Collimatrix

Posted on the WOT forums, our very own Zinegata weighs in on the issue:
 
 
 
I wish that the US presidency were a sham institution, concealing a king.  Tell me when elections are suspended and whoever the hell is in the big seat starts having big posters of themselves put up in urban centers and having Congress machine-gunned down.  Twentieth Century history has plenty of examples of what happens when a country slides into despotism, and it doesn't look like this.
 
The US presidency was probably best summed up by that great sage of our times, Hunter S. Thompson:
 
 
The US president is basically a celebrity, with all the prestige and mind-altering amounts of attention that go with it.  He has slightly more say in the legislative process than a typical celebrity, which is itself highly ceremonial legacy institution, but this is barely worth mentioning.  Rather, the president is constantly surrounded by people who act like he is an important individual, and the sort of person who tends to succeed in politics tends not to be the sort of person who's savvy enough to figure out the essentially theatrical nature of the whole thing. 
 
You can tell it's a scam pretty easily.  Nixon campaigned on the grounds that he would "clean up the mess in Washington," only to oversee an enormous expansion of the same.  Nixon had been a hard-line anti-communist as a senator, and would go on to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China.  I seem to recall a certain governor of Texas campaigning for a "humbler" US foreign policy, and I think we all know how that ended.
 
 Clinton may have been an exception, as Clinton was an unusually high-functioning president, but generally speaking the poor dumb bastards don't figure out the scam until it's too late and twenty years have been sucked out of their lives.
 
Twentieth Century history also has plenty of examples of what a country looks like when it slides into militarism, and it's not like this either.  For one thing we'd use all those beautiful nuclear weapons that are just collecting dust. 
 
The US military doesn't decide to go on ill-advised adventures to bring freedom to remote corners of the world that frankly don't want it.  That would be the State Department's job, although within living memory the CIA did this sort of thing also.  The US military isn't a quasi-jail for undesirables who can't hack it elsewhere.  There have been armies that have operated on this model; the Prussians come to mind, and they've all had revolting and horrifying standards of discipline.  See the French and Spanish Foreign Legions for other instructive examples.  Further, the idea that recent combat experience is creating an entire class of dangerously unhinged, traumatized vets is beloved of the media, but not particularly well-supported by evidence.
 
The US military exists primarily to waste money.  This is so it has a larger budget to waste the next year.  Occasionally they do spend money on useful things, but since inflating the budget by wasting money is easier than inflating the budget by buying useful things, a much greater percentage of the money goes towards waste.  In this way it is similar, perhaps indistinguishable, from any other US government agency.
 
The military does have an unusual relationship with the so-called "private sector."  There are basically entire sectors of the American economy that act as the retirement plans for officers.  Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, GDLS and their ilk are the most obvious ones, but speak to any officer in the US military and you'll hear of companies that largely employ officers and make all of their money by selling things to the US military.  They need US military officers to help them navigate the byzantine regulations regarding tendering to the US military, of course.  You may have heard the phrase "self-licking ice cream cone."  This is it.
 
Now, this essentially incestuous relationship is by no means unique among US government organizations; it's just very well developed in the US military (the SEC probably runs a close second).
 
A rather small portion of the military does fighting.  Part of this is reflective of the realities of modern combat; the logistical shaft of the spear is much larger than the spearhead.  Part of this is a result of years of bureaucratic decay; it's easier to waste money arbitrarily than it is to waste money equipping people to go fight.

I think this will end up like PAK-FA.  There were tons of studies and a handful of prototypes for new fighter aircraft in the late Soviet era, but PAK-FA was not a rehash of any of them.  People thought it would be based on 1.44, 7.01 or Berkut, but it was a novel design.  Internet speculation on its appearance was generally wrong.
 
A likely shopping list of features of Armata looks like this IMO:
 
-New 125mm gun that is backwards-compatible with existing ammunition stocks, but can use unitary ammunition with longer penetrators.  You probably can't get such a weapon to the same class as the Rheinmetall 120mm; there just isn't enough case volume to work with, but you could go a long way in bridging the gap, especially if the pressure ceiling were higher.
 
-Urban combat-oriented features like the JSDF Type 10.  Lots of cameras for driver and commander, remote weapons stations of some sort, thermal optics to highlight ATGM kill teams (how many times have you seen combat footage from Syrian and thought "man, those RPG tank-killer teams would be totally screwed if those T-72s had been refitted with thermals?"), short overall hull length, high-precision neutral steer, etc.
 
-Hydropneumatic suspension.  The Soviets have been playing with it since the 1950s, and now that the Russians aren't doing ginormous 10K production runs, they can splurge a bit on bling.
 
