#furious wheatgoogling

[silentwalrus1]

ITHLYN CH 13 wheatgoogling post

aka my author’s notes were getting RIDICULOUS due to the level of bg research required. FUN FACT: writing from the POV of an Air Force colonel with a literal PhD in rocket science is a lot of work when you’re a filthy liberal arts toddler, even when u dont fuckin.... end up using 90% of what you reasearched. Anyway, here be explanations of terminology, tech, links, helpful visuals and other supporting facts for CH 13! 

NASA X-43 scramjet

If you want a general idea of what Motherfucker looks like: kinda like this.  

Trashcan Faraday cage. What Natasha’s doing is putting Steve’s phone in the trashcan to block the signal, then opening the lid at two and six second intervals so the signal arrives at Bucky’s phone in long and short periods. This is a terrible way to contact someone. I have tested this empirically (not very well, but I tested it). I used an Iphone 5S, the official Find My Iphone iCloud feature and a steel ammo can lined with cardboard instead of a galvanized steel trashcan. 

The ammo can Faraday cage did not block the location signal at all, probably bc i slapped it together in 5 minutes and didn’t really check that the edges sealed all the way. More to the point: what I really wanted to know here was the delay between the signal cutoff and the Find My Iphone registering the signal as cut off. I suspect the fidelity is very low due to the nature of GPS contact working on a lighthouse protocol, i.e. pinging the satellites every couple of seconds or so, so the signal in and of itself is already non-continuous. Add this to the other environmental factors that can add signal delay and we get a big fat pile of THIS WON’T WORK IN REAL LIFE. But!! This is the MCU, where I can bend physics as I wish, and more importantly my own damn fic, where I am god. 

 Experimental Results: Did I achieve anything I set out to achieve? Not at all. Am I a huge nerd? Results coming back 100% positive captain

MORE WHEATGOOGLING

Eastern District court of New York and prosecuting terrorists: this is a super interesting article about how that works

IFF check http://www.dean-boys.com/extras/iff/iffqa.html i’m making up…. let’s say a good 70% of the comms/frequency tech. I figure i have some handwavey leeway given that they’re in the Iron Man/War Machine suits, but even given that they’d almost certainly have encrypted comms. To read more about this stuff, go here:  https://www.quora.com/What-stops-the-militant-from-tuning-on-to-radio-frequency-of-the-U-S-Rangers-or-other-while-in-combat

Railguns, in the context of the US Navy: http://www.naval-technology.com/news/newsus-navy-deploys-prototype-em-railguns-on-uss-millinocket-jhsv-4314943. Railguns are very much prototype weapons still in R&D; I’m making up literally everything about how “mounting it on a barge” and “three inches of steel” being a bad idea. I have no clue if that’s a bad idea. Maybe it’s the best idea for a railgun, I wouldn’t know. I deus ex’d the shit out of this.  

USS Tripoli, aka what the Delta and Echo targets looked like. It’s a real ship, 1960s era amphibious assault vehicle, in use for damn near 60 yrs and only decommissioned in 2016. Read: an older model of battleship that’s still functional but wouldn’t necessary cause a huge freakout if, say, disappeared by mad scientists/squid terrorists. It was also used for a while as a launch platform for ballistic missile defense program testing in Hawaii, so Rhodey, as a guy who definitely worked on that program, would have cause to recognize it. 

Charlie and Bravo target would’ve looked like this. Alpha target would’ve looked like this.  

STUFF THAT DIDN’T MAKE IT INTO THE FIC BUT THAT I FOUND REALLY COOL ANYWAY

AFISRA: Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency. As of 2014 it was renamed the 25th Air Force and assigned to Air Combat Command as part of DOD regulatory “realignment”, aka it does the same stuff using the same people under a different name. Rhodey, as a guy in his forties, would probably stick to the old acronym. 

AFRL: Air Force Research Laboratory. The R&D of the Air Force, basically. As an Air Force Colonel, Rhodey would’ve been heading one of the depts/directorates - most likely the Aerospace Systems Directorate, which also handily gives him an excuse to be in Cali all the time at Edwards AFB, near enough to liaise with (harass) Tony.