here's a airplane thread This Is What The B-52 Will Look Like With Its New Rolls-Royce Engines https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...ll-look-like-with-its-new-rolls-royce-engines
BUFF's (Big Ugly Fat Fuckers) will look pretty sexy with the RR mills. My father cut his maintenance teeth on the B-47 then the 52's.
I had that sticker on the back window of my truck for years. BIL was in them his whole career, retiring out in 2006. While he was still in Boeing made the Pentagon an offer to rebuild the remaining fleet for the cost of one B-2. It's about time they do some upgrades..the design is only 75 years old!
maybe with the new engines the crews wont have to worry about the dreaded 7 engine landing that much....
Many years ago, the local fighter squadron transitioned to F-16s and they had a fin flash (the logo on the vertical stabilizer) contest that was open to everyone. The prize for best design was a ride in the back seat of the new jet. My brother ended up with the winning design, but he was seventeen at the time and, consequently, unable to collect on the prize. Instead, he got a ride in the B-52. Exactly how many waivers, and what general at SAC signed off on that, I don’t know.
This is an example of how a 2,000 lbs. laser guided bomb works in its last minute as a fully-assembled weapon. For the unfortunate target(s) of such a thing, the actions are somewhat predictable after you’ve watched a few of them through the gun camera. One example is a group of bad guys somewhere rather quiet: 1. 30 some-odd seconds after the bomb is dropped from the wing of your jet at 20-50k feet up, the engine’s distant rumble can be heard. This usually is not noticed by anyone in the war zone. Still, it’s pretty much already too late to get away. 2. About five seconds before impact - the rather loud (and they are loud, for some reason) clicking sounds from the bomb’s servos making the last corrections to stay on target get most everyone’s attention. People kind of stop moving while trying to figure out what that sound means. Unless you can run 200 meters in five seconds, you’re about to have a bad day. 3. About two seconds before impact, the familiar cartoonish whistling sound of the bomb falling can be heard. Everyone who hasn’t, starts to run somewhere … 4. In terms of accuracy, there’s nothing better when you need to put a bomb through a specific window or other part of a structure, except maybe, just a bigger bomb.
It is kind of amusing that the very expensive bomb in the picture is about to vaporize a relatively inexpensive deuce and a half
I always thought that clicking was some type of sonic phenomenon from the supersonic projectile. Kind of like the clicks heard before artillery shells hit or depth charges explosion can be heard?
No, because by the time you heard that, the bomb would have already passed you by (or obliterated your poor dumb enemy ass).
This is a J-58 engine on a test stand. It's the engine that propelled the SR-71 through the atmosphere. A good way to tell the state of tune for the engine was by counting how many diamonds there were in the flame. If 10 or more, you had a properly jetted, err, jet engine. Unlike the big-fanned engines you see on passenger jets (which @Gino230 knows pretty well), and pretty much every mass-produced jet engine ever made - this particular design operated most efficiently at full throttle travelling at top speed while it swallowed a stadium's worth of air, by volume, every second. One of the toughest problems to solve during development was how to slow down the triple sonic air without producing a lot of drag. This because, supersonic air inside the compressor stages tended to destroy engines. That air was slowed by the distinctive giant spike you can see at the front of every Blackbird's engine nacelle. Those moveable spikes used the air's own supersonic shockwaves to slow it down before it hit the front of the actual engine. And it was this process that produced 80% of thrust at 70,000 ft.+, which is why the engine was so efficient once it got up to speed. These technical achievements cannot be understated and engineers figured all of this out with slide rules. And if you want to know what's the best oil for your motorcycle, well, it took a few PhDs at UPenn or Penn State (I can't remember which), to figure out how to lubricate the thing over its tremendously wide flight envelope.