-Modular armor ala Merk IV seems to be the way to go.  For very little extra cost, you reserve the ability to up-armor your tank very easily in the future.
 
-Getting rid of the the frontal weak points around the driver's hatch and gun mantlet.  They've been trying to do this since Object 187, and Russian milbloggers love to harp on similar weakpoints on the abrams.
 
-Probably no turbine, alas.  Russian gas turbines still aren't as good as American or Western European models.  SFC and power density are comparable to their American counterparts and sometimes a little better, but TBO is still much, much worse.  A diesel should be fine, especially a fancy new common-rail fuel injector type.
 
-Auxiliary autocannon seems likely.
 
-I wouldn't rule out a driver-in-turret configuration.  The Soviets did more research on this arrangement than anyone else.

Ob 277.  Note that the fourth road wheel uses a leading swing arm so that the turret basket is not sitting on top of the torsion bar.  It's a similar arrangement to the AMX-30.
 
I have been unable to locate good enough pictures to tell if the example in Kubinka is like this too.  A lot of profile drawings show 277 with normal, all-trailing swing arms.

I recently began a class on nuclear rocket propulsion, and one of the first topics covered was various nuclear rocket cycles. I'll do my best to explain them using amazing MS Paint drawings and words.
 

 
The first is the hot bleed cycle. In this cycle, some propellant does not go through the reactor, but is instead shunted off in a different direction. This is mixed with some of the propellant that has passed through the reactor, but not out the rocket nozzle, creating a relatively hot stream of propellant. This propellant is passed through a turbine, which then powers the fuel pump. After passing through the turbine, the propellant is exhausted overboard (on some designs this can be used for attitude control). Since the propellant that has passed through the turbine is at lower temperature than that which has passed through the reactor, some efficiency is lost. The NERVA design from the 1960s/1970s utilized the hot bleed cycle.
 
The cold bleed cycle is similar, except no propellant from the reactor is used to power the turbine. As a result, the propellant passing through the turbine is colder, thereby reducing turbine efficiency. However, this does have the advantage of producing less thermal stress on the turbine components. However, since the mass flow through the turbine is larger, the cold bleed cycle is less efficient than the hot bleed cycle.
 
The expander cycle cleverly avoids propellant wastage by passing all the propellant used in the turbine back into the reactor. This avoids expending propellant in the relatively low temperature turbine exhaust, and means that the expander cycle NTR has a higher specific impulse than the hot or cold bleed cycles.

I recently came into posession of some video clips related to nuclear propulsion, so I thought I'd share them;
 

 

 

 

 

 

So, I'm snowbound in a little motel in Rawlins, WY.  It's a dinky, creaky old place with no internet, no running water, and it's built on an old Indian burial ground.  Anyway, I was thinking about music.  I listened to The Pierce's Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge on the way down here, end to end.  Holy crap, this is a superb album.  Allison and Catherine Pierce are both excellent singers with some really excellent harmonies (but not so often it gets dull).  Instrumentation and melodies are varied too, but not so much it feels thrown together.
 
And wow, the lyrics.  The probity of the album's concept is immaculate.  It oozes jealousy, loss, lust and toxic sexuality worthy of an opera.  A taste:
 

Interesting to see:
 
http://www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Archery-Testing.pdf

It confirms Terry Pratchet's comment that "chain-mail from the point of view of an arrow can be thought of as a series of loosely connected holes."

Alright, this one is for LC:
 

Pretty sure that's a YAH-63.

Alright, this one is for LC:
 

I found this interesting picture of the Yakovlev MFI design:
 

 
Obviously, it was never built.  The MiG submission was the 1.44 and the Sukhoi submission was the SU-47.

I'm beginning to think that the optimal planform for a stealth ship is something like... a submarine.

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.

Khand-e mentioned that I should share my thoughts on thorium reactors in my primer on nuclear energy.  I swear I'm still working on the primer; it's 2,800 words and climbing; about halfway through the outline.
 
So, seeing as that's a ways off, I thought I would explain my reservations about thorium power.  You may want to watch Kirk Sorensen's presentation on liquid fluoride thorium reactors.
 
Nuclear fission relies on splitting actinide atoms.  There are two actinides which occur naturally on Earth; uranium and thorium.  Uranium on earth is about 99.3% uranium-238, and about .7% uranium-235.  Except for the tiniest trace amounts, all thorium on Earth is thorium-232.  Of these three naturally occurring actinides, only uranium-235 is fissile; that is, only it can sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction.
 
However, uranium-238 and thorium-232 can be transmutated, or bred into plutonium-239 and uranium-233, respectively, which are man-made fissile isotopes.
 
