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It's the A-10's gun firing at 4200 rounds per minute, 70 per second:

The General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger is a 30mm hydraulically driven seven-barrel Gatling-type cannon that is typically mounted to the United States Air Force's Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II. It is capable of firing 4,200 rounds per minute.

Here is a gun test of the system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33teK7L4DM4

driver totally missed one hell of a thunderbolt that knocked out the power to the lights.

***update -- I was wrong about P-47 having a rotary engine, confused *radial* with rotary. Other than noting that mistake here, I'll leave my original comment unedited below (in which I draw erroneous conclusions based on that brain fart):

@eric3579 and @newtboy -

I was also quite interested in the "advantages" question. My grandfather was an armorer on P-47 "Thunderbolt" aircraft in WW2, and I knew that rotary engines were used in those.

Both of your answers tie in to the strengths of P-47s during the war. They were considered very reliable and resistant to damage (sorta like a WW2-era A-10; they could take a beating and make it back home). And of course, in internal combustion powered aircraft, power to weight ratio is even more important than in automobiles.

So, I'm sure that some of those strengths were at least partially due to the use of a radial engine. Not entirely, because other things in the design played a big role also -- like the fact that the P-47 engine was air cooled, so it didn't need a radiator system. As I understand it, comparatively light damage to a liquid-cooled aircraft like a P-51 that happened to damage the cooling system could disable or force them down for repairs... Not to knock the amazing piece of engineering that the Mustang was, but for sheer ability to take a beating and stay in the air, the Thunderbolt may have been the best US fighter in the war.

I like this commercial, but Boxx workstations are basically just a rackmount server with nVidia quadro/tesla cards and a remote PCoIP card. If money is no limit, I can build you an 80-core workstation with 2TB ram and 200TB of storage. (probably about 6kW of power required). You'd have to run Windows 2012 Server to support that much ram though (8.1 pro only supports 512GB)
EDIT: with recently released Xeon E7v2, can have 8*15-core, so 120 cores, and 4TB ram...


Most of their arguments are ATI vs nVidia and Windows vs Mac OS X.

I got to unbox a MacPro two weeks ago, they are quite nice, small, easy to open (flip 1 switch, then lift). What's different about seeing them in person is how shiny it is - all the images made it seem kinda flat black, but it's very glossy. The internal SSD could sustain 900+ MB/s (both read and write) on the Blackmagic benchmark tool. Really impressive. Attach a thunderbolt Drobo, and you are set for storage capacity.

I will never buy a mac... but I sure as hell appreciate the mechanical and electronic engineering in this thing. Yes... expandability sucks in some ways, naturally with thunderbolt-2 or whatever the hell they call it, external disk is no problem at all, but the graphics and memory will hit its limits.

>> ^chicchorea:

Fairchild, love the name, Thunderbolts are subsonic.
A friend's daughter is in the Stan on her third tour flying a Hog.


Just the thought of a woman on the stick of an A-10 makes my dick hard!!

>> ^chicchorea:

Fairchild, love the name, Thunderbolts are subsonic.
A friend's daughter is in the Stan on her third tour flying a Hog.


I think he means the rounds are supersonic which is why you hear them impacting before you hear them being fired. But most ammunition these days is supersonic (bar some pistol rounds like the .45) so it's not that special really, its just that the rounds impacting are usually closer to the camera than the A10s which adds to the effect. That A10 *burp* is damn awesome though.

Fairchild, love the name, Thunderbolts are subsonic.

A friend's daughter is in the Stan on her third tour flying a Hog.

Thunderbolts and lightning very very frighting...

>> ^Sagemind:

... But Why?


During the cold war, there were some 2 mile long arrow-straight, bridge-free stretches of autobahn. There were supposed to be used as emergency airfields when the primary runways got bombed/nuked. Not a lot of these stretches remain in their aircraft supporting condition.

This cheery news has been brought to you by the same set of circumstances that had every major bridge in west germany stuffed with high explosives up until the mid 1990s.

>> ^deathcow:

I'm not saying 10 TB of video. Several TB of astronomical images, etc. Stuff that takes a long time to move around. USB2 is not up to modern requirements for speed.


You are still not answering the question. What is there to get excited about???

Hard drives (SATA 3.0) are topping out at 6Gbps, which means that a typical PC can't get anywhere near the max Thunderbolt speed. USB 3.0 (available right now) peaks at 5Gbps, which is more than most hard drives can handle. PLUS USB 3.0 is backward compatible. In the real world, there will be no noticeable difference between USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt unless you have multiple RAID arrays in close proximity, and are pushing your systems to the limit on a daily basis. It would be about a thousand times more useful to have that kind of speed on your network connections, and 10G ethernet has been around for years!

Thunderbolt is nothing but a small incremental improvement over USB 3.0 that most people will not be able to notice, except for the fact that all their old peripherals won't be compatible.

If you're just geeking out about the new shiny, that's cool. But please just say so.

>> ^deathcow:

I have 10 terabytes here online and I am not particularly fanatical about video. A few years ago nobody would have casually had that much space. By the time Thunderbolt is common on every desktop, it will seem an appropriate speed for typical user needs.
>> ^MaxWilder:
>> ^deathcow:
> And I gotta wonder how many people do.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Lots of people have terabytes of videos.

And I cant tell you how many times per day I feel like moving my ripped movie collection from one PC to another PC sitting right next to it...
Like I said, this is probably great for untold dozens of professional video editors worldwide.



10 terabytes? And you are not fanatical about video? I'm not sure you have a well-adjusted perspective.

I watch all my movies and tv off my hard drive. And I watch a LOT. Several hours per day, at least (while I'm between jobs). I keep most of it on one external 500 Gig hard drive. For the most part I delete as I go, but there's quite a lot of stuff I have saved and/or haven't watched yet. 500G is enough for almost 1500 television episodes at standard bitrate. 10 terabytes is almost enough for 30,000 tv show episodes, or 15,000 movies. Even if you increase the bitrate for 720p resolution, you've got enough space to store over 7,000 movies.

If that isn't fanatical about video, I don't know what is.

But more to the point, we're talking about technology that is specifically designed to transfer that kind of massive data from one pc to another pc . . . IN THE SAME ROOM.

So even if it becomes completely normal for people to have massive collections like yours (for instance on a home server), Thunderbolt will still serve absolutely no purpose for day-to-day tasks like viewing video and downloading from the internet.

TL;DR - What the hell are you doing with 10 terabytes that would be assisted by massive LOCAL bandwidth?

>> ^dag:

Seriously? What about the instant-wake from sleep?

I think I'm just spoiled now and have taken it for granted.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Seriously? What about the instant-wake from sleep? >> ^blankfist:

>> ^dag:
I was going to say the same thing. I think my next Macbook will have an SSD. Finally, no moving internal parts. >> ^deathcow:
Hook me up with this and SSD drives.
He says it's 10 gigabit. I think it's two independant channels of 10 gigabits.


I'm not sure I can tell much of a difference with mine.