Space Stations, Forts and Strategies

The other good example is the USAF AMRAAM engine issue. In 2010 the new production rocket engines made by ATK started failing the cold soak tests, which simulates being carried on the outside a fighter at high altitude for hours. It just stopped behaving as expected without any known changes. Last I hear, in 2013, they had never solved this, Raytheon instead went to a totally different engine manufacturer (who had been building AMRAAM motors for NATO contracts) and used them to complete the several hundred missiles they had sitting in a warehouse without engines and are using this for new production.

David may well think production of complex stuff is simple, but it is really damn hard to do and have it work reliably.

Oh, and if you can produce any design given just the plans, that cuts both ways. So as soon a someone steals a Mk23 design set everyone can produce it anywhere.

Hi KZT,

My understanding of this issue is that Obama's EPA decided a critical chemical was too toxic to continue to allow it to be made in the US, which is why all the rocket motors made here since 2010 have failed.

Our allies have gotten increasingly irritated over this, given how critical the AMRAAM is to their security, being the only western long range air-to-air missile [now that the AIM-54 Phoenix is gone], to which the administration remained deaf to.

So the Finns, who were very exasperated, helped fund building a factory in Norway that does include the vital chemical, that started producing working rocket motors in 2013 and Raytheon has assumed control for the US etc.

L

kzt wrote:The other good example is the USAF AMRAAM engine issue. In 2010 the new production rocket engines made by ATK started failing the cold soak tests, which simulates being carried on the outside a fighter at high altitude for hours. It just stopped behaving as expected without any known changes. Last I hear, in 2013, they had never solved this, Raytheon instead went to a totally different engine manufacturer (who had been building AMRAAM motors for NATO contracts) and used them to complete the several hundred missiles they had sitting in a warehouse without engines and are using this for new production.

David may well think production of complex stuff is simple, but it is really damn hard to do and have it work reliably.

Oh, and if you can produce any design given just the plans, that cuts both ways. So as soon a someone steals a Mk23 design set everyone can produce it anywhere.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:They are rebuilding the F1 engines today for going to mars. They cheated. Ditched the plans. Used lasers to create a 3d map. Now have entire engine in CAD 3d. Running FEA, etc. Got rid of 1/3 of the components that were all individually welded and instead used large forged parts. Recently test fired the fuel pump portion. Huntsville AL is too built up and cannot be used to test fire the full engine. Need $$$ to build a new stand. When this gets completed will test fire a new F1 engine. Can read about it at NASA and at space.com. Enjoy your search.

Sure, they are going to rebuild from scratch and recertify for flight every single part, then every assembly, then every major component. Which is taking just a teeny tiny amount of time, like several years so far.

I think that was what I said.

Was an FYI more or less.

Relax wrote:Was an FYI more or less.

There was a very nice article on it in ArsTechnica last year.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/ ... k-to-life/

I was meaning to ask this question in this thread, since it's relevant.

If it is so difficult to detect ballistic missiles, then what solution is employed in finding hundreds, maybe thousands, of orphaned missiles, just coasting ballistically, after losing lock, in previous battles?

cthia wrote:I was meaning to ask this question in this thread, since it's relevant.

If it is so difficult to detect ballistic missiles, then what solution is employed in finding hundreds, maybe thousands, of orphaned missiles, just coasting ballistically, after losing lock, in previous battles?

David has declared that this problem doesn't exist, the self destruction systems always work perfectly. Well, not really.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/131/0

And no, it's really not that hard to find ballistic missiles. They are hot objects (like >400K against the 4K background sky) on reasonably well known general vectors in a fairly tight clump. Getting them all is a big problem, but getting most of them wouldn't be that hard as you just need to get them to hit a ship wedge or blowed up with energy weapons fire. You can just keep hyperjumping in front of them and work the problem until you are satisfied with the results.

kzt wrote:

cthia wrote:
I was meaning to ask this question in this thread, since it's relevant.

If it is so difficult to detect ballistic missiles, then what solution is employed in finding hundreds, maybe thousands, of orphaned missiles, just coasting ballistically, after losing lock, in previous battles?

David has declared that this problem doesn't exist, the self destruction systems always work perfectly. Well, not really.

http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/131/0

And no, it's really not that hard to find ballistic missiles. They are hot objects (like >400K against the 4K background sky) on reasonably well known general vectors in a fairly tight clump. Getting them all is a big problem, but getting most of them wouldn't be that hard as you just need to get them to hit a ship wedge or blowed up with energy weapons fire. You can just keep hyperjumping in front of them and work the problem until you are satisfied with the results.

Energy weapons fire, or a shitload of counter-missiles directed to possible vectors?

Thanks for post. I wondered about that.

Question, kzt, did David give the conditions of the self-destruct? I.E., distance from parent ship, elapsed time, received command? Received command may not be possible if entire squadron is space bunnies.

Just wondering. Thanks in advance.

edit:
Just read pearl. Seems there's an awful lot of orphaned missiles that just go boom.

cthia wrote:Question, kzt, did David give the conditions of the self-destruct? I.E., distance from parent ship, elapsed time, received command? Received command may not be possible if entire squadron is space bunnies.

Just wondering. Thanks in advance.

edit:
Just read pearl. Seems there's an awful lot of orphaned missiles that just go boom.

I can't remember if he gave any details. I was arguing that the MA should use their spiders to go chase down Haven MDMs to reverse engineer and he essentially said that every single one would have self-destructed. As a guy who has some experience with military ordinance that goes boom I have pretty huge issues with this, but whatever.

Eh, just devote a couple hundred kilos of the missile (1% of total mass or less) into a couple dozen mini-nukes with separate detonators, all being set for expected flight time plus 1 minute.

If the possibility for a single self-destruct failure is 1% (which is kinda huge), the possibility that every such self-destruct out of two dozen will fail at the same time is 1/1E48, which is simply too small a possibility to happen, realistically speaking.

Belial666 wrote:Eh, just devote a couple hundred kilos of the missile (1% of total mass or less) into a couple dozen mini-nukes with separate detonators, all being set for expected flight time plus 1 minute.

If the possibility for a single self-destruct failure is 1% (which is kinda huge), the possibility that every such self-destruct out of two dozen will fail at the same time is 1/1E48, which is simply too small a possibility to happen, realistically speaking.

It is far, far more important that they DO NOT go off when you don't want them to go off. The 5-10% dud rate that you get with munitions is accepted because the dud rate is trade off with the chance of premature function. People who handle weapons demand the odds of premature function be essentially zero. Having a fuze function inside the launcher 0.1% of the time is totally and completely unacceptable. It is much more acceptable for the system to fail to a dud state then it fail to a blow up now state.