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Boeing First Flights Today
A couple a significant first flights in history today, both notable Boeing products. First up, the Queen of the Skies. The first Boeing 747 prototype flew on February 9, 1969.
Next up, the Boeing EC-137D, the prototype for the production E-3A Sentry Airborne Warning and Control plane.
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What song will Sarah McLachlan use to raise funds to prevent robot abuse?
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Sick as a dog.
Yeah, we’re battling an infection right now. So rather than posting quality content, we’re going to snuggle under the poncho liner and watch episodes of Sea Patrol- an Australian semi-soap showing the trials and tribulations of an RAN patrol boat.
XO, portrayed by Lisa McCune, was a past Load HEAT.
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Guided unitary warhead MLRS in action
Esli sent along (finally!) these screen caps of a GMLRS shot he set up in Iraq a few years ago, showing just how accurate the artillery rocket can be.
The target building was full of mines, and presumably it was safer to blow it in place, rather than try to safe all the old ordnance.
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Combat rations of 20 armies around the world revealed | Daily Mail Online
Cans of minestrone and ravioli, sticks of bubblegum and freeze-dried packets of chicken rogan josh are just some of the essential foods eaten by soldiers in the field around the globe.
Italian industrial designer, Giulio Iacchetti has displayed the contents of army ration packs for an exhibition, providing a glimpse into the difference between the daily diets of the world’s military.
The stark portraits form the basis of new exhibit K-RATION: Meals for Soldiers in Action which is on display until 22 February at the 2015 Expo Milano in Milan, Italy.
via Combat rations of 20 armies around the world revealed | Daily Mail Online.
Combat rations of other nations are always interesting to take a look at. Some look great, and some… well, MRE’s aren’t that bad.
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In Which a Brown University Student Beclowns Himself.
A November 2014 Herald article described the lack of military support on Brown’s campus. The article outlined how students considering careers in the military and participating in ROTC programs on campus feel marginalized by “the anti-military — and even hostile — stigma attached to ‘schools like Brown.’” Students anticipating careers in the armed forces outlined ROTC as one of their central concerns, and while ROTC is only one facet of military presence on campus, it is undoubtedly one of the most important. On Tuesday, the faculty endorsed a resolution to create a partnership between Brown’s campus and the Navy and Air Force ROTC programs.
Brown has a rich “anti-military,” anti-war history — said with pride. But is our campus today as anti-war as it once was, or are we losing a certain aspect of our past?
via Makhlouf ’16: ROTC: Return of the criminals.
The Ivy League universities are supposedly repositories of the best and the brightest.
Above is an example of a student’s “critical” thinking published in the OpEd section of the campus newspaper.
Mr. Makhlouf seems to think that it is the right and proper nature of the universe that Brown University must be, always and forever, a progressive, liberal, indeed, leftist institution wholly committed to resistance to American foreign policy.
Should you decide to click through to the article, you’ll immediately find him bemoaning the militarization of local police forces. Which, maybe that is a legitimate concern, but it is one wholly disconnected from the issue of ROTC on campus. That’s a matter of legislation from the Congress implemented by the Department of Justice. Does Mr. Makhlouf decry the entry of Brown graduates into the DoJ?
His ramblings display a lack of exposure to any aspect of the military ethos and lifestyle. He instead rails against a caricature of the military that he has constructed solely in his own rather pathetic mind.
Brown University mission statement is as follows:
The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation. We do this through a partnership of students and teachers in a unified community known as a university-college.
If Mr. Makhlouf is so certain of the viewpoint he espouses, that an anti-military, leftist viewpoint is so self evidently right and proper, why then does he not feel that it can withstand exposure and challenge from an opposing view? The mere thought that a student at Brown might hear an argument that does not hew to his own viewpoint sends him to the keyboard to spew this tripe. That would certainly seem to be in conflict with Brown’s stated mission of free inquiry and discovery.
One suspects that Mr. Makhlouf is receiving scant return on investment for his annual tuition of $46,408.
This is, of course, hardly the only example of close mindedness on a college campus posing as intellectual superiority. It’s just one of the more egregious examples we’ve seen lately. Persons responsible for hiring employees would do well to keep such buffoonery in mind when looking at resumes from the Ivies.
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Load HEAT- Charlotte McKinney
Fresh off her Superbowl commercial for Carl Jr’s. All Natural Burger, here’s this week’s hottie, former Guess model, Charlotte McKinney.
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Retroactive Global Warming!
The Daily Telegraph has a none-too surprising article on how the climatologists have adjusted recorded readings to fit the Global Warming panic meme:
When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
…Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
Nothing screams “scientific validity” like changing recorded results to fit a hypothesis. When the bleeding-heart tree-huggers ask with such self-righteous indignation how we could possibly doubt “climate science”, you would do well to share information such as this with them. And just who is leading the charge to re-write the weather data from yesteryear? Why, it is the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
Homewood checked a swath of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken.
