David Hingtgen

AEGIS destroyers---what about them? Burke class and (likely) Zumwalt class. Well, for US ships at least. JMSDF has some now too (the new Kongo class, including the Kirishima), as does Spain.

Multiple layers are less effective than a single layer of equal thickness. A single 10-inch thick plate is better than an 8 inch and a 2 inch plate together. Formula I think is 50% for a "spaced" plate, 75% for a "combined" plate. So if you have a 2inch directly on top of an 8 inch, it's like 8+(.75x2)=9.5 inches of a single plate. If you have a 2inch separated from the 8inch by a space, it's equal to 8+(.5x2)=9 inch thick armor. The thicker the armor, the greater the difference. And yes, there are armors out there that are multi-layer combos, with and without spaces, and you end up with a nasty "3+5(.5)+8(.75(.5x2)3)+4" ratings. So why have multiple plates? Because the thicker it is, the harder it is to manufacture. The failure rate for battleship armor is tremendous. Heck, the Iowa and New Jersery only got 98% of their rated armor, as there were so many failed batches, they ran out of time, despite a 4-year head start on the ship's construction. By the time the MO and WI were built, they'd had enough "successfull" batches that they got full rated armor. (The IA and NJ had a full armor set, but not all of it was up to spec---there are weak spots that didn't pass the tests, but it's the best they could get from what they had, and there was a war to fight) Also, sometimes there's not room for really thick armor, and you must space it. So instead of like a 10-inch plate, you use 2 spaced 6.5's, which are about equivalent to a 10 inch plate. As for how to protect: you basically calculate the most likely engagement ranges and angles, and try to project against shells along those trajectories. You assume you're fighting the most similar enemy ship to yourself---a weaker ship should run away from you, and you shouldn't be taking on a vastly superior ship---you're really only expected to be battling it out with an "equivalent" ship. The really basic rule is "protect against yourself". Your armor should be able to withstand being hit by your own guns at your own optimum firing range. That'll pretty much take care of the whole "similar enemy vessel" criteria. As for modern armor: the simple answer is "no". The long answer is that modern carriers and destroyers (and many ships being retrofitted when they can) "kevlar blankets over vital areas to prevent the spread of shrapnel". Basically if the hull is hit, it'll be blown apart, but they're trying to protect the machinery within. Flight II Burke class destroyers are supposed to have thicker hulls over the vital areas, but not true "armor". The USS Cole is one of those, and was hit over a "protected" spot. And we all saw what happened. Most ships would have been far more damaged. Iowa-class ships are considered immune to all anti-ship missiles and all current naval guns. Only threat is aircraft, which is pretty much an equal threat to any modern ship, and they all have the same defenses---their own CIWS for up-close (nobody's got more CIWS installed than an Iowa) , and AEGIS cruisers escorting.

If you want to see really subtle, look at the Iowa class. Iowa class was designed for speed and manueverability above all else. They had more of a "top speed/agility increasing" bow, rather than a "drag reducing at normal speed" bow like most bulbous bows are for. Iowa class suffered for it though, very wet up front and not too stable in rough seas or high speed. But they could out-turn and out-run most anything. Their turning circle is insanely small, it's on the order of most destroyers. And could stop in less than a boat-length at flank speed.

LOL. Leave it to the Air Force to use A PLANE THAT'S NOT SHOWING ITS SERIAL NUMBER as an example of how to read a serial number. That's the squadron commander's plane, with non-standard tail markings. No year, no serial. 99% of the planes in the Air Force would have been a better example. And it's not even the normal "use a matching serial number displayed in a non-standard way" method that most commander's planes use. Sheesh. (Though that in itself is another discussion). The quick version, an example I know. 36th Wing. Well, they happened to get F-15C # 79-0036. A perfect plane for the 36 wing's commander. So, they put on the plane "AF79-00" in small letters, then in BIG letters put the "36" after it, then a small "TFW". Thus you get "36TFW" markings on the tail, and still have the serial number displayed "the right way", only with certain digits exaggerated. ::edit:: Ok, so it is showing its serial number. In itty-bitty tiny pixelated lettering. It's at the base of the rudder. That grey ill-defined splotch. "Thanks USAF, that'll teach people how to read tailcodes"

