Originally Posted by
melmothtw
But that doesn't actually mean that Iranian hostilities towards Israel will end,
Completely agree.
They have been using the Axis of Resistance strat versus Israel since shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. That low level harassment with the occasional outburst (From Hezbollah or someone else) is a simple fact of life. What I am sure Mr Biden would prefer is that things between Israel and Iran return to that state of play, rather than ratcheting up a notch or two.
Originally Posted by
MechEngr
{Clock differentials in spoiler}
AFAIK Patriot was bad against the Scuds because of two problems - the first was that different modules used different time-bases that differed in the number of bits assigned to their clocks. The second was that the Patriots were kept running far longer without a reboot than ever before. This meant that the two modules had increasingly different notions of time. One module did the calculation of when to shoot and passed that time to the other, the other looked at a different clock as the basis for when to initiate the launch. Had the Patriots been rebooted several times a day they would likely have hit the incoming scuds. As it was they were firing way off schedule, where "way off" was some seconds or fractions of seconds. I think they were running continuously for days.
See also the Ariane flight V88 had a similar design problem that led to the loss of the launch vehicle and several satellites. "
The active module presented a diagnostic bit pattern to the On-Board Computer which was interpreted as flight data"
Edit to add why they were on line so long. In the anti-aircraft use, there would be long distance radar that would provide sufficient time to wake up the system and get it ready, but with missiles that time was reduced below what the system start took. I would be surprised if a reset would take as long as a startup, but they didn't know the source of the problem and thought it was because the missiles were too fast.
That sounds similar to what I recall from a debrief some ages ago; there were some other bits involved as well.
On the bright side, the less than awesome performance led to PAC Three development and other efforts at improvement.
I'll double check with an old Hawk and Patriot Battery commander I worked with years ago ... if he's still alive. Been years since I talked to him.
for albatross and Ralph: wrong thread guys. Let's not put Mod attractant up if we can help it, OK?