DDE

It's actually about marketing, really. The fifth generation label was invented by LockMart and the rest made up post-factum, although the classification isn't too terrible. Warships mostly had eras. If we go cross out the Age of Sail for simplicity's sake, it becomes mostly a matter of main armament. It's a bit chaotic, but after an initial era of slow-firing and inaccurate early rifles, you have the Hail of Fire era when quick-firing guns were only available up to 6 inches and so everyone would have those and only a couple larger guns. Then comes the Dreadnought era where long-range gunnery becomes possible, alongside turbine propulsion, and so there is a new focus on consolidating and maximizing main gun firepower. It lasts until the post WWII-period, punctuated by post-war force reductions and arms control treaties. The subsequent Missile Era can also be subdivided into before and after late 1980s as single or twin launcher arms with below-deck magazines are replaced with VLS cells. Frankly, this is comparable to the rise of the dreadnought because the number of 533 or 620 mm weapons carried per each ship has increased drastically. This was still a thing during the First Cold War. I know for a fact that Project 956 went from a mostly artillery-focused destroyer to a (very overloaded) general combatant in response to the rise of the Spru-Can. Also, the Iowas were unmothballed largely citing Soviet Project 1144 heavy cruisers, IIRC.

IIRC the series basically ventured past their expiration date, as so many franchises have. The loss of Depp - likely irreversible, what even is the poor guy up to these days? - was just the final nail in the coffin.

A 1966 CPSU Central Committee memo on expanding production of ready-made breakfasts from popped rice. Besides a major point that's rather eye-raising in a Soviet paper (popped rice production lags behind because corn flakes are more profitable), it includes such gems as the Artillery Academy helping design an industrial popcorn machine (after all, it's "exploded cereals") and two full paragraphs on the advantages of Kellog's rice flakes (Rice Krispies?), the failure of the Soviets' efforts to replicate them, and the need to reach out to the British to license production. https://t.me/tarkhils_channel/2591

I'm a cringe accelerationist now. Let it happen. Let it bomb. Let it burn. We must find out where rock bottom is.

Ah yes. The kind of guy who eventually learns that "alpha" isn't really the first letter of the alphabet. An assortment of three-letter acronyms come first.

Oh, come on, today's terrorism experts can identify the cause down to a specific group based on newswires and grainy footage before the shooting even stops! *cough* Christo Grozev *cough* On a less snide note, I do find it weird that the ship ostensibly out of control smashed the support pretty much head-on even though various improvised stopping methods were being used. I understand some of the dynamics are non-obvious, but a layman's perception implies intent. So of course some people are crying about a Chinese cyberattack while the Russian internet makes memes how it was them all along, as with every manmade disaster in the US in the last couple of years.

Answering to several people at once: yes, a local pilot was present. Intermittent loss of power has been a confirmed problem, the ship was attempting to stop when it rammed the bridge. As to the captain, this was a hasty misinterpretation of a cursory search turning up a crewing agency page: In reality he held the post for some time in 2016, about right after the Dali had an unfortunate brush with a pier in Antwerp blamed on poor actions of its crew, and that's it The Singaporean pictured above (whose job description matches someone who'd be responsible for loss of power) is also not involved, as we now have confirmation that the crew is all-Indian. https://www.economictimes.com/news/india/crew-of-container-ship-that-collided-with-baltimore-bridge-all-indian-company/amp_articleshow/108796636.cms My argument still stands. Jacob Rusil Bin, who went from painting walls straight to being helmsman of the cruise ship Consta Concordia and whose non-existent English backfired at the worst possible moment - not that it would have likely saved the ship, but confusing port and starboard didn't help - is a representative example of a seafarer in an industry obsessed with cost-cutting, and, being squeezed on the ecology side, the cutting focuses on personnel costs, with crew selection typically outsourced to outside agencies and guided by the nit particularly stringent requirements of the countries of flags of convenience. I looked into this some years ago, and pretty much every informal source in two languages back then and now agrees that it's a hellish market of the absolute lowest bidder, no matter the quality (which the shipping companies expect to mitigate through procedures and automation).

It might be much cheaper to solve the awful quality of mechant mariners these days than build indestructible bridges. Usually it's one licensed captain from Eastern Europe (in this case Sergei, 52, Ukrainian national) and a crew of a dozen barely literate hirelings from the boondocks of South-East Asia, all underpaid. This backfires constantly - sometimes they conspire with oirates, sometimes they ground ships trying to catch a cell signal from ashore cell towers. Rebuilding bridges was heavily explored during the Cold War. But it basically requires having a spare bridge, usually a spare construction site as well in case the main one gets cratered by a nuke. It's very, very expensive.

In 1916, two British destroyers on Dover patrol, HMS Zulu and HMS Nubian, had a very bad meeting with German ordnance. Each of them became half the ships they used to be. So, at the height of WWI the British had two unserviceable halves of a ship. Paging Doctor Frankenstein! Enter HMS Zubian. It wasn't a trivial surgery either. No two ships are exactly alike, even within the same order, and it turned out the beam was different by a whole two inches, but they got everything to fit (presumably, big hammers were involved).

Turns out the developers of FN P90 also had an upside-down gun moment:

Upper (Block I)

MS-25 second stage reentry over Vladivostok, previously believed a Chinese piece of space junk https://t.me/kiam_ison_network/191

Spectacular reentry over Vladivostok believed to be the product of this thread's subject matter. https://t.me/space78125/2505 Edit: more authoritative sources say Soyuz MS-25 second stage https://t.me/kiam_ison_network/191

I caugh something that sounds a lot similar almost a month ago. If it's tye same crap, you're in for a load of hurt, because I haven't fully recovered yet and the residual cold seems to drag on and on and flare up the moment I set foot outdoors.

Supply chains. The thing distinguishing SpaceX the most is that it went past a whole lot of aerospace suppliers that normally expect a piece of the action. Often, this has cost them, but ultimately that's where their cost savings come from. Dunno if they'll manage to keep this up given the reliability levels needed for their ambitions. For ESA, where spreading the pork internationally was the mandate from the start, this would have been even worse.

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Aeroflot flight 953. The one where the second pilot decided to let his two kids hop into the seat for a bit, and the son lost control and tugged hard the stick on his way out. 75 dead.

Accept accept accept accept

Take two, successful. https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/12906 Not that it's the launch(es) everyone is eager for today.

Well, we've been sticking with an Office 2016 permanent license once the corporate 365 got yanked in 2022. It's going to be interesting how many companies will purchase keys abroad and stick with the familiar product, no matter how much hassle it would be.

Microsoft Office 2024, coming up! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/upcoming-preview-of-microsoft-office-ltsc-2024/ba-p/4082963 How's that always-online, cloud-based architecture coming along?

Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author and the inventor of cyberspace and technological singularity, among other things https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/vernor-vinge-father-of-the-tech-singularity-has-died-at-age-79/

Apparently the chemical battery was somehow related to PZUs. Complete ignition failure. https://t.me/roscosmos_press/1913

Scrub due to a dead chemical battery https://tass.ru/kosmos/20308597

There's a long, highly critical article by Fyodor Yurhikhin in the GLONASS journal. I dunno if I'll ever get to pulling the whole interview out of a PDF and into a translator, but one point felt particularly novel to me. Roscosmos is a poor attempt to emulate the success of Rosatom. Also, fun fact: Roscosmos's Telegram lists Vasilevskaya as a spaceflight participant, not a cosmonaut.