "Russian rocket fighter," A) it doesn't sound like they got it to fly as well as they liked, B) there is no mention on the Wikipedia article
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The J8M, Su-5, and I-250/MiG-13 never flew in combat.
In contract, the Me-163, Me-262, Ar-234, and He-162 all did, and in fact all got at least one kill (although the Ar-234s were bombers, I'm sure they hit something successfully).
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Parent is modded +5 insightful ??
I was thinking +5 funny, or even a -1 off topic. Insightful is just wrong
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It also failed the Romans and the Germans.
Helicopters (Score:1)
I heard that the army uses helicopters not because they want to but because they have to (Air Force having jurisdiction over planes existing since late 40s as a seperate branch) and that in many missions they use helicopters planes would actually be superior.
Is this true?
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Well, having been in an (German) Army Helicopter unit the "tight interaction" between ground troops and flying units requires stuff that fixed-wing aircrafts are not really good at. They can't stand still in the air, the cant land vertically in tight spaces (without burning people with jet exhaust like a VTOL jet would) , etc...
Basically anything fast/long-range/big is usually handled by the air force planes (or helicopters), while slow/agile/close coordination with ground troops is handled by the army air
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USAF here ... yes, this. Class III UAV's are a bit of an anomoly, as they're fixed wing, but so slow that they kind of just work. However, still, the Air Force has the armed UAVs and the army has unarmed ones.
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But when it comes to flying armed drones in missions where missiles are fired at targets, it's the CIA doing it !?!?
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Well, having been in an (German) Army Helicopter unit the "tight interaction" between ground troops and flying units requires stuff that fixed-wing aircrafts are not really good at. They can't stand still in the air, the cant land vertically in tight spaces (without burning people with jet exhaust like a VTOL jet would) , etc...
Basically anything fast/long-range/big is usually handled by the air force planes (or helicopters), while slow/agile/close coordination with ground troops is handled by the army air corps. Usually with helicopters, although some planes are used by armies, like the Britten-Norman Defender by the British army.
Very true, and try getting the Air Force to support a JAAT (speaking late coldwar here) without 30 days notice or some BS. If you needed close air support, the Navy and the Marines needed to be nearby.
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Kinda, the devil in the details.
Until the 1980s with the formation of JSOC, the Army and Navy (and later the Air Force and to a lesser extent, the National Guard) were intentionally divided by federal government. Cue political infighting over who gets what, fast forward to the 20th century; and you have the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, etc all arguing over who gets what kind of 'aircraft', where, when and how.
As for missions where the Army would use helicopters when planes would have been
Re:Helicopters (Score:5, Informative)
I heard that the army uses helicopters not because they want to but because they have to (Air Force having jurisdiction over planes existing since late 40s as a seperate branch) and that in many missions they use helicopters planes would actually be superior.
Is this true?
The Key West Agreement that formed the Air Force had a stipulation that the Army would not have any armed aircraft. Lather that was re-interpreted as no armed FIXED-WING aircraft.
Side note on the Cheyenne, the helicopter that was to be the scout helicopter for the Cheyenne attack aircraft evolved into the AH-1 Cobra. IIRC, the original scout helicopter for the Cobra was the OH-6, later replaced by the OH-58.
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I heard that the army uses helicopters not because they want to but because they have to
No... they actually want to use helicopters, because they fill important niches that fixed wing craft suck at.
(The purpose of the 1948 Key West Agreement was preventing the Army from re-forming their own air wings, under their own control.)
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Re:Helicopters (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously you've never seen an A10 really working it, when they pop up above treetop level and your a badguy, your in for a world of whoop-ass.
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And he does not know the german/british Tornado :)
grammar allergy (Score:2)
Obviously you've never seen an A10 really working it, when they pop up above treetop level and your a badguy, your in for a world of whoop-ass.
http://youryoure.com/ [youryoure.com]
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I heard that the army uses helicopters not because they want to but because they have to (Air Force having jurisdiction over planes existing since late 40s as a seperate branch) and that in many missions they use helicopters planes would actually be superior.
