Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1. Somewhere I remember a documentary about Vietnam, and there was audio of a wild weasel pilot talking over the radio. Somebody asked him if he knew where the enemy SAM site was, and he replied in a calm, cool voice, "Not yet. I'm trying to get him to shoot at me." Crazy and fearless indeed.
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  2. And the winner is: Fisher! They still sell those pens today.
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  3. That Energia II looks really cool. NASA had messed with the idea of flyback boosters before, too. There was a plan for a flyback F1 booster stage and also plan to replace the shuttle's SRBs with Liquid Rocket Boosters (LRBs) that would have wings and fly back to a runway using jets. Ultimately we had to wait for the Falcon 9 to see anything that cool.
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  4. It seems Britain has a history of optimistic assumptions about new technology as an excuse to cancel programs. Their aerospace sector suffered from the assumption that surface-to-air missiles would make fighters obsolete, full size aircraft carriers no longer needed because the future is all Harriers and Harrier-wannabes, and now that we have ballistic missiles, who needs bombers? All these new technologies turned out to be useful, but there were serious tradeoffs made. Britain seemed to have to strain hard to project power in the Falklands, for example. Bet the Royal Navy would've liked to have had a ship full of F-4 Phantoms and A-6 Intruders along with those Harriers...
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  5. I grew up not too far away from Bell Labs. It was the kind of place I dreamed of working at some day. And they weren't the only one, lots of big companies used to have laboratories and did lots of in-house research decades ago.
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  6. 8:30 Theory: the real reason Skylab was allowed to burn up was to make sure they got the spiders.
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  7. The fact that the fusing mechanism can withstand all that and still function has always amazed me. The earliest proximity fuses for antiaircraft shells used vacuum tube tech and had to survive the shock of firing and spinning, and that was in the 1940s, which amazes me.
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  8. I remember when the M1 Abrams tank was heavily criticized. Too expensive, too heavy, too fuel inefficient, the turbine engine would surely clog, on and on. All of the detractors shut right up when the US Army took them to war for the first time and monkey-stomped an entire army of Soviet quipped and trained Iraqi tankers.
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  9. Ever since I was a little kid I have loved the F-104 Starfighter. Everything about that jet is cool, even the name. Speed, power, futuristic 1950s space age looks. Pure Kelly Johnson badassery, the hell with utility, just make it fast as hell.
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  10. That guy at 00:31 is crazy!
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  11. The Soviets would use vodka bottles.
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  12. Let's try to keep the discussion focused on UK power projection and defense programs and V-bombers and leave the current politics bullshit for some other video, please.
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  13. 6:22 This is actually a camouflaged internet cat video.
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  14. "We here at Flying School try to avoid phrases such as 'Dead Reckoning' and 'Crash Course'."
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  15. I was unaware that there was a plan to boost Skylab without using the Shuttle. Now I'm kind of angry they blew that chance. Skylab could still be in orbit today if they had done that, so how much money did they really save by letting it fall? One thing you didn't mention was the incompatibility of Skylab's Apollo-type life support system with the Shuttle's. Skylab used a low-pressure pure O2 atmosphere, while Shuttle (and ISS) use ordinary air at human-normal pressure. A special airlock module was built to allow Shuttle crew to transfer back and forth between the orbiter and the space station.
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  16. You win the internet for today, sir! (Now get your coat)
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  17. The Falcon missile is an interesting animal. According to F-106 pilot Bruce Gordon (check out his channel), the Falcon is a fine enough weapon when paired up with the correct radar and fire control system on the F-106. The missile and aircraft were specifically designed to work together. Putting the missile on an F-4 Phantom sets it up for failure since the F-4's avionics was built more for the Sparrow. Since the F-106 never saw combat, we'll never know if the Falcon was actually a good missile or not. Similar tale for the Falcon's successor, the Phoenix, which was specifically built to work with the F-14. Only a small number of those were known to been fired in combat and their record was not good, but with a sample size of 2 or 3 it's hard to draw a conclusion. Both the Falcon and the Phoenix performed very well in training shots with their complimentary aircraft. Gordon shot down a BOMARC missile in a head-on supersonic pass with his F-106/Falcon.
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  18. Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane survived an ejection from an F-111 earlier in his career. He called that his "first" rocket ride.
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  19. When I was little I had an SRN-4 Matchbox car toy. Too bad I never got to ride on a real one.
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  20. He should've proposed using a flux capacitor instead. That would've cut the power draw down to 1.21 GW.
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  21. TMI resulted in zero deaths, but is often called the "worst nuclear accident in US history". Why is that? The SL-1 accident, for example, killed three people directly, yet a lot of people have never heard of it, and there have been other nasty accidents as well. TMI was very public and very scary (I was living not too far from it at the time as a child and it was BIG news), but in the end turned out to be little more than an expensive mess.
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  22.  @nathanfisher6925  That's the film of unburned kerosene fuel that coats the inside of the nozzles to keep them from melting. F1's burn fuel-rich to protect themselves from their own heat.
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  23.  @adampedersen5384  Mice don't study physics either.
