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:

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.

The V2 launch sites were well back from the front line

Didn't they used mobile launchers, some of which were captured?

and, secondly, the
issue of rockets from Nordhausen to operational units was well documented.
There is possibly some discrepancy between the number issued and the number
launched but that wouldn't be very large.

Righto.


[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.

Southampton area would have been big enough for a fair few hits.

For sure that's a big enough target to aim at, but not the docks.

It wasn't
just the docks, there were large equipment dumps and troop marshalling areas
on the Common for instance. A major food dump was located at a school just
up the road from me.

Righto.

And Antwerp got more V2s than London.

Just been there and seen the memorial. There's a floor map outside the main
art gallery showing the bomb plot. Antwerpen was much closer to the launch
sites than London with the concomitment increase in accuracy.

There is that.

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.

But, like us, they wouldn't have had enough time to develop anything before
the end of the war.

Why do you say that? They had some pretty good rocket engine designs
before the war.

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?

I believe so, my son's borrowed my copy at the moment so can't check.


[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?

I've no idea what the proportions were but given the works were started
failrly late in the war I'd suspect that Jews were becoming a scarce
resource.

Uhuh.

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?

Criminals, resistance fighters who'd been captured and, especially in the
east, Slavs, also regarded as untermenschen but, unlike the Jews, regarded as
suitable as slaves.

Righto.

[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?

Cruise missile attacks on Al Quaeda camps in Afghanistan and powdered milk
factories in Sudan?

Is that really strategic bombing? Okay, if it's a factory, maybe. But
what was that place really?

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

What's the B1B all about, then?

Is it still being developed? I though the programme had been terminated.

Yes, and then restarted and the first ones came into service in 1986.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B1B#Partial_retirement>

`Partial retirement

A total of 100 front-line aircraft were produced at a cost of over $200
million each. After several accidents that resulted in the loss of
aircraft (and in some cases the death of crew members), 93 bombers
remained by the turn of the century.

In 2003 the USAF decided to retire 33 of the B-1Bs to concentrate its
budget on maintaining availability of the remaining aircraft, although
in 2004 a new appropriations bill called for some of the retired
aircraft to return to service. In 2004, the USAF returned seven of the
mothballed bombers to service, giving a total force of 67 aircraft, with
the rest cannibalized for spares. Five of the seven that were brought
back to service went to Dyess AFB in Texas, one to Ellsworth AFB in
South Dakota, and another to Edwards AFB in California. In 2005, The
Pentagon announced the closing of Ellsworth AFB and the transfer of all
operational B-1s to Dyess AFB. However, on August 26, 2005, it was
announced that Ellsworth AFB would remain open; thus, no transfer of
Ellsworth's B-1s would occur.'

There's a proposal for a faster replacement.

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.

As opposed to Heinkel 111s with glide bombs or Vulcans with Blue Steel

Well, yes. Aerial intelligence/communciations/whatnot platforms have
been around since the First World War - you might call the old
artillery spotters the forerunners of AWACS and GSTARS, if you like, but
these modern `flying eyes' (so to speak) aren't forerunners of drones,
they're part of the package that includes the drones.

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.

Shades of Collosus and TSR2.

TSR2 had been killed my committee from what I've heard - if they'd
actually gone ahead with it, it would have been awful because they'd
bureaucratised the design into impracticality. If it *hadn't* be
committeed to death, well, that would have been different.

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.

OK, explain DC3s :-)

They crash, quite often, actually. There's a pub on Snake Pass with
some bits of Dakota engine on display - it flew into a hill during the
Second World War.

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

Never had the chance.

The only person I've ever heard of even trying to buy a Concorde was
Branson (and even then it was the firm's money) but they wouldn't let
him.

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.

Just launch another half dozen, they are expendable.

And they'll get shot down too - ammunition is also expendable. And some
of those drones aren't all that cheap, you know - maybe the USA could
happily avoid running out of 'em, but our armed forces couldn't, not
with stiff military opposition and the Treasury as it currently is...

A flippin' *Spitfire* could shoot down pretty much any of them that I've
seen.

One of the advantages of being small and slow, you can't see them and if you
do you are travelling too fast to get a shot in.

Not so if you're flying an old-style fighter, though. Okay, maybe a
Gloucester Gladiator would be a better bet?

Something that was brought
home to me trying to film a glider doing 35-40 knots from a chase plane doing
double that, by the time I'd lined it up in the viwefinder we'd overshot it
and had to go round again., Drones are designed to loiter at around the
glider's speed, put up a jet inteceptor that has trouble doing under 200
knots and it's a problem for the defence.

Okay, but how about an armed trainer?

Rowland.


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