DarkAdapted

The Air Force tried to cancel the E-7 and Congress basically ordered the AF to continue to fund development. E-7s are not coming off the line any time soon. The AF believes that airborne moving target indication (AMTI) can be done from space and while the E-7 is a good platform, it is no less vulnerable than the E-3 and paying to get it into USAF spec and then support it is money better spent on assets on orbit, which are a lot harder to hit with a SAM. In the short term, the Navy’s E-2D can do the job if needed, albeit at a lower airspeed and altitude. E-2Ds are currently in production, and any squadrons in the US not on carriers could be deployed to the Middle East if AWACS functions were needed.

Curious why this chic thinks the military doesn’t have newer assets to replace old ones.

Kai Trump is rich, model-pretty and hits 260+ off the tee. Kind of surprised @nypost doesn’t take the opportunity to use her picture and announce her whereabouts with more things. ‘Flood Innundates Coastal Bangladesh, Kai Trump was at Chipotle’ ‘Senators Continue Debate On SAVE Act, Kai Trump spotted at Ulta with Friends’

@nypost I didn’t think she had anything to do with it until you published this, but now I’m kinda wondering

Kai Trump was miles away at Miami Open during Tiger Woods crash trib.al/cFVy170

@StephenPunwasi @DesertAIP W80 with people for scale. Note that this is at least a 2-stage thermonuclear weapon, and likely a 3-stage with maximum yield of 150kT

Critical mass is less than 20lb of plutonium. It’s even less for a perfect spherical implosion (more efficient), but an ellipsoid with air gap, D-T gas injection and 2-point implosion detonation system will definitely go boom, in a much smaller package than you seem to understand. Not small enough to build into a vest, no…but easily small enough to fit in a backpack. During the Cold War the US had nuclear artillery shells down to as small a diameter as 155mm (6.1 inches), the W48. It weighed 120lbs, and most of that weight was casing plus what was needed to survive being fired out of an artillery shell as well as for aerodynamics. It was an implosion device with diameter LESS than 6 inches. The picture below is a bomb casing for the W80, total package diameter is 30cm at the widest, where the secondary (fusion) package lives. The rounded smaller part is the fission initiator…plus whatever shielding/protection would be needed for safe handling. Nukes can be smaller than you think, apparently.

FYI a nuclear suicide vest isn’t feasible due to basic physics. Nuclear explosions require critical mass, which means slamming the particles together. It needs space, so containers are large & heavy. This isn’t limited by tech. It’s limited by physics and reality.

@BTsrs9rh58w @StephenPunwasi @DesertAIP It is absolutely historically known that the US did, the W54 and additional variations that became SADM (Special Attack Demolition Munition) and were man-portable.

@StephenPunwasi @DesertAIP According to grok, critical mass of Pu in an emplosion device with reflectors can be as low as a 5 kg (some weapons can get even smaller). Since it’s incredibly dense, it’s a small sphere (3.1in OD). It’s absolutely theoretically possible to build a man portable nuclear weapon.

@realdaymon @WeaponsVault John Nash approves.

@WeaponsVault Every dude should hit on the one to the right. Sweeney will get mad and you will win either way. 🤷😆

@JonahDispatch It’s not a hard test. Unless you have dementia. And most of the time when I saw patients later diagnosed with Alzheimer-type dementia, it did not bother them that they did not pass it.

I will never stop laughing at the fact he’s so proud that he passed a rudimentary test to see if he’s got dementia. I mean it’s not a hard test.

@SARGENTSCRUFY @TimOnPoint I was thinking Mylar on the inside and camo on the outside.

@DarkAdapted @TimOnPoint Mylar is wrong, it's shiny in IR because it reflects. A common household umbrella works great.

Hot tip: if you’re on the receiving end of an attack, don’t take cover in one of the remaining undamaged structures. Drivers like seeing their handiwork. This applies less to aircraft that hunt with IR - AC-130s and helicopters.

