DDE

Probably old news for some, but the RD-107/108 engine igniter is two flares on a birch stick.

I remember coming across an article about a NASA F-15 with a tweaked fly-by-wire capable of seamlessly compensating a malfunction of any of the control surfaces. So it's fairly likely.

That's rather unreasonable. Proposals for operational use featured lithium dust suspended in hydrogen. Seems rather low. I remember being able to push a full 18 t to LEO out of a Soyuz with FLOX-70.

So Russia will be putting its faith exclusively into mefloquine for now. https://fmbaros.ru/press-tsentr/novosti/detail/?ELEMENT_ID=38052

And I suppose this is what passes for Russian military presence in Italy:

And now a litmus test for ex-Soviets in this thread. ...or not. The Revenge of the Sith novel writers have (probably accidentally) managed to turn it into the foreboding of a coup in the Star Wars universe as well: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Squid_Lake/Legends If not, this is the most glorious of inside jokes.

Her face seems to have a permanent frown.

Officially it's a 'smoke torch'. What's the difference, really?

"Sasha, there are so many dangerous things on our emblem. Are we the baddies?"

I suspected something like that. If so, I wouldn't call them a particularly striking counterexample.

It also cuts into engine power. I've seen a lot of concepts of what's now known as Berkut with some sort of stealthy flat nozzle. There are many reasons why no attempt was made with Su-57.

Can't be her in this shot. She was only elected this year. And I'll admit I didn't immediately tell her apart from the President of Croatia.

Not just the sanitizer.

I have found a covert canard! Bonus content: how the Soviets learned to dislike the rectangular nozzle:

Welcome to the fold, Boris!

Fire control, comms, engineering. Note how the Smerch has them in a central location instead because it's long enough relative to the rocket tubes. You also often see it altered quite a bit between vehicle subvariants or removed, even while the driver's cabin stays put. Plenty of similar tasks for all the civilian versions.

Because for starters no-one can even make their own mind whether the movie is a satire or not: The problem is that Verhoeven never even read past the first chapter and yet attempted to, ahem, destroy the novel. The problem being that he was so vigorously opposed to the novel's message that he never bothered to make a good case against it: it's just a political system he assumes everyone agrees is utterly evil. Meanwhile, the goofy all-infantry tactics in the film are par the course for both sci-fi and non-sci-fi fiction. He very barely threw in a few more 'villainous' aspects, such as non-citizens not being allowed to have children, and the Federation procuring their uniforms from Hugo Boss Sr, but he never tried attacking the core premise. Indeed, in the film the Federation proves to be both quite meritocratic - the Sky Marshal quits as soon as they fail - and transparent - no sane dictatorship would embed a live TV crew with a forward drop detachment. The fact that people have to come up with a "bug plasma can't melt steel beams"-level theory about the Buenos Aires attack for the film to make sense as satire is telling, and the sequels decided to quadruple down on absolute cartoonish villainy to keep up the charade.

The president of Slovakia is better-prepared for the apocalypse than you.

And that, perhaps, is the big problem. You generally don't see it mentioned offhand. You see it blasted full-tilt by enemy propaganda - which creates a bias against believing in reality of these acts - you see them discussed in the thick shroud of euphemisms, or not discussed at all because this is how things are normally done. A further problem I can see is that, often to escalate the grimdark factor, a sci-fi setting will instead turn to an unconventional, alien adversary that thus defies our very understanding of the concepts of war crimes. There are reasons why gung-ho sci-fi too likes hive minds, clones or armies of robots.

Me after the end of the second week of self-isolation: Meanwhile elsewhere: *sad retailer noises*

What does Elon Musk wish for Christmas?

@XB-70A, needs more Michael Bay.

Ramps are incredibly space-consuming. Since they are usually duplicated by stairs, the whole shebang ends up occupying three times as much space. And nobody wants to make that much of an effort for a fire exit.