ArthurThe Hortens flown all were for an interceptor, and had little to do with any of the Amerika Bomber designs. The Horten IX was to enter service as a fighter as the Go-229, but it never got that far (too bad, i think it was one of the most beautiful designs ever). In fact, i think the Horten flying-wing bomber designs were not drawn to the Amerika Bomber specifications, but for the 1000x1000x1000 bomber, which was another one of the ambitious Nazi German projects now conveniently piled together as the Luft ’46 designs. There is a great site on all of these designs, http://www.luft46.com if i’m not mistaken.
ArthurSometimes, when things get too sad to cry about, laughing is all that’s left. Being raised on Disney-films like just about anybody else under 70 these days, there’s nothing as shocking as seeing pictures of flattened turtles.
Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo… to the rescue! Avenge your brethren!
ArthurThe East Germans and the Russians were ready to move out in a very short time, but that also meant that they did not practice much and espcially not as large formations.
Oh yes they did. There was relatively little cross-national drilling (few combined Polish-Soviet exercises for example), but most WarPac forces did have exercises on an absolutely massive scale. Just like ReForGer in the West, the Soviets would have at least one massive drill every two years or more often if required (enough to make every conscript experience such a massiveo operation at least once), and absolutely huge exercises every five or six years. For the size of those huge exercises: think 2000 aircraft airborne at one time, and double that number of tanks rolling
So if NATO would detect a change in their training, then Reforger would have started. That was confirmed by many sources.
True. One of the reasons the world was actually closer to WW3 in 1983 than it was in 1962…
How effective would a 60+ planes raid be, if the pilots are only used to fly in pairs ?
They knew how to fly in larger formations. How does a formation of 25 Mi-6es sound to you, Seahawk? Or forty Mi-8 + Mi-24s? Twelve Su-17s?
The outcome could be anything from a huge success to a big turkey shot for NATO.
Either way, radioactive contamination would make analysing what exactly happened not a first priority for the survivors.
ArthurRegardless of the type and size at hand, looking at the night sky with a pair of binos is a relaxing and mellowing experience after a hard day of arguing war and politics. 🙂
Absolutely true – nothing better than sleeping under the night’s sky on a clear summer night, and looking up through your binos!
ArthurOn the other hand, those turtles and ostriches won’t live to become terrorists!
ArthurIt could well have been a B-1 making that contrail. After all, having contrail-reducing engines, exhausts and chemicals was just one of many requirements the B-1 didn’t live up to 😀
ArthurThanks Blackcat for the bigger pic. On this one you can see the editing a lot better than on the small pic Ja posted :rolleyes:
ArthurJohn Hackett’s books (The Third World War and a sequel to that) are a lot better than Clancy’s. With Hackett being a British general and Clancy an insurance-salesman-gone-writer, i leave it for you to decide which has a better base on which all the theories are based. Hackett is not as optimistic as Clancy, but then again he doesn’t take Western luck and Soviet misfortune for granted as much as Clancy did. Although i assume this is one of the reasons Tom Clancy got so populair, even though Clancy is mostly focused on naval-operations and the delusional ideas the West had about Soviet naval airpower in those days.
Airwar-wise, it would all have dependent on the amount of USAF deployments present in Europe at the time of hostilities. There was nowhere near enough flying stuff available in Europe to offer a serious defense against a WarPac attack.
ArthurIt’s not an upgraded F-4E, the birdslicers are part of the PI upgrade program and not some sort of retrofit.
ArthurAnd then there was that GD testbed with a F-111 nose. But I’ve never seen a picture of it. Dunno it ever exists.
That was O-34296, originally an RB-47H. It was SAC’s last operational Stratojet (flown into storage on Dec. 29, 1967), and only spent a short time at Davis-Monthan before being resurrected by General Dynamics. There is a picture of it with it’s F-111 nose in IAPR #6, which has a B-47 variant rundown. The aircraft survives, it is now preserved at Eglin AFB but with it’s F-111 nose replaced by a regular nosecone.