Is this true?
The biggest case where this is an issue for the US Army is actually with drones. They can't operate the larger, more capable drones that they would like because they fall under the purview of the US Air Force. If its fixed wing and flies over a certain altitude, the army cannot operate it.
Re:Helicopters (Score:4, Informative)
What you're thinking of is the result of the Key West Agreement [wikipedia.org] which basically says the Army can have air assets with a reconnaissance or medical evacuation role. If they have a need for a fixed wing aircraft, blimp, helicopter or whatever within those roles, they can have them. Combat aviation machines remain the purview of the Air Force, so the A-10 tank buster and the AC-130 gunship whose primary mission is a ground support role are NOT Army assets, but Air Force. In practical terms, this has limited the Army to "low and slow" unarmed fixed wing recon platforms and helos for medivac duties. However, after the Viet Nam War, the Army was able to expand on those roles and start using smaller turboprop and light jet fixed wing craft for cargo transport and armed helicopters such as the Apache.
The Navy (and Marines) was able to keep its own combat aircraft for several reasons. My own summary of those reasons are a) Navy often operates too far away from Airforce bases for the usual type of cross-service support and b) The navy had done an excellent job of proving in the recently ended WWII of how effective carrier based aircraft are. A capability the Navy was not going to give up without a serious fight...
*It is generally accepted in military circles that special/covert operations units are exempt from the agreement, but because of the nature and scope of their missions, they are usually limited to choppers and transport craft anyway.
It's all politics (Score:1)
You can develop the most awesome weapon ever invented, but if you didn't do it in an influential Congressman's district, you can forget about the military buying it.
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Some really clever weapons systems, like the Crusader with the Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI) system that delivers an array of shells to one area simultaneously, seem to have everything going for them: congressional backing, tech, whatever. Turns out that a weapon designed for WW2 land wars isn't so useful in fighting religious nuts in the deserts. Some simply get canceled because there isn't a need for them any more.
Re:It's all politics (Score:4, Informative)
I worked Crusader for a while. I seem to recall that it was designed for Cold War, specifically a REFORGER scenario.
The collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and specifically the fall of the Soviet Union kind of made it useless, because it was too heavy to fight anywhere else.
Don't forget about the... (Score:2)
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Huh, 1994? This is one of those old cancelled military experiments you expect to see with a date more like 1954.
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Those people and their spiritual children are still with us.
Osama bin laden doll that turns into a Darth Maul. [cnn.com]
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infamous Gay Bomb [wikipedia.org]!
Well, they haven't discovered what human Pheromones are yet. But they suspect they are secreted from the areola around the nipple. I have a feeling they'll find out our feet do it to.
In any event, if they do find human pheromones, I think this is a fantastic idea if it would work. Nothing better than turning a war into a gay orgy. War would immediately regarded as "Gay" and unmanly. That would do us all some good.
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Unfortunately, it wouldn't be regarded as unmanly, just a reason to why the enemy wasn't worth much and needed to be killed- so carpet bombing and a lot of other things normally considered a war crime now would be in use.
You see, it often isn't the people fighting the wars who are all gun ho for war. Often it is people sitting safely behind desks pushing pencils and risking a paper cut of an assassination attempt from a disgruntled constituent that they haven't bothered to listen to for several years.
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LOL ... it probably failed because it didn't have enough glitter.
What, no pictures?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeez...
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This x1000. The modern internet is littered with worthless articles without any text, full of useless pictures and videos out of context with some lame headline like "She was attacked by a puppy, you won't believe what she did next." We see thousands of click through articles which feature a full page picture and nothing else forcing you to reload the page over and over again, or better still pages where the text isn't actually text but pictures in the clickbaitiest way possible making me wish for text.
Now
That's a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a good thing that some of those weapons were brought to the prototype stage, but not to production. Today, there's a strong tendency to have only one program underway for major aircraft, leading to production of marginal aircraft like the F-35.
