A couple of corrections: 29:39 On screen spelling error: 'Colossally' 33:33 I explained DISCOS incorrectly. The proof mass is there because it is ONLY affected by gravity and not solar wind, atmospheric drag etc. this also allowed a very accurate map of earth’s gravity to be built up over time. 35:33 In an ironic twist, I spell ‘pedant’ incorrectly. 39:40 I meant ‘polar' coordinates, not 'Euclidean'
51:13 miniaturizing reactors is relatively easy whats hard is making them fit on an airplane or a missile as the power source the air force never really did make much progress on nuclear powered bombers but it wasnt for lack of trying
Alex, my father served on the world's first ballistic missile submarine as a sonar operator. He passed recently, but he used to say, "We could fire 13 missiles in 13 minutes." I enjoyed the video and hope this message finds you well!
Inertial guidance is absolutely insane, I've thought about this ever since I was a kid messing around with modding games and building simple robots but I always thought this is not practical because the degree of precision you would need is absurd, summing up acceleration to estimate position is basically what they would call a chaotic system, if your clock or accelerometer is even a tiny bit off, it will be magnified so many orders of magnitudes in your results. And yet they used exactly this to guide missiles, no wonder it is so difficult to build nuclear weapons, it's hard to say which is more difficult, the navigation or the warhead itself.
I remember back in 2007 or so a lot of electronics experts were absolutely raving about how the mems accelerometers in the new (at the time) iPhone were a huge deal and would have cost thousands of dollars just a few years prior. I only really understood the hype a couple of years later when I started flying light aircraft and saw what the mechanical gyros in aircraft instruments look like.
Hey, since mems is essentially a gyroscope reimagined in a new shape, it probably also can be used as method of maintaining orientation in 0g, like CMG. Though, would likely to require a bit more oscilating mass...
You've watched my videos before!? Wow that makes me feel special. I'm a huge fan of your work! NGL the opening of this video undersells your software a bit. I'll try and use it in a future video, on my actual oscilloscope to do something more elaborate.
@Alexander-the-ok As just a broken artist at heart, i confess your intro made my day (tbh i'm at the bad spot right now, but still). Not just the render, but the hilarious Cancan theme tune in MIDI(#2?) format over the speedrun of US arms race, which i know by heart and couldn't follow, because the tune was soo good and imposing. Entertainment elevated to a level of art. Also found out about osci-render and you don't need Blender in 2D or DOS-OS old draw coding to make that, got to check out the OP guy. Even without that, a great take on Cold-War-1, and you probably realise that most Soviet space-race "firsts" (with notable exceptions) were pushed for SUCP propaganda victories and global communism soft-power projection, rather than advancement of science.
7:24 Engineering graduates in Canada: here’s a ring made from a collapsed bridge. Let it remind you to always be careful and conscientious in your work Engineering graduates in the USA in the 1950s: here’s a pipe you can smoke when you have to think really hard
UK: ‘Lol you did an engineering degree? Why didn’t you go into banking instead? Here’s a graduate job that pays not much above minimum wage, and enjoy spending your career explaining you’re not the guy that comes to fix people’s boilers’
NGL I'm pretty chuffed at 13:40 my thought processes was "well it's not CF, that doesn't quite exist yet, so then it'll be magnesium or wood right?" I guess my aerospace engineering degree wasn't entirely wasted on me :P
mine started that way then ended "magnesium doesn't exactly get along well with water in dire circumstances and was probably expensive so imma choose wood"
I've been independently working on a video about the remaining Transit satellite for a couple weeks now, it is still transmitting, still strong, as late as yesterday
@@Alexander-the-ok you shouldn't need one, just focus on the antenna, a QFH can be really good when built properly but can be really bad when not, simply make a dipole antenna, around 53cm per leg, and that's enough to receive this satellite, and might even give you better result from the weather satellites as well. Not to self plug but I do have a video about the classic V-dipole antenna configuration. Another thing to consider is that you have your SDR gain set properly, if it's too low the signal will be weak, if it's too high it will get distorted and overloaded by interference EDIT: avoid using AGC, set fixed gain manually
10:20 Counter-city is also probably a more accurate term. Counter-value would imply that Russian leadership values the lives of their citizens. In the Russian context, the term “counter-value weapon” would probably be better used to describe the ground-penetrating nukes designed to collapse the deeply-buried bunkers where Russia’s leadership would hide themselves in case of war.
Right, because the US values its citizens so much. Loss of life has always been such an expensive factor in our geopolitics. We've never started wars for the sake of stockholders and we definitely haven't been screwing over veterans continuously since literally right after we kicked out the british.
@@snigwithasword1284 but it does, and it has been. sure, our politicians have have gotten us into fucked up wars for little dicernable reason, but they wouldn't throw men away pointlessly or needlessly. every step of those fights we have tried to minimize our own casualties, and recently, even those surrounding our foes. Take the Hellfire-X, the knife missile. we made that so that our target, _and only our target_ is the one guaranteed to die. a nation that doesn't value civilian life _doesn't do that!_
@@samblackstone3400 nah. it just means we need different types of warheads to actually have a proper counter-value deterrance. if a non-nuclear bunker-buster poses more of a value threat than a nuke, just use those instaid of the nuke.
14:25 Density and hardness are actually not the only considerations for the selection of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium also happens to exhibit specific properties under conditions such as penetrating armor in which the projectile will continually “self sharpen” by shearing away away material that starts to mushroom out. This self sharpening helps minimize energy loss and allows the shell to penetrate greater thicknesses
Navy submariner, 1970 to 1976. I made six runs on a Lafayette class boomer north of England as a NUC Welder/Machinist Mate. the 16 missiles on the boat were "Poseidon" "The Poseidon missile entered service in the early 1970s and was back fitted to 31 of the original 41 SSBNs. The Poseidon was more accurate than the Polaris A-3 missile it replaced, and could carry up to 14 warheads." Each warhead could be individually targeted. The targets for the run were brought onboard during refit in Scotland by civilian-looking folks carrying pocket protectors and metal suitcases. Memory was in the form of double-sided 14-inch vinyl disks stacked and visible through a window to be checked without entering the missile control room. BTW, there were backpack versions of nukes.
Poseidon is what the UK should have adopted instead of spending a fortune on Chevaline (which was a significant downgrade of Polaris in many ways - 2 warheads instead of 3 and a significantly reduced range). Politicians not wanting to spend money on "new" weapons meant we threw vast amounts of money at keeping the old system going long past obsolescence.
The graphics (like the renders from Artem, the eerie intro sequence, and even the oil painting) really elevate these presentations to the top rung of TH-cam.
Really Alex, how do you expect me to pay attention to your impeccable technical content (edit: and unfathomably awesome oscilloscope graphics) when you've got me laughing this hard at the juxtaposed chiptune Can-Can music going on in the background?!
The more I learn about the US space program, the more impressive it becomes, with hidden gems like Transit that I've never heard of before. It would be really interesting to view a lengthy timeline of US vs. Soviet achievements in space, and see how much the Soviets sacrificed in terms of capabilities for sensational press coverage while the US had its head down, gunning for material achievments that would pay off in decades. Also, the 3d modeling is incredibly well done, huge props to Artem
I think this video discusses Soviet achievements in a pretty fair light. Don’t get me wrong, some of their feats were absolutely astonishing (Sputnik, Vostok 1, Venera etc), but others (‘first woman in space’, ‘first animal in orbit’, Soyuz 1) were…a bit silly really. th-cam.com/video/rSK7rUSnFK4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=GntZdcp5Noqj9AwT
@@Alexander-the-ok Thanks! I will give that a watch. I definitely don't mean to downplay their achievements, they were absolutely astonishing for the time, but they could have got so much further if they focused on hard technical solutions rather than eye-catching achievements. Ironically, those are also the ones we hear the most about now in the context of the "Space Race".
