Welcome

Aircraft

Navies

The goal of this community is to stimulate technical discussion about the design, the realization and the operation of an On-Line Public Domain Military Database.

That implies lot of topics: Database modeling, Open Source development, Cooperative and Peer-to-Peer computing, Intellectual Property issues, Knowledge Management and, above all, a great passion for Military History.

Too often, the term “Military” is associated to War and it must be admitted that frequently major innovation and technology enhancements where led by military fundings, expecially during big conflicts.

However, in my opinion, every people needs Peace and history teaches that not necessarily a fighted-War is the intended purpose for armament build-up: take for instance, the Cold-War development of strategic weapons such SSBN and missiles, never used in anger, but very effective as “Power in being”.

I’m quite confident that people joining this community will animate discussion about facts, data and technical issues, avoiding any form of political, racial or religious polemic.

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration is an agency of the Department of Commerce.

Prior to the establishment of NOAA in 1970, these ships were part of the Natinal Ocean Survey, a division of the Environmental Services Science Administration from 1965 to 1970.

Before that, the ships were operated by the Coast & Geodetic Survey (since 1878), by the Coast Survey (from 1834) and by the Survey of the Coast (from 1807).

Unit Identification Code is an unique number assigned, for administrative purposes, as permanent identifier to a ship or boat which served in US Navy or USCG.

Some information about UIC can be found at the Naval Vessel Register web site.

The “dumb” adjective was added during the Vietnamese conflict to distinguish conventional dropped weapons from a new emerging generation of “smart” (guided) bombs able to obtain a greater precision.

The document ruling the designation system for french electronic equipments and sensors is GAM-T-10, issued in July 1981.
Relevant excerpts from that document were kindly released by Jaques Petit via Andreas Parsch.

Even if the designation system seems to rule all the french Armed Services, apparently it was widely applied only for naval equipments.
Air Force radars, for instance, were always referred with popular names such “Antilope”, “Cyrano” etc.

United States Naval reactors are given three-character designations consisting of a letter representing the ship type the reactor is designed for, a consecutive generation number, and a letter indicating the reactor’s designer.
The ship types are A for aircraft carrier, C for cruiser, D for destroyer, or S for submarine.
The designers are B for Bettis Laboratory, C for Combustion Engineering, G for General Electric and W for Westinghouse.

After having discovered that www.spotters.it site was (hopefully, only for a while...) disappeared, I put online my collection of italian serials, announcing it to the group Military_Aircraft_Designations moderated by Andreas Parsch.

After few days, Nico Sgarlato (well known and appreciated aviation journalist and writer) provided in the cited discussion group a huge list of MM serials related to prototypes.

I’m expecially happy, for many reasons:

	the research was reputated worth to be contributed and enriched.
	the contribute was relevant (not a mere correction, but lots of serial indeed).
	the need to accommodate diverging information and more annotations stimulated a change in the Data Model behind, thus improving a less known but fundamental part of the project.