Toxn

I'm ignoring the EU entirely. So no, no diamond-boron missiles, no gravity well ships, no CIWS and no long-ranged combat.

A level of fan-wankery so high it can see the curvature of the earth.

Doesn't mean shit when you can stick explosive devices in the bridge at will. The range of a teleporter is at least hundreds of kilometres (to allow transport to surface from low orbit), and probably more like thousands of kilometres (to allow for transport from higher orbits). Star Wars battles are shown as happening at knife-fighting range (including freaking crew-served weapons firing ship-to-ship!), so the Enterprise can just sit outside of range and stuff Star Destroyers full of photon torpedo warheads until it runs out of them. Really the only thing that would allow this to be a fair fight is that greatest nemesis of science-fiction characters: a complete lack of imagination.

Teleporters means that any Federation ship should be able to curb-stomp fleets of Empire ships before getting taken down. Especially if you pull the nasty trick of disabling the safeties and dumping the enemy's reactor core into his bridge. It's not like Gene had too much to do with TNG. TOS certainly had a progressive/utopian streak, but it also had plenty of stuff that points to a creator more interesting in telling fantastic adventure-type stories than delving too deeply into the socio-political aspects of the Federation. Edit: my bad. Still, the Gene's uber-utopian Federation of TNG seems to have had as much to do with scientology as a desire by an old man to retroactively get laid in his 20's. More.

But Colli, could a nuclear-powered ramjet occupy a third-world country before being ignominiously driven out a decade later by dudes armed with Hiluxes?

Since WoTR just fucking refuses to let this thing die, I'm going to crunch the numbers a bit. We've already established that height and body fat are the prime determinants here, so let's roll with that for a bit. Average height is well-studied and provides us with the knowledge that, in a given population, women are two standard deviations shorter then men on average. As height is normally distributed, we can easily use this to work out what percentage (specifically, what maximum percentage) of women you'd expect to see in a gender-blind army. The minimum male height requirement for the US armed forces is 152.4 cm, while the average heights/standard deviations are 175.5/7.4 cm (male) and 161.8/6.9 cm (female). This means that the US army is currently willing to accept men who are between 1.5 and 2 standard deviations below average in terms of height (ie: around 95% of the male population). If the rules were applied evenly, this would mean that the army should take in women around 1 SD below average (around 84%). Take these together, and your initial population of recruits should be 53% male and 47% female. This represents the maximum for the US army, as it presently functions, applying the same criteria to men and women*. If we decide that we don't want, you know, 95% of the potential male population getting in (because we're now accepting the arguments about soldiers as übermenschen at face value) and instead limit ourselves to the top 50%, things get more interesting. Here, only 50% of your male recruits would get accepted and only 1.5% of your female recruits. This would lead to your initial population being around 3% female and 97% male. Edit: it should also lead to your armed forces being overwhelmingly white, with people of Northern European descent making up the bulk of the army. At present, the US armed forces as a whole are around 15% female. * It presently applies a standard which allows men and women under 1.5-2 SD to apply, leading to an initial recruit pool that should be 50:50.

You just know that turned to the lady on the left afterwards and waggled his eyebrows at her.

I know, but I think the point went over people's heads for the most part.

And not a single link to the actual study was posted. But yeah, changes in brain structure coming from heavy use. I'm sure the two-packs-a-day crowd and your average alcoholic won't show anything similar.

One of the issues when talking about German stuff is how internalised a lot of the bias is. If you say that an American design is flawed then you're seen as criticising the design. At worst you're seen as biased against a company. But criticise a German design and you're suddenly seen as blasting an entire people. Here's a good way to detect this issue: replace the name of the gun and its place of origin with somewhere nobody cares about and make the exact same arguments. If people still read the piece as being biased then it probably is.

Best airliner-to-bomber conversion since the He-111

I love his idea of "testing" the piece. And the idea that the cops will be too stupid to simply put two and two together (dead person in your house, you surrounded by plumbing parts) and not arrest you, gather the pieces and swab you for residue. Ah well, caveat emptor and all that.

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So you're saying that Kerbal space program lied to me all this time? Well damn.

I think it's one of those desserts that got invented back when maximising sugar and fat content was the whole reason for having pudding in the first place.

For information purposes: Tied is a broad Russian stereotype who inexplicably knows everything about Southern US culture as well. Give him a bottle of vodka and a bucket of crawfish and he will fight himself.

Tied is right. Fucking the Russians over is literally ingrained in NATO DNA by now. They will do it even when there is no profit in it.

It is the most penile rocket ever, yes My feeling here is that you could win so hard if this technology allows one to reuse the booster stack. Which is also easy to scale up - you simply slap three of these things together for first stage and stick a third on top to create a voltron of self-landing penises. Boom, orbital penetration and reusability solved

Holy shit: https://youtu.be/9pillaOxGCo Someone finally did it.

When I do speed, it's a harmless pick-me-up that helps me do my job. When you do speed you're a ravaging junkie that uses it to power your sadistic murder sprees.

The general consensus seems to be that Turkey did this to derail any coordination between NATO and Russia, so that it could get back to doing what it wanted to in the first place - fucking with the Kurds and supporting ISIS as a means to that end. It's just a pity that the US is so predictable in this regard. Rather than grow a pair and smack down an ally for fucking with their interests (again!) it will be content to circle the wagons against Russia and violate it's principles (again!) to support the misbehaving party. Expect lots of confusion over what airspace, radio communications and things falling in ballistic trajectories might mean.

I've harped on this before, but there is very amusing trend towards ascribing fiendish things to your enemies when they perform actions that in your own men would be seen as heroic. Which is why we always see 'but they were on some sort of drug' being tossed around as an explanation whenever the bad guys look a bit too competent. This goes hand in hand with blaming your equipment and praising the enemy's.

The UK's defence strategy for the past 50 years or so has been: Hide behind the US Pretend you're still relevant on the world stage So... no change?

This is some sort of satire, right?

Presumably after the scene where said protagonist discards a baby browning. Speaking of the Ruby, I'd be interested to know if anyone is making an updated/recreation version?