Iran doesn’t have to make radioactive sources, they can just buy them. I can safely bet that there are plenty of radiological sources in Iran, they are commonly used in industry to check pipeline welds, and in healthcare. Cs-137 has a 30 year half-life, presuming the radiotherapy sources were purchased in the 1970s they still have about a quarter of their activity left — enough to give a really good dose to the bomber and enough to scare people who don’t understand much about radiation. Co-60 was the miracle radiation therapy source of the 1950s, the first megavoltage (1MeV) radiation therapy introduced. I would be absolutely shocked if the Shah’s Iran didn’t have at least one by 1970. Co-60 has a 57 year half-life, so those sources are still dangerous if mishandled. Same for Co-60 sources used for pipeline weld imaging. Radiological weapons are scary. They are most dangerous to the people who assemble and detonate them. But they will absolutely set off a fraction of the population who don’t know anything about them. I agree that a small nuclear weapon is highly unlikely, it practically requires Pu-239 to get the critical mass down to something easy enough to carry, which requires a working reactor on a specific cycle AND reprocessing to maximize Pu-239 and minimize Pu-240. I wouldn’t have interpreted Vance’s comment about a current-day threat as a tactical nuke in a vest. But a radiological source strapped to Semtex to contaminate an area and scare the US public is far from an unthinkable threat. There have been accidental exposures of Co-60 and Cs-137 multiple times over the last few decades around the world.

Sure. But were you worried that Iran's nuclear program was making Cs-137? Cesium-137 is primarily produced in industrial settings in countries with nuclear reactors, such as the United States, Russia, and several European nations. You could just as well worry about all the waste ponds from reactors. Nuclear waste ponds, also known as spent fuel pools, are common worldwide, with approximately 490,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel being temporarily stored in pools and dry casks at hundreds of sites globally.

Radiological weapon wouldn’t actually kill that many people but it would absolutely scare the hell out of tens of thousand of people. A few Cs-137 tandem & ovoid radiotherapy sources with 10-20lb of HE would make quite a mess and effectively scatter the cesium powder. Would be worse if they got a Co-60 source. Not ‘nuclear’, but you would be surprised how small you can make a fission implosion device. The W80 is a 3-stage, gas-boosted thermonuclear weapon, including the fusion package it’s 11” in diameter. Pull just the fission implosion part, now it’s the size of a basketball. Now, I doubt Iran could make one of those, if they got 2-point implosion figured out they could definitely put one in a backpack. The US had the SADM back in the 60s, a 600 ton fission implosion device that could be carried by one man.

No, there is no publicly known or documented case of an actual nuclear suicide vest—a wearable device strapped to a person's body, like a conventional explosive suicide vest, that functions as a functional nuclear weapon and is detonated by the wearer in a suicide attack. More BS from Vance.

@Osinttechnical Izzat RFNA? Because it looks like RFNA, and the cameraman better have the name and number of a good pulmonologist if it is RFNA.

Civilians film the remains of a liquid-fueled Iranian ballistic missile that fell on the West Bank tonight.

@cirnosad Completely wasted their kill streak bonus. Noobs and campers.

Iran has been bombing the crap out of US bases and their "death toll" has been stuck on like, what, 13? lol.

@JacksonBret_ @dmbkparker Very important note. You really don’t want to be digging out your credit card for the new CVV2 number you haven’t memorized yet when trying to figure out which divert airport you can reach. Bad timing indeed.

@DarkAdapted @dmbkparker You forgot, No subscription, thought I would lay that out there .

You need to know that in the year of our Lord 2026 these are still used to train pilots to calculate fuel consumption, wind drift, and ground speed.

My guess would be that a lot of this depends on the range at which the fighter begins its turn. Turn too early and you give the missile time to adjust. Turn too late and the missile is close enough that your lower-g turn doesn’t matter. MANPADS are dangerous particularly when targets have limited maneuverability — helicopters that are slower, planes coming in to land that have already shed energy and are committing to a straight path. They are also dangerous in large numbers, and nobody wants to fly into a known ‘thicket’ of MANPADS. Fundamentally, they are the slowest and lowest-energy anti-aircraft missile in the SAM family with the smallest warhead, and they are probably the easiest to beat for a fast-mover jet. Even a hit is not necessarily a vehicle kill, but a hit on most aircraft is a mission kill from the standpoint that the plane is highly likely to RTB immediately if they take damage. Great if you engage an incoming jet, make them pickle their bombs early and leave. Less great if you engage an exiting fighter but at least that jet is off the line until it is checked for damage and any damage repaired. ALL SAMs can be beat…in the right circumstances. All planes can be killed by SAMs…in the right circumstances. Amongst the SAMs, shoulder-fired SAMs would be the easiest to beat as they have the lowest energy budget. In general the turning circle of a slower-moving jet will be smaller than the turning circle of a faster missile. Timing the turn will determine whether the missile can compensate enough to get a hit.