There are many smaller weapons, such as the XM8 assault rifle, which made it to prototype but were then cancelled. Guided ammo for small arms has been demonstrated, but it's still some ways from being miitarily useful.
Laser weapons are in the same state - there are working demos, but they're not worth the trouble yet. Diode laser powered weapons are now up to 10KW (big array of 10W or so diodes), and can shoot down small rockets and artillery shells in demos. Current thinking is that, at 50KW-100KW, they'll be militarily useful.
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I have no clue what you're talking about. The F-35 program started with a competition between Lockheed and Boeing. Obviously, the Boeing X-32 craft was only brought to the prototype stage.
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Navy has (or is testing) some higher-powered ones, basically five or ten welding lasers strapped together, but the power and cooling requirements are huge.
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For reference, a standard round from an M4 rifle has about 1.5-1.65kW of kinetic energy upon leaving the barrel.
That is kJ, not kW.
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t. Diode laser powered weapons are now up to 10KW (big array of 10W or so diodes), and can shoot down small rockets and artillery shells in demos. Current thinking is that, at 50KW-100KW, they'll be militarily useful.
For reference, a standard round from an M4 rifle has about 1.5-1.65kW of kinetic energy upon leaving the barrel.
And the army already uses the M4 for shooting down small rockets and artillery shells?
(The M4 is not a rifle. It's a carbine. If you want a rifle,the M16 is readily available.)
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You were the one who brought up kinetic energy-- rifle vs carbine is quite relevant.
M14: 850 m/s, 10 g bullet= 3.6 kJ
M16: 948 m/s, 4g bullet =1.8 kJ
M4: 880 m/s, 4 g bullet= 1.5 kJ
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English is not a language, it is a dialect.
Ummm...of what?
You are not inside, you are in a room.
You don't type on a keyboard, you type on keys.
So on and so forth.
Really not sure what you're trying to get at here. All those sound logical to me.
Missing: Project Pluto (Score:4, Interesting)
What? No mention of the SLAM or Project Pluto? (Score:4, Informative)
From the Stranger-than Strangelove dept:
http://jalopnik.com/the-flying-crowbar-the-insane-doomsday-weapon-america-1435286216/ [jalopnik.com]
Essentially a flying, unshielded nuclear reactor that flies around pissing out fission products, and crapping hydrogen warheads.
All to defend freedom and democracy,. of course...
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All to defend freedom and democracy,. of course...
Remember, this was the 1950s and 60s: as long as it pissed over the ragheads & Russkies, no one really cared.
Canada's could have been interceptor (Score:4, Informative)
AVRO CF-105 Arrow, killed by the Diefenbaker government, all blueprints and airframes destroyed... (rumors say one might have survived)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
Brings a new meaning to Black Friday :(
MACH 1.98 *official* speed, that's for the Mark1 with Pratt & Whitney J75 Turbojets, could have been even faster with Iroquois engines (that was in 1959), it tested faster than that on its first flight even with the J75s, but was lowered down to 1.98 because they wanted to sell the Iroquois engines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
Could even replace the F-35 with lower costs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
A really nice documentary was made in 1996 starring Dan Aykroyd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Build it at a smaller size, with modern weaponry and avionics, kinda like the Dassault Mirage...
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If you look at the fate of HOTOL, which bears a striking resemblance of the fate of the Avro Arrow, and the total lack of recent development on the Australian hypersonic engine, you get the definite impression that someone isn't keen on competition in the supersonic/hypersonic military arena.
(Yeah, I know HOTOL wasn't designed to be military, but if the engine design had been finished then those engines would have been used in military aircraft, and HOTOL would certainly have been used to put up spy satelli
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There is still stuff going on - slowly - due to the same low levels of funding that meant that the scramjet model I saw in 1986 that went in a shock tunnel is not very different from the one that got some time on a rocket a couple of years back.