There's my first beef right there; it's very slick marketing to claim that thorium, which relatively few people have heard of or have any familiarity, will allow all these nifty reactor design features, but with one exception it doesn't.  This is because thorium must be bred into uranium before it will sustain a nuclear chain reaction!  Therefore, cool tricks like liquid fluoride cores don't require thorium fuel cycles.  Uranium-235 and uranium-233 have identical chemical properties, and the only molten-salt reactor ever built initially used familiar uranium-235 as fuel.
 
In fact, the only thing that thorium lets you do that can't be done with conventional uranium fuel cycles is the creation of a thermal breeder reactor.   Now, I don't want to downplay that; that's pretty damn nifty.  Combining the simplicity of a thermal neutron nuclear reactor with the capacity to breed fuel is very slick and useful itself.  Kirk Sorensen never mentions it in his presentations on the LFTR concept because his audience is a bunch of fucking peasants who have no idea what the difference between thermal neutrons and fast neutrons is.
 
That is the biggest problem with how Kirk Sorensen is evangelizing the LFTR; he's sullying himself with the stench of ignorant peasants, routinely coming into contact with the disgusting little vermin and sullying his credibility.  Even his blog, where he actually does a pretty good job of addressing some of the more technical problems with the LFTR design, is a writhing hotbed of peasant-speak:
 
"In nuclear engineering, the fancy term for this feature is the average logarithmic energy decrement per collision. And if that’s not fancy enough, they use a funny Greek letter that looks like a squiggle to represent it. I think the letter is actually called “xi”, but I prefer to call it “squiggle” since that’s what it looks like."
 
By Mitra, Huitzilopochtli, Kamapua'a and all other gods of upright manly virtue have some fucking pride man!  Peasants may be illiterate, sub-human slime, but they are aware of when you're talking down to them (that's why I never bother to hide it).  You are not making friends by calling ξ "squiggle."  You are not helping peasants to understand the math of neutron mean free travel vis a vis moderator atomic mass by calling ξ "squiggle."  Kirk Sorensen, you worked for NASA and you are an aerospace engineer.  You don't call ξ "squiggle" because you are retarded; you do not get to work for NASA and be an aerospace engineer if you are retarded.  In fact, there are many educated people who can't be arsed to remember the Greek letters.  They do not call them "squiggle" in public because it sounds retarded.
 
The reason he does all this embarrassing crap is that Kirk Sorensen thinks that the key to his glorious, nuclear-powered future is peasants.  That's why when he talks about the loss of steam pressure in a pressurized or boiling water reactor, he doesn't mention that this actually stops the reaction cold due to the negative void coefficient of reactivity in all such designs approved for operation in the United States.  Peasants don't understand what a "negative void coefficient of reactivity" is, and they would be terrified and confused if you ever mentioned the term to them.  This is why he doesn't mention that higher fuel burnup can be achieved in fast neutron reactors, even though his blog betrays the fact that he is perfectly aware of their existence.  He's got to keep the message simple, something that peasants can understand.  Thorium = good!  Old nuclear may have = bad, but thorium = good!
 
The tragedy of all this is that Kirk Sorensen doesn't realize that all his pandering will get him nowhere.  Masses of peasants cannot be galvanized into action to change the future.  Peasants are shiftless and lazy, and only too happy to wait and see what happens instead of taking action.  That's why they're peasants.  Peasants only join the revolution because they were forced to at gunpoint, or because the revolution was about to win anyway.  Kirk Sorensen is not forcing peasants to support liquid fluoride thorium reactors at gunpoint; ergo they are useless to him.
 
Kirk Sorensen was, tragically, misled into believing that you can achieve great things by being nice and agreeable and inoffensive.  The Carter Administration banned waste reprocessing and all the fast neutron reactors in the USA have been shut down?  No problem!  Using speculative thorium fuel cycles, we can get the advantages of fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors without using any of the verboten technologies!  Get some grassroots support for the idea, and soon the future will have clean, cheap energy and won't suck anymore!
 
No, no, no.  It doesn't work that way.  Your enemies are hippies, and while hippies fold like tissue paper when sprayed with oleoresin capsaicin or beaten with nightsticks, an army of hippies beats an army of peasants every time.  That's how useless peasants are.  If this LFTR thing ever gets off the ground in a serious way (and I would be tickled if it did), hippies will emerge from the filthy mud pits whence they are bred and descend on you.  They'll cherry-pick problems with your reactor design, and if that's too difficult, they'll make them up, and raise such a stink that your beautiful, thorium-powered future is strangled to death by regulatory tape before it even begins.
 
And that's the real reason thorium is going nowhere in the USA.  Hell, that's the real reason that nothing will go anywhere in the USA, until we do something about the hippie problem.

