Toxn

Hilariously, humans are one of the few examples of sexual selection on both genders: men have oversize penises and more physical dymorphism (debated) while women get overlarge boobs and hip/buttock fat. There are functional aspects to this (eg: fat deposits indicating reserves needed for reproduction) but like a lot of sexual selection it runs on its own logic. We like boobs because we like boobs, basically.

I think we're still operating on fundamentally different assumptions. You seem to be asking how expensive it would be to make a capable UCAV. I'm asking how expensive it would be to strap the seeker head of an missile to an airframe capable of lofting some sort of weapon and staying on station for a few hours. The result wouldn't be particularly capable. Hell, it would probably require manual control for takeoff and landing and be pretty terrible at manoeuvre fighting. But it wouldn't matter, because you'd have enough of the things (with sensors of all sorts) cluttering up the sky so that doing anything in that space becomes prohibitive. Stealth simply fails as an approach when there are sensors everywhere, and especially when those sensors are attached to small, stealthy platforms. You also seem to be thinking about the US replacing all of it's F-35s with UCAVs. I'm not, because why would they? It would be like asking the Royal Navy, circa 1930, to scap all of its battleships and cruisers in favour of carriers, subs and torpedo boats. The US has proved time and time again that it will overwhelmingly dominate any conventional air defence system. So I'm not even going to bother thinking about conventional air defence. Instead, I'm thinking about dedicated factories cranking out what amount to reusable cruise missiles and SAMs, then adding those to existing air defences to deny manned fighters the air. I am thinking about sheer numbers of disposable units and the use of attrition to wear down expensive, elite adversaries. I'm getting into Iran and China's headspace, in other words. I think we can happily disagree on how effective or capable such an approach would be, but I find it interesting that the concept itself seems to be so little thought-of. I'm willing to stand on my prediction here, that arguments about the F-35 will dry up the instant a large shooting war happens. Because the F-35 will end up playing the role of battleship to whatever the new carrier is.

Encyclopedia Dramatica, really? Anyway, I'm sure I will hear all about it when Stephan (or whoever) gets off his libertarian kick and starts telling me how all of his problems are due to feminists or something. So, yeah. Looking forward to that.

Yeah, but I'm on a different continent Besides, I've had enough scotch to last me a while (long story).

NVM, found a link: http://www.protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_1403.pdf We can discuss after you guys have read it

Eh, the NRA impacts my life not at all. Frankly, I tuned that part of the article out.

You're assuming that the UCAV will need data for anything more than target selection and/or letting it off it's leash. In a hot war scenario, you'd simply direct the thing to the correct area and altitude, maybe mark targets and tell it not to kill things with a friendly IFF. Your analogy is also good to keep in mind, but flawed in terms of the technical challenge involved. Shooting down a ballistic missile is a massive challenge due to the speeds and distances involved. Vectoring in to a fighter, on the other hand, is something that was solved pretty comprehensively using a rotating sensor and proportional input. Air-to-air is, in fact, one of the few spaces where the environment is so simple that drones are already viable. Even better, it is also a domain where the cost of hauling around a human and human life support system is prohibitive enough to make the resulting human-free vehicle significantly cheaper. My conception here is of drones only a little more sophisticated than existing cruise missiles - cheap and cheerful enough to saturate a battlespace and force out much more capable aircraft. They wouldn't need sophisticated sensor suites or the ability to carry multiple ordinance types, because they would be common and specialised enough so that the deficits would cancel out. Imagine the current US airforce setup (stealth platforms included) trying to enter an airspace full to bursting with thousands of expendable anti-air platforms. And these things are loitering at all altitudes and carrying a diversity of sensors. As an example of how this could play out, consider a peer-to-peer encounter. The F-35 is projected to cost something like $150 million per unit, with Something in the region of 2000 being produced. The latest iteration of Tomahawk will cost $1.5 million. So doing the maths, you could produce 100 drones roughly as complex as a Tomahawk for the price of one F-35. At what point do the numbers simply swamp the superior capability of the F-35? Are we really expecting pilots to fly into such a cloud of hostile weapons and sweep them aside 100 at a time?

Another perspective on US gun culture from an outsider. As a bonus, the inevitable clip/magazine trash talk session can now be included in this thread. Speaking of outsider perspectives, I see TFB just ran a short piece on a dubious self-defence case here in South Africa. Some thoughts: - Man but some people do not understand the concept of 'self defence' vs. 'murder' - South African expats making conspiracy theories about South Africa seems to be becoming something of a cottage industry alongside importing wors, biltong, marmite and mrs. Balls to terra incognita. - Give Morgan Collins a column or something.

