OK, It's Official, I am a Purveyor of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Many years ago, around the turn of the millennium, I worked at Loral Vought Systems.....Lockheed Martin Vought Systems.....Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control^* in Grand Prairie, TX.

One of the items that I worked on was the Medium Extended Air Defense System, or MEADS.
I've also worked on the Armies ongoing but truly misbegotten Future Combat System^† (FCS), it's largest procurement program.

So now, I'm beginning to see just how tied into the Military Industrial Complex I am.

Maybe I should ditch engineering and become a Klezmer^‡.






Yes, I worked on this, and that little flare behind the head is for additional volume for the motor to increase range. The original PAC-3 had straight sides.

It looks like they are still using ProEngineer^™ as the CAD package. After a while, you can kind of get a sense of which cad packate it is from how it renders.











Yep, worked on this too, looking at a more flexible launch cannister than the PAC-3 launch cannister.

















Worked on most of these too.

Worst place I ever worked. It was so bad that people who never worked at Stewart & Stevenson, Tactical Vehicle Systems would hang up when they heard Sealy, TX.

Made Dilbert^™ and his workplace look like "Nerdvana".

They ended up screwing up in reverse. Their final drawing package was bad enough that no one else wants to bid on FMTV contracts, because they can't make heads or tails of the drawings.









^*It was all the same place, it just went through one merger, and two name changes.
^†Note to self, need to finish article about FCS for my blog. It's been sitting in my draft folder for months.
^‡An itinerant Jewish musician, more specifically, one who plays music typical of Eastern European Jews.