I love hearing about early space exploration in general because it's so hacked together in a way that's often easier to understand than the modern systems that are the most advanced technology in the world. I mean it still was for the time but it's more a case of taking the most advanced systems that already existed and putting them in some box rather than breaking new ground solely for a single satelite.
@@dasrit3 A lot of the stuff that the Soviets did really well is in fields that aren't discussed as much. Their liquid rocket engine designs and engineering were incredible even today, and they developed innovations such as oxidizer-rich staged combustion (first flown in 1960) and full-flow staged combustion (developed in the late-60s but the first engine of this type flown is the SpaceX Raptor) decades before anyone in the West tried anything similar. For many years oxidizer-rich staged combustion was thought to be practically impossible due to the problem of getting anything metallic to survve in an environment consisting of oxygen at hundreds of degrees Celcius and thousands of PSI. Glushko developed full-flow staged combustion for his giant RD-270 engine which was similar in thrust the to the Rocketdyne F-1, but far more efficient. It was intended for the Soviet Moon landing and would have powered the UR-700 rocket that was arguably a much better design than the rival N-1, and far more likely to have worked. Many Soviet engines also had incredibly high thrust to weight ratios that were vastly superior to anything in the West until SpaceX evolved the Merlin-1D into its highly optimised current form. Where the Soviets lagged the West was in hydrogen engines which they were relatively late coming to, although even there they created some truly remarkable designs such as the RD-701 from the late-80s which was a tripropellant engine that ran on liquid oxygen, kerosene, AND liquid hydrogen, switching between kerosene and hydrogen fuel early in the flight to just hydrogen fuel once it reached space. Its combustion chamber pressure (which heavily influences performance) was a record that was only beaten in 2020 by SpaceX's Raptor.
49:00 I ain’t no fire scientist-or even a submarine scientist-but I reckon boats what spend all their time under water routinely going on fire indicates a large number of bad design decisions.
A mix of design flaws, poor maintenance, and poor operation. The Soviets staffed their navy's enlisted ranks with conscripts who did not want to be there and received inadequate training. The result was that their subs were more accident prone than they already were, and crews were less skilled at responding to incidents than they should have been, leading to more severe accidents.
Man, your videos are EASILY my favourite on all of youtube. Probably the only time im genuinely giddy when i see a notification :D Its funny, literally everything you talk about is stuff im so interested in, and stuff that is almost non existent anywhere else on the internet in such an easily accessible way. Especially love insane cold war projects like polaris and apollo, where they threw unlimited funding at everything. Its an engineer's wet dream. Thank you for making these
I think cork is still used in insulation in actual spaceflight. It has better insulating/workability/fire resistance properties than basically anything else out there.
@@Alexander-the-ok Cork used to be the material of choice for ablative heatshields, and as far as I know, the Russians still use it for Soyuz. But the US has moved to engineered materials.
Balsa is still used in model rockets for nose cones and fins. Just not if you're buying a kit from Estes, they've gone all plastic for their nose cones.
This is insane. When discussing the most challenging human endeavors in terms of cost and ingenuity we often think of the manhattan project or space exploration and the moon landing, and yet Polaris is the equivalent to both COMBINED. I cannot get my head around that. Thanks for making this video, I always learn so much from your channel
10:19 - You are one of the few people who deliberately do not use weaselspeak when talking of military matters and I salute you for it. I loathe the modern military (and adjacent) forms of speech like "neutralized," "department/ministry of defense" and others. I understand that all these entities and systems are necessary (to varying degrees), but please stop talking about it like you're spelling out C O O K I E so the 4 year old in the room won't know. These things are designed to end human life as thoroughly and quickly as possible.
Hmm I’ve never thought about that before. Maybe it’s a British thing? If someone used the word ‘neutralized’ in that context here they’d be ridiculed for it.
@@Alexander-the-ok I think your average Joe doesn't use the sanitized military speak because they don't know it, but if you watch enough press releases, propaganda/recruitment, combat footage, etc. you will hear all sorts of byewords for kill and dead, at least in the English speaking world. These are mostly employed by higher ranking officers or servicemen who have a degree of seperation from the act itself (pilots, gunners, seamen), but sometimes used by infantry and special forces as well at least over comms. The purpose as I see it is twofold (granted I've never served), and that is 1. Make it seem more professional and 2. Create a mental disconnect between the act of killing and what it is called. It is very similar to the vernaculars used by cults or political movements (in my mind). It also reminds me of how in WWII the infantry trained on normal round targets, but found that over 90% of the killing was done by under 10% of the men, so they changed to silhuette targets in an attempt to basically pavlov the infantry into shooting to kill, not supress.
@@nomad8723 Important to note that those figures were collected by SLA Marshall and his interview work has been called into question as scientifically irrelevant. While the silhouette target is probably a good idea because of realism, the Pareto principle applied to combat is more due to... take average people and put them in a bar fight, some will walk back towards a wall to get out of the skirmish, some with stand with their hands up and look out for opponents, and a minority with tuck their chin, walk forward and start swinging. Some people have the mentality and will find themselves in situations where they face violence because they are "switched on".
An interesting fictional counterpoint are the warship classes in Iain M. Banks' Culture. These are all intentionally brutal (e.g. Abominator, Psychopath, Thug) since the Culture, as a whole abhorring violence, was going out of its way to paint them as violent, dishonorable, and undesirable (their use was to be only as a last resort after all other options had failed).
@@alexhajnal107 I love the Culture series. I keep meaning to refer to it in a video somewhere. My counter-counter point would be if we did this in real life probably a majority of the population would think it was awesome. Hell, even I would love the UK to name a carrier the 'Attitude Adjuster'. It reminds me of that meme of Chinese propaganda repeatedly inadvertantly making Americans look awesome.
@@stevengill1736 I know that quartz varies its frequency when rotated along its axes, especially the vertical one. Perhaps it's the same with Rb, no idea. It also exhibits piezoelectric behavior, in reverse, forgot the scientific term for that (triboelectric?).
I worked on (read: as a tradesman, not a sailor) one of the ohio class missile boats back in my old job about 5 years ago, and though I don’t know for sure as I wasn’t working directly on any of the components involved, I remember seeing a presentation about one or more of the sub’s launch tubes being converted to some sort of special operations launcher, I would assume to launch carrier vehicles for seals and their equipment or similar. Evidently the navy agrees with you these days about the whole “number of nuclear deterrent subs that are actually necessary” thing, lol.
Worth pointing Trident is much more effective than Polaris, both in terms of the of the number of targets that can be attacked (MIRVs providing a significant amount of crossrange to attack multiple targets, whereas the Multiple (not Independent) Reentry Vehicles of Polaris A3 could only be delivered in a pattern around a single target), and accuracy of warheads.
Great video as always! I'd love to see you do a video on nuclear ballistic missile defenses. It isn't widely known that early defenses were nuclear weapons themselves, used to nuke the nukes out of the sky, and intercept is an even harder problem than payload delivery. On the topic of weird missile fairings, I had a friend who worked on kinetic interceptors and told me his fairing was made of a classified beryllium oxide ceramic because in addition to the usual requirements, it had to be transparent to radar.
Both the sprint missile and the Raytheon EKV have been on my 'maybe' list for a while. Trouble is, much of the info is still classified so they are really difficult to research.
@@Alexander-the-oki could watch Sprint content (especially the launches) all day, I’ve searched far and wide for info on it several times and you’re right….its hard to come by. Having said that - a video of you covering it would be a REAL treat!!