I know YOU'D think its crap. But we've already established that you're an anti-American commie. Plus you have that entirely Platonic relationship with Colli!

This is not something I've looked into extensively, but my understanding is that D-T fusion is the easiet type of fusion to achieve by a retarded margin.  If I'm understanding this equation correctly, the energy that the nuclei have to overcome in order to fuse is a function of the product of their atomic numbers.  Add to this that D-T fusion is four times punchier than D-D fusion, and I've read that it has far lower bremsstrahlung losses than other fusion plasmas.
 
Come to think of it, I'm not sure if that was "far lower bremsstrahlung losses than other plasmas" or "far lower bremsstrahlung losses relative to energy density than other plasmas."
 
D-D fusion seems like less of a pain in the ass than D-T fusion for commercial power production (you know, assuming you can ever get that to work) because less of the energy is released as insanely fast moving neutrons.  About 80% of the energy from D-T fusion is released as neutron kinetic energy, and the neutrons from D-T fusion are about seven times more energetic than those released by nuclear fission.  This strikes me as a large practical barrier to practical commercial fusion power.  In D-D fusion neutrons are only carrying about 33% of the energy, and they're about as energetic as the neutrons released by fission.  D-D fusion also produces half as many neutrons per mol compared to D-T fusion.
 
If you want to go the other direction, and make lots of neutrons, T-T fusion sounds absolutely hilarious for bombs, since it will produce a 65% increase in neutrons per gram of fusion fuel over D-T (possibly more in practice, due to the elimination of D-D reactions in the D-T fuel).  That'll learn ya!

I can't have D.E. Watters, who is an actual researcher and stuff, reading my usual grade of gibberish and nonsense.  Now I have to put actual effort into my posts.

Everyone here knows how much I hate effort.
 
This is terrible.

i.e. at all.
 
We're talking about that game that's like a fighting game, only for some unaccountable reason the developers said "hey, do you know what fighting games need to be?  Even more spastic, unreadable and random!  So let's add lots of explosions and guns and bombs falling from the sky, and the camera will zoom out unexpectedly, and there will be bright effects when anything at all happens!  That sounds like fun!  Possibly also an epileptic seizure!"

I can't have D.E. Watters, who is an actual researcher and stuff, reading my usual grade of gibberish and nonsense.  Now I have to put actual effort into my posts.

Everyone here knows how much I hate effort.
 
This is terrible.

I can't have D.E. Watters, who is an actual researcher and stuff, reading my usual grade of gibberish and nonsense.  Now I have to put actual effort into my posts.

Everyone here knows how much I hate effort.
 
This is terrible.

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.

My understanding is that phage therapy has a lot of potential, but some pretty severe limitations as well.
 
A given phage will only attack a very narrow range of bacteria, whereas antibiotics will nuke a wide spectrum of bugs.  This means that accurate diagnosis is crucial for phage therapy to be effective.
 
Interestingly, animal mucus contains bacteriaphages.

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.

It's called "phylogenic bracketing."  The earliest ancestors of tyrannosaurs clearly had feathers, so for the more derived species to lack them they would have had to have had some mutation which caused them not to grow feathers.
 
The default assumption is that this would not happen.  Note that even naked mole rats, domestic swine, humans and other weird mammals with apparently naked skin actually have very fine skin hairs.  Hell, even cetaceans have hair.
 
We know that theropod dinosaurs had feathers left and right, and now there are... at least three I think fossils of ornithiscian dinosaurs with suspiciously feather-like hollow keratinous integument.  Unless theropods and ornithopods independently evolved hollow, keratinous insulative structures, the most parsimonious assumption is that the last common ancestor of both theropods and ornithiscians had feathers.
 
This would mean that basically all dinosaurs had feathers as the basal condition; bizarrely, feathers would be the basal condition for sauropods too.
 
You think feathered theropods look weird, try imagining feathered sauropods.  It's possible that sauropods secondarily lost feathers, but again, in the absence of other evidence that should not be the default assumption.
 
My hunch, and hopefully better fossils will come out to prove me wrong or right, is that the suspiciously proto-feather-looking hollow keratinous insulative structures on pterosaurs are homologous with dinosaur feathers.  That would mean that entire dinosaur/pterosaur clade (can't remember what it's called) would be feathered by default.
 
I could kinda buy that some larger tyrannosaurs were naked-skinned by analogy with elephants, rhinos and hippos; there are some skin impressions of larger taxa showing bare skin, but those are small patches and hardly vouch for the condition of the entire animal.  However, yutyrannus, which is allosaurus-sized had feathers, and mammoths had fur.

I thought that was for star wars fans who wanted to roleplay being an AT-AT.