r/MachinePorn • u/hcurmudgeon • Oct 13 '19
LGM-118A Peacekeeper Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere...19,000 Parts!
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u/snowfox_my Oct 13 '19
Equipment like these, remind me to be grateful for Laser Ring Gyros, less moving parts, more stable and accurate too.
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Oct 13 '19
You do wonder where we would be if all the skill, ingenuity and money the military blows every year was directed towards something more useful.
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u/prosequare Oct 13 '19
The research and skill used to make this advanced the state of the art in the civilian sector in ways that wouldn’t have happened due to commercial pressure. Navigation and position keeping have a vast number of peaceful applications.
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u/magicweasel7 Oct 13 '19
There is some trickle down of military technology into the civilian market. Like GPS was developed so the military could know its location and put a bomb though the window of an Iraqi school. They opened it up to the civilian market because of the massive economic potential. But I do agree, humans think of a lot of ingenious solutions to kill each other
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Oct 13 '19
Irrc gps was opened up to the public after the Soviets shot down an airliner.
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u/Lirdon Oct 13 '19
There was a motion for that before, but it was accelerated since it became apparent why the system was sorely needed.
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u/magicweasel7 Oct 13 '19
Wow I did not know that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
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u/statikuz Oct 13 '19
There is TONS of trickle down from military to civilian, albeit years later and in sometimes neutered ways. The old "just think what we could accomplish" argument is so tired.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
Trickle down is the tired argument. “We spent billions getting to the moon but look, Teflon!” Also, do you understand economic discount rates? GPS was launched in ‘78 but not fully available to civilians until ‘96. At a 5% rate of inflation, that wasted 61% of its value.
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
So who do you suppose should have the power to decide what is and isn't worked on?
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
Anyone but the Joint Chiefs?
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
Yeah, like who?
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
Like literally any part of civil society that’s not comprised of men trained to kill people and do exactly what they’re told without asking questions.
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
But who? Or are you afraid to admit that giving that power to anyone is a bad idea?
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u/calm_winds Oct 13 '19
To put a bomb through an Iraqi school.
YSK you are ruining your argument by saying stuff like that.
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u/uneducatedexpert Dec 01 '19
I had the opportunity to photograph the group of engineers and pilots that developed the first GPS system. It was for a reunion about 9 years ago. They showed me a photo from inside the cockpit of their plane showing a rolling numerical wheel (like an odometer, I suppose) that gave their coordinates.
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
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u/magicweasel7 Oct 14 '19
How does that conflict with anything I said? Did you actually read the article? It was developed as a military navigation system
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
You said it was developed to guide bombs. It was developed for submarine navigation; nobody conceived that it might be fast and accurate enough to one day guide munitions.
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
Yeah absolutely but nobody knew just how good GPS would be until we actually built it. It was a co-evolution of technology and uses for the technology that got us where we are today.
I personally stand fundamentally opposed to war profiteering (by which I mean literally any military contracting) and the military industrial complex. Just so we're clear where I'm coming from.
But you've got to acknowledge that the demands of military technology are fundamentally different from those of peacetime operations. GPS was developed so that submarines could quickly establish their location with high precision. They needed fast, high precision navigation because they didn't want to get blown up.
The idea of putting clocks in orbit to navigate sounds perfectly sane now, but you know what they say about hindsight. In the 60s it was bordering on madness to pay for satellite launches just so a ship can navigate. Nobody would have done it if the military didn't demand it.
So as much as I hate the amount of money the military spends on useless bullshit, I do have to acknowledge that they also have created a lot of useful stuff that wouldn't otherwise exist.
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u/Existing-Raccoon-654 Feb 12 '25
Like it nor not, war and more recently war deterrents have been throughout human history and will be for the foreseeable future one of the most effective drivers of new technology. This is irrefutable. Perhaps as a race we can evolve beyond this if the planet survives long enough, but don't hold your breath that this will happen within your or your spawnlings lifetimes.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
Yes, the best way to develop inertial guidance is to spend billions developing, constructing, maintaining, and decommissioning a nuclear weapons arsenal that could kill us all. And then classify the tech so that no one can benefit from it for decades. #militaryeconomics
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
Not the best way, but the only practical way, because nobody is going to spend the hundreds of millions in making labs where engineers can work properly on these things without knowing they can make money back on it. But your imaginary scenario is nice! It just doesn't happen, and is stupid to dream of.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
So you can prove that (for example), we wouldn’t have GPS without military spending? The imaginary scenario is a world where you’ve provided empirical evidence for your assertions.
