Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
|
#1
|
|||
|
|||
"David Stinson" wrote in message ... Trying to identify a vacuum tube based missle seeker head. Can anyone ID this? The box said "NIKE AJAX." "Nike Ajax" was one of the first anti-aircraft city defense systems ever. It was ably designed by Bell labs to act like a short-range detection, tracking, and interception system. But if you do the math of coastlines vs radar vs missle range vs costs, you quickly discover you'd need about 600 times the GNP of the USA to put up enough of these to intercept 75% of the bombers. Oh, and they knew that very soon the bombers would be obsoleted by ICBM's, which would completely obsolete the whole Nike shebang. Even in the free spending 1950's there was only enough spare $ to put up a miniscule shield. Many of the Nike sites were put up in full view of major public thoroughfares, to reassure the public that the US govt was on the job! When the Nike sites were tested against actual "attacking" bombers (ours), the results were less than stupendous. No problem, the results were classified. To further boondoggle things, the Feds didnt want to run the sites, so they somehow delegated the job to each state's National Guard. Mild contradictions with the US Constitution, quickly fixed by a flurry of individual "treaties" between the State Dept and the 50 states. Now you try scheduling the part-time NG troops to man these sites 24/7 with any kind of effectiveness. My neighbor was a programmer on Nike-Ajax. IHRC they had a custom-designed computer that tried to track targets in real-time. The computer had some parallel-processing capability designed in by the Lab wizards. But the programmers quickly found out that all that extra parallel hardware was almost impossible to harness. (Much like the discoveries of later generations!). So the computers couldnt keep up with a typical target mix, much less with jamming or bad weather. Count yourself lucky, you're one of the few people that have benefited from Nike (the system, not the shoe) ! |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
"George R. Gonzalez" ) writes:
Even in the free spending 1950's there was only enough spare $ to put up a miniscule shield. Many of the Nike sites were put up in full view of major public thoroughfares, to reassure the public that the US govt was on the job! Yes, I remember seeing one site just off a main street in Detroit, MI. The site was surrounded by a high fence but citizens (and visitors from Canada, like me) could easily see the missiles sticking up above the fence. This was early '50s. Just wonder if the second part of the name (Ajax, Hercules, etc) refers to the booster rocket that the Nike was mounted on. I recall that some upper atmospheric research rockets were mounted on Ajax boosters. .... Martin VE3OAT |
Reply |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Free Boatanchors | Boatanchors |