DDE

The author refers to the background as "grotesque architecture of a world now alien to the returning starfarer". I was just itching to post some of his work here. "Byzantine futurism" is Anton Frolov's shtick. So enjoy Einstein Cross.

"Mine now"

"I have seen things you wouldn't believe..."

"So who's your apothecary?" "A homeopath!" "And do you feel better?" "Yes... but to a very 'homeopathic' degree..." - The Exchange News, 1903

@shotinfobar makes a "brave proposition": a Museum of Roscosmos Slides.

Not a particular surprise, Darwin himself was a fan of Malthus and he was basically surrounded by future eugenicists and race hygiene experts. He was heavily criticized at the time for taking a theory he didn't invent - Richard Owen, the inventor of the term "dinosaur", was one such critic, and his work both predated Darwin and turned out more accurate. He observed Darwin's theory was rife with subtly hidden creationism, making evolution a divine teleology of some sort, and as a result it also posited the possibility of devolution or species-level degeneracy; essentially, he thought Darwin was a new style of creationist with extra steps. He particularly went to loggerheads with Darwin and Huxley-senior over the origin of man, and was repeatedly castigated for refusing to accept the evolution of homo sapiens from modern clades of apes. We now know he was right. I'm not banging on it for no reason. Darwin's sticky fingers are still all over popular understanding of evolutionary biology. Whenever someone talks about "less/more evolved" or "the next step in evolution", that's an echo of those early debates, and it's not dying. Another pervasive aspect is this style of artwork: This is a modern, politically correct version, you can guess who was originally between chimpanzee and European-ish humans. But its application is absolutely classical - another warning about society-wide degeneration unless you immediately convert to some totalitarian ideology of "maintaining social health".

Jedem das Seine? It's a translation of Latin suum cuique, and it's also as notorious a gate sign as Arbeit macht frei...

Freaking contortionist...

Meanwhile at the Korolev readings, marginal LVs and ships abound. Energomash is still working on a plug nozzle engine for Korona https://t.me/dobriy_ovchinnikov/2870 Meanwhile at Energia, somebody's brewed up a Dreamchaser https://t.me/dobriy_ovchinnikov/2865 Edit: whoa, a godawfully ugly Energomash SSTO! https://t.me/dobriy_ovchinnikov/2874

Progress MS-25 boostercam (vertigo warning) https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/12125

I think Hyman Rickover would spin up to flank speed in his grave. Instruction in applied and easily attainable (yet rapidly obsolescent) subjects at the cost of actual academics was something he railed against quite a lot.

political mudslinging can ensue: Gee, I wonder how demands for international environmental regulation over the Arctic would turn out these days.

Why do we have a death day thread but not a birthday thread? Thinking how we haven't marked Buzz's 94th.

IU-59 Nuclear Explosion Imitator was a drum with 120 kg of TNT and a "pyrotechnic composition" that would produce a very convincing mushroom cloud (and potentially kill or injure anyone within 200 m in a decidedly non-imitative fashion). It appears the Russian military is less enthusiastic about such earth-shaking training aides. Kavkaz-2020 featured... this:

I think it's the combination of the nature of the kits and the presence of less generic parts. My parents put a lid on the buying at around the time the various branded kits began showing up - that is, LEGO realized the Star Wars prequels are a goldmine. I knew a guy who had a LAAT, and the set was enormous, clunky, and had a whole bunch of pieces with no real alternative uses. The explosive growth in the number of colors also upset my figurative OCD. I did however window-shop, a lot, and some of my earliest musings on things changing in the wrong direction involved a LEGO store overrun with collectors' kits and other stuff that didn't look nearly as fun as combining a railway crossing barrier and the shuttle crawler's tracks to make a tank.

Oh, great, it's 2:47 AM but this thread has sent me down Memory Lane. I remember noticing how the LEGOs of the 2000s were already getting less versatile. It's interesting to see how the old manuals actually encouraged experimentation... wondering if it was the same for later generations.

And this is where I learnt to check my staging... on something that probably shouldn't be staged.

Did someone say "streamlined trains"? I used to have one of those

Eurodollars. Not as in Cyberpunk currency but as the phenomenon of USD accounts and deposits in non-US banks, facilitated by such a bank holding a correspondent account with a US bank. It's how much of the capitalist world economy runs to this day. And it was invented by the Reds. Details vary whether it was the treat of sanctions against China over Korea or against USSR over Hungary, but in the 1950s one of the earliest, if not the first such schemes were hatched by Soviet-owned European banks to theoretically move "red" USD out of the US (as you can see, back then the sanctions were not terribly sophisticated). The Soviets then worked on creating a greater market for dollar deposits in Southern Europe to better use their dollar cash, and are even understood to have propped up London's financial industry when it in turn was clobbered by sanctions over the Suez Crisis. Eurodollars are in turn a core enabler of the concept of offshore finance, although the US and Britain have domestic offshore subjurisdictions as well. And then, once Comecon fell and there was no alternative to the now-dollarized world... "Ivan, are we the capitalists?"

I'm not in the target audience, but I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW MORE All the more cynical that it's coming out just behind the wave of official Starship Troopers games.

The Petrozavodsk Phenomenon of 1977 isn't big enough for you?

P.S. Oh, lord, those Peruvian "mummies" were so crap... and yes, they were found and confiscated dressed up. The skull of each is likely an alpaca's. "Maybe they're a cardboard-based lifeform?" "Convergent evolution: those hands are shaped like shovels to shovel suckers' money" - VK

Not to toot my horn, but I was suspicious of the whole UFO drive of the last few years, so I had not a second of doubt. (and I also wanted to use this image) Come on, I've grown up on Alyosha of Kyshtym (a prematurely-born fetus likely affected by radiation and then incompetently mummified), that was far more convincing. The final story is rather wild (KP prevents use of translator links, though). TL:DR is that a schizophrenic hoarder found it, neighbors called the doctors on her for walking around with an imaginary baby, an alcoholic acquaintance stole it and tried to make it stop stinking (through use of copious alcohol), then bribed a cop with it, cop called the news but a UFO cult showed up first and took the body off of him, before - surprise- handing it over to an actual pathologist, who disposed of it, only for individual cuktists to spread stories about burying it at Yevpatoria's deep-space array or on the grave of Baba Vanga (crossover - check!)

* whistles, pretending he's not trained to perform similar "horizontal" sales at every opportunity*

Alternative General Dynamics A-16, a.k.a. if you don't stop asking us to put that whirr-BRRRRT onto the poor Viper, we're gonna sell you this