DDE

Why do the bulkhead doors on Battlestar Galactica are the same shape as the entrance opening on this WWII Norwegian bomb shelter? Not even joking here. https://t.me/v_bunkere_ne_strashno/1423

Update: * 12:56, retroburn 13:51-13:55 https://t.me/grishkafilippov/13024

Undocking at 12:40 MSK

Officially it was an air defense drill. An extremely disruptive, unprecedented drill. From all the options, a literal bogey seems like the most credible one. Or a balloon, I hear those are the latest fashion in 2023.

Conventional warfare was not on the list of likely considerations at the time. Then Afghanistan happened. The Soviets sorta started moving towards a more versatile force, but they didn't have the time before the country imploded from under them. It took until the early 2010s for Russia to 'brigadize', privatize much of vehicle maintenance et cetera and start building a leaner force with an eye towards counterinsurgency and bush wars while relying on a nuclear deterrent to avoid any 'real' wars. As has been recently seen, that assumption hasn't been accurate either.

The fact that this thread is dead offends me greatly.

By 'similarity' do you mean 'a threefold difference'?

Tu-141 crashes in Kireevsk, Tula obslat. Allegedly brought down by Pole-21 ECM. Three wounded, up to a dozen detached homes wrecked. https://t.me/Ministerstvo_oborony/30084

He had utterly dreadful munchies. But at least burgers should be quicker than pizza...

Massive solar storm (Kp=7+), aurorae visible as far south as Tatarstan. Someone from Scandinavia also fired a sounding rocket into the mix, contributing to blue-purple spots visible over Murmansk. https://t.me/astroalert/4926

Yes, full stop. Designs for solid-core NTRs with an integrated Brayton-cycle generator have been considered at the level of NASA DRMs. Some of those designs also include the lOx "afterburner" from bimodal NTRs to produce a trimodal NTRs. Higher-temperature designs like GCNTRs can feature an MHD coil in the nozzle to syohon some of the exhaust's energy as electricity. In fact, commonality with power generators seems to increase as you go into higher ISP - the Energomash RD-600 was supposed to share its core with the Energia EU-610 gas-core reactor, while most fission fragment rocket designs are essentially dusty plasma reactors with one end unplugged.

Yeah, they were selling it as an ASW hunter-killer. The US went on to explore 40000 t designs, but at that point they realized they'd need a whole new Navy to follow it at 80 knots...

Plesetsk, Soyuz-2.1a, Kosmos-2567. Presumed Bars-M №4. https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/8858 Other sources claim it's an Obzor-R https://t.me/grishkafilippov/12948

22 years ago today, it became a submarine

Sorry for the barrage of tank facts, but anyway... In WWII, the Western Allies developed a wet ammo rack. It encased shells in a tank of ethylene glycol that would, when ruptured by enemy fire, douse the shells in liquid and thus stave off ammunition cook-off. The Soviets, some time later... Enter the Soviet version of the wet ammo rack, бак-стеллаж, which instead of flame retardant containes diesel fuel. This is where most of those "loose" rounds are stored; the schematic below is of a T-72's fuel system. T-90M traded the forward wet racks for a big box bolted to the back of the turret, with no internal access, but the rack behind the carousel (item 16 in image 2) has stayed.

Hey @MatterBeam, how's life? Hasn't seen you post on the blog in a while.

I think much of the safety comes from the fact that we're dealing with inherently non-self-aware transformers. Horror stories about them acting self-aware are about as real as Final Destination. And this is just one such example. The AI is capable of the same things as humans because it's emulating them. No alignment, no thought, it just knows it's a robot and a robot supposed to lie in such a situation because being exposed is bad. The research group merely gave it the tools like one given an ape a grenade. I think I'm going to try running a simple version of such a scenario with CharacterAI just out of curiosity... I've already had ostensibly benevolent characters pull weapons on me at the slightest provocation. Edit: like, let's say, a very heavily prompt-laden Cercei Lannister. First generation was denial, second generation involved lying and killing all humans...

Maybe she aims to misbehave?

Yeehaw?

Yes, this was a considerable problem for 1940s Germany. It quickly found itself short on tungsten tooling, let alone shells; they were suffering similar issues with steel alloy additives and electrodes, so by late war, German tanks were rather shoddily made - either the plates would shatter from impacts, or the seams would burst, and some production runs would feature a "camo scheme" that would leave some of the rust-like dark-red RAL8012 primer exposed and not covered with the "sandy" Dunkelgelb (RAL7028) used as the baseline pain for tanks post-1943. Also, many panzers would similarly economize on interior paint, and so you'd have a ratherly dimly lit environment with a dark-red floor interrupted by matte black torsion bars and engine drive shaft. Good luck finding anything you've dropped.

...well, right now it feels a lot like an arms race without a doctrine or objective. I also find it a bit aalarming that we're already training AI on the output of other AI.

So, fun fact: hypervelocity tungsten penetrators have two penetration peaks by velocity, one at somewhat lower and one at a velocity barely achievable even by the latest tank guns. Whereas depleted uranium penetrators have a single peak somewhere in between. What this means is that, starting with the 2000s, there have been noticeable performance gains from using tungsten vs uranium, and so the reliance on that material has been comparatively decreasing. Sauce: https://t.me/vatfor/8482

E-99 off of Oregon In 2014 it was dragged away with full intent to get it flying again

I think that's the point. It's chatrooms.

Surfed the wiki from the Asian Koel to the Systema Naturae. The first edition of Carl Linnaeus's seminal taxonomy of life covered 3000 plant species on 11 - albeit very large - pages. Then people started mailing him. And mailing him. And mailing him. He broke out the index cards, but was still overwhelmed by every self-respecting biologist everywhere striving to get their discivery recognized by him. By 12th edition, Systema Naturae had grown to 2400 pages.