Watched this video the other day. Lockheed had been knocking around the airplane business since 1912, but the P-38 and WW2 really made their bones. They built 9,000 P-38s.
Pentagon’s No.1 weapons supplier Lockheed Martin Corp. says it has terminated its agreement to acquire rocket engine and missile maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc.
Ice Pilots NWT Bonus Features - Lockheed L 188 Electra
Glacier PilotBob Reeve eventually started his own airline using Lockheed Electras. Poking around must have triggered Google because YouTube served up this entertaining little clip.
"Pentagon’s No.1 weapons supplier Lockheed Martin". Seems to me I've heard that expression before. Checking my old posts, there are a bunch about Lockheed, but that particular expression only showed up recently.
Lockheed F-104 Starfighter | The worlds first Mach 2 fighter
The Atomic Cafe
I am starting to develop a feel for the development of aircraft over the course of the 20th century, but I think my feelings could do with some structure. People invested enormous amounts of time and money developing these machines and it seems like every one exceeded the capabilities of previous aircraft in some manner: bigger, heavier, faster, flying higher or father, carrying more people or cargo. I might have to put together a spreadsheet. The early Cold War era is particularly intriguing because it seems like great advances were made and they all kind of pointed to the Apollo mission to the moon. After that, it all seemed to be polish and refinement and computers.
What we have here are (three) two-second clips from a Lockheed-Martin video of a ground attack rocket test. These clips show the missile just before it impacts the target, in this case a tank. Blutarsky noticed a small white flash just ahead of the missile near it's projected point of impact. nougabol tells us that it is the "Pressure wave from the missile hitting the tank." Since the pressure wave hits the target before the missile, you have advance notice that the missile is coming. Since the missile is supersonic, that time is very short.
Aerial Visuals Airplane Dossier has a history of this aircraft. It flew in the Berlin Airlift back in 1949. It was converted to a military VIP transport (VC-121) and served for sixteen years before it was handed over to NASA where it served in support of the Apollo missions.
DARPA's Little Secrets That Changed The World
Curious Droid
Methinks the American defense industry has been going wild for two long. I dunno but I suspect much of that $35 trillion debt we are carrying was incurred to pay for all the wars we've been involved in since WW2.
The Lockheed Martin-led industry team launched the nation's seventh Littoral Combat Ship into the Menominee River on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2014. The future LCS Detroit was formally christened prior to her launch by Mrs. Barbara Levin. Barbara is Senator Carl Levin's wife. He is a Democrat from Michigan.
Okay, Lockheed I've heard of, but the Menominee River? Where's that? Turns out it forms part of the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It empties into Lake Michigan. About 50 miles North of Green Bay.
Update: Just realized that the boat in the video and the boat on the map are facing opposite directions. Did they turn it around before they launched it? Or are we looking at two different boats?
Some T-33s retained two machine guns for gunnery training, and in some countries, the T-33 was even used in combat: the Cuban Air Force used them during the Bay of Pigs Invasion, scoring several kills including sinking two transport ships.
Don't know how accurate the caption is. The International Ice Patrolhas been operating in the North Atlantic Ocean ever since the Titanic sank, and the Navy operated Neptunes all over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing their own ice patrols while looking for enemy submarines.
P.S. April 2022. I just noticed that the propellers on this airplane are not turning. Normally photographs of this vintage show the propellers as a blur. It's only since the advent of digital cameras that we have been getting psychedelic images of props. Since it looks like they are not turning it means either: the engines have stopped and the airplane is gliding, on its way to its doom, or they used special high speed film and camera to stop the propeller, or the date is a lie. If the engine is turning at 1200 RPM, then the tip speed of this 15 foot diameter prop is around 1,000 fps. Typical exposure time for a 35 mm camera is 1/100th of a second which is 10 milliseconds. In ten milliseconds, the tip of the prop would have moved 10 feet, or about a quarter of a rotation and we would not be seeing the individual blades. Of course, this is a military aircraft and they would have had access to high speed film and cameras, so that's likely the explanation.
Came across this photo or the Lockheed S-3B Viking and thought that's kind of a cool airplane, something different anyway. Then I read the blurb and find the photo was taken at Vraciu Field, which took me aback. I thought I knew the names of all the US air bases, or at least I was familiar with them, but I've never heard of this one.
