Go Navy!

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Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

MSimon wrote:I couldn't find a thing on

waterbombing of the Luisitania

got a link?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luisitania
Dublin-based technical diver Des Quiqley, who dove on the wreck in the 1990s with Bemis' permission, has reported that the wreck is "like Swiss cheese" and the seabed around her "is littered with unexploded hedgehog mines". Royal Navy officials have claimed they had merely been "practicing" on the wreck, but others have suggested that in fact the Navy was deliberately trying to destroy evidence.
So the Wehrmacht was governing Germany from 1933 to 1945?
The Wehrmacht was not directly following Hitlers orders. There was some osrt of a hirarchy there (though Hitler tried to soften that) and Hitler and the higher Wehrmacht officers did bump heads more than once. Read up on Erwin Rommel. Yes, it did not always do them any good, but generally the Wehrmacht was in the tradition of WW1 soldiers and honor. I know more about the BDU and the German submarine navy and they were even still calling it German Royal Navy (secretly). All of this and the fact that Hitlers insanity contributed to many of the leading Wehrmacht officers conspiring against Hitler. It is a shame that the allies did not support this cause more. The war would have been over in 1943, millions of lives could have been saved.
Anyway, the commanding officer in charge of that massacre at Oradour was meant to be courtmarshalled and there was A LOT of fuss about that among the leaders of the Wehrmacht. The guy had clearly exceeded his orders. His orders were to take hostages to negociate a prisoner exchange with the Marquis. He was not supposed to kill anybody!
Erwin Rommel is even quoted as being apalled and requesting swift punishment of the perpetrators.
I will look up the link on that for you.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

Here is the Wikipedia link that brievly mentions the courtmarshalling of the responsible soldiers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane
Protests followed from Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel; General Gleiniger, German commander in Limoges; and the Vichy government. Standartenführer Stadler felt Diekmann had far exceeded his orders and began a judicial investigation; however, Diekmann was killed in action shortly afterward during the Battle of Normandy, and a large number of the third company, which had committed the massacre, were themselves killed in action within a few days
There was an article that I stumbled uppon elsewhere that talks about the protests by the Wehrmacht and SS leaders and the courtmarshalling of those involved in more detail, but I can not find it right now.
Anyway, I think that the Wikipedia article says enough to proof my point.

bcglorf
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Re: Giggles

Post by bcglorf »

KitemanSA wrote:
MSimon wrote: If Saddam was smart he would have avoided paper currency and accepted only gold.
Would have had the same effect, the voiding of the petro-dollar. He would have been stopped.
I guess Iran has been living on borrowed time for awhile now then?

I'm sorry I have to actually ask this, but are you serious about the whole petro-dollar conspiracy?

KitemanSA
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Re: Giggles

Post by KitemanSA »

bcglorf wrote:
KitemanSA wrote:
MSimon wrote: If Saddam was smart he would have avoided paper currency and accepted only gold.
Would have had the same effect, the voiding of the petro-dollar. He would have been stopped.
I guess Iran has been living on borrowed time for awhile now then?

I'm sorry I have to actually ask this, but are you serious about the whole petro-dollar conspiracy?
The timing was suspicious and the other "explanations" made no sense. Propose a better reason.

bcglorf
Posts: 436
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Re: Giggles

Post by bcglorf »

KitemanSA wrote:
bcglorf wrote:
KitemanSA wrote: Would have had the same effect, the voiding of the petro-dollar. He would have been stopped.
I guess Iran has been living on borrowed time for awhile now then?

I'm sorry I have to actually ask this, but are you serious about the whole petro-dollar conspiracy?
The timing was suspicious and the other "explanations" made no sense. Propose a better reason.
You want merely a better reason?

Bush Jr. was wanting to get the guy that tried to "kill his pa", should qualify as better.

9/11 happened, and in the grand tradition of Kissinger, America had to show it's resolve and act out in a big enough way to persuade other nations of the world they didn't want to harbor guys like that. That IS a better reason. And don't play cute about Saudi Arabia making more sense or some none-sense like that. Saddam praised the attacks and collapse of the towers while Saudi Arabia's leadership condemned it. If more is needed, and it isn't, Saddam offered safe haven to Ramzi Yousef after he mixed the chemicals for the first attack on the towers.

You realize how many holes the petro-dollar conspiracy has in it, right? Not least of which being the extraordinary sanctions in place on Iraq's oil already and Iran's current practice of selling oil in anything but American dollars.

