The British once again have a carrier capable of supporting modern aircraft – HMS Queen Elizabeth may be uncommonly ugly, even for an aircraft carrier, but welcome back to the carrier club, Royal Navy! The shipboard rolling vertical landing is an interesting technique, and although I don’t believe they’ve tested it yet, it should do wonders to increase the F-35’s bringback weight in British service.
India prepares to buy S-400s; US prepares to impose sanctions – Or, and I’m just spitballing here, we could let India buy S-400s, then ask nicely to see their new toys, then see their new toys, because the Indians are generally our friends and are often willing to bring fancy, modern Russian export gear to American exercises.
Parvusimperator is now onto Volume 3 of Shelby Foote’s Civil War! Much like McClellan on the Peninsula, I am constantly looking at Volume 1 and saying, “I can take it, I just need another cup of coffee.”
Defense
Taiwan can win a war with China – A particularly spicy take, but a long and well-researched read (as you usually get with Foreign Policy). I thought we’d talked about defending Taiwan in the past, maybe as a podcast segment, but I have a hard time finding it. Private browsing evades the paywall.
The Army buys MH-139s to replace UH-1Ns – Don’t worry. We aren’t buying weird pasta helicopters to do real combat tasks. They’re just for VIP transport and missile silo security in the US.
The Drive to the rescue, with more detail – I buy that a Su-35 could find an F-22 via IRST, especially if (as the Russians say) the Su-35 were behind the F-22. I don’t know if I buy the accuracy of the Russian story, just on principle, but it does at the very least pass the smell test.
Thursday bonus article: The US should buy diesel subs – Written by a perennial favorite here, James Holmes, who became much harder to find on Google following the Aurora theater shooting. The headline might make you say, “Don’t be absurd,” as it did me, but once you get about halfway through, you hit the wham line which made me say, “Oh, that’s actually not a bad idea.”
The ABC Conjecture: proved or not? – I share this in large part because Quanta is reliably excellent math, science, and technology writing, and deserves to be on your reading list.
Catholic drama in China – The short version is, the Vatican struck a deal with the Chinese Communist Party to let the CCP have a say in the nomination of local bishops. In doing so, they’ve robbed themselves of some legitimacy there, in favor of not rocking the boat too much. Especially in authoritarian places, Christianity is by nature a boat-rocking religion.
It’s a good month for training, but I appear to have lost my screenshot thereof.
Still, the drills stretch on interminably, and news of a rebel concentration suitable to attack is a welcome diversion.
The Action of September 13, 3052
The surprisingly-timely action of September 13 involves both Bear’s Bruisers and Drake’s Destroyers. (That’s Teddy Bear, Hanzoku, Severe, and Euchre, if you’ve lost track, plus Carcer, Woad, Linebuster, and Blinky.)
The enemy is a reinforced Vedette platoon, six tanks and two medium mechs of indeterminate make, currently stationed in a town. Weather is bad; high winds rare reducing weapon accuracy and hampering vehicle movement.
Deployment
The enemy deploys in the city, where the tight quarters will work to their advantage—and ours. Bear’s Bruisers move north to deal with the enemy Wolverine, while Drake’s Destroyers swing around south to march through the center of the city.
Round 1
Both of the Bastards’ lances advance. Almost nobody is within weapons range at this stage. Hanzoku takes a crack at an enemy Vedette, while the first enemy medium mech, a Wolverine, fires on Euchre‘s Trebuchet.
The Wolverine scores the luckiest of lucky shots, clanging an AC/5 shell off of Euchre‘s cockpit. He shakes his head, bell rung, but forges on.
Round 2
Bear’s Bruisers now have a number of good targets, but are good targets themselves, as both enemy mechs move out of the city and a Vedette runs at top speed down the road.
Drake’s Destroyers, under Carcer‘s command, aren’t in great position, and the weather means they’ll be a little slow to reposition. Blame your staff officer’s rustiness.
The Bruisers concentrate on the Vedette, hoping to knock it out this round. Down south, Woad with his trusty Grasshoper is the only pilot with a shot. He lines up on a broken-down Vedette in the center of town and lets loose an alpha strike.