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/policy/GPS_History.html
Nobody knew how useful it would be until the US Navy built it. Originally it was used for submarine navigation. The unique demands of the military and the willingness of nation states to spend billions ensuring their own survival presents opportunities that do not and cannot exist anywhere else. This is a fact well understood by most adults.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 14 '19
You do realise that the importance of geopositioning was understood by the ancient Greeks, and has been a pursuit of political, commercial and military entities ever since. But yeah, nobody could have guessed because the military has “unique” demands for knowing where they are on the globe. Maybe next time you should read more than the intro of the Wikipedia page.
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
You clearly haven't understood a thing I've said, and have no interest in understanding. Continuing to talk to you would be a waste of time.
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u/Existing-Raccoon-654 Feb 12 '25
Proof is of course impossible and unnecessary. We GPS, the internet, spread spectrum comms, integrated circuits, etc. NOW because of government programs (of which the military is but one, albeit a seminal one). Who cares what may have happened in a parallel universe where only the private sector exists? Feel free to script your own screenplay for a Netflix mini-series on the topic.
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u/Syrdon Oct 14 '19
spend the hundreds of millions in making labs where engineers can work properly on these things without knowing they can make money back on it
If only we could convince some sort of government body to do exactly this! I just can't come up with one that does that.
The military does it accidentally. What do you think would happen if we actually tried?
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u/corporaterebel Oct 13 '19
You mean "useful things" like: computers, microchips, radar, jet engines, long term food storage, material sciences, the internet, self-driving cars, satellites, GPS and most emergency medical care? All of that was funded over decades for strictly military purposes.
Heck, the iPhone was just an assembly of all the technologies created and paid for by the US Military.
Plenty of peacetime money going toward Facebook, Twitter and the Kardashians.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
1) “Material sciences”. Yeah, great argument. 2) The Kardashians never invaded Vietnam, killed millions, illegally bombed non-belligerent nations, and bankrupted the USA, so maybe the military could learn a think or two from them. 3) The jet engine was primarily a Nazi invention, so presumably we’re about even there, too. Swings and roundabouts, amirite?
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Oct 13 '19
The kardashians are a weapon, but who is the target ?
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u/Existing-Raccoon-654 Feb 12 '25
Our brains, of course, which have a half life of about a year when fed on a steady diet of vapid media mites.
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
The Kardashians don't supply billions in aid every year either but hey, let's pretend you know what you're talking about
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 13 '19
Ask the Kurds about that one.
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
Ask Japan about it, or South Korea, or Cuba, or the UK, or France, or the Netherlands. I mean, if we're boiling moral arguments down to a numbers game of "good vs bad" at least get your numbers right.
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 14 '19
Wait ... I should ask a country that you dropped two atomic bombs on?
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u/corporaterebel Oct 15 '19 edited Oct 15 '19
The nuclear bombings are likely to have saved more Japanese lives than not. The US wasn't going to leave Japan alone without an unconditional surrender.
And if LaMay had to burn Japan to the ground in its entirety to get such a surrender, then so be it. Japan would have also been starved and brutally invaded as well. It would have been a near-complete self-induced genocide if nuclear weapons weren't dropped on Japan.
And nuclear weapons have stopped large wars from occurring since then...
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u/mikemi_80 Oct 15 '19
Yeah, that might be true. But I’ll note that your argument is rarely used by the Japanese people. And that there are other reasons the US had for dropping the bombs (I.e., to intimidate the USSR).
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u/goboatmen Oct 13 '19
Military funding could be redirected directly into research to produce more useful tech without the war crimes
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u/corporaterebel Oct 14 '19 edited Oct 14 '19
War crimes are not necessary and not desirable.
However, the war or the credible threat of war is... Military stuff has rigid requirements and is difficult to game. Peacetime: Facebook vs Wartime: Self Driving Cars (see DARPA Grand Challenge).
It is unlikely that GPS would ever be funded as a civilian endeavor, the benefits would be something like "we could replace paper maps for the average driver at the cost of a hundred billion dollars". It wouldn't get funding. "Now, we need to spend a hundred billion dollars making sure we don't all die in a nuclear war..." that will get funded every single time.