@@Alexander-the-ok YESSSS!!! If you ever were to do a video on sprint or the EKV, that would be a dream come true! I have been fascinated by sprint (and all of nike x... AESA radars in the 60s!) for so long. Unfortunately its really hard to find any info on it. The (unclassified) late 80's footage of old EKV variants thats on youtube is actual sci-fi too. Anti ballistic missile defense has always been seriously insane, quite a bit more impressive than ICBMs themselves imo :D
"I think we can all agree that placing liquid-fuelled rockets inside submarines would be an absolutely deranged decision" - Chevaline (which you mentioned) was an entire packaged hypergolic liquid stage.
That is UTTERLY horrifying. I cannot imagine serving on a sub with hypergolic fuel on board. Hope they kept it from the sailors honestly, knowing about it would only serve to keep them up at night lol
The royal navy was initially resistent but they went to enormous engineering lengths with the packaging to demonstrate it could be stored safely (and they succeeded) - they didn't really have a choice considering the complex multiple-relight requirements.
@@plasticbeetle6209Heyo! I'm a uni student with a chemical engineer room mate, and we had hypergolic fuels just like in the room for the last year. It's easier to sleep than you think next to them. We did also just have regular explosives and some solid fuels as well... Nitro Glycerin did keep me up for a bit, but you get used to it.
Thanks! You just kept me entertained for over 2 hours just rewatching the 1:50 minute intro over and over. 😅 It's sooooo awesome!!! Unreal! Kudos! 😎🎆👏👏🇺🇲🚀.
Thanks very much! I now have the issue of having to constantly ‘up the ante’ for my intros. Ngl the next video will have a slightly less impressive one.
33:33 The description of the DISCOS system definitely can't be correct: gravity affects the trajectories of all freely moving bodies identically. Gravity isn't going to pull on the test mass more than the surrounding satellite. I haven't researched this system in particular, but I know that orbits are perturbed by more than just gravity variations. There are still aerodynamic effects even in pretty high orbits, and even when that's negligible, the solar wind will still perturb a satellite's orbit. What I imagine the DISCOS freely floating sphere did was to provide a mass that was _only_ affected by gravity. This would have allowed the system operators to construct an exquisitely precise gravity map of the earth as they continued to track the satellites, and since the mass distribution of the earth is fairly predictable (weather induced air and sea motion and ground water changes aside) this would then have allowed them to make much better predictions in the absence of tracking than if the satellite followed a trajectory subject to the buffeting of the solar wind and atmosphere.
Wow yeah that was a pretty fundamental error on my part. What you said is exactly correct - the proof mass was affected ONLY by gravity. I’ll put a correction in the pinned comment.
@@Alexander-the-ok awesome! And I should have said in my original comment, your videos are always super informative and interesting, and I really appreciate how you try to present a realistic picture of the sometimes problematic context of the tech you're covering. Fantastic work, love it!
Appreciating your videos. My father worked at Lockheed as a lead EE on various ICBM guidance systems. I'm only a few minutes into your video but I will learn more about what he did than he could tell me while he was alive. Living through the end of Cold War and doing 'duck and cover' drills wasn't fun. Thank God we've survived and will continue to I believe. Oh, and if you grew up as a teenager when Top Gun (or Red Dawn) came out you'd understand why it was so popular. I'm a red-blooded, hetero male who feels the need for speed. Carry on.
I drive by that gantry at Hunter' Point every day! I had heard the tale of the use of the extension for the Polaris testing. To see the actual footage is a real treat! Thanks AtOK, you're the best.
45:00 The Soviets actually conducted a few tests with live Nuclear missiles, notably with the R-14, during the Cold War. There's a video that featured this - it's very rare, so I don't blame people for missing it th-cam.com/video/qFe97u7cUGs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xQsNCrMa8DNpR93U
My uncle wrote the software for the Navy's terain mapping system. The system as implemented on our submarines used passive sonar and thus did not give away position. Thus the boomers could very accurate position with which to load position into SLBMs before launching. Satellite navigation was developed for other purposes. The original terrain mapping computers on submarines required big equipment and vast power. The stored terrain map was giant and no aircraft at the time could carry the computers and database to do terrain mapping. Collecting the terrain map was a project in itself that employed a fleet of special survey ships. My Uncle claimed he served on all the survey ships as a civilian. Since the survey system was a one of kind system, he went on survey runs to deal with software problems as they occurred. Today US Navy Ships use the updated and improved terrain mapping to provide accurate position on a chart like display. The current systems on Navy Ships each have more computing power than all roe computers in the world when the terrain mapping was developed. Miniaturization allowed the terrain mapping system to put on cruise missiles.
@@Vinzmannn I had someone try to insult me with, "wow, you really think a lot of yourself, huh?" (I do, it's true) My reply was, "Yep, how fantastic am I? My favourite parts are the parts where I talk!" Seriously people, you gotta strut.
There's a mockup of a Polaris A-1 in a park in my hometown. I guess the INS was partially designed at the Uni here. I wonder if that planted the seed of my later fascination with nuclear weapons.
I had no idea how much I didn't know. Thanks for the content. After watching this it feels like these obstacles were insurmountable and yet they were overcome and that was done in such a way that the public at large was able to just take it for granted. Engineering is amazing.
I know an old engineer who worked on some aspects of those first missiles, he talked about the way the vaccuum.tubes had to be supported and they used aluminum plate with holes for the glass tube support.
Somewhat sure Capt. Grace Hopper was involved in this great list of accomplishments too. Her lectures have been declassified, they are very interesting.
She would have been one way or another. Not only was she a genius but also an outstanding orator. I recommend her lectures to anyone reading this. She’ll be making an appearance in future videos on this channel.
That intro was absolutely EPIC!! 😅. I watched the first 1:50 minutes a dozen times before moving on to about the 3 and 1/2 minute mark, when the song was still stuck in my head I went back and watched the intro 10 more times in a row. Then I made it to about 6 and 1/2 minutes and went back and watched it half dozen times again. Then I had to do a quick job for work, and it's back to watching the intro over and over. I've been watching this for about an hour and a half and I haven't gotten past the first six and a half minutes because it's so dang awesome!!! 😅😅. It's green (like an ogre) and it has LAYERS (of incredible awesomeness).
First time viewer. That is a beautifully put-together video. I am aware of errors (not a criticism), but nonetheless, very nicely done. From the arcade-game-style intro (which I particularly enjoyed), to the level of detail, refraining from using "clever" language, and nicely done humour, I enjoyed that from start to finish. I assume you are some kind of engineering chap yourself (I am not beyond a basic level). With many thanks. Subscribed (a rarity after one view).
Why? It's not a stretch at all. Ford served in the navy during WW2 on an aircraft carrier. This compares favorably to Reagan who served in the army during the war making training movies and who also has a carrier named after him.
@@derek4950 True, but as Alexander mentioned, carriers in the US are used for PR as well as warfare. Regardless of his service to the public Ford is best known as the president who fell down an excessive amount of stairs. You might as well have named it the USS Dick van Dyke.
i love the intro sequence. explaining everything that goes into a weapon of mass destruction to a synth remix of the can can? hilarious. this video can only be good
i can nearly guarantee that the mechanical clock used in Transit-1 was a Timex, it fits so well. In the 50’s Timex had a commercial where they would attach a watch to an outboard motor and blast it at full power for 15-30 seconds underwater.
54:40 satellite navigation is an absolutely intentional benefit of a space program no matter what its original purpose is because well satellites require spaceflight
I have reasearched the design of older reactors extensivly {as its pretty connected to my schooling/job} so if you want to know, the design, iterations, and just the insane ammount of engineering that went into building them (just not any of the classified stuff)~ But I absolutly love your content. My father and grandfather were both NASA engineers and what your channel goes over puts a lot of the old engineering documentation I have from them in perspective.