Nothing hits to very much effect. Severe scores with one of her Clan ER Medium Lasers, slicing into the Vedette’s armor. Woad hits his target with a single medium laser. The Wolverine and a Vedette score hits in response. Everything else goes wide or spatters harmlessly off of armor.
Round 3
In the south, the Destroyers split up. Carcer and Linebuster, with longer-ranged mechs, split out to the west, where they’ll be able to fire on enemies leaving town along the northwest road. Woad and Blinky, in faster, shorter-ranged mechs, move into town to flank the vehicles hiding there.
In the north, Severe and Teddy Bear aim to shoot at and stomp on the nearest Vedette, respectively, while Hanzoku trades fire with a Vedette poking its nose out of town and Euchre looks to deal some damage to one coming out along the northwest road.
Four of Severe‘s five lasers find their mark, dealing a combined 24 damage, but Teddy Bear gets the kill with a stomp. Euchre damages his target’s left track, but doesn’t get the kill, while Woad and Blinky team up to knock out the immobilized Vedette in town. Blinky gets the last hit.
Round 4
Carcer is in range of a Vedette, and lines up her laser shot eagerly. Woad pushes into the town, thanks to the magic of jump jets, while Blinky lags behind a bit.
Severe again proves the worth of her Koshi, slicing deep into a Vedette’s rear armor and heavily damaging its engine. Hanzoku finishes off the Vedette darting past his mech with a kick which caves in the roof of its turret.
Round 5
Everyone is in on the action now. Hanzoku, Carcer, and the allied Vulcan race to take down the enemy Wolverine, while Severe, Woad, and Blinky move into the center of the city to deal with the remaining two Vedettes.
Teddy Bear lands a full alpha strike on his target Vedette, immobilizing it and knocking off both tracks, but not quite managing to bring it down with weapons fire. He finishes the job with a kick to the rear armor. Hanzoku beheads the Wolverine with a well-aimed volley of laser fire, notching the kill for himself. Woad and Severe collaborate to immobilize one of the city center Vedettes, while Blinky immobilizes the other.
Cleanup
The other enemy mech, a Phoenix Hawk which did very little, falls back, leaving the two Vedettes for Woad and Blinky. Each scores one kill.
Damage, Injuries, Salvage
Our mechs are all but undamaged, none of our pilots are badly hurt, and although we can’t convince the ComStar liaison to give us the Wolverine, we do get six Vedettes for the mechanics to cut apart. An excellent battle, professionally won.
Between selling off the Vedette chassis after stripping them of everything useful and ransoming prisoners, we end the mission up about 750,000 C-bills.
Kill Board(s)
Blinky and Hanzoku both emerge with two kills. Hanzoku leapfrogs Linebuster by dint of having more mech kills and now tying for overall count.
Last Battle
Forgot to take a screenshot. It’s been a while! I’m out of practice.
All-Time Leaders
“Rook” Ishikawa (27, 8 mechs, 2 Clan kills)
“Drake” Halit (14, 6 mechs, 2 Clan kills)
“Woad” Kohler (14, 5 mechs, 1 Clan kill)
“Carcer” Ngo (11, 5 mechs, 2 Clan kills)
“Wizard” Que (7, 6 mechs, 6 Clan kills)
“Teddy Bear” Jamil (6, 3 mechs, 2 Clan kills)
“Double Dog” Dare (5, 2 mechs, 1 Clan kill)
“Hanzoku” Yuksel (5, 4 mechs, 2 Clan kill)
“Linebuster” Atkinson (5)
“Severe” Payne (4, 4 mechs)
“Milspec” Ortega (4, 1 mech, 1 Clan kill)
“Ker-Ker” Ec (3, 2 mechs)
“Euchre” Kojic (2, 2 mechs)
“Blinky” Stirzacre (2)
“Kicks” Hernandez (1, 1 mech, 1 Clan kill)
Simona (1, 1 mech, 1 Clan kill)
“Wojtek” Frajtov (1, 1 mech)
Status
It is now September 28, 3052; there’s another battle pending.
Finances
We have 65.431 million C-bills in the bank, up 108,000 since last update.
Repairs and Refits
Our techs continue to work on refitting our two assault mechs. Edina Cameron is only a few days’ work away from getting Rook‘s Stalker back into the field. Kepano Endo has about four months of work left on Drake‘s Awesome.
