The Final Countdown (1980)
US Navy chief petty officer: It's a code.
US Navy commander Thurman - USS Nimitz executive officer: Can you break it, Chief?
CPO: I think someone's putting us on.
Dan Thurman: Why?
CPO: Because I learned this code at Great Lakes. It's ancient!
Red Storm Rising (1986) - by Tom Clancy, author
excerpt, Chapter 16 – Last Moves/First Moves
A door opened, and a sailor dressed in what looked like a purple planeflueler's shirt joined him on the flight deck catwalk.
"Darkened ship, sailor. I'd dump that cigarette," Toland said sharply, more annoyed to have his precious solitude destroyed.
"Sorry, sir." The butt sailed over the side. The man was silent for a few minutes, then looked at Toland. "You know about the stars, sir?"
"What do you mean?"
"This is my first cruise, sir, an' I grew up in New York. Never saw the stars like this, but I don't even know what they are-the names, I mean. You officers know all that stuff, right?"
Toland laughed quietly. "I know what you mean. Same with my first time out. Pretty, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir. What's that one?" The boy's voice sounded tired. Small wonder, Toland thought, with all the flight operations they've been through today. The youngster pointed to the brightest dot in the eastern sky, and Bob had to think for a few seconds.
"That's Jupiter. A planet, not a star. With the quartermaster's spyglass, you can pick out her moons-some of them anyway." He went on to point out some of the stars used for navigation.
"How do you use 'em, sir?" the sailor asked.
"You take a sextant and plot their height above the horizon-sounds harder than it is, just takes some practice-and you check that against a book of star positions."
"Who does that, sir?"
"The book? Standard stuff. I imagine the book we use comes from the Naval Observatory in D.C., but people have been measuring the tracks of the stars and planets for three or four thousand years, long before telescopes were invented. Anyway, if you know the exact time, and you know where a particular star is, you can plot out where you are on the globe pretty accurately, within a few hundred yards if you really know your stuff. Same thing with the sun and the moon. That knowledge has been around for hundreds of years. The tricky part was inventing a clock that kept good time. That happened about two hundred and some years ago."
"I thought they used satellites and stuff like that."
"We do now, but the stars are just as pretty."
"Yeah." The sailor sat down, his head leaning way back to watch the curtain of white points. Beneath them the ship's hull churned the water to foam with the whispering sound of a continuously breaking wave. Somehow the sound and the sky matched each other perfectly. "Well, at least I learned something about the stars. When's it gonna start, sir?"
Toland looked up at the constellation of Sagittarius. The center of the galaxy was behind it. Some astrophysicists said there was a black hole in there. The most destructive force known to physics, it made the forces under man's control appear puny by comparison. But men were a lot easier to destroy.
"Soon."
From 3/8/1908 ( ) To 6/23/2018 ( ) is 40284 days
40284 = 20142 + 20142
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 20142 days
From 1/17/1990 ( United States NASA announces the selection of the Group 13 Astronauts ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 11300 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 10/10/1996 ( premiere USA title: "Princeton: Images of a University" ) is 11300 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_13
NASA Astronaut Group 13
From Wikipedia
NASA Astronaut Group 13 (the Hairballs) was a group of 23 astronauts announced by NASA on 17 January 1990.
The group name came from its selection of a black cat as a mascot, to play against the traditional unlucky connotations of the number 13.
From 1/22/1905 ( from Wikipedia on the global-internetwork: Clara Harrison Stranahan ) To 5/9/2015 ( premiere USA film "Tomorrowland" ) is 40284 days
40284 = 20142 + 20142
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 20142 days
From 3/29/1968 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Star Trek"::"Assignment: Earth" ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 19264 days
19264 = 9632 + 9632
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/17/1992 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Nova"::"An Astronaut's View of the Earth" ) is 9632 days
From 4/16/1938 ( premiere USA film "Test Pilot" ) To 6/8/1993 ( commencement, Princeton University Class of 1993 ) is 20142 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 20142 days
From 12/20/1994 ( an aviator in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my United States Navy Cross medal date of record ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 9502 days
9502 = 4751 + 4751
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 11/5/1978 ( premiere US TV movie "The Time Machine" ) is 4751 days
From 11/15/1958 ( premiere USA film "Missile to the Moon" ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 22686 days
22686 = 11343 + 11343
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 11/22/1996 ( premiere US film "Star Trek: First Contact" ) is 11343 days
posted by me, Kerry Burgess, June 23, 2018 3:59 pm
Red Storm Rising (1986)
Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 31 – Demons
&&&
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"American fighters!" shouted a number of Russian pilots. Their threat receivers instantly told the pilots that fighter-type radars were locked on their aircraft.
