Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 8, 2021 16 tweets 7 min read Read on X
@DrydockDreams has put up another Coral Sea post modeling ships & US Navy CAG William Ault plus his disappearance returning from the strike against IJN CarDiv 5.

This thread goes into what the role of preventable HF communications failure played in that

...disappearance.

To do so I will be using screen captures from Squadron Leader A. L. Hall, RAAF, presentation "farewell to communication failures" reprinted in the Aug 1944 CIC magazine

This is a clip showing the beginning of S/F Hall's manuscript.

WW2 wartime military periodicals often have 'retro' or 'era specific' high tech buried in the articles that modern eyes will not understand.

3/
What that diamond & cross shape with chains between a plane, a ship and two ground antennas represents is a Rhombic antenna.

This antenna was invented by Bell Labs in the 1930's and was used extensively in WW2 era strategic HF coms & SIGINT.
See:
qrznow.com/the-mighty-rho…
4/
At the beginning of WW2 Australian government & military built a series of rhombic antenna point to point high frequency analog voice circuits (wireless telephone of W/T) to link Northern & Western Australia to the South East.
5/
This system brought Australia face to face with the problems of what we now call "space weather" living in the bad radio neighborhood of the "Great South Pacific Radio Blob."


6/
This radio system didn't pop into existence like Athena from Zeus' brow.

Australian Radio Research Board, established by J P V Madsen in 1928, worked together with the Australian civil service & got the American Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism to
7/
...put an ionosphere observatory in Watheroo, Australia.

The operation of Australia's HF wireless telephone system brought Australian RAB scientists face to face with the fact that the British military HF frequency prediction system pushed by Marconi scientist T L Eckersley
8/
...did not work as well as the the British civil radio predictions using the Appleton-Beynan periodic layer model.

E Appleton & T L Eckersley had been academic enemies of the worst sort since 1930. When the British ISIB was stood up in 1941 & copied by the USA. It used the
9/
...rival Newbern Smith model instead.

In Australia, it was all "needs must as the devil drives" & the devil was the "Great South Pacific Radio Static Blob."

Just prior to Coral Sea, Gen. MacArthur called a scientific conference to standardize HF communications in the SWPA.
10/
This standard was implemented for Coral Sea and all SWPA air & sea search elements. They had no problems communicating with each other.

This was not the case for CAG William Ault and the air groups on Lexington & Yorktown.
11/
S/L Hall obliquely refers to this inability of the SWPA to communicate by radio to USN carriers during the Battle of Coral Sea in his manuscript.

The inability of the SWPA & SoPAC to effectively communicate endured until the latter was absorbed by the former in Aug 1944.
12/
The inability of USN carrier groups in 3rd/5th Fleets to communicate to SWPA units lasted the entire war and played a major role in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The US Navy, or course, blamed General MacArthur for this.

13/
S/L Hall's manuscript gives a very good idea of how CAG William Ault died.

Six Mhz was generally the best SWPA HF radio freq. during the daylight hours, but failed at dusk & dawn. But, you had to have planned alternate frequencies for where your plane was going & it's base.
14/
CAG William Ault was not so blessed.

Being outside the ground wave, facing a weather front, Ault wound up in a high freq. "skip zone" where no communications would reach USN CV's.

Like Hudson A-16-198 in S/L Hall's manuscript, Ault got lost, ran out of fuel & crashed.
/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Aug 28
Remember all the professionally incompetent yo-yo naval officers & hangers on claiming FPV drones were not a threat to naval warships in 2023 WHEN I TOLD THEM THEY WOULD BE?

Reality just kicked them one and all in the 'nads...

...HARD⬇️

1/2
I told these professionally incompetent US navalists accounts on X/Twitter in 2023 that both containerized drones and FPV drones were a deadly threat to every naval vessel on the water they were ignoring to their crew's peril.

2/
Those professionally incompetent yo-yo US navalists accounts didn't listen because of their Dunning-Kruger group think delusions.

