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Comment count is 6
Redford - 2014-09-03

Guided missiles that existed before the magic of a GPS used a combination of radar data and an internal computer to figure out where they were. This was done by figuring out where the missile wasn't, and then they just kept doing that until there was only one place left, which is where the missiles was.


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2014-09-03

I would imagine a computer (and its software) from the 50s which can do that and also fit in a missile would be fascinating.
Also what you described sounds scarily like what you might use in programming a game!


The Mothership - 2014-09-03

So this is what the guys in Top Gun were talking about when they said pilots in Vietnam lost dogfights cause they had forgotten how.


Nominal - 2014-09-03

I'm not sure if that statistic includes losses from ground fire, which the vast majority of Vietnam air losses were from.

And even most of those losses were from the crazy incompetent strategies laid out by the higher ups: arbitrary rules of engagement that nullified many advantages, targets picked via political considerations, and predictable never changing flight paths.


SolRo - 2014-09-04

Also these aircraft aren't designed for dogfights, stubby wings mean high speed but slow turn rate.

Mig21 is the same


Urist - 2014-09-06

Fun fact.. well.. not really fun but whatever... and possibly not that factual.

They stuffed the GAR-1 (Falcon) missiles onto the F4 Phantom early on in Vietnam. The sidewinder was a Navy project and the Air Force wasn't putting that shitty dead end missile onto its Phantoms.

The Falcon was designed to be carried internally and fired from a rack with a complicated fire control system (the one in this video) making all the shit work. They couldn't do that on the F4 so they basically strung the wiring out around the F4 best they could and filled the cockpit with buttons to make them work in place of the control system and sent them off to shoot down little twisty migs.

Didn't go so well.


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