one of my favourite conspiracy theories of late is...

Bert Raccoon is a communist and Cyril Sneer was simply a hardworking capitalist

[:-) this is my face

The Jack Northrop flying wing excellent that you brought this up. Northrop was attempting to find a way to be able to bomb Germany from America. They found that by removing all non flight surfaces they could greatly reduce drag and increase the range of the aircraft. The entire idea comes from Bernoulli's Principle. By making air move faster above the surface you reduce the pressure and create the desired lift. Flight is possible when lift and thrust over come drag and gravity. Northrop's idea was to attempt to remove all drag so the existing engines of the day could be used to carry a 1700 lb bomb load from New York to Berlin.

For the 40ties this design was too unstable and killed a couple of test pilots but it lead to the later "lifting body" designs that are used by the space shuttle today -remember the crash scene in the 6 million dollar man that was the first true lifting body design - . Not until the computers advance was a flying wing or lifting body safe enough to use. Just a very good idea that was about 50 years ahead of it's time.

If you really want to talk about aircraft that may have ties to aliens we should be talking about the SR-71. I still have a hard time putting together how in the 50s engineers using slide rulers could design and build an aircraft that to this day holds all major speed and altitude records. The offical word on the speed of the SR-71 is mach 3+. This craft employs nothing more then a really big set of engines but that is the American way we just build bigger engines until it goes as fast as we want it to.

well, nottheslacker, you may be interested in the Sanger Amerika Bomber, a hypersonic sub-orbital vehicle intended to deliver a dirty nuke to the continental USA.

Poor Sanger; so far from being a Nazi or political in anyway, all he wanted to do was build spaceships. He got into trouble again later, after the war when work he was doing for the French ended up being used in the Middle-Eastern conflicts.

I've always been incredibly impressed by this design, though, it was years ahead of its time and still looks incredibly advanced today.

Sanger reminds me a lot of Dr. Gerald Bull, apolitical to the point of being dangerous, he'd ignore anyones agenda in order to further his research. Now Bull and his Supergun is a wonderful conspiracy theory for our times - was it the Iraqi Am'am that killed him or the Israeli Mossad? Was Project Babylon ever practical? What exactly was it supposed to fire? And where/what was it's target? What was Bull really doing for Saddam and what did he think he was going to get out of it? I love the Supergun affair; the firm i was working for at the time was actually doing a job with Forgemasters UK, Sheffield, who cast the dam thing!

the u2 was from the 50's the sr71 was from the 60's / 70's

The design for the SR-71 was made in the 50's. The U2 design was much earlier. Most concept Aircraft are about 10 years difference between design and operational. So exceptions exist like the JSF but usually it's about 10 years. HAV-blue later to become the F117 was a product of the 70's most people have no idea that the craft even existed before the gulf war. I was in the USAF in the late 80's to early 90's and I can now say that the wing of F117s were deployed to be used in Panama when the US wanted to oust Noriaga (don't think I spelled that one correctly) that was 1988 while the craft was still a "black" program.
So your statement for the time line of the U2 and the SR-71 are a little off.

he's right you know, ff, it was designed in the 50s, it took years to get it right, it was all new stuff.

Look at our Eurofughter fiasco, that things been on drawing boards and prototyped for over 20 years now and it's still cr*p - the radar (British) doesn't work and the thing goes into landing mode when it flies into clouds (gulp!) not the best thing for a supersonic fighter to do because the softwares full of bugs (that's British too) so the MOD are selling off our Eurofighters before we even get them in service. Great way to waste billions. Now there's a conspiracy, where's all that taxpayers money gone to?

@TAW

Wonderful I see you are another person that marvels as what the Germans did for advancing flight and space travel. I have seen this design before and NASA has too (take a look at the x15, x-20, and the dyna-soar program to see what I mean).
The German engineers that America got before the Russians could laid most of the ground work for aircraft designs today. Germany had the first rocket aircraft, first jet aircraft, first ICBM, first guided missle, most advanced tank designs, first assault rifle, etc. If it wasn't for you Brits figuring out RADAR and stealing their crypto machine I hate to think where all that would have ended up. Also I remember reading something like Hitler put a 2 year hold on all new weapons development while they prepped to take on Russia.