Stamen--those are the reasons the tooling was destroyed! To prevent any chance of more F-14's being built, and to eliminate the parts source. The basic plan was to FORCE the Super Hornet to be built, due to the utter inability to keep F-14's flying. That's why F-14D's are already being taken out of service with like only 1/4 of their hours used up--they're already out of spares. See, the Navy (particularly the carrier commanders and quite a few admirals) kept asking for more F-14's. Cheney and the Super Hornet lobby kept pushing for the Super Hornet for all the typical political reasons. Navy kept saying "no, the first Hornet kinda sucked, the new one won't be much better, and will cost WAAY more. Just give us a bunch more cheap new F-14's, and give us the small amounts of money required to convert old F-14A's into new F-14D's". And even congress saw that large quantities of F-14D's could be had quickly, and cheaply (since you could just convert old F-14A's, and new ones cost less than Hornets). That didn't look good to the Super Hornet lobby. So Cheney made it so that any naval officer asking for more Tomcats would be effectively court martialed, and immediately cancelled Grumman's contract with the Navy, and ordered all F-14 tooling destroyed. That way, they HAD to get new Super Hornets, since the Tomcat was done for, having lost its technical support, and the means to convert A's into D's. Heck, we weren't going to buy that many new D's, maybe a few dozen. But we were going to convert hundreds of A's into D's. And the D was ready and flying, while the Subpar Hornet was spending a year trying to fix its stall problems, then another year fixing its pylon problems, and is just now entering service with massive amounts of excess drag, cutting into its range quite a bit. Historical note: Grumman was desperate for work, and would have built F-14's at a loss, just to keep people's jobs. New F-14D's for much less than the cost of a NORMAL Hornet. Not to mention the "F-14A to F-14D" conversion kit was cheap and simple enough that you didn't even need to send it back to the factory, many well-equipped naval bases could do it. (And some did, for the few kits delivered before the factory tooling was destroyed)

1. Increased thrust solves 99% of most weight/power/drag/speed problems. And it's usually not too hard to get. Try that before anything else. 2. More importantly--given that it's got another decade until it enters service, it will only get heavier. Has ANY plane ever lost weight from prototype to in-service? Heck, they usually tack on 10-20%. I think the F-15 had about the lowest gain of any recent plane. F-16's was quite high, F-18 was of course enormous. Sure, F-35 might get a lower-weight engine. But it won't help with the other thousands of pounds that will inevitably "creep" onto the airframe as they make a plane actually suitable for combat, rather than a demonstrator. Only saving grace is that it's stealth, and thus that implies no external additions, and thus could limit weight growth due to sheer lack of internal volume. 2.5 (rant). I tend to hate external additions to planes, e.g. "lumps and bumps". What's the point of spending 10,000 hours with a wind tunnel perfecting the airflow, when the C-model is just going to have a half-dozen new antenna bumps plastered along the leading edges and fin, bulged gear doors, and a new hump on the spine anyways? Of course, increased thrust can overcome all the drag/weight problems they impose... "In thrust we trust". SR-71 motto.

Tornado's good. Except when being shot down by Patriots: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/20/patriot_missile/ Patriot sucks, IMHO. It's like the AEGIS system, only with a much worse record.

I've brought it up before (not for a long time though) but Yamato has no excuse to not tampo on the markings. I own hundreds (yup, plural) of model planes with tampoed markings. Most of them have productions runs of less than 2,500, with over half having runs of 1,000 or less. And almost none retail for more than $25. And many have a half-dozen colors tampoed on. So why can't toys that cost many times more, with many times the production run size, get a simple white skull and red kite printed on????!?!?!? Tampo printing costs "go up" the same as decals---it's not the sheer amount that's printed, it's : 1. How many different colors. 5 costs more than 4. A valk generally needs nothing more than black, white, and red. (Maybe yellow). 2. How many colors must be "aligned" with another. A white skull doesn't really have to be "aligned" with anything else, +/- a few mm won't be visible on the tail, so long as it's in the right area. But a UN Spacy kit requires the red, black, and white bits to all be quite accurately aligned with one another, or the logo and its outline will be off. (Out of register is the term). 2.5: Curved surfaces tend to be expensive, as a tampo cannot cover more than a few degrees of "arc". If you want to tampo a sphere, it'll cost a lot. As would a tube. You basically print one area, rotate it a bit, make sure it's aligned, print, and repeat until you've gone around the curve. But for say Nora's, it'd actually be fairly cheap. 1 color, nothing really has to align. Just a whole lot of yellow splotches on the wings and tail. Only expense would be wrapping them around the nosecone, legs, etc. Heck, I've got ones with 24-color (or more) tampos on them for photographic quality on the tail logos, that still only cost $17. Though I think the production run on those may be 5,000 or more. Real quick tampo explanation: think of it like a rubber stamp. You'd carve out the design, dip it in ink, then apply it to the model/toy. And you can only do one color on any particular stamp. So a US flag would need a white background stamp, a red stripe stamp, and a blue "star field background" stamp. And they'd have to be carefully aligned as you applied each one in sequence. But Nora's SV-51 would have one HUGE stamp with zig-zags carved on it, dipped in yellow, then applied to the entire upper surface. And then a few smaller ones to do the bits that curve around the sides, etc.