NASA funded some of it back in the 1980s but I'm not sure where the money came from since. I could be wrong but the US military only seems to have been running their experiments in the last
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HOTOL technology has not been abandoned, it is now being actively developed for the Skylon unmanned space-plane by Reaction Engines Ltd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.reactionengines.co.... [reactionengines.co.uk]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Re:Canada's could have been interceptor (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, if you believe everything ever written about the Arrow, it's the escort vehicle for the second coming of $DIETY. Reality however insists (as it usually does) in being somewhat messier.
From a more balanced view, Diefenbaker probably did the Canadian military a huge favor... Arrow's fire control system was a real mess and probably years from being combat ready. Also, the day of the big heavy high speed interceptor was already starting to draw to close, being replaced by lighter and smaller air superiority fighters. Though overseas sales were often discussed, similar aircraft of the era had a dismal sales record because they were very expensive niche aircraft - and the niche was rapidly vanishing. Odds are (assuming the Arrow ever reached full combat capability) that by 1970 Canada would have been stuck with an obsolescent and aging Arrow contingent sucking up vast amounts of the slender Canadian defense budget.
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The Arrow was intended to intercept proposed Soviet supersonic bombers and possibly also be a platform for air launched anti ballistic missiles. It was never intended to dgfight. A better idea for covering a few million square miles than putting in fixed base misile systems like the Bomarc. Which was a joke from the start. An air breathing missile can't go exo-atmospheric and so can only reach a warhead in the last few seconds of its flight. You can re-direct a manned airborne platform as more situational d
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The Arrow was fast.. in a straight line.. that's it. Canadians like to crow about the Arrow, and how the US helped to shut the project down, and how all the Canadian engineers helped put the US on the moon. Bull.. Fucking.. Shit. The Arrow benefitted from a shit ton of UK engineers who immigrated to Canada.
If you're going to complain about immigrants working on advanced aerospace technology and the Apollo project in essentially the same breath, it might be worth noting all of the German immigrants who worked on the Apollo project.
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the Valkyrie. Big delta wing. Big flat box for engines and weapons bay. Mach 3+ Sound familiar?
A nice supersonic bomber. Just in time to face the Soviets high altitude, high speed SAMs. And just in time for the dawn of the ICBM era. The program was scaled back to an R&D effort, although some of the lessons learned were bypassed for the SR-71 and proposed supersonic transports (specifically, the wave rider wing configuration). The program was also valuable in that it kept the Soviets spending money on supersonic intercept technology which it turns out would never have had a use in a confrontation
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Posting to undo mistaken moderation.
Crappy websites (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the list using the Wikipedia pages, so that you don't have to click through the tedious article and follow the links to various crappy websites that don't even have pictures:
AH-56 Cheyenne [wikipedia.org]
B-70 Valkyrie [wikipedia.org]
A-12 Avenger [wikipedia.org]
Future Combat Systems [wikipedia.org]
Sea Control Ship [wikipedia.org]
Nuclear Artillery (Score:3)
I saw one an M65 [wikipedia.org] up close at the Army Artillery Museum in Oklahoma. Let's see fire a nuke out of a cannon. It was tested but no fucking way would I be the guy on the firing line with one of those things.
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no fucking way would I be the guy on the firing line with one of those things.
That's OK. You'll be taking point with the M28 [wikipedia.org] recoilless rifle.
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You know with the thought of nuclear proliferation I still wonder to this day WTF they were thinking with that thing? That M388 round packed a lot of punch and was small, so it could disappear quickly into any third world country.
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There was a MASSIVE soviet tank army standing by in Eastern Europe after the end of the war. The Soviets never stopped building armor after the end of the war and kept piling tanks in the East. The official NATO defense strategy was to drop nukes on the line of that army as soon as it crossed the border. This required quick deploy nukes. The M388 was actually one of the larger rounds, there was a very tiny jeep launched one as well that would only go about 5 miles (think about that job for a minute).