There is a Royal Navy Chevaline Polaris missile on public display at RAF Cosford air museum, near Telford, UK. It has been partially deconstructed into sections. It is fascinating to see. This was of course one of the most significant technical and political creations of the Post War era.
Excellent! One of the best pulling-together-of-threads on this subject I've seen so far. Congratulations on the quality of your research. I've long had a fascination with the work undertaken by North American Autonetics on INS (alongside Litton) which lead to the autonomous star-tracking trajectory control computer of the HoundDog cruise missile, a pre-cursor to the VERDAN and MARDAN (navalised Mk2 VERDAN) computers: the MARDAN was later coupled to SINS/TRANSIT system in the subs. VERDAN was later chosen for the TSR-2 flight computer (one of two), licensed by Elliot, but later abandoned in favour of their own 800/920 flight computer designs that eventually ended up in MRCA/Tornado. What a tangled web we weave... if I can persuade you, more on Autonetics' and Elliots' work, please!
It's lucky for everyone involved in manufacturing and handling of those fairings that plywood came out a few pounds lighter than SOLID PLATE BERYLLIUM.
41:39 "One interesting aspect is the lack of specialised logic hardware" It might be called an "Adder", but logic ops are mostly there. It's just that the instruction naming is obtuse. Merge is bitwise OR. Extract is bitwise NAND. Complement is bitwise NOT. The adder can process these at 15 bits per cycle. With those, you can also build bitwise AND and bitwise XOR. This "Adder" also has various shift modes and can shift at 1 bit left or right per cycle. The Multiplication, Division and Shift instructions are "microcoded" on top of this, and so execution time varies.
@@Alexander-the-ok Actually, I read through the manual a second time. It was bothering me that they clearly described the Adder as just an Adder. What I think happened: the Adder only adds, but the shift + logic operations are actually implemented as part of the A and E registers. One major clue to this is that the Add operation always writes it's result to A, but the Extract/Merge operations can write their result to either A or E. Merge might actually be implemented as simply a register write without clearing the previous result.
At 25:12 that's a Thor-Ablestar not an Able. The Ablestar itself was a major first in space being the first rocket stage that could restart its engine. The whole Thor/Delta rocket family are pretty fascinating in their own right. It went from a temporary solution while the longer ranged Atlas and Titan were developed to flying as a space launcher till 2018!
Get yourself a copy of Chuck Hansen's _Swords_ _of_ _Armageddon_ . It's a 3000 page compendium about the development of US nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project through the mid-1990's. There are errors in it, but the references to the source documents are valuable for sorting things out. The development of the Polaris' W-47 warhead was considered quite a breakthrough at the time.
I'm an idiot. The gain was way down. I've had a few folk get in touch saying they have been able to receive it. I get a perfect flyover tomorrow afternoon so I'll try again then and do a community post.
A couple of corrections:
29:39 On screen spelling error: 'Colossally'
33:33 I explained DISCOS incorrectly. The proof mass is there because it is ONLY affected by gravity and not solar wind, atmospheric drag etc. this also allowed a very accurate map of earth’s gravity to be built up over time.
35:33 In an ironic twist, I spell ‘pedant’ incorrectly.
39:40 I meant ‘polar' coordinates, not 'Euclidean'
I just wanna say I love the vector graphics at the start
51:13
miniaturizing reactors is relatively easy
whats hard is making them fit on an airplane or a missile as the power source
the air force never really did make much progress on nuclear powered bombers but it wasnt for lack of trying
"I means 'polar' coordinates, not 'Euclidean'" Presumably, you meant "meant" not "means". =P
Alex, my father served on the world's first ballistic missile submarine as a sonar operator. He passed recently, but he used to say, "We could fire 13 missiles in 13 minutes." I enjoyed the video and hope this message finds you well!
Bruv this vid was 🔥🔥🔥. U got a sub here.
22:31 - I had recently also *almost* impulse-bought a chip-scale atomic clock, and my idea what to use it for was clear: An egg timer.
Wow. Atomic precision boiled egg 😂😂
That's abaolutely hilarious in a poetic way, and i love it.
Inertial guidance is absolutely insane, I've thought about this ever since I was a kid messing around with modding games and building simple robots but I always thought this is not practical because the degree of precision you would need is absurd, summing up acceleration to estimate position is basically what they would call a chaotic system, if your clock or accelerometer is even a tiny bit off, it will be magnified so many orders of magnitudes in your results.
And yet they used exactly this to guide missiles, no wonder it is so difficult to build nuclear weapons, it's hard to say which is more difficult, the navigation or the warhead itself.
I remember back in 2007 or so a lot of electronics experts were absolutely raving about how the mems accelerometers in the new (at the time) iPhone were a huge deal and would have cost thousands of dollars just a few years prior.
I only really understood the hype a couple of years later when I started flying light aircraft and saw what the mechanical gyros in aircraft instruments look like.
@@Alexander-the-okI had a RC quadcopter from the pre-mems era with a *mechanical gyroscope* on it
Dead reckoning is a fitting term in more ways than one.
Hey, since mems is essentially a gyroscope reimagined in a new shape, it probably also can be used as method of maintaining orientation in 0g, like CMG.
Though, would likely to require a bit more oscilating mass...
Excited to see this intro made in osci-render, especially as someone that's watched your videos before!
You've watched my videos before!? Wow that makes me feel special. I'm a huge fan of your work!
NGL the opening of this video undersells your software a bit. I'll try and use it in a future video, on my actual oscilloscope to do something more elaborate.
@@Alexander-the-ok would love to see that!
as an old analog electronics engineer, I very much enjoyed the use of the scope for the bit of video! Very clever!
As i’ve come to expect from this channel…it certainly didn’t dissapoint!
@Alexander-the-ok
As just a broken artist at heart, i confess your intro made my day (tbh i'm at the bad spot right now, but still). Not just the render, but the hilarious Cancan theme tune in MIDI(#2?) format over the speedrun of US arms race, which i know by heart and couldn't follow, because the tune was soo good and imposing. Entertainment elevated to a level of art.
Also found out about osci-render and you don't need Blender in 2D or DOS-OS old draw coding to make that, got to check out the OP guy. Even without that, a great take on Cold-War-1, and you probably realise that most Soviet space-race "firsts" (with notable exceptions) were pushed for SUCP propaganda victories and global communism soft-power projection, rather than advancement of science.
Oh my god the moskva clip absolutely killed me, this channel is the best
Same. It took me longer than I care to admit to realize the joke. (:
It is a good thing they put the name on the ship for those slower on the uptake.
7:24
Engineering graduates in Canada: here’s a ring made from a collapsed bridge. Let it remind you to always be careful and conscientious in your work
Engineering graduates in the USA in the 1950s: here’s a pipe you can smoke when you have to think really hard
Eh I'm sure Canada's made an actual contribution to something meaningful at some point.
@@ShortArmOfGod
Dont make them to contibute again
We dont want another geneva convention
@@ShortArmOfGod Lol how about the NASA Gemini space program.
@@ShortArmOfGodgood luck winning either world war without the canadians who did a whole lot of the dying.
UK: ‘Lol you did an engineering degree? Why didn’t you go into banking instead? Here’s a graduate job that pays not much above minimum wage, and enjoy spending your career explaining you’re not the guy that comes to fix people’s boilers’
NGL I'm pretty chuffed at 13:40 my thought processes was "well it's not CF, that doesn't quite exist yet, so then it'll be magnesium or wood right?" I guess my aerospace engineering degree wasn't entirely wasted on me :P
mine started that way then ended "magnesium doesn't exactly get along well with water in dire circumstances and was probably expensive so imma choose wood"
'Wood!' club checking in. 😁 Cellulose materials, the original 'composites'.
