Salute!
For all you Vulcan fans ( and I am one), a news article on a science blog has a reference to an exercise in the U.S. in which a group of Vulcans and some ECM friends embarrassed U.S. and Canada air defense, you know, NORAD.
I cut and paste, but the whole article is worthwhile. As I cut my teeth and learned the trade flying VooDoo's up north on the Canadian border, it caught my attention. The technology in the early 60's was way out there for applications and not sims or games. I mean, who could afford a home computer? However, I was in on the earliest computer-driven systems and stayed with them until retiring on the flight line after flying a mission in the Viper. So from the article:
"
These international exercises were intended to test the capabilities of SAGE. Large groups of bombers were assigned targets to “attack” in the United States, with the SAGE units controlling the response with fighters and ground-to-air missiles.The UK’s Royal Air Force, flying their new Vulcan bombers, got orders for the exercise, but the plucky Brits ignored some of the details. Flying their own attack profiles (essentially cheating) and using highly effective radar jammers, the Brits exposed wide gaps in SAGE capabilities. Despite a generally high success rate claimed for the fighters in “destroying” their targets, the best estimates were that only a quarter of the bombers were intercepted."
A lot of urban legend to that episode, but a fiction book describing it is :The Penetrators" by Anthony Gray. I went operational a year after it was published and a crusty senior pilot made me read it. You might recall that my flight commander at Deuce School was a Brit Lightning pilot. Was cool to get gear up, change frequency to our division and report up. Watch the gauges and confirm the datalink was working and call, "LimaLima 54( my actual callsign), Dolly sweet". Then hear a steady voice, "Roger, Majority( the SAGE division callsign) assumes control". If the datalink was bad, they used another freq and voice commands. And if that failed, we had BUIC or basic standalone sites for "close" control.
The computer description of our aircraft avionics is close, but the VooDoo did not have the ability to "couple" autopilot to the SAGE datalink like the one-0h-six. We had a crude position on the RIO's scope for the bogey position from us and my altimeter, heading indicator and airspeed/mach meter told me where to go. Nothing "digital", just the gauges jumping around. Nevertheless, the system was impressive and fairly jam resistant. More impressive to me was our radar, which had the genesis of spread spectrum technology with its hydraulically pumped magnetron that could vary our frequency over many megacyles and do so a thousand times a second. Made it really hard on the bogey EWO.
All this was done with tubes! And our intercept computer used mechanical gears like a fine wristwatch to portray my steering commands. Two years after I left NORAD the A-7D came along and used Apollo-related digital computers that were solid state, and inertial platforms were an order of magnitude more accurate than the ones in our early 60's ICBM's.
Link:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022...ever-heard-of/
Gums sends...