They refused to accept the reality that surprise FPV attacks happen because the enemy always gets a vote...FIRST!

This is where I laugh at them⬇️
3/3
Read 4 tweets
Aug 23
We need to have a talk about Russian military corruption and its effects on the Russo-Ukrainian War.

It's kind of like these sun-rotted missile truck tires that make my reputation on Twitter.

Corruption happens slowly, then all at once.

Corruption🧵
1/ Image
The Russian Army issued a "live off the land" order in early March 2022 resulted in lots of Russian enlisted stealing outside the line of sight of Russian junior officers.

This hollowed out discipline the RuAF "Professional Volunteers" in early 2022.

2/
Given the visuals of the base level corruption of Russian society in terms of oil income disparity.

A lot of "Russia Strong" yo-yo's just shrug and say, "so what, Russia won wars when it was corrupt."

3/
Read 21 tweets
Aug 21
At a production rate of 100 FP-1 drones a day. Fire Point will make 13,200 FP-1 one way attack (OWA) drone by 1 Jan 2026.

By itself.

Every other Ukrainian OWA drone maker is in addition to that 13,200 number.

1/2
If the FP-1 really is 60% of Ukrainian OWA drone production. (Rather than just recent launches)

0.6 (x) = 13,200
x = 13,200/0.6
x = 22,000

Ukraine is on track to make 22,000 OWA drones in the last 132 days of 2025. 👀


2/
22,000 Ukrainian OWA drones in 132 days certainly is a strategic bombing threat of the first order.

Even if Russia downs 80% of them.

That is 4,400 Ukrainian OWA drone hits in Russia in the next 132 days or 33 and 1/3 precision guided drone hits on Russia per day to 2026.
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Aug 21
More information has come out on the FP-5 Flamingo which gives insights io both the systems and production engineering involved for low cost production.

I'm going to use the WW2 F6F Hellcat & M4 Sherman as examples of Ukrainian FP-5 design choices.

Engineering🧵
1/
The FP-5 GLCM production photos released today shows what looks like a combination of carbon fiber composite, molded thermoplastics, and sheet metal.

Cruciform tail controls are all moving.

Wings are attached before launch like a 1960s USAF MGM-1 Matador.
2/ Image
The FP-5 Transporter Erector Launch (TEL) trailer looks like a new custom build.

Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point, stated to the AP that "Fire Point is producing roughly one Flamingo per day, and by October they hope to build capacity to make seven per day."

3/ Image
Image
Read 16 tweets
Aug 19
I've gotten a lot of comments on this thread here and via DM. I'm going to share one from a Cold War gray beard on the engine that powers the FP-5.

"FP-5 is around 4 x Tomahawk in mass.

FP-5 Engine🧵
...With a similar configuration, drag will not be dominated by lift induced wing drag but will form drag which is typical for 500 knots air speed jets and missiles with low aspect ratio wings.

2/
...So a rule of thumb estimate is that you will need around 4 x the thrust of a Tomahawk F107-WR-402 700 lbf (3.1 kN) engine for an FP-5 Flamingo GLCM.

3/
Read 7 tweets
Aug 19
Slowly, with a lot of notice, Trump is morphing into Pres. Biden

This territorial concession malarkey is exactly what the Biden Administration was playing games with in Nov 2021 via an op-ed by Samuel Charap of RAND in the Nov 19, 2021 Politico.

1/
That Op-Ed advocated, in effect, that the US abandon Ukraine to Russia in exchange for other concessions by Russia, greenlighting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

It was understood in Nov. 2021 era DC that Charap...


2/rand.org/pubs/commentar…
...was Jake Sullivan's totem animal for surfacing ideas of "de-escalation" with Russia.

Former Estonian President Ilves and Prof Stephan Blank utterly shredded the Charap/Sullivan thought balloon.

Seeing Trump revive that Charap/Sullivan thought ballon now is sickening🤮

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets

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