SAMs now are stupid and boring with their city slicker digital computers, signal processing, wide engagement ranges boring ass solid propellants and other modern amenities. I've been reading about the good ol days of liquid propellants nuclear warheads and analog computers and rushed megaprojects like the S-25 system and SAGE and found this neat site with a lot of info about the Nike system and SAGE including
>Unintended erections transmitted over the phone
>Detailed ECCM info from the 60s
>Collections of old usenet posts and emails from people who worked on and operated old air defense systems
https://ed-thelen.org/

What else should I read if I want to know more about ancient SAMs and air defense?

>New thing ... LE BAD! BAD BAD BAD, LE HECKIN BAD!!!

>>63955092
deranged bot reply

>>63955087 (OP)
>Unintended erections transmitted over the phone
wut

>>63955108
>Well, it was a pretty complicated beast, and of course it was necessary to test the electronics of the missile when it’s sitting on the ground. So they had a test mode for the missile complex, in which you throw a switch to test, and then you can send simulated firing commands to the various missiles and you check whether they received them and understood, and all that. But of course it doesn’t cause the missile to fire, it just is testing the electronics. Well, when we were asked to review this, one of our engineers looked very carefully at this system, and discovered that if you send the missiles the test commands, and then throw the switch from Test to Operate, without individually resetting each missile, they will all erect and fire. [Laughter] As soon as we mentioned this to Boeing, they quickly concocted a fix for that.

>A year or so later I somehow was selected to lead the team that obtained nuclear warhead certification for the Bomarc missile, so we had to go through all the hardware and software and prove that the probability of failure—combination failure of anything—would produce an inadvertent launching, with probability less than 10-to-the-minus-very-large-number on any given day, and that it would take at least two berserk people to do it by themselves; that is, one person couldn’t do a launch.

>>63955108
>Well, we were able to convince ourselves eventually that it was okay, but along the way we discovered a rather frightening thing about the way it worked. All the telephone lines from the computer out to the launch sites were duplexed for reliability, so if one goes down you have another way of issuing the launch commands. All of SAGE was built that way, with backup and redundancy. So, at the far end of the line, there’s a little black box that listens to the primary line, and if it senses that that has gone bad, it automatically switches to the backup. Unfortunately, we discovered that if the backup is also bad, what it does is amplifies the noise and generates a random bit stream. [Laughter] So one of our guys did a Markov analysis to figure out how long it would take to get a firing command; it turned out to be a little over two minutes. [Laughter] However, in order for the missile to actually launch, it has to get a full set of commands—that is, direction, speed, altitude, in addition to the firing command. And it had to get this within a certain length of time. We were able to show that the probability of getting all of that stuff within the required time frame was very, very small, very unlikely. Therefore the effect of this would be, the missile would erect, and then abort. I published an analysis of this with the provocative title “Inadvertent Erection of the IM-99A.” [Laughter] As luck would have it, two weeks after we released the report, it happened, in suburban Washington, D.C. [Laughter] So, I promptly found myself to be the head of a committee to fix that, and it was very easy. You just sensed bad line #2 and then you shut down.

>>63955092
Sensible real human bean SOVL reply

'Air defense'? What 'air defense', precious?

>>63955126
This one