1) So that South Africans can feel good about winning Miss World for a millisecond. Thanks, Rolene! 2) So that my 18 year-old self can feel smug about being superior to the sheeple for a month. This is an important market, and I'm glad it's still being served by the writings of a bitter ex-Russian serial philanderer. 3) So that South Africans can have yet another reason to point and laugh at America's quaint version of rugby. 4) So that South Africans can have a valuable point of comparison with the U.S. when our first-year university students dress like maids and then post the photos to their Facebook feeds. 5) So that South Africans can wonder, yet again, why we can't just call you guys Columbians and save on having to remember about the existence of a country. See, perfectly valid answers to society's burning questions.

From recent WoT 'best infantry' thread: "And so began the jeering from behind the shield wall of the clan of the comieboo. Their visages bore the scars of many a battle. The skulls of Wehraboo beasts planted on the tips of their penants bespoke their victories. While today's victory was insignificant, not worthy of even a passing note among the song-tellers, the sight of the stunted Wehraboo beast tripping over its own tail as it fled added a little levity to those warriors used to worthier foes." Also: "Ivan Lannisterov: When I was Deputy Commissar under your father's predecessor, the skulls of all the wehraboos were kept in this room. And the skull of the last of them was right here. It was the size of an apple. Georgiy Baratov: And the biggest was the side of a carriage. Ivan Lannisterov: Yes, and the creature to whom it belonged was banned 300 pages ago. Curiosities on the far side of the internet are no threat to us."

It's an interesting subject, to be sure. I've said this before as well, but part of the problem with anything biotech-related is that we're literally too ignorant to know what might work or not. We're tinkering with a complex system that lacks anything like a human regard for logic or structure, and we have no way at present to make coherent sense of all the pieces we've found. This article, which I can send to anyone interested (because of course Springer took something publically available and put it behind a paywall), gives a nice analogy for the problem.

Robotic war balls have long been a priority research topic for the corps.

Yeah, post-human society of any sort gets very weird very quickly. I'm actually pretty jazzed about the prospects for some research/technologies (biosystematics, tissue culture and printing, machine-neuron interfaces, whole genome engineering) but feel that we too often wax lyrical about the boring or impossible stuff. Kind of like how material science folks wince every time nanotech gets mentioned.

This all becomes exceedingly moot the second we have a shooting war of some description and fighter drones end up eating pilots. By sheer cost-effectiveness and attrition, if nothing else. Speaking of which; I've mentioned the 1971 MASTACS exercise before, where modified firebees smoked two phantoms in a simulated engagement (the phantoms were live-fire). However, there seems to be no reference for this incident other than a 1982 Armed Forces Journal piece by a certain W. Wagner (thanks wiki). Given the fact that UCAVs are a much-talked-about thing now, and the fact that they'd been proven to work in the 1970s already, I'd expect there to be more literature on this particular incident. Does anyone know where to go searching for a full report or analysis?

I think you're missing the point. We like boobies, but the market is saturated with free boobies. Which is why SI is losing ground on what is already their most profitable product. Which is why announcer guy wonders when they'll just call it a day already. Also, is SJW going to become a thing now? Will I be forced to listen to humourless gits on both sides bang on about this till I want to kill everyone who so much as mentions it? Must we all be so terribly pedantic and dull?

As a geneticist and as someone who has looked into this one pretty thoroughly, all I can say is that that poster is adorably naïve. The problem with aging is that it's not a disease. It's a syndrome. Tackling one area of age-related illness (heart disease, for instance) simply means that another one comes along a bit later to fuck your shit up (dementia, cancer). In the end, you'll simply have an exponentially increasing series of interventions attempting to fix problems as they come up. Once you bring genetic engineering into the picture (this is a ways into the future at best), you can see some major gains. This book, for instance, argues that mitochondrial engineering could up lifespan to something like 300 years. Past that, though, and you reach some fundamental limits to what cells (especially neurons) can handle before going caput. The problem is akin to someone arguing for a design of car which never breaks down and never needs maintenance: you can do it, but you end up throwing the entire concept of 'car' out of the window in the process. Ahahahahahahahaha. No. We are so far from even being able to simulate a neuron, let alone a neural pathway, that the idea of copying your billions of neural pathways without loss of fidelity and then simulating you is just an appeal to magic.

I'm busy working on a write-up for a test system, and will post it if/when. In other news, we're still waiting for a final submission for the position of overlord. Note that if no candidates step forward I may have to resort to a duumvirate. Because that always works as a way of governing something.

I would like to play, but will probably hinder the part a lot due to limited free time and being waaay out of synch with your timezone. Give a shout if there's anything else I can contribute, though.

This is all sounding excellent!

Does anyone have the collected works of HAV in the form of the story of clan comieboo?

That's a pretty good analogy. Thanks for enlightening me.

Tough crowd.

Have we done the obligatory snackbar joke yet?

Link for those of us not in the know?