Mechwarrior Claims and Assignments
For the record, the following mechwarriors are claimed.
We’re now running MekHQ 0.44. Happily, everything I’d done on a custom basis is now merged into the main branch, so it was pretty painless. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get 0.45 to load the save game, so we may be stuck here for a bit.
Slim pickings this week, in part because I did not do my usual defense news trawl every morning. My bad.
Books
I’m still plowing through Volume 1 of Foote, having now made it past Grant’s victory at Shiloh, the entirely unsuccessful Confederate attempts to march through the desert Southwest to California, and the capture of New Orleans. It’s worth remarking how the story of the Civil War is the Confederacy winning slightly in one place and losing badly in four other places.
Defense
On the new KC-46 – We’ll see how the next year or two goes, but the KC-46 might end up on our list of procurement successes.
Capitalist markets in North Korea – My opinion on the currently-ruling Mr. Kim is that his secret desire is to be remembered as a liberalizer who brought North Korea out of darkness and into the modern age, owing to his evidently-long childhood in the West, but that his ability to do so is limited by the North Korean power structure. Not to say our man Jong-un is anything but a brutal dictator even by the standards of brutal dictators, which is what the preponderance of the evidence suggests, but brutal dictators who liberalize tend to be treated decently by the world, whereas the rest of the North Korean government would pretty much all end up on trial for crimes against humanity.
Parvusimperator is up to volume two of Shelby Foote’s three-volume Civil War set, which means I’m now on Volume 1. Foote’s narrative is, so far, excellent and comprehensive.
Russian performance in the Syrian War – notable for its brief treatment of Russian precision munitions, which aren’t so much precision munitions, generally, as precision attack systems in the aircraft delivering them. Per War on the Rocks above, this has changed somewhat, with greater numbers of actual guided weapons now in Russian stocks.
Boeing wins the MQ-25 contract – good job, Boeing. You’ve had a bit of a tough go of it with contracts lately, but between the KC-46 and the MQ-25, you’re now the acknowledged leader in air-to-air refueling worldwide. Also, way to go, Navy, for finally realizing that a dedicated tanker is important. It remains to be seen whether a drone tanker is a good idea, but buddy refueling definitely has its limits. Speaking of…
Navy F-35C and F/A-18F involved in air-to-air refueling accident – oops. Apparently, the F-35 managed to ingest the end of the drogue. No details on the actual extent of the damage, but the Navy said it’s a Class A Mishap, which means damage exceeded $2 million. Now we’ll get to see how good the LockMart repair manuals are.
Guns
The Last Enfield – my favorite bolt-action battle rifle, in its ultimate form.
Football Is Pretty Much Here, So Educate Yourself
Via parvusimperator, a long list of American Football 101 articles from Bleacher Report. Buckle up.
Are we the kind of people to publish an article on Thursday, backdate it to Wednesday, and still call it ‘Wednesday What We’re Reading’? Evidently, yes. Also, I was on vacation over the weekend and only got back on Tuesday, so it’s going to be a little lighter than last time.
Books
On my trip, I read Blind Man’s Bluff, subtitled The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, which is very much worth a read. As a sim-submariner, I thought from the introduction that it was going to be a bit of a lightweight puff piece, but it quickly got better.
Parvusimperator is working his way through Shelby Foote’s three-volume Civil War set.
An automatically-actuated AR-15 bolt release – Insert a magazine, and the bolt closes it. Useful or gimmick? I don’t have the spare cash for it right now, and parvusimperator leans, I think, toward gimmick, so a review will have to wait.
Football Fast Approaches
As red-blooded Americans, we’re big NFL fans, so there’ll be some content of that flavor for the next six or seven months.
The Bills Suck – Courtesy of western NY native parvusimperator.
Your Team Sucks Too – Deadspin’s annual classic on why you should feel bad about your football team.
Miscellaneous
Teeth-chattering winter in the cards? – Sure, they do about as well as chance, but it feels like it’s going to be a long, cold winter here in western Pennsylvania, so there’s that.
Since most of our daily interaction here at metaphorical Soapbox World Headquarters is sending articles back and forth in the Many Words Press metaphorically-corporate Google Chat, sharing a list of articles seemed to us like a nice, low-effort way to add another day per week with a post without having to do any real work.
