It's a great service for providing the wrong answers to things I didn't search for, but I admit I haven't yet figured out why I am supposed to desire this.
Thank God. The cult was getting horribly boring after coasting on leftover nonsense for a few years and I'd quit doing much but checking in every couple of months to watch them lose money. Here's hoping this produces a fresh generation of bagholders to perpetuate my weird trainwreck-staring hobby with a fresh injection of fascinating new madness!
I was very skeptical of this until I had the chance to fly one of those brand-new C172 models that come equipped with 'em. They're so convenient!
Sure, ye olde haptic feedback + inner ear + stall horn/shaker combo has always worked for me—but if you are a new or overwhelmed or complacent or unlucky pilot, having a big angry indicator sitting atop the glare shield furiously (visually & audibly) informing you of the approaching cross-control stall that is about to bury you in your base-to-final grave makes danger IMPOSSIBLE to miss.
The LEDs were bright enough to be clearly visible even under direct sun, but the Geiger-esque clicking and chattering increasing in urgency as I approached critical AoA made it for me. No need to put your head down or even alter your scan to include it: you can hear trouble coming!
> as if government spy satellites operate on the same schedule with the same priorities as publicly known satellites.
This bit, at least, is more or less the case. Even if you spend some fuel to alter your orbit and throw people off for a bit, you can't do anything major over the course of a few hours without sci-fi engines.
You're thinking of SM-3, not SM-2, and SM-3's minimum altitude is somewhere in the rarefied upper atmosphere when it burns out and can separate the kill vehicle. Not even the abortive SM-2 Block IV was hit-to-kill.
That said, all SAMs without nose proxy fuzing are /theoretically/ capable of directly impacting their targets. Only a scant handful of ABM-specialized interceptors are designed to do so in order to ensure either complete warhead destruction OR a miss that doesn't produce a boatload of shredded debris clutter.
A direct hit would shred a huge amount of of the airplane, the expanding cloud of non-warhead missile bits would blow a hole through the other side, and the entire thing would be LITTERED with shrapnel.
A marginal intercept is unlikely; you'd need the missile itself to fail in some way; airliners are, unfortunately, effortless targets. Even then, it would have to miss by an absolutely humongous distance (probably larger than a proxy fuze could measure, so command-detonated by the launching system) to golden BB one single piece of shrapnel into a vital airplane bit.
There are a nigh-infinite number of ways anti-air engagements can go, but virtually none of them result in splashing the target without poking a telltale quantity/distribution/shape of holes in it.
I'm not. The SM-2 has contact fuze capability in some models. Look it up. This was almost under active development at the time, as the SM-2 Block IV.
I'm not talking about therotically here. The SM-2 was at the time in a development program that involved direct hits.
A test warhead for direct hit capability is something that was tested for the SM-2 repeatedly, and was almost certainly being tested around the time this incident happened.
You would not expect any fragmentation in such test. Since hit to kill capability was under development at the time, and since test missiles often have dummy warhead, you could reasonably expect exactly what I said.
Ahh, I'm so used to thinking of SM-2 IV as stone tablet-tier ancient history that it didn't even occur to me that there was a time when it was under development!
If you're talking low TRL dev shots where you dgaf about putting the real boom in since you're just measuring miss distance (presuming you're referring to the IVA's new steering/seeker/dorsals before uhh... 97 or whenever they shipped it?), that makes a great deal more sense.
I am still extremely skeptical that one could punch a missile that huge and that speedy through an airliner without it being blindingly obvious, but it certainly wouldn't have any standard frag bits flying around.
As someone allergic to those stupid cold calls, this is real disappointing to hear—I hadn't been exposed, presumably because I'm already a customer and have been for years.
As much as I love the product, I'll have to reconsider my usage of Datadog in future projects.
Without, personally, as I think I'd have to be completely detached from reality and good taste to opt into wired earbuds.
...but I /do/ think the rest of y'all maniacs deserve a choice, too, even if it's utterly unhinged, so ceteris paribus I'd rather you be able to have a 3.5 than not :P
