Pages

Showing posts with label invaluable. Show all posts
Showing posts with label invaluable. Show all posts

Tuesday, 10 March 2020

Helicopters 75 Years! Part-Two.

U.S. Catching up to the Russian Kamov KA-52 Alligator?

It is only now that the U.S. is finding a place for the Russian Alligator helicopter concept, which is the fastest in the world!

The idea of the helicopter gunship has been around from the 1960's and there early deployment in the Vietnam war, machines such as the Cobra are well established, while Europe developed the Tiger and the U.S. upgraded to the Sikorsky AH-64 Apache. 

Many other countries have just put rocket pods and machine guns on helicopters with a crew of two and use them in a similar role, but these are not dedicated machines for ground support combat and anti-tank or MBT-Killers?

Meanwhile the Soviets lead the way initially in the development of the Mil Mi-24/35 combination special forces and gunship, nothing like it has yet been attempted and sales of it continue to flourish world-wide.

But the Kamov design team cam up with the first jet powered helicopter in the late 1990's and the west did everything to knock it down boasting that the faulty British Lynx was far superior, now demised while down on the south pole the Kamov KA-32/34 transport helicopters are an essential tool to cope with the coldest weather conditions on the planet.

Various new concepts are coming to the fore in the U.S. and many drone versions too, since this is now being seen as another invaluable tool in warfare and many civil adaptions in the years to come?

Tuesday, 16 May 2017

The Motorbike. One.

A passion on two wheels!

The Motorbike has an interesting history and has been around over 100 years, its first hey day was perhaps World War-I (1914-18), when it was devised for dispatch riding and went on twenty-five years later to be an invaluable tool in military intelligence.

The concept was to motorise the bicycle and many original ideas are actually being re-invented today as we move into battery power over that of petrol. Racing bikes did develop better motorbikes between 1919-1939, but there was a plethora of makers, who took up their tooling after 1945.

Apart from the famous names of today Britain was one of the worlds leading producers and much of the 1950's technology went out to India, while the United States is most famous for the Harley. The motorbike of rockers and Hells Angel's chapters, or the road riders of many great motion movies.