xthetenth

Actually there's something glossed over in that sentence that might lead to a better comparison, it's comparing bows/arrows and guns/bullets. This is actually pretty analogous in terms of which roles (structure/energy provider/projectile) are in which category if the implicit rest of the cartridge is on the guns side of the guns/bullets split. The gun is a mechanism to allow the propellant half of the cartridge to impart energy to the bullet, while the bow is everything but the projectile and provides the energy itself, and the structure is about providing that energy rather than containing energy from an external (internal physically but external to the gun as an object) source like the gun does. The article is really talking about the arrow though, so it feels kind of weird to me that it's trying to clear up where the energy comes from and how important the different parts of the system are. I think the really important bit is that there's not really a distinct provider of structure separate from the process of imparting energy, and that there's important interaction between the projectile and launcher as the energy is released into motion that's essential to the function of the system. Hope I'm not being a tired ranty pedant. As a separate thing, it's pretty interesting to see how it seems to be that if humans have something and spend a lot of time making it without disruption it tends towards some local maximum pretty reliably, while discovery itself is somewhat far between and much less reliable (for example iron working)

Please. Rightsizing.

Remember that you have to swap the direction when uploading music to your NAS. If you upload it the wrong way your bits will get dry rot.

Yes those are Hawks.

Not for sale on Amazon US, and hard to con them into thinking you're not an American.

If he wants to spend his afterlife posting well I'm okay with it.

It was. The history of the eastern front was written by the Western Allies as a weapon against the USSR and vice versa and we spent the next 45 years quibbling over alternate interpretations of history (and a few other things). The NATO bloc won, and now we've got a history of WWII that was written as a weapon against the USSR.

Huh. I was reading through earlier stuff and reminding myself that no matter how bad decent airliners get, it's way better than cars, with no real CRM or anything. That list reads like what I'd expect from drivers, not pilots.

It's a longstanding Kratman thing, and he seems to be largely immune to evidence.

I've got to say there is little in this world as reassuring as listening to people you disagree with on politics discussing what they think about the course of things. On the other hand, it's really disconcerting how easily watching people making the sort of disingenuous arguments like Kratman's one that Toxn cited reinforces the beliefs they argue against. Even though I know that's the mechanism by which people convince themselves that people like me hold demented strawwomyn views in lockstep (and is in fact the mechanism by which Kratman probably arrived at his social views), it's easy to fall into without care. However, his point on the special forces is right, you can't skim all the cream off the top without being left with too little cream and a bunch of white water.

"Just put it roughly on the ground."

Watch the throttles (and flaps) There's also the Elmendorf C-17 and Fairchild B-52 that go to show that lax attitudes towards rules and flight envelopes and air show flight plans do not and cannot be allowed to go together. Also just saying, people who screw with a whistleblower should be liable for murder.

For reference, Pinnacle 3701 is the one where a ferry flight's pilots decided to take their plane up to the maximum altitude by setting their autopilot to too aggressive a climb, overrode warnings until they stalled and their engines flamed out. With six airports they could have reached without engines and having recovered from their stall. They then went to restart their engines and didn't actually check they were going fast enough to get the turbines going fast enough. They then told ATC they had lost one engine rather than the two they had, and after spending the altitude they needed to reach their emergency airport trying to restart their engines, which were locked by that point. By that point they tell ATC they actually lost both engines, they didn't have enough altitude to reach an airport. They finished their airmanship display by attempting to land on a lit road and crashed the plane. This is also the place for: The DC-10's cargo door, American Airlines 96 and Turkish Airlines 981, Japan Airlines 123 and the world's shittiest repair job, which used two different plates with two and one row of rivets rather than one plate with three rows to fix a cracked rear pressure bulkhead, Air France deciding that they could wait to replace pitot tubes with a freezing problem until routine maintenance and Air France 447, which combined that with a crewman who just wouldn't stop pulling back on the stick and other crew who didn't manage their information properly all the way into the ocean, isn't it? Honestly the scary one is the last, because I'm pretty sure that airlines still aren't doing good long flight simulations and training workflow for a three person crew running shifts.

I'm still kind of surprised their catcher barge wasn't a SWATH design or similar extremely stable ship type.

I'm going to derail the current tangent cheerfully. This is a really good thing. There's the obvious SJW stuff about the weird social context the draft is in as a sort of price of citizenship, but there's something that most criticism misses even if you accept the postulate that women are biologically unfit for combat (because of some physical limitation that can't be expressed in terms of physical limitations, because women can't handle it, because men can't handle it or whatever). The modern military isn't just the infantry, there's a heck of a lot of tail to back up the teeth these days. Firstly, every person who can go into a tail job but not a tooth job that frees up someone who can go into both to take a tooth job is every bit as good for combat ability as someone who can do the combat job. Second, tail jobs these days require a bunch of specialist skills and education at an aggregate level. The more access you have to the full human brainpower pool in your country the better. That's also one of the places where the military may very well need to get a whole bunch of people who would be crazy to not go into private industry, and nobody's going to say that women are somehow totally incapable of doing intellectual labor even in a place like the US where there's a huge disparity in the proportion of American women in computer science compared to those from other nations. I wouldn't be surprised at all if experts in things like computer security got drafted way out of proportion to the overall population if we get in a war where conscription matters.

I rather doubt that. I think we'll be considered relevant for a while if only as the answer to "where have all the resources gone?". We'll probably end up more like the early modern period or the great game period in that people know of us but we aren't the sort of immediate thing that all the pop history focuses on.

Good tags, that reminds me to talk about Far Cry 2 and Spec Ops: The Line in the games subforum. Also it's good to have a look at some chronically underappreciated history.

Might give more control over getting the missile out, allowing for the doors to open and close a bit tighter to getting the missile out. I'd be willing to bet it's the sort of detail that isn't giving much away that they can use to get hype and is mostly just because they were having difficulty getting reliable separation and didn't want to pull a Grumman.

Daedalus. Bonus points if it spits a probe out to go melt in Venus.

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/Kamikaze/AAA-Summary-1045/#I This is a good breakdown of AA effectiveness by type in a few different ways.

It's kind of funny, because the I-26's hit on Saratoga is used to crap on turbo-electric propulsion because it just so happened to be in the right place to knock out the bus and take her propulsion down for a while. Turbo-electric drive was pretty cool in some big ways, and the downside of weight was a bit bad but it was low in the ship. The right sort of fluke hit can make a big change and I'd much rather the fluke that left Saratoga without power for a few minutes and have four times as much compartmentalization aft if I take a hit to the shafts like Prince of Wales. (I'm generally a fan of turbo-electric drive in ships, and tend to agree with this article) There's also some examples of ships getting systems knocked out that are really notable, such as Bismarck getting shot to an unfightable hulk that resembled a warship only as much as a Viking funeral pyre.

Regarding AA effectiveness, I'd love to find the SoDak's action reports again. It is worth remembering that the Pacific Theater wasn't the only naval combat going, and without competent naval strike aviation (itself not a trivial task in the slightest, especially if you want to stuff it into a ship) battleships' combat power was a real and useful thing. As always, the context makes a huge difference for how units fit into the combined arms system as a whole. Also, an interesting thing I intend to read at some point: http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/BB57/1942DamageReport/GuadalcanalDamageRpt.html

Well, thanks to that and Bethesda's inability to hire RPG writers. Alpha protocol had no problems making things pretty clear or being more amazing than you could've hoped.

Turns out that the timeshare industry in the middle east didn't work too well.

Wonder what of it will still be happening when it isn't fashionable to be doing big things and spending big money.