The po
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I think MAD had more to do with keeping the Soviets on their side of the Iron Curtain more than anything else. Sure, some of these were interesting like that Jeep Nuke but yeah, crazy job and pity the poor soldier who had to fire one because NFW could you get out of the way fast enough. Also when these were developed our missile technology wasn't all that great, think Jupiter class missiles, so from a tactical sense I can't see how a strategic weapon makes much sense unless it's a last
ditch hail-mary phil
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At the time these were developed NATO did not believe they could beat the Soviet forces without them. The soviets had something like a 3:1 armor advantage to the NATO forces and when combined with Warsaw pact forces they outnumbered NATO forces as well. The late 40's and 50's were pretty scary in this regard because western Europe was devastated and trying not to starve to death and the US had mostly demobilized while the Soviets still had their entire army and had increased heavy weaponry in the interim. I
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I understand that but we had the B52s, the B47s and in 1960 the B58s and true, long range ICBMs (Minuteman in this case) didn't come online until the early 60s but that doesn't mean a few B52s of which quite a few were based in England couldn't have dropped a few H-Bombs on Eastern Europe if they ever needed to. That's why they were there to begin with. To my recollection I don't think the Soviets had a nuke proof tank or at least one that could hold up to a few million degrees of heat. It's the tho
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there was a very tiny jeep launched one as well that would only go about 5 miles (think about that job for a minute).
I have a friend who was qualified to carry one of these [wikipedia.org]. And he wasn't stationed anywhere near Europe. I'm not saying where, but think about setting the timer on one of these and then running through a jungle.
What about the Goblin? (Score:2)
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Dishonourable Mentions (Score:5, Interesting)
The US attempted to build a version of the British "Grand Slam" bomb. Fixing some of the aerodynamic issues and making assorted other "improvements", they ended up with a 44,000 lb. conventional unguided bomb. The Tallboy/Grand Slam series of bombs worked on a very simple principle - you send a gigantic shockwave through the ground as a result of an impact very close to mach 1, and a second shockwave through the ground as a result of a shaped charge.
This type of bomb destroys pretty much anything at the boundary between two different materials. So if you dropped one of these bombs on a reinforced concrete bunker, you'd pulverize the inside of the bunker without having to actually punch a hole right the way through. They were superb at taking out dams, far better than the bouncing bomb (Barnes Wallis designed both), because you didn't have to hit the dam at all. The interface between dam and valley was a weakpoint that, if shredded, would achieve exactly the same effect the bouncing bomb did - far more reliably and without the vulnerability.
The British version worked brilliantly. If, by "brilliantly", you mean removing all the armour, defences and bomb bay doors from a Lancaster bomber. Ok, to be fair, it did exactly what was intended. It destroyed ships, dams and factories in a way that no bomb before could.
So, what did the US version do?
What it should have done is make a mess of bunkers with 22' of reinforced concrete or less, and severely disrupt heavier bunkers than that.
What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.
What it did next was also nothing. The US abandoned all further work on it, as tactical nuclear weapons would have had more punch at a lighter weight.
Would it have changed warfare? It might have reduced the number of survivors from Tora Bora by a small amount, but the US had gas/incindiary bombs and air pressure bombs that could reach into the deepest caves there. An earthquake bomb might have reduced the time needed, but that's it. It might also have changed the Iraq invasion. A bomb that could pulverize deep bunkers would have made it much harder for neocons to claim WMDs were being stored in such bunkers. If you can target them directly, conventionally and reliably, your obvious next question is to ask where these bunkers are. Since US intelligence knew of no such bunkers, it would have had no positions to give.
Would it change the dynamics with Iran? The Iranians have placed their nuclear technology in bunkers with walls too thick for most conventional bombs and smaller tactical nukes. The concrete also uses a recipe that was, when last demonstrated in a technology exhibition in the US, around a hundred times stronger than the reinforced concrete used by the US military. However, strength doesn't matter here. The whole idea of sending a shockwave is that a hard, consistent medium delivers the shockwave that much better to the other side. And modern explosives are rather better than torpex. Having said that, there is still no US bomber capable of carrying such a weapon and there's no guarantee such a bomb would do anything worthwhile.