TIOC May 2005
Eaten Alive by Parasitic Oscillations
by Kevin Cameron
As a new hi-fi amplifier is designed by an electronic engineer, particular care must be taken to be sure that unforeseen combinations of resistance, inductance, and capacitance do not permit so-called parasitic oscillations; to build up, destroying the music.
Each property of electrical circuits has a mechanical analog, and one mechanical system that is often rife with its own parasitic oscillations is the valve train. Rocker arms bend, pushrods compress and expand, camshafts deflect between their bearings, and valve stems flop from side to side while valve heads deflect like trampolines or floppy disks. All of this is invisible to us. Its symptoms are valve seat recession and valve spring and valve breakage. In many cases, after tests with a new cam that gives really good power, we have to reluctantly back up to a previous, less powerful set-up because we can't afford the DNFs [Did Not Finish] and breakages that the hot set-up produces. Valve train failures are hit-and-miss, trial-and-error, a mystery. Lighter valve train parts and stronger springs sometimes just seem to make everything worse. Is there any truth?
Back in the 1920s Percy Goodman decided it was time to put aside clattering pushrods and adopt trendy OHC [Overhead Cam] valve drive on the TT [Tourist Trophy] Velocettes he manufactured. Soon he was driven crazy by erratic valve motion and sensibly resorted to the use of a strobe light to reveal what was happening. But naming the illness is not the same as a cure.
When I was recently at the NHRA [National Hot Rod Association] drag nationals in Houston, I had the opportunity of conversation with Byron Hines, whose purpose-designed giant 160-cubic-inch V-twin engine has recently begun to win Pro Stock races. I asked what had made the difference after some uncompetitive seasons. The Spintron, was his answer. It showed us that our valve motion was nothing like what was in the cam profiles.
COMP® Technology Explained: Spintron
Spintron use a big electric motor to spin your engine while a variety of instrumentation is used to measure the actual trajectories of the parts you are interested in. This is different from using a strobe light in that the information you get is detailed enough to allow the flexing of each part to be isolated and understood.
🇺🇸 Working Model of a Harley V-Twin Air Cooled Motorcycle Engine at SEMA Show [4K]
Byron went on to say that valve train dynamics are particularly difficult to control in big twins because of the large variations in crank speed as each cylinder fires. The cam profiles were originally developed to work at a particular maximum rpm, provided that the camshafts turn smoothly. They do not turn smoothly because the crank does not turn smoothly; it advances in a series of fairly violent jerks. 80 percent of the recoverable energy in the hot combustion gas does its work between 10-deg ATDC and 80 ATDC. Out of the 720 crank degrees in the engine cycle, power is given during only 10%. This means that the instantaneous speed of the cam can often be much higher than its average speed. This also means that as a cylinder fires and the crank accelerates suddenly, an open valve in the other cylinder may be tossed right off its cam profile, or dropped prematurely onto its seat.
This reveals why tuners of singles and twins found that their bikes top-ended better and faster the heavier their cranks were made. A younger generation of tuners has rejected this idea as turn-of-the-century dirt-track nonsense, reasoning that physics requires lighter flywheels to result in faster acceleration. Vintage racer Todd Henning learned the heavy crank truth in back-to-back testing of his highly tuned Honda twins, as did Rob Muzzy in 1981-83 with 1025-cc Kawasaki in-line fours. The heavier the crank, the smoother its rotation becomes, and the less power stroke disturbance, or is transmitted to the cams. Where does the lost power go when a light crank is used? Erratic valve motion is one answer, and big valve bounce after closing is another.
Power pulsing is not the only disturbance to the valve train. Consider a parallel twin, a flat twin, or an in-line four. In all of these, all the pistons stop simultaneously. This means that as pistons decelerate to a stop, the crank must accelerate rapidly because there is nowhere else for the pistons' energy to go; it's conservation of energy. Peak piston speed is about 1.5 times mean piston speed. This means that all the kinetic energy in the pistons, moving at near 100 feet per second, is suddenly dumped into the crank. This is especially bad for in-line fours, which have small-diameter cranks and little in the way of flywheel mass. This sudden crank deceleration/acceleration cycle is performed twice per revolution. No wonder new engine development usually involves coping with cam drive breakage. No wonder there are mystery failures of valve train parts.