The Soviet fighter commander was not surprised. Surely the Americans would not risk their heavy bombers again without a proper escort. He'd ignore these and bore in for the B-52s, as his training dictated. The MiG radars were heavily jammed, their ranges cut in half and as yet unable to track any targets at all. He ordered his pilots to be alert for incoming missiles, confident that they could avoid those that they saw, and had all his aircraft increase power. Next, he ordered all but two of his reserve force to leave Keflavik and come east to support him.
The Americans needed only seconds to lock onto targets. Each Tomcat carried four Sparrows and four Sidewinders. The Sparrows went first. There were sixteen MiGs in the air. Most had at least two missiles targeted, but the Sparrows were radar-guided. Each American fighter had to remain pointed at its target until the missile hit. This ran the risk of closing within range of Soviet missiles, and the Tomcats were not equipped with protective jammers.
The Americans had taken position up-sun from the Russians. Just as their radars began to burn through the American jamming, the Sparrows arrived, the first directly from the sun, exploding its MiG in midair and warning everyone in its flight. The Soviet aircraft began radical jinks up and down, some pilots breaking into hard turns as they saw the seven-inch wide missiles racing in, but four more found their targets, and in moments there were three hard kills and one severely damaged aircraft that turned to limp for home.
The Jolly Rogers turned as soon as their missiles were spent and ran northeast with the Soviets in pursuit. The Russian commander was relieved that the American missiles had performed so poorly, yet still enraged at the loss of five aircraft. His remaining aircraft bore in on after-burner as their targeting radars began to defeat the American jamming. The American fighter escort had had its turn, he knew. Now it was his turn. They ran northeast, their visored eyes alternating between squints into the sun and quick looks at their radarscopes to pick out targets. They never looked down. The lead MiG finally had a target and launched two missiles.
Twenty thousand feet below them, shielded from ground radar by a pair of mountains, twelve Tomcats of the Black Aces went to afterburner, their radars shut off as the twin-engined fighters rocketed skyward. Within ninety seconds the pilots began to hear the growling signal that indicated their Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles were tracking targets. Seconds later, sixteen missiles were fired from a range of two miles.
Six Russian pilots never knew what hit them. Of the eleven MiGs, eight were hit in a matter of seconds. The commander's luck remained briefly as he jerked his fighter around, causing a Sidewinder to break lock and fly into the sun, but now what could he do? He saw two Tomcats running south, away from his remaining fighters. It was too late to organize an attack-his wingman was gone, and the only friendly aircraft he could see was to his north-so the colonel reefed his MiG into an eight-g turn and dove at the American, oblivious to the warning buzz of his threat receiver. Both Sparrows launched from the second group of Black Aces struck his wing. The MiG came apart around him.
The Americans had no time to gloat. The mission commander reported a second group of MiGs heading their way and the American squadrons regrouped to meet them, forming a solid wall of twenty-four aircraft, their radars shut down for two minutes as the MiGs raced into the cloud of jamming. The Russian second-in-command was making a serious error. His fellow pilots were in danger. He had to go to their rescue. One group of Tomcat volleyed off its remaining Sparrows; the other fired Sidewinders. A total of thirty-eight missiles closed in on eight Soviet aircraft who had no clear picture of what they were running into. Half of them never did, blotted out of the sky by American air-to-air missiles; three more were damaged.
The Tomcat pilots all wanted to close, but the commander ordered them off. They were all short of fuel, and Stornoway was seven hundred miles off. They turned east, ducking through the cloud of aluminum chaff left by the B-52s. The Americans would claim thirty-seven kills, quite a score since they had expected a total of only twenty-seven Russian aircraft. In fact, of twenty-six MiGs, only five undamaged aircraft remained. A stunned air base commander immediately began rescue operations. Soon the parachute division's attack helicopters were flying northeast, searching for downed pilots.
[excerpt ends - by me, Kerry Burgess, 06/23/2018]
From 10/15/1999 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Stargate SG-1"::"Past and Present" ) To 12/25/2020 ( ) is 7742 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/13/1987 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Nova"::"How Babies Get Made" ) is 7742 days
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 12:02 PM Pacific-timezone USA Monday 06/15/2026