The next US project was also a variant of a Barnes Wallis design. They built a variant of the bouncing bomb. Originally, the bomb was never intended to attack things like dams, it was intended to lift ships out of the water. Military ships, especially, are not self-supporting structures. Lifted, even briefly and by a small amount, would be sufficient to break the back of a ship. Even if that didn't work, placing a bomb directly under a ship would likely crack the hull anyway. It would then sink almost immediately. Sinking at that speed would also pretty much guarantee no survivors. Barnes Wallis was incredibly sensitive to human cost, but his military inventions (only a small fraction of all the work he actually did) were designed to perform a specific task extremely well.
In this case, he was off by a bit. The bouncin
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I'm not convinced that a bouncing bomb would have been all that effective against ships. The delivering aircraft still has to be close to the target, flying straight, low, and at a certain airspeed, and it's an unguided bomb so there's still a decent chance of a miss (several bombs missed the German dams, for instance). We had other planes that attacked low-and-slow; they were torpedo bombers and fell out of use after 1945 due to being excessively vulnerable to flak during their low, slow and straight att
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Neither Tallboy nor Grand Slam had a shaped charge.
Back then the UK looked "weak" (Score:2)
Not really. Thatcher's massive cuts and a rapid transition from a manufacturing economy to a financial services one was a change that gave the Argentinians that the UK was militarily finished and without the manufacturing base to sustain a prolonged war, so they thought the UK would just roll over without a fight over the islands. Argentina also had leading figures in the US government on their side so thought t
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a big reason why Argentinian noise right now, when Britain has no carriers at all, is troubling
Indeed the lack of carriers is troubling, but not in this instance. There's now an RAF airbase armed with Eurofighters, plus an antiaircraft missile destroper permanently on station. So, while one needs an aircraft carrier to project power to remote locations, in this case, they already have it there.
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What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.
Either it took them a really long time to adapt that bomb, or you probably meant the B-29.
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You know what else can lift a ship and break its back? A torpedo with a magnetic fuse. Oddly enough, torpedo bombers don't appear to have rendered the world's navies obsolete.
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Also, note that the Germans developed a great ship-killing weapon in the form of a remotely guided airplane packed with explosives. On its first use in 1943, during the Italian change in sides, it sank the latest Italian battleship with one hit, and crippled HMS Warspite, another battleship, with another single hit. That didn't render navies obsolete in European waters; the Allies just made darn sure they had air supremacy before sending in large ships.
Improved weaponry affects tactics, but it has less
No Images? (Score:2)
Even some of the web-linked articles don't have images.
Bad click-bait article aside, it is typical that the USA (and other nations) develop weapons systems that they never end up "needing to use." Weapons systems can be seen as a kind of insurance policy, but it can be damned hard from keeping the hawks from wanting to go play with their toys (kill people) all the time.
XB-70 (Score:4, Interesting)
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...In the mid 70's? someone defected in Japan with a Mig-25, almost crashing into a commercial jet at the Tokyo airport.
Viktor Belenko and it was Hakodate Airport in northern Japan. He overshot the runway, damaging the landng gear, but he was almost out of fuerl and couldn't go around (plus, he didn't want to get shot at).
Well of course the USAF pretty much went over it with a fine tooth comb before returning it. They found out the environmental system sucked,
The pressurized flight suit worked fine, I've never read that it didn't (athough the current F-35 program seems to be having problems). Possibly you are referring to the sophisticated environmental system for electronics that the Mig-25 did not have because its vacuum tube electronics did not need them? Th
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The F-86 was developed before the MiG-15 entered combat service. The only thing the MiG did to the Sabre was make the Air Force deploy it quicker because the MiG spanked everything else the Air Force had.