Allan Lockheed [Jr.] is the man behind the engine design software Engine Expert, and he talks to engine people all over the world. He has tales of engines whose valves were stable with a chain or belt cam drive, but which mysteriously began to break valve springs as soon as a much more rigid gear drive was put in its place. The slight flexibility of chain or belt took the sharp edge off the sudden crank speed variations, preventing high frequency motions from reaching the valve train. This may be why Yamaha retain a chain cam drive in their M1 in-line four MotoGP race engine. The oil film between each of the cam chain's pins, bushings, and rollers can be thought of as a kind of viscous damper. Such fluid film damping is one of the motivations inclining the designers of rocket engine turbopumps to give up rolling element shaft bearings in favor of plain journal bearings. A gear cam drive has fewer than 10 oil films between the crank and cam, but a chain has a great many more.
Phil Irving, designer of Vincent motorcycles, suggested construction of parallel twins with crankpins not at the traditional 360 degrees, but separated by 76 degrees. With usual rod ratios, the piston reaches maximum velocity at about 76-deg ATDC. At this point, the crank arm is at right angles to the con-rod; the condition for maximum piston velocity. This crankpin angle would therefore cause one piston to be stopped when the other was at maximum speed. The result would be that the two pistons would exchange their kinetic energy only with each other, and not with the crankshaft, eliminating one important source of cam drive disturbance.
Wide-angle Vee engines are better in this respect than parallel twins but even they have their problems. The classic Cosworth DFV V8 GP car engine of 1967 was estimated during design to have no more than a 35 pounds-foot torque peak in its cam drive, but actual testing revealed peaks ten times greater; leading to drive failure. As the engine was already near production when this was discovered, designer Keith Duckworth had to scurry around and design a compact spring drive (analogous to what is found in clutch cush hubs) that could be incorporated into one of the gears in the drive.
Another approach is that seen on certain WW II German V-12 aircraft engines, and on late race versions of Honda's RC30. In these and other cases, small flywheels have been attached to the cams themselves.
It is interesting to note that both Velocette and Ducati have found that changing the stiffness of cam drive towershafts can be used as a tuning measure to adapt an engine to a given race track a stiff towershaft on short courses, and a more limber one for longer tracks. The parts seem stiff and strong only in our imaginations and in our not-very-stiff protein hands. In fact, at speed, everything in engines is flexible because the amounts of energy moving from part to part can be so large.
Byron Hines noted that as useful as Spintron's instrumentation is, even more so is the experience and advice of Spintron personnel. One of the first things they suggested was that he replace his aluminum rocker arms with steel, for accurate motion depends more on stiffness than on weight. He also said that full benefit from Spintron requires making several laps through their process. A first lap involves re-configuring the cam profiles and valve train to settle the motion and eliminate float and excessive bounce. A second lap becomes necessary when it is realized that after lap one, the engine's power curve has sagged in some places. This is because before, cam timing and lift had been unwittingly chosen to at least partly compensate for the uncontrolled valve motion. Once the valve motion is settled, timing and lift are wrong. Now lap two consists of finding new optimum cam timings and profiles to again maximize power. That, in turn, brings to view new dynamic problems to be solved in lap three, and so on. The people with the greatest sophistication in all this are, naturally, NASCAR engine builders.
As an extreme example of what can happen, airflow pioneer Jerry Branch was once called upon to dyno a special V-twin that was conceptually a slice off a small-block Chevy, crank and all. Being intended as a motorcycle engine, it had no flywheel other than its little piece of V8 crankshaft. Branch said that although the engine had plenty of displacement and hot tuning parts that suggested an easy 100-hp, it never made over 35 horsepower. Each time it fired, with almost no flywheel mass to smooth the pulse, it launched its valves into orbit.
