B-52 Bomber Gets Its First New Communications System Since the 1960s
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They received a major revamp in the late 1980s, which is when the current CRTs and ACUs (computers) were brought in. Additionally, since their upgrade in the late 1980s, they've received numerous incremental upgrades to both the system and the software.
CRTs stuck around so long, because they weren't fragile, and could handle a lot of the long term vibration and shock you deal with on an aircraft like this.
Source: I worked on these systems on the B-52H for a few years. The systems even felt somewhat archaic back then, but there was a reason: they were probably the most reliable military avionics systems I've come across.
Your bet met is running the algorithm ~20-100 times and comparing the outputs, then averaging.
It's pretty horrible honestly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS-I
I found it while searching for large wooden buildings a while back:
"Trestle is the world's largest structure composed entirely of wood and glue laminate"
Hardware hardeneing is easier, just make large band gap's in your transistors.
My understanding is that the real threat from EMP is physical destruction of the circuits by inducing voltages beyond what the wiring can handle. Any bit flips would be transient, since the EMP doesn't last very long (thus the P part).
Trying to use software to protect your chips from being fried by hundreds or thousands of volts being shoved through parts that weren't designed to handle it is clearly not viable.
>I'd wager [..] that resilience in the face of EMP was probably a big factor too
The poster was talking about software reliability, which the next poster asked if software reliability was related to EMP hardening.
The only mention of software in the whole comment is a brief comment about "upgrades to both the system and the software".
> so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
One, a B-52 can carry more than one nuclear bomb. You want the crew to remain in flying condition after dropping the first one so they can drop more.
Two, you can end up with pretty severe motivational problems if you don't at least make an effort to allow your pilots to return home. Even if you think it's unlikely that they'll make it home, you still want to give them the tools they need to try.
Three, it's not entirely unrealistic that some of them would make it home. Even if every landing strip was destroyed, they could parachute out. The idea that a nuclear war would be a 15-minute orgy of MAD didn't really happen until the 70s. Before that, ICBMs were limited in number and accuracy, and bombers would be carrying out a lot of the strikes, especially on military targets. The war could take a day or two, with B-52s and other bombers making multiple roundtrips. Even afterwards, there was no guarantee that a war between the superpowers would go from zero to full-scale MAD in an instant. It wasn't out of the question that B-52s might be called on for nuclear bombing of a small number of targets in some form of limited nuclear war.
In the outbound direction they would get aerial-refueled over the arctic, so I don't think they can make a roundtrip. I've read (but don't have any authoritative sources) that the war-plan called for flying to western europe at the end of the mission, but that during simulator training they just shut down the simulator and stepped out after hitting the last target.
Those of us who grew up towards the end of the Cold War (I'm assuming most of the participants in this conversation fit that) got exposed to nuclear war as The End of the World As We Know It, a brief, rapid orgy of destruction that leaves everyone dead. And by the 80s, that was probably about right unless the superpowers could figure out some way to keep the war limited in scale.
But there were two or three decades before that stage where the situation was pretty complicated. Nuclear bombs started out envisioned as being an improved version of the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. (And indeed, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the deadliest ones.) As bombs grew in number and power and bombers got better, there was a whole series of moves and countermoves involving better bombers, better interceptors, better radars, short-range ballistic missiles, tactical weapons up to and including nuclear bazookas, ICBMs, ICBM countermeasures, ICBM counter-countermeasures, ICBM counter-counter-countermeasures, submarines armed with ballistic missiles, submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes....
There are three fictional treatments of nuclear war which, to my limited and imperfect knowledge, appear to give a pretty realistic picture of what a real war would have looked like.
Two, surprise surprise, focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knows that it came close to a nuclear war, but until I read these, I didn't realize that it literally came down to a single officer objecting to the launch of a nuclear torpedo while on a submarine, while two other officers were in favor and tried to convince him.
Those two are The Cuban Missile War (http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=...) and The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust (http://mrtomecko.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/9/13292665/what_if...).
Spoiler alert: both end up with the US largely intact and Russian reduced to an extremely niche language, as the disparity in nuclear arms between the two nations in 1962 was enormous.
Then there's Warday (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday) which deals with the aftermath of a limited and quick war in the 80s.
No doubt all three have inaccuracies, but I think they paint a much more realistic picture of the situation than the more typical "mutants everywhere" or "literally every single human being dies" treatment.
According to a March 2014 budget request, the Air
Force plans to spend $14 million on the project this
year, and a total of $40.6 million between 2014 and 2019.
Even the expensive ones that do are often overblown. As I understand it, the infamous $500 hammer was a specialized non-sparking hammer for use in an environment where the atmosphere was explosive. The $500 toilet seat was actually a full fiberglass molded unit (both seats, the thing they went on, and associated other stuff) custom fitted and produced in numbers of just a few dozen for an unusual space in an airplane.
Not that there isn't waste, but it's often different from what gets reported....
The "coffee maker" was for the freaking C5, a huge transport, our biggest ever; if configured for carrying people, it might have to serve a lot of coffee over a long trip (can be refueled in mid-air). It would also be ... more than inconvenient if turbulence or whatever caused it to spray hot coffee. And if you're serving a lot of coffee, that leads straight to:
The "toilet seats" were much like you say, small quantity and being for a military airplane, weight is a big consideration. Note that pretty much any modern military plane that's big enough to have one or more toilets is going to produced in small numbers. Heck, Lockheed only made 650 P-3 Orions (naval patrol craft), Boeing only 744 B-52s; if this was for the C5-A as I remember, we only built 131 of them, and only 81 in the initial 1968-73 batch (no doubt canceled like everything else then), followed by an inevitably expensive restart of only 50 in 1985-89.
As far as coffee makers go, it's not always true in aircraft---especially combat aircraft---that gravity always points down. You see the same awareness in NASA Tech Briefs: coffee makers, toilet seats, even simple things like cabinet latches can't depend on gravity always having the same magnitude, or direction, or steadiness.
[1] Ben R. Rich. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. ISBN 0-316-74300-3.
And yes, overhead and accounting can make prices interesting, especially when somebody has a political axe to grind. The trend towards smaller numbers of more sophisticated aircraft exacerbates it. For a random example, the marginal cost of building a new F-22 (if they were still being built at all) is about $150 million, but if you just take the program cost and divide it by the relatively small number (under 200) built, you get about $350 million apiece. Someone who wants to portray the F-22 as cost effective will no doubt use the $150 million number, and someone who wants to talk about how expensive and wasteful it is will use the $350 million number....
3,970 B-25s Superfortresses, which we kept using for a long time, along with a B-50 upgrade, 370 units.
384 B-36 Peacemakers.
744 B-52 Stratofortresses (but we actually used them in hot wars).
100 B-1B Lancers, although they were built as stopgaps, and the remaining active fleet of 67 have had their nuclear weapon capability removed.
21 B-2 Spirits, for like the F-22 we stopped production way too early.
Anyway, the problem here is that, someday, we're going to fight a serious hot war again, and these paltry numbers, which will decline due to wear and tear and operational losses won't suffice absent it going nuclear. ALL F-15s built have a nasty problem with a structural defect, what was built was not what was specified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15#Structural_defects) ... the F-35 looks like our generation's TFX....
Anyone want to bet the F/A-18F Super Hornet will play the same historical role the F-4 Phantom II?
Your friend's bird, particularly if he was in recently, was an EA-6B Prowler, the electronic warfare variant of the A-6.
Edit: Are there high-availability versions of Windows? If so, does that version run Word?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server
> If so, does that version run Word?
Yes.
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boeing-b52-C...