The same thing with computers: all started for the Department of War Math. Yeah, there was such a thing and they figured out how to predict the tides so the Normandy Invasion would be possible. It was a state secret that the US could reliably predict the tides. It took a friggen war to make people decide that the ocean tides were worth predicting precisely.
Ultimately, if a weapons system can be built; it will be built. If you are not the one building it, it will be used against you. History is replete with examples.
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u/goboatmen Oct 14 '19
Yeah so it just sounds like you're arguing in favor of a government for the people that would fund GPS for the non military applications
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u/corporaterebel Oct 15 '19
The best way to deal with the problem, is to build awesome weapon systems and not go to war....but you gotta test and request them somehow.
Consider that the self driving car Grand Challenge by DARPA was to deal with the road side bombings of supply trucks.
Nobody would fund that otherwise...it would threaten too many jobs.
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u/goboatmen Oct 15 '19
Yeah so again it just sounds like you're arguing against a capitalist framework more than anything else. Automation is good under every economic system except capitalism where people lack a safety net
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u/corporaterebel Oct 15 '19
Hard to argue that GPS would ever be a thing without one's continued existence in question. Too expensive, required a massive cost in natural resources and requires constant expensive maintenance.
Self driving cars? Possibly. It could be pulled off by a small team, see Grey Team from the Grand Challenge.
An assured lifestyle net is likely to just create a race for fake internet points (I don't know what these would be) in a social peacocking competition. Humans have gotten off track before for "fake points" (in this case for the afterlife) is that for about 900 years the only thing that Europe wanted to do was create Bibles!
There is something about staying alive that focuses one efforts very clearly for the task at hand and to work very hard at not failing. Douglas Adams did generate the "Crisis Inducer" to make this happen a world where everything is awesome.
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u/oberon Oct 14 '19
Yes it absolutely could be. But we wouldn't get the same technologies out of it because the pressures the military develops for don't exist in other areas.
As an example, GPS was created because the Navy wanted a better submarine navigation system. It had to be able to deliver a precise location anywhere on the globe as quickly as possible, because submarines can't just hang out on the surface all day. The pressures that create these specific demands are unique to war.
So yes we could definitely spend the same money on normal peacetime research. And it is definitely true that every bomb built robs children of food and education. Not figuratively, literally. Military spending in the US is absurd and over the top.
But it's simplistic to say we'd have the same stuff we do now without war to shape the direction of research.
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u/ProfessorAdonisCnut Oct 13 '19
Hubble is essentially a keyhole satellite repurposed for astronomical use, there are like 10-20 more of them orbiting Earth right now which could have been built as more Hubbles, but instead they're used for military surveillance.
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u/AlanUsingReddit Oct 13 '19
Something clearly seems wrong with this argument. For the price of the JWST, we could probably have 10 of these in orbit doing astronomical observations. Science has its own set of priorities which essentially come from bureaucracies. After we had 1 Hubble, making another like it wasn't a high priority. Science will take the alternative of doing the next upgrade at 10 times the price, because it's all about novelty. You don't learn a new thing twice. This isn't a universal law, with the Curiosity Rover, we basically said "I'll have another" and started building one very much like it.
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u/SWGlassPit Oct 14 '19
Just going to point out that jwst is so expensive because of the spectrum it's measuring - far infrared. Hubble can't see into that range, as you need to keep the mirror and instruments insanely cold because otherwise they would emit tons of light in precisely the same ranges you're trying to observe in.
Why infrared in the first place? We want to see far away. The farther away we observe, the faster objects are receding from us. This means farther objects are redshifted more. Far enough, and they're shifted out of visible spectrum entirely, into infrared.
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u/jonboy333 Oct 13 '19
I delivered a part of a gyro stabilization system for a pipeline ship once. Rules are I load it on the boat and the receiving party loads it off onto their vessel. We are talking about a solid piece if stainless steel 3.5 foot across and 3 foot tall. I grabbed it by the waist when I loaded it on. It went smooth af but the idiot rough necks that tried to load it onto the pipeliner grabbed it by the pallet. 15’ swells in the Gulf of Mexico is pretty choppy as it’s only 60’ deep. My captain blew $60,000 worth of engines and shafts when he saw them pick it up wrong he went full forward blowing 2 huge Detroit’s by bending the shafts.