[Excerpt from] Valve Float
Another aspect of unplanned valve motion is the vibratory modes of valves themselves. Particularly with rocker-arms (which exert some side-thrust), a valve can be excited laterally as it lifts, the head of the valve whipping from side-to-side on the stem; the stem possibly made more flexible by undercutting to squeeze out that last CFM [Cubic Feet per Minute] of airflow. When this flopping valve approaches the seat, one edge can hit first, causing a motion not unlike the final stages of a spun coin's motion. Or, approaching its seat squarely, the rim of the valve stops but the stem and center of the valve head keep right on going; the trampoline mode of valve flex. When the motion at the center finally stops, the valve head is quite deformed and it now snaps back, tossing itself back up off the seat in a cycle that can make several hops; with considerable lift being reached in the process. This is a cautionary tale for those who wish to carve away valve head mass in search of ultimate lightness. Or for those who wish to replace existing valve shapes with something quite different. Think about it if things don't go right. You may have made transformed those elegant chunks of metal from valves into springs.
Spintron is not cheap but all of us can afford imagination. If you have valve or spring problems, think about what has worked in your experience with your particular engine, and what has not. Careful mental sorting here can reveal a lot. Besides, what else is a body to think about while waiting for a dental appointment? Sit with the engine and rotate it through its cycle, thinking about what is happening at each point. Over time you can develop a mental picture of what may be happening and what might correct the problems. There is more to valve trains than light parts and heavy springs."
Text via Uniberp. I added the links, images & videos.
In the early Fifties, our nation's first line of defense against Rooskie nukyular bombers was "all-weather" fighters with on-board radar for finding the incoming targets.
The weaponry needed to destroy jet bombers once the radar-toting fighter had located them was the sticking point. Guided missiles were still in their infancy, machine guns lacked the power required to bring down a big bomber, and even cannon weren't a sure thing since a head-on pass by a 600mph Lockheed F-94 Starfire at a formation of Soviet M-4 Bisons doing 500mph would be over in an eyeblink. A 20mm autocannon might only chug out a few rounds in that blink.
Stealing an idea from late-WW2 German jet interceptors, the USAF turned to unguided rockets. The Northrop F-89 Scorpion carried a hundred and four of the things, split between two wingtip pods.
United Boeing 377 Stratocruiser Hawaii Travelogue - 1950
Nowadays it seems like everyone goes to Hawaii. Before WW2 almost no one went, but then the war came and a zillion GIs went through there on the way to hell. When they got home, I suspect that many of them remembered Hawaii. The airliner opened the floodgates for tourism. Near as I can tell, back in 1950 a round-trip ticket to Hawaii cost about $1,500 which in today's money would be about ten times as much, or $15,000.
The Boeing 377 was a contemporary competitor to the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-6. The Constellation was the clear winner in everything except altitude.
Sometimes I think I may be in the wrong line of work. I just ran a search on indeed.com for "BIOS Engineer" and it returned 192 matches in my neighborhood. The BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) on a PC is a bit of code written into a chip on the motherboard. It performs a number of low level functions for the computer.
The one function everyone deals with is the boot (or bootstrap) loader. It reads the first bit of code from the boot disk which is what gets everything started. The boot loader gets its' name from the expression "pull yourself by your bootstraps", which is how one my professors explained it. I wonder how many people know what a bootstrap is?
On a simple machine, the boot loader may be no more than dozen bytes of code:
Output the address of the control block to the disk controller,
jump-busy until the controller is done,
jump to the newly loaded code.
On PC's it is a little more complicated because you do not know which disk you will be able to boot from, or even if the device is a disk.
The problem with BIOS Engineering is that it seems to be a bit of a closed community. You can only get in if you have worked on a PC BIOS before. I think this is a load of hogwash. It is just code for Pete's sake, it isn't magic. Matter of fact, it's the simplest kind of code you can write. The constraints are fairly well understood. Most all of the problems have been dealt with before. It's just a matter of cutting out the obsolete and integrating the new bits.
I interviewed with a guy running a BIOS group at Intel some ten years ago. His guys were working 60 and 70 hours a week for months on end. I have done that on occasion, but never for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I find that it doesn't pay. After about eight hours of work, I am tired and I start making mistakes. I come in the next day and it takes me four hours to straighten out the mess I made the day before and get lined out with what I need to do today.
I remember reading something about the Lockheed Skunk Works. The guy who ran it (Kelly Johnson) was of the same mind: If you work smarter, you don't need to work longer. Here is another take on the same subject: Urgency is poisonous.
So what I am thinking is that BIOS engineering has attracted some real dweebs and I probably don't want to working there. Which means I am kind of glad I didn't get the job.
Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.
Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.
Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal
[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]
Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.
INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)
They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.
There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.
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