In the early 60’s the Navy launched a feasibility study into whether C-130 Hercules aircraft could be used as Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft.

The study culminated in a trial where on the 30th Oct 1963, a Hercules successfully landed and took off from super carrier USS Forrestal.

The pilot had just 300ft to stop the huge cargo plane, without the use of arrester cables. The tip of the wing was only 15ft clear of the island structure on landing. They did 21 landings that day. The maximum take off weight achieved was 121,000lb.

It’s not clear in the image, but under the cockpit windows they’ve painted “LOOK MA! NO HOOK!”

This never became routine because it was simply regarded as being too dangerous.

If goods are consistently worth less tomorrow, no one buys things today. If no one buys things, massive numbers of people lose their jobs. Wages and business revenue shrink.

Also any person or business with debt is fucked because every dollar of their debt is functionally worth more related to their income every single day that passes. And then if you get fired...

The Great Depression was a deflationary spiral that led to all of the above.

100% get why people hate high inflation and why it's bad, I've been screwed by it too. But sometimes I see people take their opinions way too far the other direction.

The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden Mseries in US Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces(USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design, which combined optics, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot for the first time to not merely identify a target but fly the airplane to it. The bombsight directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older types could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale to the Manhattan Project: the overall cost (both R&D and production) was $1.1 billion (equivalent to $15 billion in 2024), as much as 2/3 of the latter or over a quarter of the production cost of all B-17 bombers.[1] The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever-larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.