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DDE

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    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    "Encyclongs" is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and settled throughout parts of Europe.

    This is, sort of, what articles looked like on enci.ru / Большая Советская Энци.ру (the Cyrillic domain suggested it was an online Greater Soviet Encyclopedia). It was a copied-over Russian Wikipedia with ads.

    However, to conceal its origins, the site owners ran a simple regex script for "вики" (wiki/viki), which ended up affecting not only the Vikings, as seen above, but also the plural form of the nouns (-viki) with the extremely common Russian suffix combos "ovik/evik" (to use an example of a word loaned into English, 'BolsheEncyclo').

    There had been an English-language counterpart a few years prior. Barnes & Noble were promoting their e-reader Nook, and so they were selling a War and Peace e-book that appears to have beeun run through a regex that replaced 'kindle' :wink: with 'nook'.

    https://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2012/05/nookd.html?m=1

    Real Life "Kerbalisms"

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    1936 Soviets had a little bit of trouble with physics and thought that the ideal way to land the nascent VDV's armored support was by using water as a cushion.

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    The little T-37 was not particularly amphibious afterwards:

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    Arianespace launch thread

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    N° 7–2023: Loss of flight VV22: Independent Enquiry Commission announces conclusions

    https://www.esa.int/Newsroom/Press_Releases/Loss_of_flight_VV22_Independent_Enquiry_Commission_announces_conclusions

    Quote

    Initial investigations, conducted right after the launch with the available flight data, confirmed that the launcher’s sub-systems reacted to the events as designed, and that the cause of the failure was a gradual deterioration of the Zefiro 40’s nozzle. More precisely, the Commission confirmed that the cause was an unexpected thermo-mechanical over-erosion of the carbon-carbon (C-C) throat insert of the nozzle, procured by Avio in Ukraine. Additional investigations led to the conclusion that this was likely due to a flaw in the homogeneity of the material. 

    The anomaly also revealed that the criteria used to accept the C-C throat insert were not sufficient to demonstrate its flightworthiness. The Commission has therefore concluded that this specific C-C material can no longer be used for flight. No weakness in the design of Zefiro 40 has been revealed. Avio is implementing an immediate alternative solution for the Zefiro 40’s nozzle with another C-C material, manufactured by ArianeGroup, already in use for Vega’s Zefiro 23 and Zefiro 9 nozzles. 

     

    Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    Soviet/Russian tanks are the only ones to (still) have the gunner to the left of the gun, and the commander to the right.

    Originally, this was the normal arrangement, because the small guns of early tanks would be elevated and traversed by the gunner's muscle power alone, and would have a shoulder stock and a pistol grip, so naturally the gunner would be on the left.

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    Problems began when turrets got big enough to require mechanised, hand-cranked traverse, which would naturally end up near the left hand... and a full rotation would involve 40-80 turns of the crank, which quickly became a problem for the non-dominant hand.

    Britain's Vickers just moved the cranks, but the Italians tried to fix this by moving the gunner to the right. The US then got in on the game with the T6 medium tank, the proto-Sherman with a cast hull; US WWII heavy and medium tanks all shared this improved layout, and the benefit made itself really felt as the loader found it a lot easier to handle the increasingly heavy shells. Light tanks were a bit of a mess - in the Stuart, the horizontal traverse would be on the right and operated by the commander, and the new seating arrangement wouldn't be "canonized" until the early 1950s. The Germans and the British would follow soon afterwards.

    The Soviets, meanwhile, were ahead in adopting electric-powered traverse - others would adopt hydraulic traverse, and with a significant delay; this greatly negated the issue with hand fatigue.  The newer seating arrangement was duly noted - what's with thousands of lend-lease Shermans - and loader convenience mattered as the Soviets were already ramping up to 100 mm and 122 mm guns, but attempts to copy it were mainly bundled into Grabin's tank gun projects and would not luck out. The issue would last unaddressed long enough for autoloaders to make it go away, and so T-64/72/80/90 retain a de facto archaic seating arrangement.

    arca steam powered booster?

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

    Those are all solid-fuel rockets, right?

    No. With the exception of Typhoons and Boreis, the Soviet-Russian lineage of SLBMs is UDMH-NTO with some past research into Alumizine and ClF5. And judging by some relatively recent noises, Makeyev have been making a push for any Borei successor to be liquid-fuelled.

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