@DarkAdapted @RSE_VB I tried asking Grok but answer don’t satisfy me. It focus on cracking manoeuvres and beating the manpads energy but it only works with BVR missiles. We agree manpads don’t count on TVC but still stand more Gs and are faster, also it didn’t lose look on the target

And this, kids, is why you break (turn hard) INTO a missile. You’re trying to force an overshoot, just like this.

The museum that owns that Saab Draken is going to be really pissed that someone stole it and flew it to Tehran. Now you will face the wrath of Sweden.🇸🇪 They have been neutral for ~300+ years, so that would imply they have been canning whoop-ass for a long time, and it’s time to open the lot. (Seriously, if you are this stupid it’s no wonder you think you are winning.)

🇺🇸F-16 DOWN IN🇮🇷TEHRAN

@RSE_VB “Well, honey, do you remember when we talked about compound interest?” “Yes, daddy!” “Secondaries are like compound interest, only for bombs.” “Ooooh! Wow!”

"Daddy? What are secondaries?"

Most planes don’t turn well at high speed, in fact, none really turn well at top speed, in terms of radius. This is one of the reasons rated top speeds have declined since the 1970s. Big brute that it was, the F-14 could pull 7g at Mach 2. But that still meant a turn radius larger than some countries. F-15 is still rated at Mach 2.5 F-16 Mach 2 F/A-18 at 1.6-1.4 (Super Hornets are actually a little slower than Legacy Hornets, according to official statements) F-35 Mach 1.6 F-22 Mach 2.2 (or so, not specified) Top speed used to be a bragging rights thing in the Cold War but it is considered far less important now. It’s a great way to turn fuel into CO2 but unless you are flying at max speed to catch a tanker for refueling, you will burn all your fuel in short order and be back on the ground, one way or another. The F-4 Phantom II was faster than almost all of them, but it couldn’t turn with any of those jets. It wasn’t really built to, it was a fleet defense fighter, meant to take off, go full throttle to an intercept point and shoot Sparrows at Soviet bombers carrying cruise missiles that would try to kill the carrier. The F-14 got that job next, but it could turn, too. Modern fighters after the Vietnam war are built to dogfight in the transonic speed range, somewhere between 300 and 600 mph or so. They will have optimal altitudes and speeds for turning, and the pilots will have these memorized. Part of what makes modern airframes modern is paying attention to energy management, losing as little energy as possible in turns and having the acceleration to build back energy quickly. In terms of MANPADS, they have max energy more or less when the engine burns out, and it’s not a big engine to start with. TVC on a MANPAD would likely require heroic levels of miniaturization and it would cost a LOT, for not much return. MANPADS are ambush weapons, you can do a lot with a good plan and starting with a good launch angle. Probably better to shoot more, cheaper MANPADS than go the TVC route.

@DarkAdapted @RSE_VB This situation is not a sustained turn It is also not perform at max speed but at the terminal guidance which is slower and, as you said, can’t use thrust vector control. BTW I don’t think any Misagh have this capability

Agreed, this is a break turn, not a sustained turn. Agreed, assuredly not an AIM-9X fired at a F/A-18 (Kuwaiti pilots excepted, unfortunately). Agreed, very likely a short-range SAM and almost assuredly a MANPAD. That I know of, the F/A-18’s advantages over most US fighters are tactical flexibility and maneuvering at high angles of attack. The F-16 is a legendarily good energy fighter in almost every respect but from what I have read it is limited by control laws to no more than a 25° AOA otherwise it becomes very unstable in a turn. The F/A-18 retains control authority up to something like 60° nose-up AOA, most fighter pilots say that there is no plane you want to get into a slow fight at high AOA with less than a F/A-18.

@DarkAdapted @RSE_VB Sir, I have to agree in many things, it is a very interesting post, but I also have to disagree in some of the assumptions. This should be a larger conversation but some considerations are, a F18 is as agile as an F16? AIM 9 are not a mampad(probably was a Misagh) 1/2

@dmbkparker They will be used at least until the 24th Century, according to the Historical Documents.