Thunderbolt10031 wrote:Whoa Whoa Whoa! Why are you spiting out things like that before the siren comes out. Seriously calm down.
Whoops, looks like you mistook my lengthy rant for quite the assertive rambling. No harm intended, buddy.
You don't know what they are trying to accomplish
Do you? I certainly don't, but given an official statement that they are coming up with something, I try to look at the situation realistically. The fact that Federal claims to be involving themselves in an old design is far-out, and I applaud them for it, but how much of a powerful business case do you think the Thunderbolt will have against its two established brothers? I personally believe we're simply looking at a curious experimentation; take that as you may. Nevertheless, I'm as stoked about this as anybody.
you don't know what this siren is going to be like.
How much better could it possibly be than a 508 or T-128? I'm sure you can notch the thing a few extra decibels above the rest, but at what extra effort? ASC managed to squeeze a few extra decibels out of their lemon by jacking up the motor to three or four times the power output of the T-128's and supersizing everything else to suit, and the lemon is about as efficient as a mechanical siren design will get. I can't see a supercharged siren gaining much output without getting beefed up, either... which brings us back to the main point - unless it can fulfill its own unique share of the market, it's just fighting a tide.
But the reality is we just don't know and can speculate all day but it's all speculation.) The advantage once again is for a mechanical dual tone siren and or a siren that you can actually hear in attack mode... Instead of: wwWWWOOOOOOOOoooh... wwwwWWWWWOOOOOOOooooh... wwwwWWWOOOOOOOooooh... You actually get a full: wwwWWWWOOOOOOOOOooooohhhhhhhwwWWWWWOOOOOoooohhh!!!!! The bass of those sirens will rattle your windows if you are close enough. (Heck we had a single tone one a few miles from us and a lot of 2001s closer and I could hear the thunderbolt inside the house over everything else. Even the closer 2001s. Then we opened the door and oh there are the 2001s! But it didn't sound like every day noise to me.) Anyways my point of this whole thing is: It is a great siren. We still have enough coming down and in graveyards to restore them even if FS doesn't bring it back. Weather they do or not may not change much. With a current 125 DB output people won't go for it unless they could get an original one for cheaper just by getting it used. So if it stays at 125 they will probably just scrap the project. But hey I don't know. Just my guess. Worst case scenerio they don't bring it back and our friends here on the board including Jeb and Ian will most likely be restoring and putting up more. Unless something changed...
