Not a perfect solution by any stretch but a quick, practical and usable one and a lot like much of what they are doing nowadays. That and throwing enormous sums of money into R&D.
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Cold War revisited
- Thread starter HeyJoe
- Start date
Not a perfect solution by any stretch but a quick, practical and usable one and a lot like much of what they are doing nowadays. That and throwing enormous sums of money into R&D.
I thought that they didn't do R&D....they just steal others R&D and go into production. Have you seen the J-20? Uncanny resemblance to the F-22...They certainly spend a lot less than the US.
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Sled Driver was my favorite coffee table book. Was....Til I got your guys' book.
Now my 2 year old points to it (it's up a bit higher) and goes AIRRRRPEEEEEEEE. Child rearing is progressing according to plan.
Both of my younguns have also rocked out the “AIRPEEEEE” exclamation. Daughter enjoys VFA cruise videos, even.
Tuttle had USS America in total EMCON moment we left the east coast but he had other ships come up with our TACAN and/or play prerecorded flight ops comms well away from us. We easily left the tattletales in our wake. We practiced and practiced in PROA well before Northern Wedding. Our Ready Room was Ready 8 and the constant high speed maneuvering and high seas were shaking everything loose out of the overhead. We also stayed low after launch observing EMCON until well away from “mother”. This was height of Cold War so we were playing for keeps
Funny you should say that as George hired the same designer who did Sled Driver to lay out our book. I think our book was a bit more affordable!
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Last I checked, Sled Driver costs about a car payment.
I've watched one of Bryan Shul's talks on YouTube- it's very good. I understand people in the SR community have mixed opinions of him for different reasons but his talks are very good and his pictures are just fantastic. (As are your pictures too, of course!)
I had never heard of the book, and after googling, I was like quite shocked at the price....Last I checked, Sled Driver costs about a car payment.
They say that about Ed Rush too, but Ed can still make anyone a fighter pilot, just ask him yourself.
In both of my North Atlantic NATO deployments and even on standard deployments, I was always lucky with it came to actually launching as an Alert 5 or a Spare. The more I got ahead, the more Skeds tried to even the spread which backfired because the more Spares I manned up, the more I flew. As a Mission Commander, I was needed to man spares so he couldn’t keep me off totally off the schedule. And I always had at two least 2 cameras loaded with print and slide film that the ship was gracious enough to supply me with along with nightly processing. I actually lost count of my Bear intercepts after a few weeks and since they all looked the same, I can only separate them today by the weather in background like this early morning Alert launch intercept. 
Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
The Soviet tattletale is not generally spy ship, more often it was DD or FF, just sometimes LST or survey vessel, when warships were in short supply. There was a special duty: KNS or "direct contact ship", the most reliable source of target information for attack forces, combined air, surface and subsurface ones, and this duty could have been assigned to a spy ships very seldom. Spy ships were at sea on their own plans and when they wandered along the CBG it usually meant they have special task to gather more info about some carrier innovation, but they weren't the targeting source. Not too much changed: Russian FFG Admiral Essen was a KNS/tattletale a couple of years ago off Syria tracking the FNS Charles De Gaulle. Nowadays it is quite easier since the satellite links allows to feed the staffs with targeting info constantly. Back in 80s, only a few of Soviet ships had satellite comms equal to USN OE-82 and the main channel to send the info about carrier position, status and evolutions was so-called superfast telegraph, encrypted short messages of 240 letters/digits each, about 1.4 seconds in the air. Enough to inform the staff ashore but far from enough to describe the beauty of summer ocean. And even these messages were vulnerable to USN ECM measures. Sometimes it was natural gambling to find which USN platform is responsible for that fast jamming. Was it S-3 aloft? Some escorting DDG? Carrier herself? When the analysts went crazy unable to determine that platform, KNS would have been paired with the spy ship, whose main task was to resolve that intricate question. This way.
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Yes, but Russia had an entire Balzam class and Vishnya class of ships specifically designed and built for the 1980's cold war. Any ship can be a tattletale, but the collection ships are purpose-designed specifically for the mission.
Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
Note that it quite could be the same aircraft several times since the side number, red or black, was never the lifelong sign of the airframe and could be easily changed. Ship's pennant number too, BTW. Moreover, when some DD went beyong her administrative fleet area, say sailing from North Atlantic to Med and then via Suez to Indian ocean, the ship's company changed the pennant/side number twice, with no logic in that, just painting the new prescribed one. When the VSTOL carrier Kiev went from Black Sea heading to her constant base in Murmansk, 1975, there were just 6 Yak-38 light attack planes in her hangar, but each aircraft changed the side number seven times during those two weeks - just to fool USN about the real quantity of airplanes aboard. Some intel guy has told me that NATO intel counted 70+ these ugly little VSTOLs on the carrier. No. There were just six. Really.
Max the Mad Russian
Hands off Ukraine! Feet too
Balzams and others with SSV prefix were so-called Large Intel Ships, called "communication ships" for the same reason of fooling. Those smaller with GS prefix mimicing for ocean survey vessels, the natural GSs too, but differ from "original" GS by huge amount of antennas, were Medium Intel Ships - all of them, both SSVs and GSs (unnatural) were just "spy ships".
Even more, using generally the same layouts and blueprints that CGN of Kirov-class were built along, the nuclear intel ship Ural had been built, with the same dual nuke and steam boilering propulsion. The cruiser's case logic is clear: if in base with cold reactors and suddenly alerted to intercept the carrier, such ship won't wait until nukes were firing their gears (at least several hours) and is able to steam under conventional boilers up to 18 knots for all those hours. But for what the reason is to repeat such engineering layout (fucking crazily expensive) on an intel/spy ship? Let's call it Soviet way of thinking.