xthetenth

I like how the decent Hitler did get a job from his Uncle by proxy, since the US Navy gave him training that he used to start a business.

Spiral development baby. Can't wait till the 22 can fire them.

Although it totally makes sense to fire from outside before seeing if you can make the handover work for bay fires.

One thing I'm glad to see less of in the SW greatest hits album is that some of the more stupid flourishes in the duels where people would turn their backs on their opponent while still in saber range. The prequels were full of that, and it was stupid as hell to see.

Missing out on the 68er-Bewegung probably did East Germany no good.

 

Shit happens.  You can slap defensive air to air missiles on just about anything:

 

 

Yes, I passed. Thankfully, it was a written exam, my pronunciation was, and still is, garbage.

Don't worry, even the people who made the language can't even speak it right anymore.

Have you ever wished you had access to a pool of information, but didn't because you had no way to understand it?

I have enough problems getting through my English language sources without dealing with the fact that the mustached Germans who wrote about everything in the 1800s write prose dry that I probably couldn't get through a sentence even if it were my native language.

EXCEPT FOR THE ANNOYING DER-DIE-DEM-DAS AND WHATEVER OTHERS THERE ARE

The great virtue of English: fuck gendered nouns and cases. Half the grammar is optional to being understood, it's fantastic for being understandable on a minimal grammar knowledge. Then we overcompensate by having seven words for everything just in case you want three alternate meanings to line up for puns or subtle gradations of meaning.

It's a great language for learning to speak badly and we frankly deserve no better.

Pretty solidly monolingual here. How can I describe it?

I'm pretty monolingual, I'm reasonable with languages until I get to cases and genders and my brain just says no. I forgot Spanish three times and had to learn conjugation three times but the nouns only once. I get enough German exposure that it wants to stick somewhat but half the reason I listen to so much music in that language is because I don't understand it so I can use it as familiar noise when reading. Otherwise it's lose it rather than use it for me.

I think part of it is just that the simple aspects of English make it harder for me to deal with structures I never really picked up. Gendered nouns suck to learn because I treat words as atomic things rather than really associating an article with them.

Tamale Thursday pics:

 

 

At work, we do them traditional style: soak corn in water and slaked lime for like a day, then grind it into dough, etc. But since I'm at home and fuck all of that, this is made with maseca, essentially a corn flour.  It gets a good taste, but the straight-up corn masa is in a league of its own. The filling is pork shoulder with home-made sofrito with some green olives. Lemmy is frame-right providing supervision.

You have got to doxx yourself so I can eat some of that stuff.

The real NVA:

 

That's PAVN to you.

I'd think fuel storage would have more to do with planes burning than being made of wood. For instance, I don't remember the Mosquito having a reputation for catching fire easily.

Part of the fun of carrier planes is that they're metal. Wood and fabric are passe, what you really want for spontaneous carrier to viking funeral conversion is a giant plane shaped pile of fuel, explosives, and nice hot burning aluminum. At least it's not as bad as some of the stories of Superfort engines burning their way free of the wing.

Also Re: interservice rivalry, the IJA controlled the draft and at the very least didn't exempt civilian navy employees. Beat that allies!

That guy has a really optimistic view of China and India.

Probably. But Saudi Arabia is a mirror by which anything looks good. They did considerably more with less even if one of the things they bought is environmental calamity.

Yeah, there's the whole Norden bit, the allusion to silverplate modifications as in modifying ships to carry the new weapon, the idea of other weapons being obsoleted overnight, and then the "suddenly fusion" bit.

But this smacks of the same sort of mindset that you see in people who read holy books to justify their biases.

Yeah that was just a general comment on the withering incompetence and blatant inability to understand what the allegory was of in the first place.

Allegories illuminate things by comparison. Sometimes they just illuminate the author's ineptitude.

If you're going to make such a thinly veiled allegory the least you could do is actually make the problems anywhere near similar what your allegory represents.

A squadron of silverplate superforts has about the combat power of the 8th AF and was in fact deployed in parallel with conventional formations.

He's tilting at windmills with an imaginary weapon because they pose an imaginary threat.

I think humans were definitely having effects on the environment (at least ecologically) thousands of years BC, but I don't really think they can be discerned geologically. Radiation showing up seems like a reasonable marker.