While the B-47 indeed used the toss/loft bombing method (one way was an Immelman, but a steep climbing curve was used more often), the airframe wasn’t really suited for such hefty maneuvres. Although only 100 some aircraft were actually assigned to deliver their payload this way (for the use of hydrogen bombs against well-defended high-priority targets, Moscow or something like that), but the airframe just wasn’t designed for repeated 2g and 3g maneuvring. A number of B-47s actually broke up doing these stunts and many others got cracks because of it. A crash-program to strengthen the wings was ran as project Milk Bottle, to make the Stratojet actually capable of what it was supposed to do…
ArthurOf course that’s a bad thing. But if they were treated equally bad as the non-Jewish population (apart from the Iraqi Jews there were/are also a number of pretty large Christian groups in Iraq), then the whole point of Jews being maltreated just because they were Jewish is invalid. I’m not too well informed in the subject, but Jews in Morocco used to be pretty well settled in society there well into the 1960s.
ArthurGreat collection you got there Sauron! You use them for hunting/birding/wildlife? With such a collection you can actually pic the scopes you need for a certain occasion, definately a good thing.
The light in those 11x80s should be absolutely fantastic, definately the sort of scope one could use for spotting US Army helos and other low-contrast ‘targets’. Same with the 25x150s, but i reckon those would be a bit too big for my purposes. I know a guy who made a shoulder-stock for a one-eyed 50×120 telescope, to at least have some control over it without using a tripod or some sort of improvised support. Unfortunately, walking with a big black tube with a shoulder stock is not really recommendable near military installations these days…
Softlad, Tento’s 20×60 are occasionally to be found on Ebay if you’re interested in one of those.
ArthurHey, if you look long enough and combine the right lighting circumstances, you can make any camo ‘work’ on a photo. That doesn’t have much to do with reality though. I doubt that MiG-27s paintjob has been selected because it just happens to give a nice background-blend over a sanddune desert during sunset.
ArthurYou should consider how and how often you are going to use it as well. For expeditionary spotting, you will want sturdiness and lots of magnification, with weight not so much an issue since you won’t be going too far from your car all that often. If you want to use it primarily for airshows and such, you won’t need that much magnification (you’re generally closer to the aircraft) but since you’ll be hauling the bloody thing all day, the weight is more important. Also, an airshow-scope doesn’t suffer nearly as much as a trip-scope. Taking proper care of the binoculairs at an airshow is a lot easier than the panic-grab-a-scope-and-throw-it-back-into-the-car stuff it will have to endure when ‘on the road’.
A good, but antisocial tip: fix your dioptry settings to your own needs. Other people won’t be happy when borrowing your scope (it might seem cross-eyed to them), but a semi-fixed focus can buy you some crucial time. Fixing both dioptry and focus is even more antisocial and saves even more time, but is not to be recommended if you haven’t got another set of lenses at hand. Peeking through that hangar window suddenly becomes impossible with a fixed-focus scope (as i noticed with my one-eyed 20×60 which i fixed – and that 30×60 one-eyed i’m going to make from my chipped binoculair is going to be fixed as well).
ArthurI think there are decent two-eyed 20x60s for sale at quite a few British airshows, around one hundred quid. They are getting pretty populair here in the Netherlands now it seems that the import-source of Russian 20x60s has dried up. I consider myself lucky i got one of the last 20×60 Tento binoculairs (those massive steel Soviet naval binoculairs, extremely durable and dead cheap) here in the Netherlands – mine is only two years old. I also have an old and algae-infested one-eyed 20×60 occupying my glove compartment, and a nice small 8×30 Chinese mini-binoculair for the stealthy work. I had a Chinese-made 30×60 for a short time too, but one of it’s prismas got chipped after only a few months. This is to become a one-eyed scope, to replace the one in my glove compartment.
For trips, we usually have a 60x telescope as well. Comes in pretty handy, although it won’t be the first time if you’re hauling such a thing it gets mistaken for a rocket launcher :rolleyes:
As far as i’m concerned, those big heavy steel Russian 20x60s are the way to go. They are INCREDIBLY sturdy (i saw a Dutch planespotter break his kneecap with a one-eyed, and a twin-eyed fall off the roof of a pretty fast driving Renault Espace without any serious consequences for the scopes), very cheap and the 20×60 gives enough light for most purposes except US Army Blackhawks in crap weather. Also, the size and the weight of those binoculairs make them really stable even without using your car/a fence/a tree.
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