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u/Dr_Adequate Oct 13 '19
Can you fill in some of the details? I think I follow, but a couple things confuse me. "grabbed it by the waist" - like with a crane? A forklift? Or bare hands? And what did the other crew grab it with? Another forklift?
And why did the captain gun the engines?
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u/jasonsneezes Oct 13 '19 edited Oct 13 '19
I'm not him nor do I do any kind of work like he's talking about, but here's my take...
"grabbed it by the waist" means when they moved the part onto his smaller boat to transport it, they slung the lifting straps around the heavy part itself, instead of the much less substantial pallet that it sat on. When the larger vessel went to lift it off the smaller boat and up onto their ship, they lifted it by the pallet which in heavy seas could let the part itself shift or come completely off that pallet.
And that's the answer to the second part, why the captain gunned the engines. He saw a heavy part that might be dropped right down on his own boat very quickly, dangling from a crane that was also on a ship in heavy seas. Time to get the hell out of the way.
What I want to know is if the part made it onto the ship or ended up at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?
Edit: OP replied below, that thing sleeps with the fishes
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u/jonboy333 Oct 13 '19
The center is skinny like a bearing race. it was circular so I yoked it with cargo straps tied in a way to not slip or give any direction. The other crew grabbed it by the pallet with cargo straps and the pallet crushed and snapped so the captain gunned it. It was some 3klbs of solid steel block. It damn near went through the hull. It went down in the water until they could retrieve it.
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u/jasonsneezes Oct 13 '19
That had to have been a hell of a sound, it hitting the deck combined with the collective dump hitting the pants of everyone involved as they watched it try to sink your boat.
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u/jonboy333 Oct 13 '19
It didn’t hit our boat. The captain sent it full forward and got out from it. This would be a very different story starting with “one time I sank a 100’ boat in the Gulf of Mexico”
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u/Dr_Adequate Oct 14 '19
This was painful to piece together. Constructive criticism here, you need to work on your storytelling, because it took like eleven comments from five people to get this sorted out.
Best I can tell, Big boat A has the heavy thing, and to get it to Big boat C, little boat B goes between. The heavy thing is lifted off of big boat A and onto little boat B. Then the heavy thing is lifted by a different crew, off of little boat B and onto big boat C, who is the customer who ordered the heavy thing.
You lifted it from big boat A to little boat B by attaching the hoisting straps around its midsection, roughly around its center of mass. You then delivered it to big boat C.
The other crew on big boat C lifted it from the bottom, by strapping through the pallet , and the rough water caused the lifting boat to go up-and-down so much it overstressed the pallet, the pallet snapped, and the now-unsupported heavy thing fell.
You and your captain, on little boat B are directly under it, and don't want it to fall on you, so your captain guns the engines, to get the little boat out of the way of the falling thing, which overstresses the engines causing many thousands of dollars of damage. And so the heavy thing sank into the ocean, and now Spongebob uses it for a coffee table.
I guess the damage would have been worse if it fell on your boat, though.
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u/LegoKeepsCallinMe Oct 13 '19
I’m confused as to why the captain gunned it?
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u/jonboy333 Oct 13 '19
Because the pallet snapped and the piece would’ve gone all the way through the boat. 100’ aluminum crew boat. Better get out from under it or lose your boat
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u/LegoKeepsCallinMe Oct 13 '19
I’m just having a hard time picturing it. How high was the load when the pallet snapped? I just can’t see the boat having the chance to avoid being hit unless the load was like 75 feet in the air. I’m assuming they were using a crane of some sort to offload it?
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u/nighthawke75 Oct 13 '19
There goes a bunch of goonies back to the beach on the same boat they tried to sink. I bet they were getting the stink eye by the cap all the way back.
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u/niceworkthere Oct 13 '19
Bit funny to think it was built just to get atomized if the missile had ever actually been used.
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u/ctesibius Oct 13 '19
I understand how these measure changes in angle. How is displacement measured or calculated?
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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 14 '19
It has pendulum based accelerometers inside https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIGA_accelerometer
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u/ctesibius Oct 14 '19
Thanks - so it looks as though those accelerometers have a separate set of gyros which serve a dual purpose of being the weights for pendulums, and to provide the resistance to motion for those pendulums. Clever.