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  24. A near perfect design. There's a saying, "The only thing that can replace a DC-3 is another DC-3." Over the years there have been lots of upgrades for the old DC-3's avionics, of course, but also re-engine jobs. I remember seeing an ad in a 1980s edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine for a company offering to put turboprops on your DC-3. But anything that makes it less simple and harder to work on is almost a downgrade.
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  25. That's pretty cool. Railroading is a skilled profession.
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  26. It's kind of Lovecraftian, actually. Lovecraft stories often feature geometric shapes that make people insane by looking at them or which channel energy and open portals to other dimensions.
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  27. Merlin-equipped Mustangs had a ceiling of 42k ft? Wow, some jets even struggle up there.
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  28. They were optimized for a particular altitude, like any fixed-geometry bell nozzle engine. They were very efficient in near vacuum, which is where they spent most of their burn time.
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  29. "They pretend to tell us jokes, and we pretend to laugh."
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  30. I saw it in the theater on the 50th anniversary of the mission. Totally blown away! Absolutely emotional documentary. The footage looks like it was shot yesterday, but also the editing and music were amazing. Hard to watch it without tearing up.
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  31. NASA took a needless risk by launching the first shuttle with a human crew. I was told once, and this may be urban legend, that the only thing a human was needed for to pilot the orbiter was to throw the landing gear lever on final approach. Everything else the vehicle did could be done by computer and remote commanding, at least for basic stuff. For once the Soviets did something smart and launched Buran's first flight unmanned. NASA was super cocky after the Apollo program and to put Young and Crippen into a couple of ejection seats and hope for the best was not wise. To make matters worse, it was later determined that the ejection seats were useless and would've killed the astronauts in the plume of the SRBs, so they were very fortunate they never felt compelled to activate them. It's a testament to the engineers who built STS that it worked so well on it's very first flight. The program managers should've known better, though.
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  32. VMA-231 Ace of Spades. Oldest squadron in the USMC, Gulf War 1991. Will be the last Harrier squadron when it switches to F-35B likely in 2026. We got a whole lotta mileage out of those beautiful birds. Semper Fi.
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  33. I once visited the USAF museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and saw the B-36 up close, along with an engine on display nearby. Good Lord, what a gigantic beast! I always loved Pratt & Whitney's logo, with the eagle and the motto "Dependable Engines". Can't get much more plain language than that, and reminds the managers and employees what they are supposed to be striving for.
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  34. Teabagging the kills
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  35. "I shot down 3 MiGs with one of those."
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  36. In the old days, cops were held accountable for their actions and not treated like god-kings. Plus they hadn't yet learned mantras like "Stop resisting!" and "Officer feared for his life."
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  37. The B-52 is still in service because it has to do one simple thing and it does it well: be a flying dump truck full of weapons. It can't overfly defended targets with gravity bombs like it was to do in the 50s, but even in a lethal environment it can carry a metric shit ton of cruise missiles to within striking range. And once air supremacy has been achieved, it can go back to being a simple gravity bomb truck or it can load up with GPS-guided JDAMs and loiter in the area waiting for troops on the ground to call for support. There's something to be said for a fairly conventional design that can carry lots of stuff.
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  38. That missing jetliner is also probably in a thousand pieces, too, even if you find it you might not know what it is at first.
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  39. The dark plumes are due to water injection during maximum power takeoffs, when the plane is loaded to the gills with fuel and weapons and trying to get airborne before the incoming nukes obliterate the airbase. They aren't that smokey in cruise flight.
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  40. We don't need AI to land on the moon, we just need more practice.
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  41. True, but building a modern improved version of rockets like the Energia or even the Saturn V is not technically difficult; both vehicles are well-documented and have successful flight history and data, and there are even existing examples to physically inspect. NASA even has a raft of fresh never-used F1 engines in storage. The hardest part is funding, bureaucracy, institutional inertia, public perception, etc.
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  42.  @Shinzon23  It looks like something from Thunderbirds Are Go
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  43. Ah, I see, so he's registered that move with the Ministry of Silly Walks, then.
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  44.  @joevignolor4u949  And made more space available for donning suits, and on later missions, sleeping in hammocks.
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  45. These are, indeed, weighty matters to consider. For some reason I find them quite attractive. I am however, at a loss as to why I keep falling for them.
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  46. While Lockheed was involved in a lot of shady practices during that period, I don't think they can take the blame for canceling the SR-177; the British government at the time was making a lot of dunderheaded decisions to try and be cheap, and this was just one of many. The one that stands out in my mind is the assumption that the surface-to-air missile would shortly make fighter planes obsolete for defending the home islands, a classic case of believing what you want to believe. I am sympathetic to the fact that the UK wasn't swimming in cash at the time, but some of those decisions were hard to believe.
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  47. Yes, and be able to do it without spying on you via the IOT like every gadget made today is designed to do.
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  48. I recently visited KSC and took the bus out to the Saturn V visitor center, which drives right past the VAB. Sitting outside next to the VAB were both crawlers parked. The thing I love about Apollo is that everything we did was going to be the biggest, the best, the most powerful, the most badass, and we were destined to freaking win. Like the Saturn V itself, America's space program was an unstoppable juggernaut in those days, and the crawler transporters are living, breathing, still-working artifacts of that age.
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  49. While still in the gulag, even
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  50. The Red Queen has given me my target.
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