19.72387% - Geek Test is so computer-oriented. If there was any airplane stuff, I'd be at like 90%. (People on airplane forums think that I am obsessive and geeky, even for people on airplane forums)

Yes, but, since the US is buying 1,000+ to replace every F-16, Harrier, and early F-18 in service, that's a problem. Especially for the Marines, since a non-VTOL Harrier replacement is really, really, worthless. And for the Navy, 3,300lbs is a tremendous problem. They don't operate F-18B's or D's from carriers because the 2nd seat and person adds too much weight and cuts into fuel reserves. F-8's only had an 800lb margin for landing IIRC. Later F-18C's weigh 250lbs more due to RAM, and that's a problem in some circumstances, especially night ops. 3,300lbs is more than the bring-back allowance for just about any plane. Regardless that the Navy doesn't want VTOL, they sure do want payload! "Yeah, it can land on a carrier just fine, assuming it just sort of glides on deck empty with no fuel and no weapons"

Comanche was very recently, utterly totally killed. Kaput. Tomcat's been kaput since, oh, 1991. Most "instantly stopped" jet program ever AFAIK. One day, people were building F-14's at the factory like they had for years. The next day, all the factory workers didn't have a job and had to go find new ones. Any unfinished Tomcat still on the line was scrapped along with all the material and tools. I could type quite the rant, but Tomcat-21's could have cost 8 cents each, and the Super Hornet would still have been built due to various people's/company's political clout. F-22's in service early 2005 AFAIK. Can't remember if it's the 27th or 71st squadron that gets them first (I was hoping for the 94th, my fave CONUS fighter squadron) Skull Leader: the F-35 looks almost exactly like a single-engined F-22. Could always check out the official site: http://www.jsf.mil/

Not to sound "harsh" but looking for exact matches in diecast is usually pretty fruitless. If you want something *that* specific, the only option is to make it yourself. I mean, I want something as "simple" as a red Lambo Countach with a white interior---and that doesn't exist (plenty of red/black, white/white, or red/tan, but not red/white AFAIK). You've got a half-dozen specifics. Here, this is every 1:18 1969 Pontiac car, period: http://www.scale18.com/cgi-bin/browse18?c0...Pontiac+&c2=%2A All 1:18 GTO's: http://www.scale18.com/cgi-bin/browse18?c0...3AGTO%2A&c3=%2A Can't help with other scales.

Hey, the F-4 got up to "S" for normal versions. I'm sure the Subpar Hornet won't take too long to get up that high either... Man, if only MDC was still around. Take their Harrier experience, combine it with a "mini-YF-23" airframe, and you'd have a world-beating JSF... Anyone who watched the Nova program could literally see the Boeing people over-riding the ex-MDC people's suggestions (including using the ultra-stealthy YF-23's tail design, which would have worked wonderfully in a design like that). Of course, Northrop/MDC/BAe would have been the ULTIMATE JSF team. Probably have something as powerful as the F-15, the agility of the F-16, better VTOL than a Harrier, and as stealthy as the YF-23.

Sonar is used for hunting subs, little more. (Of course subs use it to hunt everything). No battleship had sonar, only 1 carrier ever actually got one (America) and I doubt a tanker ever would. Bow-mounted sonar domes look very much like a bulbous bow, but are generally too low and wrongly shaped to serve as such, AFAIK.

The explanation is really quick and obvious: Miramax is owned by Disney. Nothing like DisneyDVD™ to annoy/screw people.

If you follow Navy custom, there's no way to tell year of manufacture at all. They simply do serial numbers sequentially in blocks, regardless of what type of plane, year, etc. 160500-160531 could be F-14's, with 160532-160567 be F-18's. And depending on how busy they are, could cover 2 months, or 4 year's worth of planes...