KitemanSA
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Re: Giggles

Post by KitemanSA »

[/quote]
bcglorf wrote: Bush Jr. was wanting to get the guy that tried to "kill his pa", should qualify as better.
I've read that one too, and it probably help sway the shrub (lil bush). But not enough.
bcglorf wrote:9/11 happened, and in the grand tradition of Kissinger, America had to show it's resolve and act out in a big enough way to persuade other nations of the world they didn't want to harbor guys like that. So why not Just afganistan which HARBORED the AQ leadership?
That IS a better reason. And don't play cute about Saudi Arabia making more sense or some none-sense like that. Saddam praised the attacks and collapse of the towers while Saudi Arabia's leadership condemned it.
SA (KitemanSA, get it) wasn't on my list.
bcglorf wrote:If more is needed, and it isn't, Saddam offered safe haven to Ramzi Yousef after he mixed the chemicals for the first attack on the towers.
Did he go there? For long?
bcglorf wrote: You realize how many holes the petro-dollar conspiracy has in it, right? Not least of which being the extraordinary sanctions in place on Iraq's oil already and Iran's current practice of selling oil in anything but American dollars.
Re: Iran, that started on the fall of the Shah and when the Irani production tanked to nearly nothing. Boiling a frog and all that. Re Iraq, they were 'allowed" to produce oil for humanitarian reasons and then...
Not, the petro-dollar issue wasn't the ONLY reason, but sure seems to have been a significant one, at least to the owners of the shrub! :)

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

With floating exchange rates it matters not if oil is priced in Euros, dollars, or ounces of gold.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

KitemanSA
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Location: OlyPen WA

Post by KitemanSA »

MSimon wrote:With floating exchange rates it matters not if oil is priced in Euros, dollars, or ounces of gold.
Nice bold statement, we'll have to agree to disagree. :wink:

Diogenes
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by Diogenes »

Navy will deploy first ship with laser weapon this summer


Image

After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).
http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... is-summer/
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

williatw
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by williatw »

Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots at Sea in 2016: Adm. Greenert


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Htszh_6S ... bedded#t=0

[UPDATED April 8 with more rail gun & laser detail from Rear Adm. Klunder]

NATIONAL HARBOUR: 23 pounds ain’t heavy. But it sure hurts when it hits you going at seven times the speed of sound.

That’s what a prototype Navy weapon called a “rail gun” can do, and it does it without a single gram of gunpowder or rocket fuel — just electricity. For many missions, a rail gun is better not just than current cannon but than the laser weapons the Navy is testing this summer in the Persian Gulf (I’ll explain why in a minute). And, after years in development and hundreds of test shots on land — see the video for a small sample of the destruction — the rail gun is finally going to go to sea.

“We’re beyond lab coats, we’re into engineering now,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, told the audience at the Navy League’s annual megaconference here, Sea-Air-Space 2014. “It’s going on a Joint High Speed Vessel in 2016.”

Just in time for the Navy’s biggest gathering of the year, the Sea-Air-Space conference, the Navy released this video and issued new details of the test plan. Both rail gun prototypes will be shown off to the public in San Diego this summer, aboard the new Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Millinocket. Then the Navy will install either the BAE Systems prototype or the General Atomics one — that hasn’t been decided — on Millinocket for at-sea test shots in 2016.

It’s a crawl-walk-run approach, however. The 2016 tests will only involve one shot at a time. Firing multiple rounds in a row will wait for another series of tests in 2018. Actually installing a rail gun permanently on a combat ship — Millinocket is a transport with a civilian crew — is even further in the future. Meanwhile, while one prototype or the other is doing the tests at sea, BAE is already working on a “Phase II” rail gun with such improvements as an automatic multi-loader for rapid fire and better heat control so rapid fire doesn’t melt the barrel. (General Atomics didn’t win a Phase II contract).

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials have been impressed with the Navy’s tests and are exploring the idea of a land-based version of the rail gun for missile defense, a mission currently performed by expensive and often unreliable anti-missile missiles.

So why do rail guns matter, besides generating cool clickable video? Three words: impact, range, and reloads.

Impact. Accelerated electromagnetically down a set of rails — hence the name — that 23 pound projectile moving at March 7 has 32 megajoules of energy. The Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, likened the impact to “a freight train going through the wall at a hundred miles an hour” in a recent phone call with reporters. It doesn’t have an explosive warhead, but then it hardly needs one. According to official Pentagon modeling, the sheer impact is enough to meet “every single mission” the Navy and Marine Corps have for naval gunfire, although some really tough targets may require multiple shots. With the right targeting system, the rail gun could shoot down incoming aircraft, cruse missiles, and even ballistic missiles. Lasers can do the anti-missile mission too, but they probably won’t have power for harder targets for many years to come.

[UPDATED: The Navy's working on a laser with five times the power of the one headed for field-testing in the Gulf, "[but] today, it’s more defensive in nature,” Klunder told me when I caught him after his public remarks at Sea-Air-Space on Tuesday: Since lasers fire at the speed of light and keep firing as long as they have electrical power, they’re well-suited at defeating waves of incoming enemy missiles or drones that would exhaust the ammo supply of current defensive systems, but they lack a rail-gun’s long-range punch.]

Range.The rail gun can hit targets “over a hundred miles” away, said Klunder. That’s farther than existing Naval guns and even the Navy’s standard anti-ship missile, the aging Harpoon. That’s farther than the 65 nautical mile minimum distance the Navy calculates its ships must stay away from shore to stay (mostly) out of range of land-based missiles.

Historically, a Marine Corps landing force goes ashore from ships drawn up just five miles offshore. In the future, Commandant Gen. James Amos said at Sea-Air-Space this morning, “it may well find itself sitting out a hundred-plus miles.”