PBY Catalina for sale – $1.25 million or so buys you a needs-some-restoration Catalina, plus a California hangar to restore it in. We don’t have that kind of money, but if we did…
European basketball provides an example of why point-differential scoring is silly.
Miscellaneous
Private censorship is still bad, writes the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stealing an idea for an article I’ve wanted to write for a while.
Beta releases of RPJ, the house tabletop roleplaying game system of Many Words Press, are now available. Currently available: the core rules document, along with Police Cops, the hard-charging police drama RPG.
I was looking for this information as part of my still-forthcoming Harrier blog post, and couldn’t find it anywhere. So, here it is: a quick table of Harrier II short takeoff rolls by gross weight and headwind, assuming the Pegasus -408/11-61 engine, standard temperature and pressure (15 degrees Celsius, 29.92″Hg), and 0% datum hover performance.
Gross Weight
Takeoff Roll (no wind)
Takeoff Roll (20kt headwind)
20000 lb
400 ft.
275 ft.
22000 lb
450 ft.
325 ft.
24000 lb
550 ft.
375 ft.
26000 lb
725 ft.
500 ft.
28000 lb
1025 ft.
750 ft.
30000 lb
1350 ft.
1000 ft.
Sources and Charts
These numbers come from the Harrier II NFM-400 manual. Please don’t share the download link off-site; it’s a fairly large PDF, and we’re pretty shoe-string budget-wise.
The relevant charts are reproduced below.
To use the hover capability chart, enter from the bottom, beneath the JPT half of the chart, from the appropriate ambient air temperature. Move up to the 0-degree datum line. Then, enter the chart from the bottom, beneath the RPM half of the chart, from the ambient air temperature. Move up to the RPM limit line. From the lower of the two intersections, move right to the hover performance 0% datum line without following the adjustment guidelines.
The JPTL adjustment values are maintenance-provided and outside the scope of my table. To use them, move up to them rather than to the 0-degree datum line. The hover adjustment guidelines are also out of scope. To use them, after moving right to the 0% datum, follow the guidelines up or down.
For 15C, neither JPT or RPM limits performance. Move across the chart to the 0% hover performance datum and read from there: 21,000 lb.
To use the nozzle rotation airspeed chart, enter from the left using the corrected hover value from the hover chart. Move straight across to the 29.92″Hg datum. Move parallel to the guidelines to the ambient pressure.
From there, move straight across to the takeoff gross weight. Stop at the intersection, move directly downward, and read the nozzle rotation airspeed off the bottom of the chart.
For a 22,000lb gross weight, start at 21,000lb, the corrected hover weight, and move across to the 29.92″Hg datum. Since the pressure is 29.92″Hg, continue moving directly across to the 22,000lb gross weight line. At the intersection, move down the chart to find the nozzle rotation airspeed of about 63 knots.
To use the takeoff chart, enter from the top left using the nozzle rotation airspeed calculated before. Move horizontally to the 29.92″Hg datum, then move parallel to the pressure guidelines to the ambient pressure. Move horizontally to the start of the temperature guidelines, then parallel the temperature guidelines to the ambient temperature. From there, move horizontally to the curved line to the right. At the intersection, move down to the zero-wind line at the top of the ground roll chart to find the 0-knot takeoff roll. Follow the solid line down the chart to the appropriate line to find the headwind takeoff roll.
To continue the example, enter the chart at 63 knots and move to the pressure baseline at 29.92″Hg. Move horizontally left to the start of the temperature guidelines, and parallel them to the 15C baseline, at about 66 or 67 knots. Move horizontally to the reflector line, then move vertically to find the takeoff roll of roughly 450 feet. Parallel the solid headwind guidelines down to a 20-knot wind to find the headwind takeoff roll of about 325 feet.
Brief Comments
Experience with DCS Harrier suggests that these numbers include a good deal of margin. I have no trouble getting off the Tarawa deck with at least 200 feet to spare, even at loads north of 30,000 pounds. These are, however, the by-the-book numbers.
In a summertime edition of The Crossbox Podcast, we find an excuse to play some of our favorite military music: talking about procurement challenges service branch by service branch.