I said styrofoam. This is probably why I’m not an aerospace engineer.
I was guessing titanium, mostly for the irony factor.
I suspected a good proportion of aerospace and civil engineers would guess that correctly. As i always say ‘wood is just nature’s carbon fiber’
7:48 "The US built 41 Polaris Submarines." that's crazy
We only ("only") have 4 modern day equivalents in the UK. And even the cost of those is absolutely eye-watering.
It's crazy to think those 41 had up to 16 Polaris missiles in each one
Overkill is underrated
@@ethans4783and each missle had multiple independent reentry vehicles with a nuke each.
@@billkew5385
Exactly why "Civil Defense" just faded away about that time....
I've been independently working on a video about the remaining Transit satellite for a couple weeks now, it is still transmitting, still strong, as late as yesterday
Fantastic! I’ve had emails from others who managed to pick it up. I’ve ordered a low noise amplifier to try again.
@@Alexander-the-ok you shouldn't need one, just focus on the antenna, a QFH can be really good when built properly but can be really bad when not, simply make a dipole antenna, around 53cm per leg, and that's enough to receive this satellite, and might even give you better result from the weather satellites as well. Not to self plug but I do have a video about the classic V-dipole antenna configuration. Another thing to consider is that you have your SDR gain set properly, if it's too low the signal will be weak, if it's too high it will get distorted and overloaded by interference
EDIT: avoid using AGC, set fixed gain manually
Brilliant thanks. I’ll watch your video and have another try!
That “typical Russian submarine” clip was SAVAGE 😂
It’s an old joke at this point but I absolutely could not resist.
@Alexander-the-ok "It's an old dig, but it checks out sir"
"Love your work Alex, give the Moskva permission to go down"
@@Alexander-the-okYou are wrong. russia and North Korea’s parades main attraction are ICBMs on TEL platforms.
Black Sea Fleet big mad
@@mikoajm122what
Shout out to Artem for always making amazing graphics!!!
10:20 Counter-city is also probably a more accurate term. Counter-value would imply that Russian leadership values the lives of their citizens. In the Russian context, the term “counter-value weapon” would probably be better used to describe the ground-penetrating nukes designed to collapse the deeply-buried bunkers where Russia’s leadership would hide themselves in case of war.
That is a surprisingly good point.
Right, because the US values its citizens so much. Loss of life has always been such an expensive factor in our geopolitics. We've never started wars for the sake of stockholders and we definitely haven't been screwing over veterans continuously since literally right after we kicked out the british.
@@snigwithasword1284 but it does, and it has been. sure, our politicians have have gotten us into fucked up wars for little dicernable reason, but they wouldn't throw men away pointlessly or needlessly. every step of those fights we have tried to minimize our own casualties, and recently, even those surrounding our foes.
Take the Hellfire-X, the knife missile. we made that so that our target, _and only our target_ is the one guaranteed to die. a nation that doesn't value civilian life _doesn't do that!_
This sounds dehumanizing man. If Russian leadership live up to their image abroad then we should make every effort to not stoop to such a level.
@@samblackstone3400 nah. it just means we need different types of warheads to actually have a proper counter-value deterrance.
if a non-nuclear bunker-buster poses more of a value threat than a nuke, just use those instaid of the nuke.
14:25 Density and hardness are actually not the only considerations for the selection of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium also happens to exhibit specific properties under conditions such as penetrating armor in which the projectile will continually “self sharpen” by shearing away away material that starts to mushroom out. This self sharpening helps minimize energy loss and allows the shell to penetrate greater thicknesses
Yeah….I just kind of put the self sharpening characteristic under the umbrella of ‘hardness’.
Fascinating!
Navy submariner, 1970 to 1976. I made six runs on a Lafayette class boomer north of England as a NUC Welder/Machinist Mate. the 16 missiles on the boat were "Poseidon"
"The Poseidon missile entered service in the early 1970s and was back fitted to 31 of the original 41 SSBNs. The Poseidon was more accurate than the Polaris A-3 missile it replaced, and could carry up to 14 warheads."
Each warhead could be individually targeted. The targets for the run were brought onboard during refit in Scotland by civilian-looking folks carrying pocket protectors and metal suitcases. Memory was in the form of double-sided 14-inch vinyl disks stacked and visible through a window to be checked without entering the missile control room. BTW, there were backpack versions of nukes.
Poseidon is what the UK should have adopted instead of spending a fortune on Chevaline (which was a significant downgrade of Polaris in many ways - 2 warheads instead of 3 and a significantly reduced range).
Politicians not wanting to spend money on "new" weapons meant we threw vast amounts of money at keeping the old system going long past obsolescence.
The graphics (like the renders from Artem, the eerie intro sequence, and even the oil painting) really elevate these presentations to the top rung of TH-cam.
Really Alex, how do you expect me to pay attention to your impeccable technical content (edit: and unfathomably awesome oscilloscope graphics) when you've got me laughing this hard at the juxtaposed chiptune Can-Can music going on in the background?!
I came up with that idea for the intro before I even knew what the video chapters were going to be.
@Alexander-the-ok it was like you were speedrunning James Burke's Connections! 😂 loved it!
It’s an ask but he knows his audience 😏
I can’t take this guy seriously. He’s a lumpy earther.
The more I learn about the US space program, the more impressive it becomes, with hidden gems like Transit that I've never heard of before.
It would be really interesting to view a lengthy timeline of US vs. Soviet achievements in space, and see how much the Soviets sacrificed in terms of capabilities for sensational press coverage while the US had its head down, gunning for material achievments that would pay off in decades.
Also, the 3d modeling is incredibly well done, huge props to Artem
I think this video discusses Soviet achievements in a pretty fair light. Don’t get me wrong, some of their feats were absolutely astonishing (Sputnik, Vostok 1, Venera etc), but others (‘first woman in space’, ‘first animal in orbit’, Soyuz 1) were…a bit silly really.
th-cam.com/video/rSK7rUSnFK4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=GntZdcp5Noqj9AwT
@@Alexander-the-ok Thanks! I will give that a watch.
I definitely don't mean to downplay their achievements, they were absolutely astonishing for the time, but they could have got so much further if they focused on hard technical solutions rather than eye-catching achievements. Ironically, those are also the ones we hear the most about now in the context of the "Space Race".
I love hearing about early space exploration in general because it's so hacked together in a way that's often easier to understand than the modern systems that are the most advanced technology in the world. I mean it still was for the time but it's more a case of taking the most advanced systems that already existed and putting them in some box rather than breaking new ground solely for a single satelite.
@@dasrit3 A lot of the stuff that the Soviets did really well is in fields that aren't discussed as much. Their liquid rocket engine designs and engineering were incredible even today, and they developed innovations such as oxidizer-rich staged combustion (first flown in 1960) and full-flow staged combustion (developed in the late-60s but the first engine of this type flown is the SpaceX Raptor) decades before anyone in the West tried anything similar. For many years oxidizer-rich staged combustion was thought to be practically impossible due to the problem of getting anything metallic to survve in an environment consisting of oxygen at hundreds of degrees Celcius and thousands of PSI. Glushko developed full-flow staged combustion for his giant RD-270 engine which was similar in thrust the to the Rocketdyne F-1, but far more efficient. It was intended for the Soviet Moon landing and would have powered the UR-700 rocket that was arguably a much better design than the rival N-1, and far more likely to have worked.