I think we've got some pretty definite disruption from gouging out mineral deposits dating back to the iron age at least. Radiation postdates a lot of big things getting gouged out of the earth.

No, I meant making the Holocene so short.

Ahh. Events can happen in close proximity sometimes. To combine the two would mean to me that either Humans were a prime driver of their environment and the world in general immediately after the development of agriculture or that them and their shaping of the environment was an inevitable consequence of the conditions of the time.

The could always make the the "Anthropocene" a stage of the Holocene epoch.  

That would make sense to me, although it might be a stage that massively outlasts the epoch it's notionally part of.

I just think it's strange to have a geological epoch spanning a period of time hardly even measurable on a geological time scale.

It spans a likely rather significant but indeterminate amount into the future as well unless something really drastic happens.

Gonna be honest, when you've got a date which makes metals made after it immediately obvious, you've got a pretty good case for having made your mark on the world.

Sorry about the double post, but the best end to the destroyer mission happened to me. It is I the kill stealer.

I fire a salvo at a half health destroyer in my cleveland at something over 10 km. As it lands, the destroyer eats the first torpedo of the salvo, gets dropped to almost nothing and one of my shells yanks him out for the last kill I need. I apologize because it was a big old kill steal, and go drive by a destroyer I don't shoot at to run interference for the DD I stole from. My secondaries then proceed to gun the destroyer down like it's nothing.

This sort of mission hates me.

^This.

 

Adding: people are generally pretty bad at coming up with something new, but pretty amazing at recreating something when they discover that it is possible. Often there is just a simple 'trick' to the thing that needs to be transmitted for the whole concept become viable. Chainmail was a good example for me, as I tried for a long time to come up with a usable weave without success before stumbling upon an approach to laying out 4:4 weave by stringing the first links up on a line. Ditto the concept of tillering - you only need to know about the idea of distributing stress evenly along the bow by thinning the limbs and everything else clicks into place.

 

Having the understanding that the Romans had all the tech needed to (for instance) make a primitive electrical grid, one has the strong suspicion that there are a huge number of other potentially game-changing inventions out there somewhere that we could pull off today if only we could think of them. At the same time, technologies tend to need the correct supporting infrastructure (including social) to become widely available and useful. So perhaps we're just not at the correct point for antigravity or whatever to make it.

And of course if you don't have the prerequisites for a technology or aren't working with the right assumptions as a basis, all the discussion in the world about some form of advance won't make a whit of difference. For example, the conquistadors' horses meant that while they were on the Inka's world class road network, they had an awful time of things because those roads were built around llamas, and incorporated steep steps. And of course there's the topic of Inka metallurgy, which was actually quite advanced, but wasn't working with the same goals Europeans tended to have and came up with a totally different toolkit of great ways to do crazy stuff with precious metals and their alloys.

I played a bit of comp stomp and uralmod is still the correct choice.

Yeah, it's annoying as fuck.  Watched a BB chase a destroyer across half the map trying to get the kill instead of capping for a win yesterday. :/

Kill missions: destroying teams since the dawn of PvP.

My other new slots were filled by the Kawachi and the Langley.  I figured that I needed to grind up to the Bogue so I can finish the 150 aircraft kill mission for the free premium Kongo.  Yes, it will have a silly anime camo scheme, but it is a free premium IJN BB and port slot!  I doubt that I will be able to finish the missions for the free premium Myoko.  I'm having no luck getting regular DD kills with my T6 ships.  Everyone else seems to snatch the kill before I can land the last blow. 

The Myoko mission is utterly horrifying. Whoever thought a mission predicated on hunting down rare enemies that can pretty much disengage at will was a good idea should be defenestrated onto whoever thinks that kills in a game with HP pools should ever be the means of gating progress on anything whatsoever.

I've been trying to get my last eight destroyers, and in the span of two nights I've only gotten three of the fuckers, and have gotten about fifteen kills stolen from me. Meanwhile I shot down 100 planes in three runs of the bogue.

Oh well, at least I can use the time to think about more disparaging ways to refer to the OSHA safety magenta tramp stamp ships.

Also for those who don't know, fighters have a manual attack like torp bombers and it murders planes. Fun!

The problem with the VTOL fighter idea is the problem with the Marines in general. Everything's got to be its own special snowflake thing made to fit requirements that only make sense if no other services are present, and these capabilities are purchased at a huge cost to the other services' abilities that in the end they depend on.