DDE

Wait until you hear about US Navy's pre-WWII exercises. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem

I have serious doubts. One, what you're describing is an SLBM submersible test stand. The Soviets used them as well, but images of those are pretty hard to find. You, however, missed the bit about an inland reservoir. It's the other daft basing method from that study, if memory serves.

Minuteman-III launch drill minus the launch. Yes, the nuclear warhead transportation semi-trailer is atop the silo intentionally - apparently during one exercise someone set off the live launch sequence, and so a humvee was driven onto the silo top and left with the brakes off in the hope that it fall into the missile. https://t.me/v_bunkere_ne_strashno/414

Keep in mind that the good folks at Bunker 703 say that the Metro was mainly a shelter-in-olace option. The blast doors were to be closed down at the first sight of an attack. Not many chances for anyone topside, although I know of dedicated surface evacuattion entrances added by some factories as cost-cutting measures.

Interesting article detailing thw US rationale about not raising a ruckus about the original FOBS. https://thespacereview.com/article/4466/1 Interesting to see how they treated the document as a gentlemen's agreement on key principles, putting the spirit over the letter, and avoiding cheap point-scoring. Those were the times...

Crude free-standing shelters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered stunningly effective at mitigaging everything except follow-up fallout damage. A strong counterexample is Sweden. Not sure what they were counting on, but they were counting on the level of 65k bunkers. https://archive.md/br8hA

Me, the day before yesterday: "It would be nice if the freight train didn't drive backwards, but had a second locomotive on the rear end" Me, today: struggling to fix the variable train car payloads on a derivative of the vanilla freight train asset

OK, so I'll take a shortcut instead of doing the math. The Iranian Qiam-1 (800 km) has a flight time of six minutes. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/for-missile-warning-in-iraq-thank-the-space-force/ Out of these, it's going to spend at least three well above the horizon, so a little bit more than your assessment. However, we also know that the Soviets considered a five-minute warning to be unacceptably low. Not really - the installations tend to be have capabilities well beyond medium orbit. This bit usually is taken to be a damning factor for an air defense system. This bit irks me because one of the most hawkish things to have come out of Japan in recent years was a call for a regional-level missile strike capability because of a hypothetical situation when 'enemy' missiles are spotted on the launchpads and fueling. Given how long ago has the issue of making ampulized, storeable hypergols has been resolved, I'm sad to say some Japanese politicians seem to be stuck in the 1960s. The difference in time between liquids and solids is about 20 seconds, needed for the fuel to flow down the lines.

As far as that goes... the only platform that was meant to use LRAAMs was the F-22, the missiles got axed, and the new developments (AIM-260, LREW) probably aren't meant for the Joint Strike Fighter either. It's taught us that if you don't hunt SAMs (and literally appoint them one-third the bounty payment of a tank, RUB 100k) the SAMs don't die and keep constraining you. But it's CAS, CAS, CAS all day long, and if you even think about SEAD, you get called a slacker...

And, more importantly, those are public. So even if they were doing it at a loss, their shareholders would be happy. Now would you look at thay peak on February 28!

"What difficulty modifiers do you want?" "All of them"

Cities: Skylines. You almost can't see the cut corners and places where I've placed dead-end roads and haven't expanded to yet.

SpaceX isn't public, so its four sources of funds are Musk's savings from past and current projects (probably not much), profits from Falcon launches (potentially not much, save for ULA-priced national defence launches), profits from Starlink, and investor capital from Alphabet et al. This latter category may be earmarked as "do not use for Starship". So, speaking in guesstimates because SpaceX financials aren't public easier, this may leave not a whole lot for a megaproject of this size.

Zak has paywalled all of his reporting on it, there isn't a political angle for a catchy headline (barring fearmongering about an Elon M.), not much info at all, I suspect... why would it make the news at all?

Do you even realize what can of worms you're opening?

Angara, Kosmos-2560, Plesetsk https://ria.ru/20221015/angara-1824348081.html Chatter says it's another EMKA.

Both would be enormously overdesigned compared to normal. You'd need to replace a whopping 1 g of acceleration, which would mean either huge ullage motors or a very overdesigned tanks to sustain an abnormally high pressure.

"Feasible" is a low barrier, so yes. The US wouldn't have much trouble coming up with a hydrolox upper stage instead, of course, but if you lock yourself into a kerolox design, an appropriately modified version wouod work. Both candidate designs for SSMEs also used to feature expanding nozzles before another wave of cost cuts, so it sounds like this option is on the table. What worries me is the start sequence. F-1 uses a tank head start (propellants coming down the likes under gravity) with an external unit powering the hydraulics throughout the starting sequence.

Inspiration to prior question: NovelAI, whose original product is a GPT text 'game', have their own version of Stable Diffusion as well. And in theory it's basically another Waifu Diffusion. But, except for the frequent issues with eyes - it seems to use anime pupils on normal-proportioned faces - I haven't had too much trouble taking it in a wholly different direction.

Even with such a development boost, and even with smaller airframes - I've heard of both MiG-25 and MiG-31 conversion proposals - the economics never pan out. Tiny market, huge flight hour bills.

Do we have a slot for a communications engineer?

Our earlier heroes, Panorama, now "report" that the Russian Orthodox Church has declared the creation of a Lunar Exarchate: VK comments be like: "Which mod is that?"

Stupid question: why can't many of these (e.g. Stable Diffusion) be run on a consumer laptop at an appropriate glacial speed? Why is there a really tall minimum system requirement to neural nets?

It wouldn't be inflationary if it's associated with an increase in productivity. Which in theory would be the inevitable result of automation and the whole IT revolution. Instead, Some have tried to attact the notion that the present degree of automation increases productivity, but I doubt it holds water. Yeah, that makes sense in the, ahem, consumerist economy. Interesting way to supercharge the system to demonstrate GDP growth.

That wasn't entirely my point. In a lot of places, a steady, noticeable level of inflation is the norm, to the point where the entire monetary policy is contructed around inflation targeting. Countries with prominent, internationally used currencies are usually reasonably protected against these same effects, and the current burst is at least partly a product of various QE schemes, yes, as well as energy prices. This non-negligable inflation massively affects investment habits, making the Anglosphere venture capitalist market - and hence the Soace Bubble - hard to replicate.