Many Soviet engines also had incredibly high thrust to weight ratios that were vastly superior to anything in the West until SpaceX evolved the Merlin-1D into its highly optimised current form. Where the Soviets lagged the West was in hydrogen engines which they were relatively late coming to, although even there they created some truly remarkable designs such as the RD-701 from the late-80s which was a tripropellant engine that ran on liquid oxygen, kerosene, AND liquid hydrogen, switching between kerosene and hydrogen fuel early in the flight to just hydrogen fuel once it reached space. Its combustion chamber pressure (which heavily influences performance) was a record that was only beaten in 2020 by SpaceX's Raptor.
49:00 I ain’t no fire scientist-or even a submarine scientist-but I reckon boats what spend all their time under water routinely going on fire indicates a large number of bad design decisions.
A mix of design flaws, poor maintenance, and poor operation. The Soviets staffed their navy's enlisted ranks with conscripts who did not want to be there and received inadequate training. The result was that their subs were more accident prone than they already were, and crews were less skilled at responding to incidents than they should have been, leading to more severe accidents.
Man, your videos are EASILY my favourite on all of youtube. Probably the only time im genuinely giddy when i see a notification :D
Its funny, literally everything you talk about is stuff im so interested in, and stuff that is almost non existent anywhere else on the internet in such an easily accessible way.
Especially love insane cold war projects like polaris and apollo, where they threw unlimited funding at everything. Its an engineer's wet dream. Thank you for making these
You’ve really stepped up the production value with this one, fantastic work!
The explanation going from "here's doppler shift" to "this doppler shift is different for every point on earth" is surprisingly intuitive
14:20 wood is still used a lot in amateur rocketry, not quite for the nosecone, but yes! Wood in rockets is still alive
I think cork is still used in insulation in actual spaceflight. It has better insulating/workability/fire resistance properties than basically anything else out there.
@@Alexander-the-ok Copenhagen Suboritals uses cork derived material for their heat shields.
@@Alexander-the-ok Cork used to be the material of choice for ablative heatshields, and as far as I know, the Russians still use it for Soyuz. But the US has moved to engineered materials.
Balsa is still used in model rockets for nose cones and fins. Just not if you're buying a kit from Estes, they've gone all plastic for their nose cones.
This is insane. When discussing the most challenging human endeavors in terms of cost and ingenuity we often think of the manhattan project or space exploration and the moon landing, and yet Polaris is the equivalent to both COMBINED. I cannot get my head around that.
Thanks for making this video, I always learn so much from your channel
What a superbly researched and produced video. Your channel is testament to how good YT can be. Terrific work. Thank you.
10:19 - You are one of the few people who deliberately do not use weaselspeak when talking of military matters and I salute you for it. I loathe the modern military (and adjacent) forms of speech like "neutralized," "department/ministry of defense" and others. I understand that all these entities and systems are necessary (to varying degrees), but please stop talking about it like you're spelling out C O O K I E so the 4 year old in the room won't know. These things are designed to end human life as thoroughly and quickly as possible.
Hmm I’ve never thought about that before. Maybe it’s a British thing? If someone used the word ‘neutralized’ in that context here they’d be ridiculed for it.
@@Alexander-the-ok I think your average Joe doesn't use the sanitized military speak because they don't know it, but if you watch enough press releases, propaganda/recruitment, combat footage, etc. you will hear all sorts of byewords for kill and dead, at least in the English speaking world. These are mostly employed by higher ranking officers or servicemen who have a degree of seperation from the act itself (pilots, gunners, seamen), but sometimes used by infantry and special forces as well at least over comms. The purpose as I see it is twofold (granted I've never served), and that is 1. Make it seem more professional and 2. Create a mental disconnect between the act of killing and what it is called. It is very similar to the vernaculars used by cults or political movements (in my mind). It also reminds me of how in WWII the infantry trained on normal round targets, but found that over 90% of the killing was done by under 10% of the men, so they changed to silhuette targets in an attempt to basically pavlov the infantry into shooting to kill, not supress.
@@nomad8723 Important to note that those figures were collected by SLA Marshall and his interview work has been called into question as scientifically irrelevant. While the silhouette target is probably a good idea because of realism, the Pareto principle applied to combat is more due to... take average people and put them in a bar fight, some will walk back towards a wall to get out of the skirmish, some with stand with their hands up and look out for opponents, and a minority with tuck their chin, walk forward and start swinging. Some people have the mentality and will find themselves in situations where they face violence because they are "switched on".
An interesting fictional counterpoint are the warship classes in Iain M. Banks' Culture. These are all intentionally brutal (e.g. Abominator, Psychopath, Thug) since the Culture, as a whole abhorring violence, was going out of its way to paint them as violent, dishonorable, and undesirable (their use was to be only as a last resort after all other options had failed).
@@alexhajnal107 I love the Culture series. I keep meaning to refer to it in a video somewhere.
My counter-counter point would be if we did this in real life probably a majority of the population would think it was awesome. Hell, even I would love the UK to name a carrier the 'Attitude Adjuster'.
It reminds me of that meme of Chinese propaganda repeatedly inadvertantly making Americans look awesome.
for the rubidium clock, a fun experiment is viewing the response to mechanical stimuli. I've done it with quartz clocks before and it's pretty fun
What do they do...put out randomly varying signals for a minute?
@@stevengill1736 here so i get a notification for the ansear
@@stevengill1736 it will cause the signal to drift in interesting ways
@@stevengill1736 I know that quartz varies its frequency when rotated along its axes, especially the vertical one. Perhaps it's the same with Rb, no idea. It also exhibits piezoelectric behavior, in reverse, forgot the scientific term for that (triboelectric?).
@@ligius3it's still piezoelectric behavior
Thank you for this video. The amount of background information and further topics is impressive. I really appreciate this channel for this depth!
I worked on (read: as a tradesman, not a sailor) one of the ohio class missile boats back in my old job about 5 years ago, and though I don’t know for sure as I wasn’t working directly on any of the components involved, I remember seeing a presentation about one or more of the sub’s launch tubes being converted to some sort of special operations launcher, I would assume to launch carrier vehicles for seals and their equipment or similar. Evidently the navy agrees with you these days about the whole “number of nuclear deterrent subs that are actually necessary” thing, lol.
Worth pointing Trident is much more effective than Polaris, both in terms of the of the number of targets that can be attacked (MIRVs providing a significant amount of crossrange to attack multiple targets, whereas the Multiple (not Independent) Reentry Vehicles of Polaris A3 could only be delivered in a pattern around a single target), and accuracy of warheads.
the number of warheads on submarines they're allowed to have is limited by treaty
Great video as always!
I'd love to see you do a video on nuclear ballistic missile defenses. It isn't widely known that early defenses were nuclear weapons themselves, used to nuke the nukes out of the sky, and intercept is an even harder problem than payload delivery.
On the topic of weird missile fairings, I had a friend who worked on kinetic interceptors and told me his fairing was made of a classified beryllium oxide ceramic because in addition to the usual requirements, it had to be transparent to radar.
Both the sprint missile and the Raytheon EKV have been on my 'maybe' list for a while. Trouble is, much of the info is still classified so they are really difficult to research.
@@Alexander-the-oki could watch Sprint content (especially the launches) all day, I’ve searched far and wide for info on it several times and you’re right….its hard to come by.
Having said that - a video of you covering it would be a REAL treat!!
Miltavia has a wonderful video on the insane engineering of the S-200 which was built to intercept supersonic nuclear bombers.
@@Alexander-the-ok YESSSS!!! If you ever were to do a video on sprint or the EKV, that would be a dream come true! I have been fascinated by sprint (and all of nike x... AESA radars in the 60s!) for so long. Unfortunately its really hard to find any info on it.
