DDE

Can you just imagine a civvie seeing such a vessel without knowing its purpose?

I’ve picked four maps I want to play, now I need to rid myself from the grid builder obsession that has bound me to Arid Plains.

The Swordfish was fully certified for dive bomber ops. Utterly false. The main belt ended about 1500 mm below the nominal waterline. Lower than that, as usual, were the longitudinal bulkheads, sacrificial compatments and fuel tanks forming the integrated, non-bulging torpedo “bulge”, butressed by a mere 45 mm of Wotan weich soft steel.

If there’s one thing to say for mayor Sobyanin (a.k.a. Siberia, Tundra, deer-herder, and the Mole, among yet more nicknames bestowed upon the man who seems to pay his wife’s business to change cobblestone twice a year) is that, at 32 sled slopes and 25 skating rinks, the man takes winter festivities seriously.

This thread just got a lot weirder. Do we start posting Anne Fischer images? It was anachronistic in more ways than one. It was, for example, the first battleship in years to have a conventional main armour belt at the expense of protecting the citadel against long-range plunging fire. ...or aircraft bombs. Limited AA was, TBH, normal for the immediate pre-war years. If you didn’t have numbers “20” and “40” in your list of armaments you didn’t have a chance. Bismarck’s AAA inferiority was further boosted by her non-DP 150 mm secondaries. It’s not the worst case - lots of pre-war Soviet Wunderwaffles had triple 180 mm secondaries. Here’s Ansaldo’s proposal for the first Soviet battleship... but if anyone asks, we don’t cooperate with fascists: We don’t cooperate with capitalists either: And please don’t call it a battlestar.

Heaviest snowfall in 70 years + 14 million people = https://www.kommersant.ru/gallery/3866343 *waves shovel excitedly*

It’s been exactly a week, and we’ve got another case against alcohol onboard. FV5863 has had an emergency landing in Sochi. This time, our chivalrous enebriated hero clobbered a stewardess.

True, here the big question would be whether the onboard supply would be sufficient. But I’m not sure you want to deal with superhot steam.

It wouldn’t pull triple duty like methane would - because the design already relies on the propellant for almost all of its radiation shielding.

This weirdo scored 6.9 while the Apollo CSM we know and love scored 6.6, and it took pressure of NASA’s two Korolev-class heavyweights, Max Faget and James Webb, to lobby for the iconic design. This thing was weird (and still is, in our age of capsule resurgence) for a bunch of reasons. The RV is flattened and asymmetrical to work as a full-on lifting body with a flap system for controlled descent, while a classic LES mast is retained. However, while it’s not shrunken significantly compared with the final CM, it features something that’s more familiar from the Soyuz - a dedicated non-returning habitat (“mission module”) for double the volume and an easier surface egress, seeing as it was designed with Direct Ascent as one of the two options. Like the Soyuz, I can’t see an entry hatch directly on the RV. Plus, since the capsule is a lifting body and the heat shield is on one flank, the habitat could easily be co-located with the service module, eliminating one of Soyuz’s huge problems, which would be exacerbated for an American design given the stubborn dislike of fairings on manned ships. The layout evokes the TKS and certain variants of Blue Gemini/MOL/KH-9, were it not for the unconventional heat shield location. Finally, the engine design is optimistically a hydrolox package using the predecessor of the RL-10. The tank layout is also strikingly similar to a design from the wrong side of the Curtain: the donut hydrogen tank is near-identical to the donut kerosene tank from L3’s Block D, and would have possibly acquired a similar skew down the line to guide the propellant towards the intake. The different propellant pairs do make themselves noticed, however, as the corresponding oxidizer tank on Block D is a whole lot bigger in relative terms. @kerbiloid, I know you love all things TKS.

Great, now I want to install KSP and build jets with the Mk 1 command pod. Hell, I’ve tried picturing how to strap a capsule into Shuttle’s hull envelope.

Ablative, no. It’s crazy resistant to heat, almost as good as RCC; you’d usually go for heat soak/radiative TPS with it.

Correct. But the press (in the form of the elite blue checkmark Twitterati) responded by spinning it into antisemitism (to be frank, the actual antisemites did their best to help), which is what I’m parodying using references to “You can have the Ford T in any colour, so long as it’s black” and Henry Ford’s actual political views, in a bout of grotesque humour. But I’m serious about Starship being carbon black.

@Cunjo Carl Tomorrow’s Elon Musk: “New architecture. We’re painting it black. We’re also painting all the Teslas black.” The Media, likely: “Is Elon Musk hinting at release of an updated version of The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem?”

I know of a Northrop Grumman project that involved a gelled IRFNA-hydrazine engine for this kind of aggressive but precise maneuvering... but it’s not the problem. At XB-70’s operational speeds, getting exposed to an outside airstream in a flight suit is fatal, which is why this sort of a shell was needed. And short of launching the pilot out of the exhaust pipe I don’t see a way to cushion that encounter, no matter what elaborate trajectory your escape seat follows.

One doesn’t exclude the other. NURO could be a CIA-Navy oversight office with no actual field assets, or their authority could end at parasite ships, and the bigger boat is under the Navy. I would agree that Carter edges into R&D territory; apparently its sortie to Korea included aerial drone launches, which is both important development work, and so very charmingly 1930s.

The National Underwater Research Organization is on the Wiki, it’s just basically an orphan article that doesn’t get a redirect, evidently. Which is ironic for an organization that engages mostly in cable-tapping and illigal salvage of foreign debris and submarine hulks - a permanent form of the old Glomar Explorer slavage mission, it seems. The Main Directorate for Deepwater Research is similarily engaged in storming the other final frontier with their “deepwater nuclear stations” and their “aquanauts”... when they’re not getting accidental coverage in Top Gear.

Well, they can’t hold a wet candle to NURO, and its ‘red’ cousin GUGI. Literally murky agencies.

Allons y!

And not the previous dozens? And on all the following launches?

If I’m particularly bored in the summer, I may start to edge in on their business - especially if I’m correct in my stereotype of Russian Anglophone tour guides.

What’s funnier is that her obsession with filling up her closet would have been hilarious... Had we not been in the same boat.

If it weren’t the same, it would have been merely bad research. Some years ago I saw mentions of interwoven molecules lattices of different explosives that were supposed to pack more caboom. You’ve come to the wrong universe.

Dmitry Savin, former CEO of previous Vostochnyi lead contractor Dalspetsstroi, is dead. Son says natural causes. Police says shotgun suicide. https://www.rbc.ru/society/28/01/2019/5c4eb5f19a79470a8242e151 A call for a firing squad all those years ago. Ironic.

Any idea why, on NROL-71 of all times, ULA has decided to end the practice of live Mission Control audio?