Posted on 08/21/2005 8:20:31 PM PDT by KneelBeforeZod
I agree, but I would put two battleships on the seas. Their armor is impossible to match today. They can launch any number of missiles, as Reagan and Lehman proved. And those 16 inch rifles are so cool.
They are limited and noisy, but they also represent pride and technological accomplishment.
I'm not sure I get your point... we have lots of 52's still flying and we still use them.
Also WRT the B-2, it can carry pretty close or more than the 52, depending.
Also WRT your tagline... there's plenty wrong with a draft. We don't need it, and no good gung-ho volunteer soldier wants to sit in a foxhole with a bad-attitude draftee.
I'm OK with two. :-) I read you about the armor, though I wouldn't say it is impossible. If we wanted to, we could armor a ship far better. The problem is that we don't want to, for some reason.
The true irony, is that the big battleships are far better able to deal with any of the modern threats of missiles and torpedoes than any ship we have afloat. A modern Exocet or two will reduce a newer destroyer or cruiser into a smoking hole in the water. A BB could likely withstand a few missile hits without being taken out of action.
LOL...we'll get there ! Hope ya'll had fun !
Stay safe !
Hey, I was just in NC near Camp Lejuene and saw a 15 ship formation of Ospreys and they were damn impressive. An article in the Jacksonville NC magazine had an article about them and they are in the final stages of their combat trials. When they come on line they will be huge asset, able to carry a complement of 24 Marines at high speed and put them down anywhere.
Smartest thing my boss ever told me - "Turn that contract away. We don't want any Osprey money."
Old 52s bays were set up to drop 40 500 lb bombs with another 12 under the wings. those flying todayare setup for cruise missles and and a small munber of prescision weapons. They can't carpet bomb. The B2 bay was never designed for large numbers of ordnance and is cramped compared to a 52 in the interest of stealth.
Correction: five generations, since the 1950's. The earlier versions were known as POGO's. The latter as VTOL's. In terms of complexity the Osprey is equivalent to a Ferarri, except the Osprey is more expensive to maintain, by at least a factor of 250. The Marines squandered a lot of money on this pig. Under the right circumstances, and with a little luck, you could down it with a $5.00 slingshot.
Oh...*sigh* Okay. But just one. [grin]
Snidely "Things That Make You Go BOOM!" Whiplash
But 25% was enough to win. And we did win!
Yes, the bay is bigger, because when "carpet bombing" was a design criteria, we had to bomb a lot of empty fields in order to hit the buildings we really wanted to hit.
Nowadays we just hit the buildings we wanna hit. "Carpet bombing" just means wasting thousands of perfectly good ordnance on utterly empty and useless pieces of ground.
I understand that "carpet bombing" is a much more emotionally satisfying expression... but given what we can accomplish today in ordnance delivery it is simply not a useful tactic.
Our guys are over there getting the job done in massively effective style.
Hah! Roger that.
Regards,
And it adds a different kind of threat.
Carpet bombing has been unfairly maligned. There are so many places that could be improved by it.
But the psychological effect is lost. Iraqis quickly learned that the safest place was outside their tank--we end up destroying lots of cheap equipment but not killing anyone---The Vietnamese were scared to petrification by the arc light raids----very effective--massive casualties---precision weapons are great for bridges and such but here we are talking about a battlefield with no high priority targets--want to break their will and make them run---have several hundred 500 lbers go off in 2 square mile area within 90 seconds--many just go stark raving mad or become imbeciles--deaf and dumb zombies--thats effective - not blowing up the toyota pickup they've abandoned.
Yea, and for anything else that flies for that matter.
What if we were in a bigger scrap than our current operations in these two small countries, neither of which has the population of just the state of California and are located reasonably close to each other?
True, yet we were still able to execute 1000 plane raids. 25% of 100 and 25% of 10,000 makes all the difference in the world.
Good thing those choppers were sitting in Arizona for 10 years. Had they been sitting idle in NC for 10 years they'd only be good for an artificial reef.
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