DDE

Back to my high horse, phone scammers. Apparently, there's a really huge cybercrime industry in Myanmar and Cambodia, naturally mostly targeting China. Its peculiar aspect is that people are forced into criminal activity. We're talking up to a quarter million slaves. As well as at least one Chinese and one Korean feature film covering the phenomenon.

Nevertheless, Borisov is already blaming the accelerometer: https://t.me/space78125/2027 KazSat-3, a Reshetnev-made TV satellite, almost bought the farm after ending up in a combination of Earth's and Moon's shadows. https://www.zakon.kz/proisshestviia/6407011-efir-vsekh-telekanalov-propal-pochti-na-vsey-territorii-strany.html A lot of my KSP sats went the same way...

Dropped by a park today, only to find myself chasing mice. One if them cared so little for me that it waited for me to stick my nose into my phone and ran between my feet. And now I'm stuck wondering if the brown rodent with a black stripe along its back is a field mouse (Apodemus agrarius) or a birch mouse (Sicista betulina, so technically not a mouse). Because originally I thought it was one of the voles, which is a hamster.

"...but you have heard of me"

That's a very thick Berlin wall...

During WWII, the Australians were among the nations that rushed to develop a tank industry ex nihilo, and unlike many, the Australian Cruiser series didn't turn out too bad, just a bit underarmed - and completely overshadowed by industrial powerhouses, relegating it to training use. However, the Aussies keep at it for most of the war, and that included cramming the 17-pounder gun into one of the later ACs. However, they did not immediately have the 17-pounder on hand, so for recoil testing they created a surrogate using 25-pounder gun-howitzers... plural.

The poor guy must've paid for this cover

"Houston, we have a problem"

Suddenly the several vanilla versions of KSP I've kept on a detachable drive look very prudent.

Well, it was supposed to keep the missile technology and scientists in Russia. It did that. Who they - and the whole of Russia - would be palling around with was another question, of a different pay grade. "...but hey, it's because the Southerners all work 24/7. You see, malign American influence..."

The Russian Empire's most recent acquisitions often had little to no serfdom restrictions, which was the case with Bessarabia (Moldova). This attracted a fair share of fugitives. A census would be conducted every 10-15 years, primarily to update the official information for the per capita taxes - a gap that usually resulted in families paying taxes for long-gone family members. But in Bessarabia, time after time censuses would come back with zero deaths as the new arrivals greased some palms and adopted the identities of the dead. In case with the town of Bendery, someone relayed the statistical curiosity to Alexander Pushkin, who in turn shared the idea for a novel with Nikolay Gogol', and thus a book entered the Russian school curriculum* while the term "dead souls" became a by-word for many sorts of statistical shenanigans.

Ah, walk-ins vs online registration. Always fun. I remember how amused I was when I learnt that the local passport office mixed the two. Depending on the mood, the appointments would be either disregarded entirely, and everyone enjoyed the same 50+ person queue, or they'd alternate between appointments and walk-ins.

The designer of Su-25, upon transferring to MiG, ran a project for post-apocalyptic variants of the aircraft (I'm being literal). It included uglies such as this:

I'm guessing today's hero is about to get a call about a vacancy at Lavochkin /s

I remember a similar conversation on this forum a few years (?) ago. I think you're missing a few extra steps, and Mass Effect (*sighs wistfully*) jumped onto an already accelerating bandwagon. I heavily disagree. I think it's a product of two processes: (1) the "maturation" of serialized TV sci-fi with stuff like Battlestar Galactica, (2) the mainstreaming and, at times, stand-up guyization of nerd culture with shows like the Big Bang Theory. The trend had reached a crescendo with big-budget items like Interstellar and The Martian, the latter being a very, very unconventional story for Hollywood - no antagonist, not even a comically evil general looking to kill Matt Damon for fraternizing with the Martians. And I really, really don't know what's going to happen now, with Hollywood and the para-Hollywoods of streaming services and AAA gaming in a creative crisis and suffocating on their own excessive production costs, and with a decidedly interesting surrounding socio-economic context. I really don't think the Generation Z (Remember that term? The pun is fully intended) of media is going to just be a mere continuation.

In 1991, K-51, one of the Soviet SSBNs, was sent out on patrol with one of the shafts messed up. The crew were stoics: "I wanna go home. Summer 91"

"Yours is made of plywood!" From Sweden's 1990s future tank selection process. The one on the left was Sweden's own proposed super-duper tank with both 140 mm and 40 mm cannons. There was one problem, though...

Tsander's very first engine, OR-1, was a modified blowtorch. Gasoline + compressed air, regenerative oxidizer cooling, 1.45 N of thrust, ants would be satisfied.

Precisely. It was an imperfect solution, much like how the INF Treaty left ships and submarines out of the prohibition of missiles with ranges of 500-5000 km (an omission exploited to hell and back). No satisfactory verification mechanism could be developed to assess the weapons payload of a ship or bomber, and so shortcuts were made in order to reach some deal. Yes, imagine that there were times where it was considered an end in itself.

Because the 2018 mass renaming of airports was subject to online voting (surrounded by many controversies subject to subsequent selective presidential... disregard), the results are an absolute hit and miss. Not one single other aircraft designer (besides, technically, Korolev) made it onto the list, the results were... amusingly monarchist (Nikolai II Airport of Murmansk being a particularly surprising finale, and Kaliningrad had to end up with Empress Elizabeth because someone "vetoed" the leading option, Immanuel Kant, by vandalizing his grave... all Germans bad, yadda-yadda).

OK, looks like I'm going to have to tour the Moscow subway again. This is Pykhtino, a station in the relative middle of nowhere, but as of yesterday connecting to Vnukovo airport. a.k.a. Tupolev airport. Which, ahem, shows.

Electrostatic fusors are capable of fusion and thus emit a non-negligable amlunt of ionizing and neutron radiation. Are they safe? As far as I can see, a transparent pressure vessel is considered sufficient.

Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. They didn't mean "cherry", they meant "cheery"

174 cm Three in a row, what are the odds?

The Accounts Chamber aren't exactly good news either. After my recent engagement with a government client, I'm utterly convinced that spending supervision and the associated paperwork are eclipsing actual work under government contracts... which leaves precisely zero room for failure in R&D, an activity associated with numerous failures and dead ends. Fixing the inefficiency of bureaucracy with another level of bureaucracy was a dubious proposition anyway...