[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
By 1950, The F-101 Voodoo was typical of front-line fighters. Top speed: 1135 MPH./QUOTE]
Good God! In 1950???
Were there any enemy planes that fast???
Sam, those Voodoo pilots in 1950 must have been using voodoo. According to your Wiki link
The first order was placed in May of 1953
The first flight was September 29,1954
And the plane entered service in May of 1957.
Uh, okay… The prototype flew in 1948. The military ordered them In 1951. They were delivered in 1953.
I think that’s pretty close to ‘this is typical of front line fighters ca 1950’
Sam Stone wrote:
Not really, according to the Wiki article the prototype flew September 29, 1954 and it entered service in May 1957. The top end fighters in 1950 were the MiG-15 and F86 Sabre both with a top speed of about 660mph.
Less than 200mph to just below Mach 1 in twenty years is still pretty damn impressive but lets not exaggerate! Actually you could get the period down to fifteen years as the typical fighter in 1935 was not that much faster - it was only with the introduction of monoplanes such as the Me109, Hurricane, and Spitfire in the late 30s that speeds started to shoot up.
Sam, do you have anything to back this up? Your Wiki link clearly contradicts this.
Sorry, I was reading the dates for the XF-88, and the order date for the plane. Apparently, it’s too cold here for my brain to function properly.
I vote computers too.
Today there is more computing power (computations per second) in a home PC unit than the entire world had in 1964. NASA basically made the first trip to the moon with computers less powerful than the first TRS-80. It boggles the mind.
Sputnik to Mercury, maybe. Mercury to Apollo, not so much. Bigger booster, bigger capsule, rendezvous technology was perfected with Gemini, but nothing really fundamental.
Another vote. In 1961 I flew on a 707 from New York to Africa. The planes I fly in today are bigger, are more fuel efficient, and have much better avionics, but don’t seem significantly better or faster. Computers started the same time as jets, more or less, and compare the difference in computing technology from 1961 until today.
Airplane technology improved rapidly from the beginning to the DC-3, then had a bump with jets, but computer technology has improved faster and for longer, with no significant reduction as of yet. (The time between generations is moving out a bit, but that is because of economics, not technology.)