At my first job (defense industry) I met a dude who, in a previous employment, had been given the assignment to investigate the avilable alternatives for air-to-air missiles for a future Swedish aircraft. He presented a few alternatives to the Swedish Air Force.
The response was that they wanted something with more BANG in the explosive part of the missile.
Dude finally got fed up and presented the missile used on the F-101 Voodoo.
The officers were excited and asked about the BANG part.
Dude explained about the nuclear warhead.
Officers were hugely disappointed, they would never be allowed to own nukes …
Sloppy labeling in the video. A missile with a “1.5 KN” yield? First, there is no ‘K’ prefix for SI units; the abbreviation for ‘kilo’ is ‘k’. Second, ‘N’ is the abbreviation for Newtons — a unit of force, not energy; an energy unit would be ‘J’ for Joules, but a 1.5 kJ yield is about as powerful as a pistol bullet, so what they likely meant was ‘1.5 kt’, which would make the weapon being referred to the AIR-2 Genie. The clip is correct, though, in referring to it as a rocket, not a missile; because of the “horseshoes, hand grenades, and atom bombs” nature of the warhead, it has no guidance system.
Thanks for the name, my colleague used that name but it was 30 years ago.
kt is obviously the correct unit.
Many of these videos are sloppy or very sloppy,
I suspect AI has been involved and the content “creator” doesn’t
know diddly squat about the subject
Way too many AI-slop videos where the creators didn’t do due diligence in making sure the video was all good before uploading. YouTube is becoming even more worthless due to this.
Just watched an otherwise good video that was savaged in the comments because the uploader didn’t tell the AI to use historical demographics and a scene of 11th century London showed a large number of Africans and Asians (even some Hispanics) in a crowd scene of a market. That would have been more appropriate to current-day San Francisco. The visuals end up distracting people from the point of the video and many dismiss the whole thing as false when it’s just poor prompting of the AI.
It seems to be the effect of people chasing the YouTube meta, where the more videos a channel owner can publish, the more opportunities they have to get views and the revenue sharing from the advertisements that YouTube jams into the middle of videos. As a result, pushing out videos as fast as possible is the goal, and since reviewing the narration for mistakes requires a human to go over the whole video, and is therefore much slower, a lot of the people pushing AI slop videos will take the other GIGO — “Garbage In, Gospel Out” — and blindly assume that whatever the AI script generator or the AI text-to-speech narration produces is accurate, and may have even less familiarity with the actual history (or just don’t care), so the AI-generated imagery they use is often riddled with hilarious inaccuracies – I recall one video whose thumbnail showed a bunch of German officers looking at the engine of an M4 Sherman, conveniently accessible through the hatch in the front armor of the tank.
The bit of text about destroying formations with a single blast is misleading as the rocket was intended to be launched in massed volleys by multiple aircraft. Mission kills could be achieved without downing the target aircraft, let alone vaporising them; the prompt radiation and EMP effects could render the weapons carried by the targets non-functional.
True that. Most people don’t know that during Korea, 1950-1953, the Pentagon DID have “tactical”, or “battlefield” nukes. The smallest was a 2-man jobber with a low yield, and short range. There was a strong push to use nukes in Korea. Looking back, we ALL dodged a nuclear bullet… Renwal’s “Atomic Cannon”, anyone?..
The M28/M29 Davy Crockett Weapon System launching the M388 nuclear projectile? The yield was only equivalent a max of 20 tons of TNT, fortunate as the range was only one and a quarter miles, although this was later doubled. However, it wasn’t available for Korea during active hostilities as it didn’t enter service until 1961, and required a minimum crew of three, although five was the usual establishment.
And the joke about the nuclear hand grenade that was developed for the Army; it would make a crater a hundred yards across. The punchline was that they were having a hell of a time testing it, because you could only throw it about forty feet…
The Davy Crockett system was apparently, at one time, under review for use by the British Army; (this is probably apocryphal but let’s not spoil a good yarn) after much head scratching and debate, they came to the conclusion that the only place (within the Army’s organisation and Order of Battle) would be within the Infantry Battalion as part of the (then) Support Weapons Company, whereupon it would be in the charge of a Corporal.
The Army Board further considered that they did not think that the use of a tactical nuclear asset should devolve on to the shoulders of one so junior in rank, so decided against its adoption.
I mean, I’m all for delegating responsibility in the best interests of mission command, but this was clearly a case of a tad too much auftragstaktik (!)