It's kind of off topic, I think this was all to explain that little green men had nothing to do with current aircraft development. See it takes too long to put down a good conspiracy therory

iirc the US wartime radar project's star scientist was.... Hedy Lamarr* the actress (the one on the Coreldraw boxes) she was an electronics genius and a physics PhD but cos she was a woman, and a stunner, no-one would believe she was any good at science so she did her research under an assumed name and had one of her male colleagues publish it. Otherwise you'd have had to buy radar off us.

*not Hedly Lamarr the nasty villain who gives out steenkin badges.

see nottheslacker I'm not so bad really!

Now you are trying to start your on conspiracy theory about you not being so bad.
bwahahaha I don't believe it for a minute. Like I said earlier you have to include a little truth or the lie is harder to swallow.

Taw, forgive my dumbness here but could you explain the supergun for me please. I've never heard of that.

briefly - Saddam Hussein had a giant gun built in Iraq in the late 80s. It was hundreds of feet long and built onto a mountain, to fire huge shells at Israel *and other targets* Captured during Desert Storm and dismantled afterwards.

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long version - Dr Gerald Bull was a brilliant Canadian physicist who specialised in armaments. His vision was of a giant gun that could launch satellites staright up. He began to work on a project called HARP (High Altitude Research Project) for the Can military in the 50s, using modified 16" naval guns. Despite some succcess, the project was moved to the US, because rockets were already putting satellites up. Bull managed to persuade the US to continue to fund his research, and the project became Super HARP. He managed to get reasonable payloads to space alt. but the US cancelled the project in the late 60s.

Bull was forced to find employment and funds for his research elsewhere. he designed artillery, shells and missiles for Israel, S Africa and acted as a consultant to several regimes around the world. All the time he was lobbying the West to back him, but got nowhere. In fact, he even ended up in jail for a while for his work for the S Africans which broke UN arms embargos in force at the time - although he'd been sanctioned by the CIA, he'd become an embarassment to the Carter administration. At the same time he had his Can citizenship revoked. He was also bankrupt. These misfortunes made him a very bitter man indeed.

Eventually news of this under-utilised arms wizard for hire reached Saddam Hussein, embroiled in his war with Iran in the 80s. Saddam played Bull like a puppet - treated him with respect, feted him, showed him round all the highlights of iraq ancient and modern, put him up in luxury, and promised him everything he wanted to hear, even that Iraq wanted to join the space race and launch satellites and that they were really peaceful and could he please help design new weapons to end this teriible war sooner? (Bull conveniently forgot that it was Saddam who had started it by invading Iran, also he chose to ignore Saddam's bloody reputation against other Iraqis)

Soon Bull was churning out modifications of his revolutionary G5 and G6 sp artillery pieces that had served his other customers so well. He was also working on new explosives, shell designs, ap missiles, medium and long-range rockets. It was these Super Scuds that pounded Tehran and Khorramshar so hard during the latter stages of the Iran-Iraq conflict in the so-called "War of the Cities" Thes rockets formed the basis for the Al-Abbas and Al-Hussein missiles that began to alarm the West after the war ended (in an Iraqi victory) as these new weapons, along with the rapidly advancing Iraqi nuclear programme, would give Iraq a regional nuclear capability against several key US allies - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel - as well as groslly destabilise the balance of power in the M East.

All the time Bull believed he was working towards his dream of a space cannon, and Saddam gave it to him, as long as he worked on military applications of space technology eg nose cones, guidance systems. Soon Bull had drawn up plans for 2 guns, a smaller test design and the full thing, codenamed Project Babylon. Strangely the Iraqi insisted that the gun be capable of firing angled trajectories, not just stright up as Bull intended. Also they wanted the projectiles to be capable of reentry.

