Quote:New Scientist: After the cold war, why didn’t Russia maintain its shuttle programme?
Oleg Kotov: We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.

The idea was to drop weapons from orbit?
Yes, absolutely. A shuttle is particularly useful for this because it can change its orbit and trajectory – so an attack from it is almost impossible to protect against. But the need for such military applications ended.

(12-28-2016 09:23 PM)compsystems Wrote:  Unfortunately or fortunately, chernobyl ended with the USSR.

(12-29-2016 01:45 AM)Mark Hardman Wrote:  "Very good, Louis. Short, but pointless."
-- Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters 2)

(12-28-2016 11:57 PM)Vtile Wrote:  I can see the similarities of the Dragon lang. and IEC-61131-3 Sequential Function Chart lang.(is older than the standard IIRC) or that old french system what the namw of it were have escaped from my head hm..

(12-29-2016 07:34 PM)jch Wrote:  

(12-28-2016 11:57 PM)Vtile Wrote:  I can see the similarities of the Dragon lang. and IEC-61131-3 Sequential Function Chart lang.(is older than the standard IIRC) or that old french system what the namw of it were have escaped from my head hm..

Do you mean Grafcet ?
I remember learning it in the early 80s, mainly to program PLCs.

(12-29-2016 10:59 PM)Vtile Wrote:  Yes that was it - Grafcet, but did it have language application or were it "only" a design system..? IIRC 5-series of Siemens Simatics did have something that were similar to Sequential Function Charts (if so name were certainly different, since it were before standard as Simatic 5 introduced in the 1979 ... wikipedia is a friend Graph5)..