Comments by "Thump Er the Sweaty Fat Guy" (@SweatyFatGuy) on "Binkov's Battlegrounds"
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A couple things assumed. Navigation. While the US Navy is currently very reliant on GPS, Navy aviators and USAF aviators are all trained in dead reckoning navigation, using compass/time and landmarks just like the WWII guys, because battle damage can take out GPS and other NAV aids. They gotta know how to get around, even in an ocean, without all the fancy stuff. They have to know several different NAV methods, so they learn the basics all the way up to high end go here follow the waypoints stuff.
Jet fuel can be kerosene or ethanol based, and going to ethanol doesn't decrease range like you think it would. the ME262, HE162, and Arado bombers in Germany all flew on vodka, which is all ethanol is. Its the exact same stuff people drink in bars and while watching the game. Modern jets can fly on methanol, ethanol, kerosene, and light diesel fuels. The MILSPEC is specific but more for a consistency of maintenance and performance, they know what the engine will do on a certain fuel, so you use that. What it will run well on, is a bit more broad. What works is very different from what you might prefer. Its not like we are severely limited in what we can use to run our engines.
The Navy and USAF can drop 'dumb' bombs with surprising accuracy, especially compared to WWII era systems which mainly counted on eyeballs and human speed/distance judgement. The difference between our capability now and my first war in 1990-91 is huge. The difference between now and Vietnam is even larger, and with WWII-Korea era its simply amazing and unbelievable to the people from that era who would be seeing it for the first time. Hitting a ship at sea with a dumb bomb while travelling faster than any other plane in the world, so their gunners can't even lead you enough, hell, it would be a turkey shoot even using 1000lb unguided bombs.
The IJN would hear nothing as the first couple carriers exploded long before any of their planes even got off the decks, other than their CAP flights. When we had to switch to dumb bombs rather than the LGBs and other non GPS guided stuff, the ships could be hit at just under supersonic or even supersonic speeds.
In Vietnam the F111 was a terror weapon to the North Vietnamese. The B52 strikes went like this. The air raid sirens went off, the lights went out, the jets were heard, the bombs exploded, the sirens shut off and the lights came back on. The F111 was like this. Something exploded, a jet was heard making a sonic boom, the lights go out, the air raid sirens go off. It freaked them out and you never knew when an F111 was on its way in. They used terrain following radar and flew NOE into the target. That was 50 years ago with very primitive electronics compared to today.
An FA18 rolling through at over 650kts a couple feet off the deck and blowing past an IJN ship as it drops a couple iron slugs filled with semtex into it would be damn hard to defend against with WWII tech. They wouldn't know if they had been shot, fucked, or snakebit as they went up in balls of flame. The IJN might get lucky sometimes, if anyone survived to describe what happened to their ship, and they could figure out we had planes that could fly at 1200mph... four times what the A6M2/3/5/7 could muster.. and then devise some sort of counter to it which isn't likely. The FA18 could run down the Oka/Baka rocket planes from 1945 easily. The Me262 would be very easy prey for any US fighter built since 1969, even in a gunfight without missiles. Shooting A6Ms would be like strafing a nearly stationary target to them.
We can use the high end weapons, but we can also use the low tech stuff with a very high degree of success, especially compared to WWII era systems and munitions. Its not like we used GPS and LGBs exclusively in my two wars(Desert Shield/Storm and OIF/OEF), we dropped lots of unguided munitions and tore shit up with them, far more accurate than the Norden or any other bombsights used in WWII.
The whole reason we use guided munitions is to limit collateral damage and take out targets with the least danger to the airframe and crew with the best cost/benefit. In Iraq #2 we dropped concrete slugs with LGB guidance attached to them on Iraqi jets parked in residential areas. 2000lbs of concrete dropped from 20k+ft hitting a jet in Achmed's back yard still makes a big hole where the jet was, but doesn't take out all the civilians around it. The US military can do things most can't even imagine and we can still do it the old fashioned way.
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It would affect the GPS guided munitions, but not so much the carrier, escort, or the planes, the crews are still trained in various non satellite based navigation. Also the avionics on the modern planes can hit much more accurately with 'dumb' bombs which are essentially the same as they were in WWII. We were dropping WWII era bomb cases in 1991 during my first war, we had scrapped a bunch of them and had to buy them back for the Desert Storm.
The modern Navy Admiral would probably hold off on using the expensive 'unreplaceable for 70 years' munitions, saving them for high value targets and instead use the iron dumb bombs of the era to take out the lower value targets. They would probably stay subsonic with the FA18s, to conserve fuel and reduce maintenance, because really they only need 50mph-100mph advantage to fight the A6M... and they have a lot more than that along with G suits. Fighting speed for the FA18 is well above that of the A6M, Ki61, and even the Ki84 from late in the war. Working in teams of three or four an entire Japanese fighter wing could be wiped out in minutes with guns alone with the greatest threat being mid air collisions. With no planes and skilled pilots, carriers are nothing more than a big empty parking lot floating around.
So he is right about a few things, but assumes a lot more, like the idea that an Admiral isn't going to conserve munitions, fuel, and aircraft to launch an all out assault to expend most of it at the outset. The assumptions are more like someone who plays video games than someone who has served in the US military. :) Still, its fun to watch and see what people think.
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@saigonpunkid often it does rely on one aircraft, well when its the USAF or USN. Other countries might have a hard time achieving it, but the only time the USAF needs multiple planes is when they want to hit multiple targets over a wide area, simultaneously. Like Iraqi tanks and C and C. An F117 goes in alone in modern combat, as do many A10s, and they move mud around. It depends entirely upon the mission, you can have one plane or hundreds, what they want to do is what determines how many planes, the loadout, etc.
But what do I know, I am just a USAF veteran.
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@contumelious-8440 Considering there is more oxygen in ethanol and methanol, they produce more power and thrust than fossil fuels, with less waste heat.
One of the original Gemini 7, Gordon Cooper, had no jet fuel available to fly back to Florida, so he fueled up with methanol and flew back. He found increased performance at higher altitudes due to the added O2 in the fuel, and it did not use nearly as much fuel as the BTU content would suggest. Also, in later tests he found that jet engines running on straight ethanol or methanol cleaned the smog laden air in the Bay Area... so it cleans the air while you make more power.
I find the BTU thing laughable, because that is only a measurement of how well any given fuel heats water. There is a lot more to internal combustion fuels than how well they heat a pound of water one degree.
So yeah, ethanol and methanol would be more than adequate to fuel an F18, besides, the modern carriers have catapults that throw them into the air. Aviation, high performance automotive engines, and fuels are kinda my thing.
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