GISS Raw Data 
GISS “Adjusted” Data And it isn’t just South America. Other “adjustments” have been made on existing and recorded data sets in other areas of the world. Adjustments that is so severe that major climatic events are erased from the records. Iceland faced severe economic impact from extreme cold weather from about 1965 to 1971, with a dramatic drop in agriculture and fishing.
…in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.
So there you have it. According to the Global Warming panic mongers, the rather traumatic times of extreme cold, so indelibly etched on the memories of Icelanders, didn’t really happen. It was instead, insists Global Warming alarmists, merely a recording error.
Note to tree-hugging liberals: When you become outraged at our skepticism about “anthropogenic climate change”, and consider us to be “flat earthers” for not buying into the politically profitable nonsense that is man-caused global warming, try to understand why we think you are brainwashed and lemming-like nincompoops for pledging allegiance to anti-capitalist politicians whose “scientific methods” would not be accepted by a tenth-grade chemistry teacher. The same politically-driven ideological crap “science” was once heaped upon me as a school boy when the dire prediction was of a coming ice age. The solution to which was the same socialist wealth-redistribution malarkey that will now halt the fictitious Global Warming.
Here’s hoping your Prius gets stuck in a snow bank on the coldest day of the year.
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A Brief History of Precision Guided Artillery Munitions in the US Army
In the 1970s, faced with the specter of thousands of Soviet tanks possibly rushing through the Fulda Gap, the Army was looking intently for ways to rapidly kill large numbers of tanks. The TOW missile, the M1 tank, and host of other weapons were developed to face this threat.*
One development looked at the revolution in accuracy that Laser Guided Bombs had shown in the late stages of the Vietnam war, and concluded that a laser guided artillery shell would be just the thing to plink tanks. Normal artillery can make life difficult for tank formations, but the odds of actually destroying a tank are pretty slim with traditional artillery. But a laser guided 155mm artillery round, especially one with a shaped charge 6.1” diameter warhead, would destroy any tank in the world.
But there’s a big difference in the robustness required of electronics that will fly aboard an airplane, and be dropped, versus those that have to withstand the stupendous accelerations of being fired out of a gun tube.
Still, by the late 1970s, and early 1980s, American industry managed to field the M712 Copperhead laser guided 155mm Cannon Launched Guided Projectile. Copperhead required a forward observer equipped with a laser designator, and a clear line of sight to the target, not to mention reliable communications with the firing battery.
Beyond that, Copperhead actually cost a ton of money more than was originally expected. Because Copperhead was so expensive, tank killing by artillery fell instead to DPICM, or Dual Purpose, Improved Conventional Munitions. DPICM was essentially the clusterbomb of artillery. A shell was merely a carrier for a host of submunitions that would be scattered over a target area. Many of those munitions were small shaped charge warheads that could usually penetrate the thin top armor of Soviet tanks.
But Copperhead did work, and it was useful for certain very high value targets, and so it remained in the inventory, and indeed saw combat use in Desert Storm, and even as late as the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
M712 Copperhead approaches a target tank
For almost 30 years, that’s where the state of the art in precision guided artillery stagnated.
But much as the advent of the Laser Guided Bomb inspired the Copperhead, so to did the advent of the GPS/INS guided JDAM bomb inspire the next stage in precision artillery.
First up with the GPS guided G-MLRS 270mm Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, which replace the DPICM warhead of a conventional MLRS rocket with a unitary warhead of about 250 pounds, and a guidance kit that gave it the ability to strike within just a few meters of its intended target at ranges of up to 70 kilometers.
Not surprisingly, the same technology was applied to a 155mm artillery shell, resulting the in the M982 Excalibur. The Excalibur 155mm guided projectile has been in operational use for over 7 years now. Excalibur is essentially a GPS guided missile launched from a gun tube. It both extends the range of artillery, and increases the accuracy.
But the Excalibur is fairly expensive. The entire projectile is a precision weapon. What was really wanted was a guidance kit that could be applied to existing stocks of conventional artillery ammunition to provide it was precision capability.
First up was the AMPI, Accelerated Mortar Precision Initiative, also known as the MGK, or Mortar Guidance Kit. By replacing the nose fuse of a conventional 120mm mortar round with an innovative GPS guidance system, the traditionally less than precise mortar system suddenly became capable of dropping the first round within 5-10 meters of the aim point.
It wasn’t a great leap to transform the MGK into a similar guided fuse for 155mm shells.
Unguided, conventional artillery will continue to have a place on the battlefield. But for many applications, both in the current Counter Insurgency fights, and in possible future near peer engagements, precision artillery has better effects, is a lesser logistical burden, reduced collateral damage, and can safely be used closer to friendly troops.
*By the way, the Air Force also spent a lot of time and money developing weapons and sensors for this very same role.
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Not sure I would want to try this
Of course, modern seats automatically separate you from the seat and deploy your chute.
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