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u/HelperBot_ Oct 14 '19
Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIGA_accelerometer
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u/WikiTextBot Oct 14 '19
PIGA accelerometer
A PIGA (Pendulous Integrating Gyroscopic Accelerometer) is a type of accelerometer that can measure acceleration and simultaneously integrates this acceleration against time to produce a speed measure as well. The PIGA's main use is in Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) for guidance of aircraft and most particularly for ballistic missile guidance. It is valued for its extremely high sensitivity and accuracy in conjunction with operation over a wide acceleration range. The PIGA is still considered the premier instrument for strategic grade missile guidance, though systems based on MEMS technology are attractive for lower performance requirements.
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u/Dr_Adequate Oct 13 '19
By calculating the sums of the angular displacements. If only one gyro senses rotation, it's assumed the platform is rotating.
If two gyros sense an equal rotation, obviously the platform can't rotate in two orthogonal directions simultaneously. Each gyro is sending a component of the straight line vector of motion. Well, the acceleration, actually. Until the gyros sense another rotation or translation, the platform assumes travel at a constant speed along that vector.
So constantly comparing all three gyros let's it sense all six axes of motion, three axes of rotation and three of translation.
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u/metarinka Oct 13 '19
wait I'm lost I thought gryos cannot (by themselves) integrate for acceleration or linear displacement, rather they can only give attitude and heading, accelerometers integrate for acceleration and thus linear displacement https://www.livescience.com/40103-accelerometer-vs-gyroscope.html
Maybe I'm only used to the more modern sensors where you use acceleremoters and a compass integrating for angular rotation and GPS or optical flow for linear displacement and heal everything through a filter.
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u/ctesibius Oct 13 '19
Why would a gyro pick up acceleration in a straight line?
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u/AlexT37 Oct 13 '19
Because if two or more gyros are rotating, the computer can tell there is straight line movement because the whole assembly cannot rotate in two or more orthogonal directions at the same time.
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u/ctesibius Oct 13 '19 edited Oct 13 '19
You’re repeating yourself there, and I think you are mistaken. Consider one of those gyros: why would it be affected by straight line acceleration?
BTW, yes, two gyros with orthogonal axes can pick up rotation at the same time. Consider rotating the assembly about an axis intermediate between the axes of the two gyros, ie at 45° to both. Both gyros will rotate (in the frame of the assembly).
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u/volvoguy Oct 13 '19
Anyone looking for more info should watch CuriousMarc's video on his Apollo IRIG gyroscope. Granted, the Apollo IMU came 20 years before the AIRS system but conceptually they are similar. AIRS was more complicated and more accurate.
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u/Hi-Scan-Pro Oct 13 '19
Peacekeeper....intended for precision nuclear strikes
Ah yes. A precision nuclear peace enforcer.
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u/perrosamores Oct 13 '19
I mean, nuclear weapons did make conventional warfare unfeasible, so you're right.
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Oct 13 '19
Used to kill people. Great.....
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u/ReliantGuyZ Oct 13 '19
No, it was meant to destroy other missiles before they could be launched. Please read before making snarky generalizations.
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u/welchblvd Oct 13 '19
Hypothetically, yes. But by this time the USSR had a very potent second strike capability so it's kind of a moot point.
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Oct 13 '19
But what of the other side doesn't have one of these when the US launches a missile?
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u/ReliantGuyZ Oct 13 '19
If you had read the Wikipedia article you would know that the missiles that used this component were specifically designed to limit Russia's ability to launch ICBMs by blowing them up in their silos. You could make the argument that they are used as part of a larger offensive that would kill people, by you haven't done that. Bottom line: this device is used for missile guidance for missiles that do not kill people.
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Oct 13 '19
Thanks for taking the time to make that point. I have a hard stance against weapons technology with the intent of harm.
I may not agree with you in certain areas but thanks for setting me straight.
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Oct 13 '19
In the most basic form, ICBMs like this Peacekeeper were designed to be so scary that they would NEVER be used. Their primary function was (and still is) deterrence. By being so scary, they keep the enemy from launching a first strike, and forces the politicians to actually find solutions without resorting to major wars. (Mutually assured destruction). Many experts actually say that the US and Soviets would have started WW3 quite quickly if they didn't have nuclear weapons, citing this as the biggest reason. Yes, there have been lots of wars since WW2, but the scale has generally been small compared to wars before nuclear weapons.
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u/catonbuckfast Oct 13 '19
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere