Re: The Macintosh is a girl's computer!

Graeme Wall <Graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:

Graeme Wall <Graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

The Germans kept remarkably good records right up to the end.

That I knew - I was assuming that the rocket launch crews kept records
and all that (well, you need to get new rockets for launching, so it's
all got to be tied up neatly with paperwork, yes?), but I was also
assuming that `things got lost in the chaos'.

Some parts of the Nazi state were obsessive about records and put more effort
into preserving them than they did into prosecuting the war.

True - but I'm thinking about the V2 launch crews and all that. They
were out in the field and all hell was breaking loose while they were
doing it, wasn't it? Well, I expect a historian could tell us what went
on - I don't have any data myself.

[snip]

Worked fine as a launch vehicle, was not actually much use as a weapon.

Correct.

Especially at that stage of the war. It was also fired at the wrong
target.

Was there a target it was suitable for? The poor guidance was always a bit
of a limitation.

Places like Southampton docks, the Mulberry Harbours and Antwerpen would all
have been more logical, being pinch points in the logistic chain supplying
the armies threatening the Reich.

The accuracy wasn't good enough to target something as small as
Southampton docks or the Mulberry harbours. And Antwerp got more V2s
than London.

By the time the V2s came into service,
bombing London was irrelevant to the war effort.

It was pretty much irrelevant when they started. The Germans failed to
learn from their First World War experience: bombing London does nothing
but make your enemy much, much more pissed off and much, much less
likely to give any quarter.

Might have had more
political effect firing them at Moscow but to the best of my knowledge none
were.

Hmm. Based on what happened when Boney attacked Moscow, I suspect that
the effect of doing that would have been to cause Stalin to put more of
the Soviet Union behind rocketry than had been the case. They actually
had some pretty good work going on well before they got the German gear.

Werner von Braun might well have been the amoral *** behind a
slave-labour constructed weapon of war designed to kill innocent
civilians and all that, but I can't help liking him in some ways. He
wanted to build bloody great big rockets to go into space and he did.

Did you see the BBC doco series on the Space Race, about him and
Korolyov?

I have no telly, so `no'.

Get the book.

Righto - is it a BBC publication?

[snip]

(Mind you, on the subject of the slave labour used to build the V2s -
it strikes me that a lot of the workers owed their lives to the fact
that they had skills the Nazis could use. I expect they'd've been
killed otherwise.)

Many of them died under the pressure anyway.

Well, yes, of course. I'm not trying to *justify* it at all - just
pointing out that it wasn't as bad as it sounds, in a funny sort of way.

If it hadn't been for the V2
project many of them wouldn't have been in Germany at all.

True enough - they'd've been killed, yes?

No, you are thinking of the Jews who would otherwise have gone to the
concentration and extermination camps. They weren't the whole of the slave
labour force.

True enough - but a significant part, surely?

Many were simply nationals of occupied countries, especially
France and the eastern European states.

Really? Just random civvies or POWs? Not selected on the grounds that
they were considered `unfit' in some way, as were the Jews?

[snip]

Yes. Do you recall why it was Sandys scrapped so many manned
aeroplanes? It was because the coming guided missiles were going to
make piloted warplanes obsolete. Doesn't seem to have happened, does
it?

Well it did with the strategic bomber.

Which is of course why the US has put all its B52s out of service,
right?

It did in the UK and the US only uses the B52s for tactical, not strategic,
use.

Well, yes, but the aeroplanes are still there, aren't they? No-one's
done any strategic bombing for a very long time, have they?

Apart from a few B2s, there is no replacenent for the B52s when they
are retired.

What's the B1B all about, then?

The guided missile hasn't put manned aeroplanes out of business, but
that's what `they' said was going to happen. Manned aeroplanes are just
different to what they used to be. I can see the same thing happening
with drones in the future - there'll be drone carrier aircraft much as
we have missile carriers.


The difference is the manned aircraft will remain well outside the combat
zone,

The point of missiles was to get the manned aircraft stood off from the
combat zone. Unmanned aerial vehicles will add to the tendency for
standing off like that - but I'd be willing to bet that even half a
century from now, there will be uses for close-in manned warplanes.

the AWACS and GSTARS are the forerunners of that development.

Hmm. Not sure much forerunners as part of the technology needed to get
it all working, I'd've thought.

The, erm, D21? hypersonic drone developed for the M21 (IIRC) Blackbird

SR71?

No. The version they built to carry the drone had its own designation.
They were all basically the same airframe, be it the A12 CIA one man
spyplane, the YF21 interceptor prototype, the SR71 two man spyplane, or
the drone-carrier - which I'm pretty sure was the M21 and I could look
up on the Web but can't be bothered right now.

btw, the tooling was destroyed on political orders some years ago. The
Blackbirds have suffered a lot of political opposition all their life,
and that's why they went.

One entertaining thing: none of them ever suffered any sort of airframe
cracking, and they're all stronger than when new. How come? They get
annealed every time they fly fast.

I'd still rather have a Concorde, though. More comfy.

spyplane variant was interesting, but they never got it working
reliably. I bet they could these days.

Possibly but the requirement has gone, replaced by satellite observations.

But a satellite cannot do the sort of observations that an aeroplane can
do. If you know something about a spy sat's orbit, it's easy enough to
hide from it, and in any case, they can only give you coverage in
particular fixed places and times, depending on their orbits (which can
be changed, but not trivially and not to arbitrary extents).

There's still a requirement for a fast high flying spy plane -
satellites just can't replace 'em and haven't.

The need now has gone the other way, drones that can loiter at low speed over
the target area for hours at a tome.

And if the target area has ground-to-air missiles or even just old
fashioned fighter aircraft, what use are your spy drones? Not a lot -
they'll just get shot down. A flippin' *Spitfire* could shoot down
pretty much any of them that I've seen.

Rowland.

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