Very much a plane for Geeks on the inside.

No, that's a In-Flight Refueling (IFR) probe. The American system is to have a rigid probe from the tanker which is guided into a small nozzle on the aircraft.

The British way is to have a drogue on the end of a hose which is wound out by the tanker. The pilot of the smaller aircraft has to guide his probe into the basket.

Do you guys know of the 'Black Buck' raid? In the Falklands, we needed the airfield the Argies were using to be put out service, however the only aircraft capable of putting the amount of ordinance down was the Vulcan.

However, these could only be deployed from long runways, the nearest we had was on the Ascension Islands, 7500km away from the Falklands. What could we do?

Well we decided to fly several vulcans from the UK to the Ascension Islands. However before they left, they had to be brought up to spec. At this time the vulcan was an old aircraft, no-one had done any in flight refueling for years. Equipment for the refueling had to be scavenged from everywhere.

One essential part was missing, putting the entire mission at risk. The part arrived just in time. As it happens, it was in the officers' mess being used as an ashtray!

Once the amarda had been amassed, they flew to Ascesion. In this photo, you can see the two harriers in the bottom left, followed by the hemp-coloured Nimrods. The background shows the Victor, which were to be the tankers.

Here's a plan of the refueling schedule. This is for just one vulcan bomber to get to the Falklands. The whole thing had to be repeated for the return journey.

In the end, only one of the two vulcans made it. It dropped its payload and scored on direct hit on the runway. The physical effect was minimal, the Argies repaired it quickly. What made it a sucess was that they took back much of their airpower to defend Argentina itself. Argentina was now a possible target.

What makes it even more incredible was that the RAF didn't have any maps on the South Atlantic. What the navigators did was take their maps of the North Atlantic and turn them upside down!

Anyway, end of story.

 

...
My dad knew one of the engineers who helped to design the RADAR system in Rapier, an anti-aircraft SAM.
...

One interesting thing about the Rapier is that the Mk1 was actually not a missile, but a hitile:

"The optical system ensured high accuracy, so it was developed with the intent of directly hitting its target, reducing the size of the warhead required to guarantee a kill, and eliminating the need for a proximity fuse. BAC joked that the system was a "hit-ile", as opposed to a "miss-ile"....The missile contained a small 1.4 kg warhead with a contact fuse and a single-stage solid-rocket motor that accelerated the missile to about 650 m/s."

The later versions however were equipped with a proximity fuse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapier_(missile)

 

Interesting you should mention that.

You may have electronic counter measures (ECM), but then the enemy will develop counter measures for your countermeasures, so you develop countermeasures for their countmeasures against your countermeasures. You can see how the quickly becomes silly, so you have EC^nM.

By the time you got past counter-counter-measures your head was spinning. This was one of the reasons so much time and energy was put into passive stealth technology starting with the A12 'OXCART' aircraft. If your radar and IR cross-section was the size of a BB getting a target lock was impossible even with something like this (VHF Radar). http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-Low-Band-Radars.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-.../breaking-through-technological-barriers.html

 

I would like to remind all members that discussions with political content are restricted. This is the reason some posts in this thread have been moderated.

Discussions that might lead to cultural clash are discouraged.

If your referring to my post sorry I didn't fathom asking what government runs a specific country as being too political.

 

Governments and their inner workings are by definition a political subject.
But it was a batch of posts by a few members that built up to a direction I didn't like. Don't think about it too much.