Eh, not quite on the tail markings. 1. AF planes don't have a modex. It's all part of the serial number, has utterly no relevence to the squadron/wing. It is what it is, and never changes, unlike a Navy plane that may change its modex every few months. USAF has "AF", then the 2 little numbers AF are the year it was "bought" not built. Most planes are built a year or two after being budgeted, approved, etc. The next 3 digits (large) are the last 3 digits of the serial number. "Important" planes get the lowest serial numbers, usually 0000-1000. F-22's of course have the lowest numbers there are, thus AF00-014 etc, standing for serial number 000014. F-16's will commonly be "over 1000" thus 85-565 is actually serial number 851565, and there will be another plane labeled 85-565 that actually stands for 850565. It can be hard to track a plane down because of this. Thus if we somehow ordered 1000 F-22's that year, there could be ANOTHER F-22 labeled "AF00-014" which would be 001014. So long as that plane doesn't happen to belong to the same wing, there's no problem identifying it (though it is hard to figure out the serial number) (They used to do it differently--like in Vietnam, you'd have 64-077---well, for that format they omit the decade of manufacture, and it is actually a 196*6* plane, number 4077) 2. The tailcode indicates the wing, not the airbase. Both FT and SJ are based at Seymour-Johnson, for example. FT is the 23rd wing (the Flying Tigers), while SJ is the 4th wing. 3. Cut and pasted from Joe Braugher's site (a GREAT site): """"Camouflage began to reappear on USAF aircraft during the Vietnam War, and this led to a change in tail number presentation. The letters "AF" were added directly above the last two digits of the fiscal year, followed by the last three digits of the sequence number. The three-digit sequence number has a height of the AF and fiscal year letters combined and is sometimes called the "large" component of the tail number. For example, F-4E serial number 67-0288 had the tail number 67(small) 288 (large). This could of course lead to confusion, since aircraft 67-1288, 67-2288, etc would have exactly the same tail numbers as 67-0288 under this scheme. This would not ordinary cause a whole lot of difficulty unless of course some of these larger serial numbers also happened to be F-4Es (which they were not). Unfortunately, the system was not always consistent--for example F-4D serial number 66-0234 had a tail number that looks like this: 60(small) 234(large). It appears as if this number was obtained by omitting the first digit of the fiscal, and combining the remaining "6" with the "0234". Consequently, one often has to do a lot of educated guessing in order to derive the aircraft serial number from a knowledge of its tail number, and a knowledge of the aircraft type and sometimes even the version is required. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has noted different tail number presentations on recent USAF aircraft. However, Air Mobility Command and USAF Europe aircraft still display the previous format for the tail number, with all digits being the same size and the first digit being the last digit of the Fiscal Year and the remaining 4 digits being the last 4 digits of the sequence number. There is no AF displayed, just the name of the command a couple of feet above it. However, there are some exceptions--for example the tail number of 64-14840 is 14840, not 44840. Both of the fiscal year digits were omitted. Another exception was the tail number of EC-130H serial number 73-1583, which had its tail number displayed as 731583, i.e., the full serial number without the hyphen. Again, I would like to hear from anyone who has seen different types of serial number displays on Air Mobility Command aircraft. """"

It's 3,300lbs. That's insane. That's not going to happen. They need 3,300lbs more thrust from the engines, because they sure aren't going to lose that much weight. They could chop the v.stabs off and it wouldn't be 3,300lbs....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3718567.stm Heh heh. PS---3,300lbs overweight? WTF did they do to it, make the production version fan blades out of lead? That is a massive amount of weight for a plane that size.

Just got back from my local BB, nada. 99% of those games they didn't even have, much less on sale.

I bump my Airshow listing thread often: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=6741

Oh yeah--is that an F-35 to the right of the F-22 in the nose-on shot?

For me, in the last hour, they stopped being imbedded in separate replies, and suddenly became one big post with many URL's linked. ::edit:: Yup, and now all the previous links have failed, even the ones saved in my cache. Edit 2: F-18 and F-22 pics work, earlier ones don't.

You know, all I can think of from those pics is: "When Hasegawa brings out an F-22 kit, it'll be a B*TCH to paint". There's like 5 shades of grey on that thing, some splotchy, some defined. And I've also heard it's sorta-quasi-color-changing. Nied--notice any weird optical properties while walking around it? US Navy ships have rather "prismatic" paint that really changes how it looks depending on the angle, I think the F-22 is supposed to as well.

New carriers have them too, to restore the speed lost due to constant weight increases. USS Ronald Reagan has one, presumably all future CVN's will too. USS JFK and America have them, but only as sonar domes, not really for speed. Most any modern cruiser/destroyer has a sonar dome mounted in a quasi-bulbous bow, 2 for 1 deal there.