Daydream Notes

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman has been somewhat vindicated, the fed dropped the lawsuit against him, with the prosecuting attorney saying publicly "we've got nothing". It could be that the Fed thought it'd just be a drag next election, but it's satisfying to see their horseshit fail so abjectly defense watch has a good summary Norman of course is now demanding his old job bad just to twist the knife in his former comrades in arms at the DND Also, Canada and the F-35 have taken a new turn. OK, so remember when the fed took de-facto policy and made it official, that any fighter design had to officially promise that industrial baksheeh ? Well it turns out that's not allowed in the framework in which the F-35 was developed, which actually wants F-35 sub-components to be sourced competitively (IE by LockMart, the primary contractor), and explicitly forbids nations from trying to get more baksheeh done in their own nation. While Canada now is BFFs with LockMart, this d...

Being ahead of your time is a paradox. The further you strive ahead technologically, the bigger your theoretical advantage over your rivals. But as you get further ahead, you run into problems nobody has encountered before. With the flying wings from the last post, these problems revolved around stability.  This youtube of a pilot from the YB-49 program gives you some idea of what is covered by "problems", but in short a flying wing without a conventional tail had a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde personality. Flying Wings are sedate and agreeable to fly -- until you blunder into the Hyde part of the flight envelope. Then, if you get out alive you would count yourself lucky. In the hypothetical world of operational Nazi flying wings, a lot of German pilots would have accidentally bumped into Mr. Hyde. This was really not a problem the Nazis could have solved, if the Horton Brothers had their way and kept tails entirely out of it. Pure flying wings only returned to serious c...

1. "Walter Riedel was a talented engineer but his lack of academic qualifications led to conflicts with the graduate engineers on the rocket team. Confusingly, he was replaced by Walther Riedel." 2. Von Braun and Dornberger invented the modern method of RnD development when all your technology is new. Sort of makes sense, I guess, but seems implausible considering some of the other advanced engineering projects happening at the time. 3. At some point Von Braun and the boys were drinking and he said to a Gestapo agent that he wanted to make rockets for spaceflight, not for the Nazis, and von Braun was subsequently arrested. While this is reported in a few places, the date changes: sometimes it is 1943, sometimes it is 1944. As to how von Braun got out, Dornberger points out von Braun is indispensable to the rocket projects, and he is released. 4. When the V-2 was being developed, as a ignition-cutoff timing mechanism it used a radar triggered signal from the ground. Th...

It's leaking hydraulic fluid in heaven, now. I've been reading Charlie Foxtrot: Fixing Defense Procurement in Canada , and I think anybody who enjoys this feature will like it. Stuff has happened the past few weeks: Some 40 years after the program to replace them began, the CH-124 Sea King helicopters have flown for the last time. Canada chooses design for Canadian Surface Combatant. The winner is the LockMart-BAE joint project Type 26 Frigates. 60 Billion will be spent constructing 15 Frigates. This move has been expected since 2017, when other bidders started complaining the fix was in for the Type 26. This is because the Type 26, unlike the other contenders, hasn't been built yet, something that the competition explicitly said was a selection criteria. Alion just filed a lawsuit against Canada about this, the second major lawsuit coming out of the NSS after Vice Adm. Norman's wrongful dismissal lawsuit.   This has caused the Canadian International Trade T...