DDE

"Pardon my newest friend. He's dead tired."

So it's more or less understood that tooth fillings have potential as accidental (oh my gosh, that's terrible) AM radio receivers. Can perceptible sound be induced or by a solar storm (catastrophic magnitudes included), or am I a failure at physics?

Il-20 is no pretty thing but its name hides an ancient secret that is far more visually offensive

"Gagara" is a loon. Yuri Loony

90th birthday

PowerPoint slides. Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

None shall pass

If you don't give her a bouquet of roses, you don't love her. If you do, you're profligating the family budget. This year the roses go at $3+ each. Flower sellers across the post-Soviet space be like:

Which wasn't an unreasonable requirement. At the time everyone was exploring how to increase effectiveness of short bursts, and the Soviets ended up with AN-94 precisely by the same logic. It's just that by then they'd largely stopped chasing new cartridges (for assault rifles, specifically - the contemporary attempts at replacing the 7.62x54R were wild, like the 10x54R discarding sabot flechettes, but they never involved a new gun).

Fact 1: bullet casings are a thing because they act as an expendable way to seal the breech. Thus all caseless rifles keep having serious obturation issues - the gas keeps leaking through the breech. Fact 2: the prototype German G11 caseless rifle with its exotic action was quite mechanically complex, and so its plastic hull was made virtually airtight to avoid dirt ingress; it had a pressure relief valve due to the issue above Fact 3: the immediate reaction products of gun propellants are rich in CO and, when concentrated, are quite explosive; and facts 1 and 2 have ensured that this concentration inside a recently fired G11 rifle was rather high Fun fact: the G11 was, among all the many other issues, liable to explode in your hands P.S. the G11 bombed so bad the British were able to easily buy Heckler und Koch afterwards

Apparently you just get more crime and a spike of attractiveness for Commercial Leisure buildings.

...am I on a mission to actively sabotage the entire workspace?

I never quite got a feel for how the day/night cycle worked. Especially because the "inertia" of the city seemed to be too great, and the changes wouldn't get noticeable before morning came.

It's not a new meme but it's always a handy one "What we pitched" "What got approved" "What fit in the actual budget"

Imagine having that hair on official record. I'm at a loss who that is to Gagarin's left.

Dug up my C:S save as well. Took a couple of hours to just retrofit it with all the paid mods, the new, higher-capacity trolleybusses that came with the final updates, and scribble down exactly what I so desperately wanted to change. Think I have something to work with without going all the way back to the foundations. Town's having a bit of a death wave, methinks, plus I hope I can power through the various growth stages before my landfills run over, but it's the first step that's the hardest.

Spektr-RG's magnitude goes from 17-18m to 11m, likely due to upcoming equinox https://t.me/kiam_ison_network/189

Wake up, everyone! New orbital drop pod style has just... dropped. Now, it's clear someone merely focused on creating a quick-disembark pod that doesn't produce much "clutter" on the ground, and so the character just rises out of the grand standing upright like a damned Myrmidon. However, thing is, that's a legit penetrator-style lander right there, and you don't see that in fiction very often, if at all. Two sets of penetrators have flown on failed Martian probes. However, literature still seems to be generated for them in 2020s on both sides of the pond. https://luna1.diviner.ucla.edu/~dap/pubs/109.pdf https://www.energia.ru/ktt/archive/2022/02-2022/103-117.pdf (exactly what is a hyperspeed penetrator?) Let's be charitable and assume the character isn't simply standing inside the pod. Is there any benefit to lithobraking like that, beside reducing the retroburn dV (and thus, potentially, AA exposure when it's a factor)? All the papers I see mostly cite low size/cost and instant digging-in of your geological instruments.

Luna-25 had a major revision to its control system, likely caused by a combination of reliance on imported electronics and the dragged-out development uncharacteristic of Soviet-era probes. Well, it's not the agency that builds the probe, is it? It's not the ghosts of Korolev and Babakin doing QA. Essentially, Lavochkin are rookies all the same... just with more bureaucracy, thieving and braggadocio. Process analysis and control engineering do seem to be JPL's magic sauce, and I don't remember them being nearly as much of a thing in the later years of the Soviet Union. The Elon Musk ethos of flying by the seat of the pants seemed to remain quite pervasive, and so precious little systematization was done. Remember the old story about Khrunichev hiring two guys to hammer out the same piece of Proton hull, for decades, instead of going to the manufacturer and asking for a respec?

Powered lift + dirt runways. Boeing had a very similar-looking wannabe C-130 replacement. The regular An-72 gets a lot of mileage, even at the top of the world (An-74 has a navigator and beefed up batteries and APU, you know, the cold weather start-up shebang).

Nice S-Bahn. But the lack of traffic on the roundabouts is conspicuous.

Soviet 73 mm rounds for the BMP-1's main gun and the closely related SPG-9 tripod-mounted recoilless smoothbore (with a bigger initial charge) are two-stage, with most of the velocity delivered by a finned rocket stage. This leads to somewhat finicky behavior, since the rocket is prone to steering into the wind, et cetera. Nothing that the users of RPG-7 aren't familiar with (its rockets also have two stages, but the sustainer stage is tractor-type). By contrast, BMP-2 fires a regular 30x165 mm, and the BMP-3 adds a low-pressure cannon firing a T-55's 100 mm HE rounds or missiles. A Warhammer 40k boltgun is commonly understood to use a two-stage projectile too, but rotation-stabilized. The IRL Gyrojet was only equipped with a rocket motor, and because of that it had trouble picking up initial speed - one could simply put a hand in front of the barrel and stop the rocket. And 40k characters love to trade shots at cinematically close ranges.

"Am I joke to you?"

Hey, did we have this one yet? An-71 Madcap Probably the nicest integration of an AWACS antenna ever.

Mozhaisky Academy's heads of departments of space comms and radio navigation arrested over authorising (and collecting) pay for 82 non-existent researchers. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6536138