Tuesday, July 3, 2012

BBC on Syria; July I&A

Here's something from the BBC that you all might find interesting:  CLICK 

In other news, the topics for July's I&A are shaping up as follows:

-A look at BDA of Libyan SAM sites struck in 2011, with an eye to what this represents as far as current SEAD/DEAD tactics go (seems like this might be relevant in the near future)

-A look at the ROK's ADD complexes

-A follow-on to the I&A special report published over the weekend examining the coverage of Chinese-sourced EW assets located in Syria

Those are all well on their way to being done, and I'm still looking at a few other ideas.  One idea is to explain the problems with this article.

I'm also re-working the layout for the imagery template I use in I&A.  The big one, like the one I posted here for the captured Syrian Type 120 EW site.  I currently have two issues to resolve, and one idea to incorporate.  First, I need to shrink the upper border a bit, to give more space to the image.  And maybe add a surrounding border as well.  Secondly, I need to figure out how to save the finished images properly so that they don't screw up the color.  Look at any of the big images in I&A, including the maps.  Any time I use red (which is a lot), the red parts look ugly in the saved image.  Nice and bright on-screen during creation, not so much after the save.  This is an image issue, not an issue converting to PDF, as it does this to the saved image before I do anything else with it.  The idea I'll be including at some point is to generate a system of identifiers for each location I show.  This can then be cross-referenced with the SAM Site Overview placemarks. 

And now I have a nice six-day weekend for the holiday, to spend working on my next IHS Jane's feature and some of July's I&A.

8 comments:

snakeye said...

Regarding the color issues, could it be a color space issue (RGB image, CMYK editing and saving)?
Anyway, here the lines seem to be bright red, with only some compression artifacts. You can also try to save the image in a lossless format like TIFF so that it gets compressed only once, while creating the PDF.

D.V. said...

Sean,
My analysis is that if you keep it up, your picture will soon be on the internet and celebrity status will not be far behind.

Keep up the good work.

Dan

Anonymous said...

+

halfyoukai said...

Congrats on the BBC piece!

Cheers from DC

Unknown said...

The issues with such ballistic missiles is that (if I am correct) they cannot receive targteting during reentry, making use of conventional warheads inefficient.

And I seriously doupt that China would be willing to nuke the american carrier.

On the other hand it presents very real threat to the chinese opposition in the region (mainly vietnam).

Sean O'Connor said...

They can't receive signals during re-entry, but they can immediately thereafter. You could uplink a midcourse guidance command to an HGV or a guided MaRV and increase accuracy. Furthermore, if you use a terminal homing system on the warhead, accuracy increases further. The idea isn't to hit a CVN with an HE warhead, either, you'd need either 1) some sort of penetrator to blow up well below the waterline and cause havoc, or 2) a submunition warhead to take the flight deck out of operation. 2) is probably the way to go, you don't have to actually sink the carrier to take it out of the picture and a spread of submunitions decreases your reliance on precision guidance.

ffjbentson said...

about your BDA on Libya check this out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0suZr893T0

ffjbentson said...

check out this youtube video on UBL mission
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG6EoSyuinA&feature=relmfu