The (unclassified) late 80's footage of old EKV variants thats on youtube is actual sci-fi too.
Anti ballistic missile defense has always been seriously insane, quite a bit more impressive than ICBMs themselves imo :D
@@hedgehog3180 The S-200 is nowhere near the same class as sprint. They're totally different things.
6:45 and having 41 Polaris submarines:
Overkill is an often underrated achievement.
Wow I can’t believe they made the Megadeth song into a real thing!
"I think we can all agree that placing liquid-fuelled rockets inside submarines would be an absolutely deranged decision" - Chevaline (which you mentioned) was an entire packaged hypergolic liquid stage.
That is UTTERLY horrifying. I cannot imagine serving on a sub with hypergolic fuel on board. Hope they kept it from the sailors honestly, knowing about it would only serve to keep them up at night lol
The royal navy was initially resistent but they went to enormous engineering lengths with the packaging to demonstrate it could be stored safely (and they succeeded) - they didn't really have a choice considering the complex multiple-relight requirements.
@@plasticbeetle6209Heyo! I'm a uni student with a chemical engineer room mate, and we had hypergolic fuels just like in the room for the last year. It's easier to sleep than you think next to them. We did also just have regular explosives and some solid fuels as well... Nitro Glycerin did keep me up for a bit, but you get used to it.
I had guessed magnesium when you gave a moment to guess fairing composition, I knew it had been used in some aircraft frames.
44:20 wow, that shot of a polaris launch by gemini 7 is just amazing
I couldn't believe it when I stumbled across that a few months ago (before I'd even started on this video!)
The intro was brilliant. So many important pillar technologies of our modern world came from a single ambitious project. Incredible.
Maybe one of the best intros I’ve ever seen. 👏
Thanks! You just kept me entertained for over 2 hours just rewatching the 1:50 minute intro over and over. 😅 It's sooooo awesome!!! Unreal! Kudos! 😎🎆👏👏🇺🇲🚀.
Thanks very much! I now have the issue of having to constantly ‘up the ante’ for my intros. Ngl the next video will have a slightly less impressive one.
33:33 The description of the DISCOS system definitely can't be correct: gravity affects the trajectories of all freely moving bodies identically. Gravity isn't going to pull on the test mass more than the surrounding satellite. I haven't researched this system in particular, but I know that orbits are perturbed by more than just gravity variations. There are still aerodynamic effects even in pretty high orbits, and even when that's negligible, the solar wind will still perturb a satellite's orbit. What I imagine the DISCOS freely floating sphere did was to provide a mass that was _only_ affected by gravity.
This would have allowed the system operators to construct an exquisitely precise gravity map of the earth as they continued to track the satellites, and since the mass distribution of the earth is fairly predictable (weather induced air and sea motion and ground water changes aside) this would then have allowed them to make much better predictions in the absence of tracking than if the satellite followed a trajectory subject to the buffeting of the solar wind and atmosphere.
Wow yeah that was a pretty fundamental error on my part. What you said is exactly correct - the proof mass was affected ONLY by gravity.
I’ll put a correction in the pinned comment.
@@Alexander-the-ok awesome! And I should have said in my original comment, your videos are always super informative and interesting, and I really appreciate how you try to present a realistic picture of the sometimes problematic context of the tech you're covering. Fantastic work, love it!
I yelled "Yay!!", in excitement for the distinction, when you finished your story at @1:48.
How about a nice game of chess?
Holy intro ROFL you truly outdid yourself with this
Alex, Artem, brilliant show.
Appreciating your videos. My father worked at Lockheed as a lead EE on various ICBM guidance systems. I'm only a few minutes into your video but I will learn more about what he did than he could tell me while he was alive. Living through the end of Cold War and doing 'duck and cover' drills wasn't fun. Thank God we've survived and will continue to I believe. Oh, and if you grew up as a teenager when Top Gun (or Red Dawn) came out you'd understand why it was so popular. I'm a red-blooded, hetero male who feels the need for speed. Carry on.
I drive by that gantry at Hunter' Point every day! I had heard the tale of the use of the extension for the Polaris testing. To see the actual footage is a real treat! Thanks AtOK, you're the best.
45:00 The Soviets actually conducted a few tests with live Nuclear missiles, notably with the R-14, during the Cold War. There's a video that featured this - it's very rare, so I don't blame people for missing it
th-cam.com/video/qFe97u7cUGs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xQsNCrMa8DNpR93U
Oooh you spotted an error! That should have said ‘only US live test’. I’ll add a correction to the pinned comment.
Now that the missile knows where it is,
Edit: Nice artwork at the end
0:45 A super-subtle Futurama reference within the first minute, we cookin'
Yes!! Someone finally spotted it!
My uncle wrote the software for the Navy's terain mapping system. The system as implemented on our submarines used passive sonar and thus did not give away position. Thus the boomers could very accurate position with which to load position into SLBMs before launching. Satellite navigation was developed for other purposes. The original terrain mapping computers on submarines required big equipment and vast power. The stored terrain map was giant and no aircraft at the time could carry the computers and database to do terrain mapping. Collecting the terrain map was a project in itself that employed a fleet of special survey ships. My Uncle claimed he served on all the survey ships as a civilian. Since the survey system was a one of kind system, he went on survey runs to deal with software problems as they occurred. Today US Navy Ships use the updated and improved terrain mapping to provide accurate position on a chart like display. The current systems on Navy Ships each have more computing power than all roe computers in the world when the terrain mapping was developed. Miniaturization allowed the terrain mapping system to put on cruise missiles.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Or we fall off as the case may be... ;^[}
And we're crushing them with our giant brains
If they're giants, wouldn't that be _shoulder?_
@@Vinzmannn
I had someone try to insult me with, "wow, you really think a lot of yourself, huh?" (I do, it's true)
My reply was, "Yep, how fantastic am I? My favourite parts are the parts where I talk!"
Seriously people, you gotta strut.
Giants propped up by batshit paranoid military policy 😜
There's a mockup of a Polaris A-1 in a park in my hometown. I guess the INS was partially designed at the Uni here.
I wonder if that planted the seed of my later fascination with nuclear weapons.
The intro is lovely, the oscilloscope, the music, everything.
I had no idea how much I didn't know. Thanks for the content. After watching this it feels like these obstacles were insurmountable and yet they were overcome and that was done in such a way that the public at large was able to just take it for granted. Engineering is amazing.
These videos are so good, I feel disappointed every time I hear "we dont have time to cover them all."
You have quickly become one of my favourite creators to watch, please keep making more videos like this!
I know an old engineer who worked on some aspects of those first missiles, he talked about the way the vaccuum.tubes had to be supported and they used aluminum plate with holes for the glass tube support.
I remember it as aluminum might have been steel.
Somewhat sure Capt. Grace Hopper was involved in this great list of accomplishments too.
Her lectures have been declassified, they are very interesting.
She would have been one way or another. Not only was she a genius but also an outstanding orator. I recommend her lectures to anyone reading this.
She’ll be making an appearance in future videos on this channel.
Love the osciloscope intro, took me back
these videos are food for my soul
this intro was beautiful. earned my subscribe in less than two minutes with some green light, fun music, and talking.
My favorite documentaries! Its STAGGERING the scope and effort poured into Polaris.
despite the little attention this video got relative to some of your others, the effort you put into it is clear, i hope that is enough for you
I was the Shemya station operator for a gps ground tracking station in 1986. Like running a lighthouse. Mostly automated.
My gods you make learning fun. Wish I could give 5 thumbs up.
