Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
Michael, I have been hit by a baseball that was thrown at about 75 miles per hour;
I'd not like to be hit by a metal object falling at about 100 miles per hour (and me with no batting helmet)
Is this where I observe that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? Maybe ET really wants to phone home.
Pun intended or not, still got a chuckle out of me.
That quote still gets mileage. I wonder if it's in Bartlett's Familiar quotations yet.
For
fltlt: About 40 years ago, speaking of high tech radars tracking things, I got to watch the CIWS (Vulcan Phalanx) on a USN cruiser continuously track / adjust its barrels toward my helicopter as we were doing some cargo hook transfers from our ship to theirs.
It was a bit un nerving, even though I knew that it wasn't in "auto" mode. I asked the Weapons officer on our ship (a destroyer) about it after we landed.
He shrugged, and said that it was tracking the tips of our rotor blades.
AEGIS was a game changer in the days of Exocet, Sunburn, et al. However, every radar back then had some inconvenient issue(s) that were part of the bag of tools. Judging from the Navy and contractor reactions, it certainly wasn’t an issue on their radar, pun intended, not many missiles arrive that slow, someone on their side had “What If’d” and pushed the all hands on deck button.
We also flew to qualify Hellfire on Apache, and don’t even mention Sgt York.