Likewise the MiG-21 and F-4; the F-4 was developed not specifically because of the Fishbed, but because the Navy (and later the Air Force) wanted a modern fighter and it happened that the Fishbed and Phantom were the most modern fighters each side had in Vietnam; they weren't even the same class of airplan
Someone's been playing Axis and Allies too long... (Score:3)
>> A weapon can seem like an amazing invention, but it still has to adapt to all sorts of conditions--budgetary, politics, and people's plain bias
I actually read TFA, and it seems like each one of these "amazing inventions" would have let someone fight the last war...a little bit better...with an incremental weapons system that would have taken a lot of resources to develop. In retrospect, it seems the right call was made to kill ALL of these systems. In fact, if there's a lesson to be learned here, its that American superiority since WWII has depended on us jumping on the right trend at the right time (e.g., carriers instead of battleships, ICBM's instead of fast bombers, missle delivery aircraft instead of dogfighters, etc.). It will be interesting to see if we moved into robotics at the right time (or if large stealth was ever worth it) when we look back in thirty years...
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Going to missile delivery aircraft before the Vietnam war was a problem: we really did need dogfighters for that war, and the F-105 and F-4, although very capable aircraft in some roles, sucked in a dogfight.
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Because the H-4 was a cargo plane, I suppose.
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Hitler and Mussolini were fascists... certainly not left wing.
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National Socialist Party
Specifically, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and formerly the German Workers' Party.
Both are big into government control (though the Far Right doesn't like to admit it).
The only difference between the Far Left and the Far Right is the choice as to which will solve society's ills:
(a) Collectivization, or
(b) killing Jews.
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The early memos where the national socialists discussed putting the word socialist into the party name so they could lure workers away from German left wing parties are on open record. The NAZIs knew from the start they fell on the right and had a natural aliance with the ownership classes, and were very cynical about getting enough votes to gain power. In Hitler's own words, his National Socialism had nothing to do with Marx, Communism, or conventional Socialism, and was totally opposed to all of those thi
Re:More Republican garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
and was totally opposed to all of those things
And yet was still big into state welfare/education/health and control of the populous. Just like the Left, but without Collectivism.
Heck, it didn't *need* collectivism, since it had power over the ownership class.
And why does the American Right keep complaining about people playing the Race Card, and then quoting Hitler like they uncritically believe him?
I don't recall the American Right (maybe the Faaaaar Right, but I don't pay attention to them) quoting Hitler on a regular basis, and when they do, it's in the vein of, Hitler said he was going to do X, and the Western Intelligentsia didn't believe him, but then he went and did it anyway. Thus, the world can't afford to ignore the rantings of crazy dictators with lots of money.
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Early on, there was a strong socialist movement in the NSDAP. That was eliminated in (IIRC) 1934 by violent means. The word "Socialist" was still useful to confuse things, and apparently still does sometimes.
Re:More Republican garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Government control over production and mass media isn't a left wing concept? You should coulda fooled me!
If you travel far enough to the left or to the right, you end up in the same place.
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Tell me, is the place in the center, between left and right wing, better or worse than the place that is furthest from the left wing? Do you aim to oppose, do you aim to unite, or do you aim to transcend? How you construct your left wing depends on your answers.
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That'd be nice if that was the case. Production, especially heavy industries, was controlled by a very profitable set of private enterprises, some of which still exist today. Krupp is just one example, BMW another. As for control over Mass Media, that's an authoritarian concept. Otherwise, what do you call Fox News?
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Actually a government-corporate-religous coallition.
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I don't remember ever seeing anyone claiming that other than someone who is leftist or liberal or whatever the favorite term of the day is now. They all vote democrat or third party that makes democrat look conservative.
Well, Nixon was claimed to be leftist because of the EPA and a few other things but if anything, Reagan, Bush Sr. Goldwater are considered conservative which is more right than left.
The biggest complaint about politicians republicans have is that once they are in Washington, they are more wo
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Don't confuse Republicans with populists
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When a clown dresses like a business man, how do you know he is a clown?
Sometimes the confusion is intentional
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Don't buy into the shell game played by both sides of the aisle. Both are equally bad and stopped caring about anything but their own power and wallets long, long ago. They play both sides against the middle constantly. It's just a shell game.