Sturgeon

Guffaw!

Why don't you move to Paris and hang out with the Girondists if you don't like the way things are done here!

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

I don't know, maybe I'm old-fashioned but I just want the President to act in a manner as proscribed by the Constitution.

Get that hippie-dippie Federalism crap out of here!

Oh, so I did.  Little underwing wingtip stations, kinda like a flanker.

 

You know, if the Israelis had really wanted to give the Chinese a hand on the J-10, they should have seen about wrangling up a TDP on the PW1120 engine.

The B model has pretty conventional tip hardpoints.

Nah, I write 40K and Gundam original side stories.

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).

I don't know that elected politicians have much effect one way or another.  Does anyone remember how Bush II initially ran on a platform of "humbler foreign policy" in contrast to the ambitious nation-building programs undertaken by the Clinton Administration?  Fast forward three years and "neocon" is shorthand for "panders to the religious right, but also engages in ambitious nation-building programs."

 

It's almost as though politicians say whatever they think will get them elected, proceed to get elected, then find out that they are completely unqualified to do the job they were elected to do, end up having civil servants write all their policy and legislation for them, but take credit for it because they have enormous egos and no self awareness.

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.

Like I said. I was informed quite succinctly by my friend who has tested the rockets used by NASA to drop bits of equipment on comets and planets that the major reason Pluto is not a "planet" is its irregular orbit and the fact that its gravitational pull hasn't cleared out the interstellar objects from its orbit.

I'm taking his word for it. Sorry.

I totally agree with that... Not sure why it seems like we're disagreeing.

Ultimately it really boils down to a world's tallest midget contest and it really doesn't matter in the great scheme of things if we call it a small planet, dwarf planet or planetary object. It's still there.

It's much like the nonsense surrounding the brontosaurus vs apatosaurus debate. Someone screwed up in the past the creature everyone knew as a brontosaurus is suddenly supposed to be called an apatosaurus. Another great win for the pedantic among us.

Well, it matters in our scheme of things; how we understand the universe is important, and classification is a major tool for accomplishing that.

Oh come on now. Animation Domination has some funny - juvenile albeit - videos. And it's mostly making fun of creationists and American culture.

A lot of this is just arbitrary arguing over taxonomy and lexicon that has been leftover from the days when scientists thought Latin and Greek were pure languages and finding the "Missing Link" was going to change everything.

Whether Pluto is classified as a planet, planetoid object, dwarf planet or the Roman god of the Underworld doesn't change the fact that there is a largish chunk of rock with an irregular orbit around the sun in the Keiper belt that has a moon and hasn't gravitationally cleared its orbit of interstellar debris.

What we call it is the least interesting thing to me about Pluto. I think it's a planet but my friend who test rocket engines that have been used on all the NASA missions you've seen in the news assures me it's not. Either way it doesn't matter when you really think about. It's like defining an "assault weapon".

The taxonomy of living creatures falls under the same category and most folks are walking around with the outdated kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species terminology derived from the good old days when it was a demonstrable fact that White Anglo Saxon Protestants were superior to Catholics who were superior to Chinamen, Eskimos and Bushmen.

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?

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...

Got the cladogram wrong in my head. FORGIVE ME!

 

I'm not arguing that a vibrantly colored Tyrannosaur is wrong, it just implies much about the way it likely would have behaved. A olive-drab colored creature is going to behave differently than a creature that looks like its from Mardi Gras. The way it hunts, mates, and interacts with other animals is very dependent on the appearance of the animal. 

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.

I don't think there is proof that later tyrannosaurs were feathered, it is just their earlier cousins. While I think the feathers are possible, the scaly T Rex cannot be disregarded as it is possible that feathers were lost in the evolution of T Rex or that it lost feathers as it gained maturity. 

 

Now raptors, there is enough evidence to show that they had feathers. Deinonychus should only be known as a feathered animal, not a scaly one and can we please give it its proper name in movies?

Here is a quote by some dweeb paleontologist on the matter. "“There is no empirical evidence that tyrannosaurids had feathers, and artists have no business decking them out with plumage until the day comes when a tyrannosaurid is found with feathers.” He also argues that unpublished findings from imprints of tyrannosaur relatives(Albertosaurus?) indicate scaly skin. 

 

I do think the fuzzy tyrannosaur is the much more likely scenario, it is not definitive.  

 

​It is also needed to know when did feathers evolve and did they just evolve from a single common ancestor. If multiple species developed feathers at multiple points over the Mesozoic then a feathered ornithischian doesn't have to indicate that ceratopsians were feathered. Feathered sauropods would mean that feathers dated back to the Triassic were protosauropods evolved. 

 

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:

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.

I'm not sure anything is comparable to the LCS...

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?

Since this is the place for it, I was wondering how often if the small arms equivalent of APCR has been developed. I konow that sectioned projos are a thing, but these all seem to be homogeneous rather than cored...

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.