That intro was absolutely EPIC!! 😅.
I watched the first 1:50 minutes a dozen times before moving on to about the 3 and 1/2 minute mark, when the song was still stuck in my head I went back and watched the intro 10 more times in a row. Then I made it to about 6 and 1/2 minutes and went back and watched it half dozen times again. Then I had to do a quick job for work, and it's back to watching the intro over and over. I've been watching this for about an hour and a half and I haven't gotten past the first six and a half minutes because it's so dang awesome!!! 😅😅. It's green (like an ogre) and it has LAYERS (of incredible awesomeness).
Incredible documentary. I can only imagine the immense amount of time that went into producing it.
I was wondering if you had read inventing accuracy by Donald Mackenzie. Glad to see it was the top of your source list.
Just a small critique: I would prefer if the music were mixed at half the volume or so. It's easier to hear what you're saying.
First time viewer.
That is a beautifully put-together video.
I am aware of errors (not a criticism), but nonetheless, very nicely done.
From the arcade-game-style intro (which I particularly enjoyed), to the level of detail, refraining from using "clever" language, and nicely done humour, I enjoyed that from start to finish.
I assume you are some kind of engineering chap yourself (I am not beyond a basic level).
With many thanks.
Subscribed (a rarity after one view).
22:30 Hiking with atomic clocks to demonstrate gravity based time dilation is always a fun pastime. (:
The realization that one of our most advanced carriers is named after Gerald Ford is mind boggling.
I'm not entirely sure that Ben Franklin would not be turning in his grave either.
Why? It's not a stretch at all. Ford served in the navy during WW2 on an aircraft carrier. This compares favorably to Reagan who served in the army during the war making training movies and who also has a carrier named after him.
Enterprise wouldve been better, or any of the E's like endurance for the firrst carrier
@@derek4950 True, but as Alexander mentioned, carriers in the US are used for PR as well as warfare. Regardless of his service to the public Ford is best known as the president who fell down an excessive amount of stairs. You might as well have named it the USS Dick van Dyke.
@@techietisdead There was a nuclear carrier named Enterprise, pretty sure it's been retired though.
i love the intro sequence. explaining everything that goes into a weapon of mass destruction to a synth remix of the can can? hilarious. this video can only be good
that intro was a insane lmao
Best introduction ever. The video is also really interesting
What an amazing documentary!!! Thank you!
Fantastic effort thanks mate
This project "video" is awesome!
Cheers Alexander 😀
i can nearly guarantee that the mechanical clock used in Transit-1 was a Timex, it fits so well. In the 50’s Timex had a commercial where they would attach a watch to an outboard motor and blast it at full power for 15-30 seconds underwater.
I like the directions this channel is moving towards; this videos was highly entertaining. Thanks you
54:40
satellite navigation is an absolutely intentional benefit of a space program
no matter what its original purpose is
because well satellites require spaceflight
I love the oscilloscope graphics for the intro SO FRICKIN MUCH! How did you go about making them? (Also, as always, amazing video!)
Osci-render. It has a plugin for blender so it’s easier than it looks.
@@Alexander-the-ok Cool, I might try it then!
I have reasearched the design of older reactors extensivly {as its pretty connected to my schooling/job} so if you want to know, the design, iterations, and just the insane ammount of engineering that went into building them (just not any of the classified stuff)~
But I absolutly love your content. My father and grandfather were both NASA engineers and what your channel goes over puts a lot of the old engineering documentation I have from them in perspective.
There is a Royal Navy Chevaline Polaris missile on public display at RAF Cosford air museum, near Telford, UK. It has been partially deconstructed into sections. It is fascinating to see. This was of course one of the most significant technical and political creations of the Post War era.
Opening video is *chef's kiss*
Excellent! One of the best pulling-together-of-threads on this subject I've seen so far. Congratulations on the quality of your research.
I've long had a fascination with the work undertaken by North American Autonetics on INS (alongside Litton) which lead to the autonomous star-tracking trajectory control computer of the HoundDog cruise missile, a pre-cursor to the VERDAN and MARDAN (navalised Mk2 VERDAN) computers: the MARDAN was later coupled to SINS/TRANSIT system in the subs.
VERDAN was later chosen for the TSR-2 flight computer (one of two), licensed by Elliot, but later abandoned in favour of their own 800/920 flight computer designs that eventually ended up in MRCA/Tornado. What a tangled web we weave... if I can persuade you, more on Autonetics' and Elliots' work, please!
Favorite tech/geek voice on the Intertubes ❤
at 15:07 do I see that they, at least in the design phase, were considering a SOLID BERYLLIUM fairing?
Gotta do something with all those beryllium spheres they got at Roswell
Oh wait until you hear about them machining beryllium for the gyros.
It's lucky for everyone involved in manufacturing and handling of those fairings that plywood came out a few pounds lighter than SOLID PLATE BERYLLIUM.
Holy Cow how come you have so few views and subs? This is fantastic
I wish I could upvote this more than once. Great work
In 1989, I was in the Army developing combat robots and aerial drones. It's cool to see how technology evolves.
how tempting was it to say "because it knows where it isn't"
just after 16:48 ?
apparently not irresistable but I know I would've struggled
Best intro I’ve ever seen
I've been watching the intro for almost 2 hours now❤. Words can't do it justice!😅
41:39 "One interesting aspect is the lack of specialised logic hardware"
It might be called an "Adder", but logic ops are mostly there. It's just that the instruction naming is obtuse. Merge is bitwise OR. Extract is bitwise NAND. Complement is bitwise NOT. The adder can process these at 15 bits per cycle.
With those, you can also build bitwise AND and bitwise XOR.
This "Adder" also has various shift modes and can shift at 1 bit left or right per cycle. The Multiplication, Division and Shift instructions are "microcoded" on top of this, and so execution time varies.
Yeah this is what I suspected - it’s actually an ALU, they must have just called in an ‘adder’ back then.
@@Alexander-the-ok Actually, I read through the manual a second time. It was bothering me that they clearly described the Adder as just an Adder.
What I think happened: the Adder only adds, but the shift + logic operations are actually implemented as part of the A and E registers.
One major clue to this is that the Add operation always writes it's result to A, but the Extract/Merge operations can write their result to either A or E. Merge might actually be implemented as simply a register write without clearing the previous result.
Why has TH-cam taken so long to show me this channel? Superb content. Subscribed.
Friendship ended with Scott Manley
Excellent video. Exactly the level of technical I want!
The intro is just mind blowingly amazing, god damn
At 25:12 that's a Thor-Ablestar not an Able. The Ablestar itself was a major first in space being the first rocket stage that could restart its engine.
The whole Thor/Delta rocket family are pretty fascinating in their own right. It went from a temporary solution while the longer ranged Atlas and Titan were developed to flying as a space launcher till 2018!
Thank you for this video. It is Brilliant as are you my friend.
Love your content! Now time to roll up a couple hooters and get lost in an hour or so of esoteric engineering goodness:)
Get yourself a copy of Chuck Hansen's _Swords_ _of_ _Armageddon_ . It's a 3000 page compendium about the development of US nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project through the mid-1990's. There are errors in it, but the references to the source documents are valuable for sorting things out. The development of the Polaris' W-47 warhead was considered quite a breakthrough at the time.
...and immediately into my reading list it goes. Thanks for the recommendation.
Pretty stupid question (but i have made this mistake), did you turn up the gain in the RTL-SDR settings? It helps significantly
I'm an idiot. The gain was way down.
I've had a few folk get in touch saying they have been able to receive it. I get a perfect flyover tomorrow afternoon so I'll try again then and do a community post.
Whenever this guy uploads, I know I'm having an amazing dinner tonight