Monday, March 06, 2006

TMI

If you have young children, you will be probably be going through an airplane phase at some point (and a dinosaur, and a train and a post-rock (hee hee!)) Anyway, I am now regularly called upon to identify air frames. I could just lie, but A) that is wrong and B) they will notice when you forget to name it the same thing later. Global Security has a nice page (I think based on Federation of American Scientist data) that has scads of info on past American warplanes. If you go to airplane museums, you are going to see a lot of warplanes. So if you want to know a little more about the Vertijet, which appears in at least one of the books you will be checking out of the library, well here you go.

Both FAS and Global Security have something for everyone. If you are the concerned citizen type, they have all sorts of info to fill up your flyers. If you are tech nerd, you will drown in data. If you want to understand the various moving parts of the military industry complex, well dig in. The info on Global Security is in fact quite global, want to know about the Brazilian Space program, here it is. Perhaps you are more keen on Spanish intelligence agencies. No problem. Maybe you need some info on WMD sites in the US. An intense level of detail on the US order of battle in SW Asia? They also have all the GAO and CRS reports on the military and foreign policy. You really have no excuse if you claim you can't find any info on these sorts of things.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even with all the info I could've gathered from those links you put up, I'm still gonna go the Star Wars Nerd route and say that the verti-jet looks a lot like Slave-I.
Sweet.
n.

Tripp said...

They probably based slave one on that thing anyway.

If you want to revel in the nerd power check all these Star wars spaceships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Star_Wars_spaceships

Brack said...

Wasn't this the subject of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik ditty?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-111-pics.htm

Tripp said...

Yes and very oddly it was referred to as a love missile.