thanks i thought it was the other way around the cats being complecated and the aresstor gear was simple.
wasn’t carriers in WWII STOBAR?
so isn’t india making a bad choise with their Keiv class and their ADS ships as they are both STOBAR

the Admiral Gorshkov was not designed for catapults and you cant put in a cat just like that. the MiG-29Ks came with the Gorshkov… they use STOBAR and are going to be embarked on the ADS as well so ADS has to be STOBAR.

the only CATOBAR fighters really available today are the Super Hornet and Rafale, and whether India can handle a fleet of either fighter as well as a brand-new CATOBAR carrier to carry them must be considered.

And, of course, lets not forget the aforementioned swimming pool! Also, amzing as it seems, I recall hearing that they have small pets (cats and birds, perhaps hamsters) living in special quarters to relieve the psychological pressure of having to spend months on the boat barely moving beneath the ice….

would they then have “special quarters” for wives, girlfriends and hookers to “relieve psychological pressure”? 😀

the NCC-1701-D carried families aboard…

If they want a long range strike aircraft why not buy some Tu-22M3s?

Or if they had to buy american they could try and buy B-1Bs… In fact I think either option would work out cheaper than any model F/A-22…

IIRC the B-1B production tooling has been scrapped.

an option though is to take over some of the 33(?) B-1Bs that were going to be boneyarded. that’s if the USAF approves tho.

If we have a trial of whether the three direct nuclear threats issued to a non-nuclear China was racial and the mountain of circumstantial evidence of American racial attitude affecting policy would end in a conviction.

it isn’t just racism. do remember that back in the 1950s the USA didn’t even recognise China diplomatically at all – the US embassy was in Taipei! much like Arab countries don’t recognise Israel today. and the nuke threats were in response to PRC threats against Taiwan. if the Americans were really racist against the Chinese RACE, then they wouldn’t have committed nuclear weapons in defense of the Taiwanese, who are chinese by race too. i imagine they’d sit back rub their palms in glee and watch chinese people kill each other.

it was plain and simple countering of Communist aggression.

Because beyond just the nuclear threats to China, the US supported both France and the UK, who were obviously in the wrong in holding on to their colonial possessions, over the native peoples in both Asia and Africa. Those were clearly evidence of racial preference.

from the start the USA had actually taken an anti-colonial stand. there’s the Atlantic Treaty, where they obliged the Brits to progressive decolonization after WWII. do you have any evidence for American help to the UK during Indian independence in 1947, Malaya 1957 etc? in fact the Americans opposed Anglo-French intervention in the Suez Canal crisis.

Again, evidence of the “blood is thicker than water” mentality which exemplified by American Commodore Josiah Tatnall when he broke neutrality and fired on the Chinese during their fight with the British at the Taku forts.

neutrality is one thing, but one can expect that the commanders of the Allied naval forces in the China sector were friends who would meet regularly to strategise and chat and drink. Tatnall could probably see that the lives of Sir James Hope and his men were in dire danger and any commander would have fired to save his friend. especially since they all regarded China as the enemy, neutrality or no… but political enemies, not racial ones.

i

I fully agree with Badger1968 “Patents do NOT mean that something has deen actually built… or even “designed”!”, but anyway they tell us a lot about what a company intends to build.

eg. Lockheed holds a patent for a “Pulse detonation cluster engine”, no 6,439,503, see

http://www.desertsecrets.com/6,439,503.txt

and have you seen this:

now that u mention it, i remember an article in POPULAR SCIENCE maybe 2 years ago on GE bench-testing prototype PDWEs.

they were saying it is a very promising tech for hypersonic propulsion and all the expected stuff.

but the prototype PDWEs featured were all very small-scale affairs and it seemed the whole PDWE technology is very immature and very far from actually powering a manned aircraft.

i wonder if the article reflects the actual state of air-breathing hypersonic propulsion tech today – or if its a red herring meant to disguise advanced and secretive operational PDWEs on Aurora and the “high-energy-density boron-based fuels” on the BlackStar XOV, etc.

Assuming for a moment, that the AWST story is essentially true, and the USAF had a working fully reusable TSTO, which they are now retiring(!), then this …

… is really a shame :mad:!

And what are all the current military hypersonic research projects (HyFly, X-51, Falcon) all about, if the Air Force already has the technology?

Anyway, it’s hard to pick a single fact from the article as particularly implausible, but the overall picture somehow doesn’t look quite right to me.

healthy skepticism.

even if they all really exist, i would think there’s really nothing to be excited about BlackStar, Aurora or antigravity flying saucers if the new technology they bring were not eventually brought out of the top-secret world.

we would all like to celebrate these great achievements of human (and american) engineering prowess, but only if they could be proven to be real.

on another note, i would expect the mothership to take a staggered climb profile like an airliner, taking on JP-4 from a tanker on the way before a final afterburner run to the upper stratosphere and thence orbiter release.

these i believe were from the chinese exhibitors’ booths at Asian Aerospace 2006. well done!