DDE

From a 1960s Soviet diafilm about 2017. Plenty of atompunk, but of particular importance is this absolutely savage alarm clock.

Russian carbon nanoparticle "chaff" grenades for spacecraft defense have been patented in the mid-2010s. It's still a cutting-edge concept.

In large powerplant reservoirs, the flooded peat bogs, propelled by swamp gas, can turn into floating islands. It gets more interesting in case of the Narva reservoir, which is split between Russia and Estonia, because hectares-sized mobile landmasses moving about right next to a state border tend to give politicians ideas.

There is a significant waste of effort in thia thread. Before something like the early 2010s SW had semi-official numbers and physics explanations intended to fit the action on screen. Yes, this included the X-Wing being able to pull off 1600 G, turbolaser blast power in the megatons, and the ubiquitous use of repulsors for both hovering and maneuvering. This was of significant importance in the old "Trek vs SW" flame wars. These statistics seemed to vanish some time before the Great Disney Reset, and I can appreciate why. But not towards the nearby planet.

My dad got his Oka shipped from KAMAZ, in a KAMAZ. Anyway, during WWII the US were awfully anxious for self-propelled AA. P.S. Ok, I'm sorry I need to throw in more memes

As a counterpoint to @SunlitZelkova, submarines have the EAB: The major difference is that it's primarily to combat submariners' other nightmare - fire, and corresponding air contamination. I don't think they can use it to last through severe flooding. Surface ship crews also don anti-flash protection gear and, under some circumstances, regular ol' combat helmets. Not to mention life vests. No. But yes. Instead of shockwaves, high-altitude nuclear weapons are, one and all, enhanced radiation weapons. Endoatmospheric interceptors like Sprint carry neutron warheads that would cause significant surface charge and fry the electronics of the target warhead, and potentially cause partial fission of the nuclear weapon itself. LIM-49 Spartan was an exoatmospheric interceptor (roughly comparable to the latter-day GBI), and it carried the 5-megaton W-71 with a gold tamper which instead moved the peak of energy release into X-rays. It was expected to eliminate all warheads in a 16 mile radius upon detonation. However, eventually MIRVs achieved far greater scattering and so the concept (along with a significant pprtion of the US missile defense program) was shelved.

So the 1930s Japanese came up with a blooper for hand grenades. Somehow (prpbably the odd form of the baseplate), the Allies came up with the meme that it was a "knee mortar": In reality, it was a nice way to shatter bones. Your own. MEDIC!

https://thespacereview.com/article/4416/1 Kalina: a Russian ground-based laser to dazzle imaging satellites Fascinating that the land-based laser can be used to illuminate satellites for photography.

Amidst a heatwave, the authorities of Saint Petersburg still haven't fully disposed of last year's snow. https://t.me/nocommentsrussia1703/1936 They have produced a scale model of Minmus.

Yes. Fusion reactors are prone to catastrophic explosions if they overheat. The D-T reaction renders the entire reactor quite vigorously radioactive. Every other reaction hasn't been even theoretically achieved. Deuterium harvesting from water is a complex and somewhat environmentally unfriendly process. Finally, deuterium is the ultimate non-renewable fuel of the universe, created only in the first 20 seconds of time, whereas nearly everything else is produced in the cores of new stars. Finally, the "always twenty years away" nature of fusion research creates room for all sorts of wastage and abuses. You can keep fission power projects to a timeline. You can't with fusion. It's the epitome of Big Science.

The late Stan Mott's imagination was something else.

You know you're desperate when you start to resort to asteroid defense operations as the sales pitch for your nuclear tug. https://tass.ru/kosmos/15078971

Going back from MS Teams to Skype for Business is going to be... interesting. Looks like our company's future is for now mostly cloudless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer I'm still struggling to find the name of that one engineer who took his probe to a comet without authorization...

Not precisely that, but Vostok-1's third stage cut out significantly later than it was meant to, resukting in an apogee 100 km above the target.

I believe magnetic bottles (e.g. the kind you'd find in many fusion reactors or antimatter storage) don't work well together.

We would if the War Thunder forums had a space warfare section.

Why don't stage-and-a-half rockets use aerospikes? Thinking specifically about the Space Shuttle.

Apparently the old 2016-2025 Federal Space Program included a feasibility study for an "Avangard (Pilot) - MKKK", a spaceplane, funded to the tune of RUB 440 mln. I'm learning that because an IT supplier is getting razzled for supplying the project with non-functional software to the tune of 27 mln. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5436900

Not that drastic, but I know the Soviets had a lot of conversions from hypergolics, including to methalox. And then of course there was the project to convert the R-29 SLBM from UDMH-NTO to a hydrazine-aluminium slurry and, separately, to ClF5. Both were at least fired.

The Iraqi space program. Up to 8 Scuds strapped together, plus a few SAMs as upper stages.

In case the RQ-3 DarkStar was ever caught in another nation's airspace, I imagine the US would be able to get away with claiming it was a UFO.

An alarmingly many process improvement and business optimization projects boil down to "X, would you like to get some people fired?" At least one IT consulting guy proudly described to me how the biggest benefit from their projects is not the main IT solution they deploy - especially if it's to do with machine learning or robotic process automation - but an employee surveillance system they throw in as a bonus, helping look for people in the process chain that perform unproductive tasks, and then purge them. A counter-precident: taxi drivers have ultimately lost to Uber, with - from subjective experience - a corresponding drop in safety and professionalism.

Back to our regularly scheduled fuel crisis. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/greek-state-tv-broadcasts-advice-on-how-to-siphon-gasoline

It's a lot thinner once you remove the fluff and the "cosmetic" armor.