Bull never seriously questioned this at first, later he was told that the Iraqis wanted to recover the projectiles for study and that they would be fired into the sea for safety. As time went on, Bull had increasing suspicions that what the Iraqi s really wanted to do was put a nuclear or chemical warhead onto the shells and fire them at Israel, for Babylon 1 was being aimed due west at an angle that would re-enter over Israel. Babylon 2 would fire south-east, at the Persian Gulf, again on a shallow trajectory.

The canons were constructed in sections, made abroad at stellmills across europe and manifested as petro-chemical pipes. Eventually various authorities in the UK and Europe stepped in and the pipes were impounded in transit, and declared to be so well made in tapering sections that they couldnt be for oil, but were part of a huge gun. Everyone was incredulous at the time!

Despite this action, enough sections got to Iraq to complete Babylon 1, the Israel gun. Bull wanted out by now, he was scared and had left Iraq and was consulting in belgium. Western intelligence agencies had warned him he was in danger, including from them, Saddam wanted him silenced, and Mossad wanted him to stop him working for the Iraqis. He was found shot by a silenced pistol outside his apartment in Brussels; the killers were never caught. A few months later Saddam invaded Q8

it's suspected that Bull had failed to provide Iraq with certain key elements of his research, and that the Iraqis had to engineer their own solutions, which the Gulf War cut short. However, consider this; Iraq was an ace away from a nuclear weapon. The Supergun, hidden inside a mountain, unknown and undetected by the West, could have fired a no-warning, virtually unstoppable means of firing a dirty nuke at the Allied forces massing beyond Kuwait. Aplane would have been shot down, a missile needs transporting, preparation, visible facilities which are all very visible. Babylon 2 had a trajectory that took it right over the jump-off area for Desert Storm. Saddam wasnt stupid and mustve known that he couldnt defeat the Coalition by conventional means, and even chemicals or bio-agents would do little to stop the inevitable. But a nuke, even a crude dirty one, would be just the ticket. His phrase "Mother of all Battles" also translates as "Mother of all Slaughters" which in Arabic association with battles means a victorious rout as opposed to just a very big battle. Rhetoric? maybe, but Saddam, always with a keen talent for Arab opinion, knew that if he could force a check to the Allies, let alone an outright military victory, he could claim to have won by arab standards. this would make him a new Nasser, and if done with a nuke, would dramatically announce to the rest of the world that Iraq had arrived and was a force to be reckoned with. Makes sense?

But the nuke never arrived, the Allies whupped the Iraqis and the Superguns went unused. The Allies and UN dismantled them and destroyed the parts after the war. Maybe Saddam will tell the truth about it all before he gets the chop.

here's some linkys (you'll love all this, its proper cloak'n'dagger!)

Project Babylon
Gerald Bull
HARP


Edited by - Tawakalna on 7/23/2004 10:00:00 AM

I am beginning to suspect that the lack of success appears to be attributable mainly in Hussein's own resort, in the later years of his regime, to a system in which reward was given (cash) to those apparatchiks who reported success or progress and lord knows what if they failed. What has come out is that much of the later years were "documented" with reports of actually non-existent progress in many areas of weapons development accompanied by queries on when the reporting agency could expect to distribute the cash rewards for these "achievement.s"

Not all Baathists, but many, had turned to a life defined by "doing the necessary" and perpetrating a fraud, in essence. As foolish as it sounds, information that has been developing draws a somewhat different picture of what the Hussein government had been able ot maintain post-PG1. More and more, career Baathist appear to have adopted a more what's in it for me personally attitude without the fear of repurcussions from the likes of Hussein himself of his sons. I think that his defeat in PG1 dealt a blow to his invicibility even at home and the price to pay for the domestic slaughter, of Shiites in the South and Kurds in the North was to surrender to other Baathists more power and influence than Hussein ever would have wanted. Because without those other "kingpins" his own survival would have been at risk.

<Edit>

@Slacker - Why the name calling?

Edited by - Indy11 on 7/21/2004 4:57:41 PM

I didn't think I was calling anyone names? Poked a little fun at Taw that's all.