Sturgeon

Guffaw!

I'm telling George III you said that! You're in trouuuuuuuuuble!

Get that hippie-dippie Federalism crap out of here!

The B model has pretty conventional tip hardpoints.

I thought it was quite interesting hearing the aggressor guy talk about his aircraft:

So do colli and I. It's a labor of love (of Satan).

To be fair, even doing that it's still a tremendously stressful job. I see it more as Pratchett's sacrificial princes. Executive politicians are in this really shitty position where everyone expects results they can't provide because they don't have the power to do so, nor the competency, nor the will. They are used up and then thrown away for public spectacle.

You forgot the two wingtip stations on the J-10.

I totally agree with that... Not sure why it seems like we're disagreeing. Well, it matters in our scheme of things; how we understand the universe is important, and classification is a major tool for accomplishing that.

I do not watch TV, so I don't know what "Animation Domination" is, but that video in particular wasn't funny to me. I understand why it's supposed to be funny, but it isn't. My explanation as to why is above. Pluto's not a planet, because classifications like that exist for the purposes of convenience for our brains. If Pluto's a planet, a shitload of other objects in the Solar System are also planets, and that's... Really not convenient. Most folks are wrong. Real scientists are working with cladograms which, while they simplify considerably what actually happens in evolution, aim to emulate lineages properly. It's not perfect, and a whole lot is still uncertain and contested, but they're making a real effort to represent reality properly.

IMO, the J-10 is easily their most worrisome airplane. It's something at least as good as our F-16s, and while the Chinese look set to make a jillion of them, our F-16s are literally falling out of the sky.

I dunno; if people want cool movie monsters, there are all sorts of those. The way dinosaurs actually were, on the other hand, is not a matter of our preference. Even when I try to sympathize to this sentiment on the level of "yeah, but scary, scaly dinosaurs that ROAR were cool because they were supposed to be real", I can't help but think... Sure, but eagles are cool, so are hornbills, lammergeiers, kestrels, falcons, moas, hell, even ducks have giant hellish screw-shaped rape-tentacle penises. All of those are dinosaurs that live right now! Isn't that inspiring, just like the idea that one day in the past packs of scaly, hunched-over man-sized demons stalked the earth? Besides the fact that nature doesn't serve our taste of what's awesome or not, isn't there even more now that dinosaurs are birds and birds are dinosaurs to see as "awesome" and inspiring? Sure, Spielberg's T. rex was cool, but isn't Conway's elephant-sized hell-gorilla up there also fucking cool? Isn't that also inspiring? Isn't this fucking inspiring? And that's not just an eagle, it's a dinosaur. For that matter, Pluto's not a planet anymore, sure, but Pluto's not a planet not because scientists wanted to be mean and make the universe more boring, but because they discovered that the Solar System was full of other things like Pluto. Not hundreds, but thousands of them. Isn't this Solar System: with its thousand, million separate worlds, each waiting for magnificent discovery by man, perhaps in your lifetime(!) more compelling and enriching than this one? If one can't get inspired, if one can't be so moved as to hold back tears and whisper awesome under his breath at the thought of all that, then their soul is a dead stone that weighs them down, rather than lifts them up. I feel this way, and that's why I don't think that video is funny.

I'm glad you've seen the light. We may have been too hard on you; whenever this subject comes up there's someone who objects (note the thread title) and an argument always ensues. Needless to say, we get a lot of practice at this.

Oh also, kestrels: They're basically tiny, flying, technicolored cats. Awwww...

That's very different than saying there's no proof that it had feathers. There's no direct evidence that it had feathers. There's a lot of compelling indirect evidence that it did have feathers, however. And tigers are orange.

No. "Reptile" is not a cladistically meaningful term. Sauropods are saurischians, so are theropods. They diverge after saurischians diverge from ornithischians. This would have been after the earliest evolution of protofeathers, which are most likely homologous to the structures found on pterosaurs. What, tyrannosaurs aren't allowed to be colorful? Says who? That you think it would look aesthetically wrong doesn't matter.

If T. rex were a tank or a rifle or an airplane, this would be the correct stance. Just because many designs by one designer have a certain feature does not mean another design does. Until you have direct evidence that it did have said feature, you cannot make that assumption. Evolution does not work this way. Traits are heritable from one type to the next. Strange as it sounds, the absence of a feature in one type that was present in its ancestors does not represent a "default" condition, it represents an active mutation. T. rex's ancestors had feathers. T. rex had feathers, until we can prove they did not. One does not reconstruct multituberculate mammals without fur. They are mammals; it is obvious that they had fur, unless there's reason to believe they didn't. Cladistically speaking, birds are dinosaurs, dinosaurs are not birds. But human brains are weird and there's a lot of sludge we've accumulated over time from repeated exposure to Godzilla-esque pop culture "Terrible Lizards", and to help clean all this out, you should chant this mantra over and over until you are seeing feathered dinosaurs in your sleep: Birds aren't dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are birds.

First, let's start with a trailer for a movie practically reveling in its poor child actors: Wait! Don't go, there's a method to my madness! The comments section, I think, is an excellent microcosm of popular opinion on feathered dinosaurs. There are comments ranging from excitement over this (assuredly terrible) film just because it has a feathered T. rex to awesomebros taking their ball and going home because the big carnivores don't look like some sort of Godzilla alternative. Now, the stage is set. Let's have a thread about motherfucking feathered dinosaurs.

I think you would have been mostly limited in takeoff run distance, especially with a good payload. This is why you see about zero multirole delta winged birds until relaxed stability becomes a thing. This means while the F-106 is an excellent interceptor, when you try to deploy it with a bunch of bombs and shit on a forward airbase it doesn't do so well. Especially when it's hot. And humid.

Well, the Chinese might have something, I don't know. Khand may be able to tell us.

The Zumwalt-class DD was brought up in Mech's PLAN compendium thread. It reminded me that my father sent me an email a while back with his thoughts on the type; I found it to be a pretty interesting read: Thoughts?

So what size of Navy is the PLA headed for? And are they going for more of a "brown water" fleet or a "blue water" one? Do they have anything comparable to LCS? Maybe that Corvette?

M995 and M993 are good examples. The biggest problem is that tungsten is too rare to use for small arms ammunition that often.

No My Immortal? For shame.