A rail gun also shoots farther than lasers, because of simple physics: Even the most powerful laser will fire a straight line-of-sight shot that eventually goes off into space, while a rail gun can fire a solid shot in a ballistic trajectory against targets beyond the horizon. On the other hand, 100-plus miles is a fraction of the range of the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Navy’s standard weapon for hitting targets on land. We used to have an anti-ship Tomahawk but made the mistake of phasing it out in the 1990s, leaving a big gap in the Navy armory that megacontractor Lockheed Martin is now developing a new missile to fill. So the rail gun is not going to be the one-size-fits-all weapon of the future, just an important part of a mixed arsenal of complementary weapons.

[Updated: "There's ever, never a single golden BB or a silver bullet," Klunder told me Tuesday. "We may find that the future of your battleforce may indeed be a rail gun that gives greater distances" -- for both offense and defense -- "and maybe a laser system that gives you more mid- to close-in range [defense],” with missiles for specialized missions such as hitting targets beyond rail gun range. Imagine concentric circles around a US Navy ship: an inner ring covered by lasers, a middle ring by rail guns, and an outer ring by cruise missiles. But the Navy hopes to use a lot fewer missiles in the future.]

Reloads. Missiles are bulky and expensive, with price tags in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. A 23-pound slug of metal is, by comparison, shockingly light and cheap: about $25,000 per shot, according to Klunder. [Updated: Klunder said Tuesday at Sea-Air-Space that a laser shot is even cheaper -- 59 cents per zap -- but the laser does a different mission]. The Navy’s existing DDG-51 and DDG-1000 destroyers can carry about 80 to 96 major missiles in their Vertical Launch Systems. With the rail gun, the Navy can fit — and afford — “hundreds” of rounds per ship, said Klunder. That means a rail gun ship can hit more targets, from incoming missiles to enemy ships to bunkers deep inland, and it can stay in the fight longer.

What that future rail gun warship will be is an open question. JHSVs are transports: The Navy is using them as the testbed because they have a nice wide flight deck to stick the gun on and lots of cargo space to carry the electrical power and other systems. Interestingly, one variant of the Navy’s controversial Littoral Combat Ship, the USS Independence class, is the JHSV’s big brother and has similar characteristics, since it’s designed with a huge flight deck and spare room for plug-and-play “modules” of equipment for different missions. LCS is also under fire for not having enough firepower, a major factor in an ongoing Pentagon review of whether the program should continue.

It’d be harder to retrofit the rail gun on an existing destroyer — a larger ship than LCS isn’t designed for plug-and-play — but it’s doable. In the long run, however, making full use of rail guns probably will require a new class of ship, one with much more electrical power. That’s a goal that will take even longer and even more money than the rail gun itself.

Updated Tuesday 1:45 pm with more information from Rear Adm. Klunder.



http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/navy ... -greenert/

choff
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by choff »

What happens to rail gun if struck by lightning?
CHoff

ladajo
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by ladajo »

Nothing.

First warship install will be a roll on kit for probably an amphib. The first actual warship install is more than likely going to be the last Zumwalt build (or two if we get really lucky).
The next best chance would be a Flt. III DDG build with 4160 infrastructure.

One can assume Railgun in the warfight mix after 2020. It will change many things, not only how we fight, but also how others seek to defend. A lot of sites will move away from the coasts to get 100nm or more inland. Other sites will become pop-up hardened where-as today they are not.

The only real problem I see right now with railgun is the cyclic rate. it is going to be hard to hit some targets with unguided or dumb rounds with the currently envisioned cyclic rate. We need to step that up. Much easier on smaller rated mounts. The 64MJ mount is going to be problematic with that for a while. Probably only good against slow or fixed targets.
What I really want to see is one that can reach escape velocity. It will completely change the space fight.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

GIThruster
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by GIThruster »

Any idea how far off guided rail munitions are?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

D Tibbets
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by D Tibbets »

Rail guns is a game changer. Recovering Russian and Chinese navies can lead to agressive behavior by their leaders. US Navy still leads in many areas but the differences are shrinking. If you wish to intimidate (call it diplomacy if you wish) potential enemies you can do so with either quantity or quality. Both cost money.

In this the rail gun is a game changer as it not only has the potential large technical advantages, it has a per hit/shot cost that may be much cheaper than current front line missles. Of course no body is advertizing the costs of the overall system.

The big news now is not the continuing laboratory development of the system, but that it has reached a stage where a prototype ship born system will go to sea in two years. Reportably this gun will throw a 24 lb round over 100 miles miles at a muzzle speed of ~ mach 7. This would be ~ 7700 ft/ s or ~5,000 miles per hour. Not only can it reach a far distance with sufficient retained velocity to do major damage, it can climb very high, perhaps higher than the most missiles except those dedicated to exo-atmospheric interception. These missiles are very expensive and few in number. Having a gun that can fire dozens of rounds at a ballistic warhead at altitudes of perhaps over a hundred thousand feet of altitude goes a long way towards voiding the advantages of these attack modes that Russia and China has been persueing vigorously.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

paperburn1
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Re: Go Navy!

Post by paperburn1 »

With a few tweaks we already have a guided version by lazing or GPS.
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

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