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Comment Re:XB-70 (Score 1) 133

by Nimey (#47300071) Attached to: The Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened

The F-86 was developed before the MiG-15 entered combat service. The only thing the MiG did to the Sabre was make the Air Force deploy it quicker because the MiG spanked everything else the Air Force had.

Likewise the MiG-21 and F-4; the F-4 was developed not specifically because of the Fishbed, but because the Navy (and later the Air Force) wanted a modern fighter and it happened that the Fishbed and Phantom were the most modern fighters each side had in Vietnam; they weren't even the same class of airplane: the MiG-21 was a small, fast light fighter/interceptor and the F-4 a big, heavy do-everything fighter-bomber/interceptor, just as the F-16 and Su-27 were in different classes.

Comment Re:Dishonourable Mentions (Score 1) 133

by Nimey (#47295351) Attached to: The Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened

I'm not convinced that a bouncing bomb would have been all that effective against ships. The delivering aircraft still has to be close to the target, flying straight, low, and at a certain airspeed, and it's an unguided bomb so there's still a decent chance of a miss (several bombs missed the German dams, for instance). We had other planes that attacked low-and-slow; they were torpedo bombers and fell out of use after 1945 due to being excessively vulnerable to flak during their low, slow and straight attack runs.

In any case, we already had a fairly similar and effective attack method: skip bombing, which works with conventional bombs.
Earth

Climate Change Prompts Emperor Penguins To Find New Breeding Grounds 215

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-to-better-quarters-on-campus dept.
An anonymous reader writes Researchers have discovered that emperor penguins may not be faithful to their previous nesting locations, as previously thought. Scientists have long thought that emperor penguins were philopatric, returning to the same location to nest each year. However, a new research study showed that the penguins may be behaving in ways that allow them to adapt to their changing environment. Lead author Michelle LaRue said,"Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins. If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail, these new colonies we see on satellite images wouldn't make any sense. These birds didn't just appear out of thin air—they had to have come from somewhere else. This suggests that emperor penguins move among colonies. That means we need to revisit how we interpret population changes and the causes of those changes."
The Military

The Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened 133

Posted by samzenpus from the pipe-dreams dept.
An anonymous reader writes There have been many US military machines of war that seemed to be revolutionary, but never make it out of the prototype stage. As Robert Farley explains: "Sometimes they die because they were a bad idea in the first place. For the same reasons, bad defense systems can often survive the most inept management if they fill a particular niche well enough." A weapon can seem like an amazing invention, but it still has to adapt to all sorts of conditions--budgetary, politics, and people's plain bias. Here's a look at a few of the best weapons of war that couldn't win under these "battlefield" conditions.

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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

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