DDE

Shocked to learn that what I for years assumed to be the Mandarin duck is in fact the Brahminy duck.

This is the standard line of thought - so standard that Eugene Messner, colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, was able to independently arrive at it in exile in the early 1960s (and MAD, and modern insurgency-centric warfare). However, the desire to smite petty enemies from afar keeps pushing people (mostly the USG, but I've heard rumblings from the Russian side) towards nothing less than conventionally-tipped ICBMs, of which the most advanced proposal was Conventional Trident. It seems to have instead morphed into the W76-2-tipped Trident ostensibly designed to deter Russian tactical nuclear blackmail ...with matching tactical nuclear blackmail. However, the people furthest down this road are actually the Chinese, who have a large number of "regionally strategic" missiles with an express dual (nuclear and conventional) mission.

Also cats:

It seems that during my Wednesday expedition, the wind was so cold that I got a headache, so I took a day off. Today I got to the newfangled Museum of Cryptography, formerly the Marfino sharashka. Let's start far off. That sharashka - once it got Solzhenitsyn and the rest of its mostly-convict team to develop a serviceable secure telephone system for the Soviet leadership - became NII-2, which today is Avtomatika, one of the many parts of the sprawling RosTech holding. In order to commercialize its military/intelligence IT capabilities, Avtomatika and a network snooper manufacturer called Citadel have budded off a new enterprise that owned the Marfino site and built the museum as a sideshow for its HQ. The company that runs the museum is called... Kryptonite. It would appear the Russian para-defense industry is preparing for every eventuality.

You forgot "arguing over taxonomies", "selling green certifications" and "trying to count all the $$$ they can earn by supporting transition but not really".

And it's Captain's bars. Supposed to be the garb of a US attaché in Moscow.

A significant downgrade from September 2017, which saw anywhere between 406 thousand and 2 million people evacuated from schools, courts and shopping centers, or February 2020, where authorities were apparently able to investigate a threat against 20 thousand schools country-wide in some video on Likee overnight.

Ah, so you've joined Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Arkhangelsk and Nizhny Novgorod, where a big chunk of schools (300+) have had to go through such an "exercise" in the last two days?

Great. Now convince everyone else in the industry of it.

So the China University of Mining and Technology (I'm already noticing a minor risk of media hype) is ostensibly building a lunar simulator consisting of a vacuum chamber with magnetic anti-gravity. https://www.rt.com/news/545796-china-builds-artificial-moon/ Now, I'm not sure what they're planning to do with it, but I'm pretty sure the 'purity' of their experiments would be compromised by the fact that magnetism isn't gravity, and their simulation would have to involve extreme contrivances to account for the different effects based on materials.

So the less slovenly part of my off time has began with the Central Museum of the Armed Forces. In no particular order:

Putin already promised said head to Nazarbayev last year. https://www.mk.ru/social/2021/09/10/cherep-za-buran-kto-takoy-kenesary-khan.html Combine that with the rather hairy topic of this being clear Kazakh nationalist pandering - a political line with an unclear future given the rather drastic shift in Kazakhstan's international standing - and we might see someone cutting the knot, so to speak.

And on the surface-to-air front, we have the elusive beast that is the 40N6 missile, which puts "400 km" into the S-400. However, it requires a non-standard TEL, of which there has been few sightings, and none of the actual launch containers. The same goes for S-400's other non-standard missile, the quad-packed 9M96.

About three years ago before I gave up trying to keep my KSP modded install updated, I whined incessantly about this sort of thing missing. Thank you. However, I hate to be that guy, but the N-1 tower operated on a principle entirely incompatible with this mod: it would be withdrawn entirely a significant time before launch using a pivot (the cycle took 24 minutes). You can see the complete tower in the withdrawn position here:

Even Soviet 4th-gen fighters are adapted for dirt runways. In order to prevent random detribtus ingestion, they switch to alternate air intakes atop the wings.

Moderators generally get a big round of applause and likes each time they intervene on some dumpster fire. Other than that, post in the relatively quiet and uncontroversial Science and Spaceflight Subforum, get yourself known by a couple of rocket bloggers oh, and don't forget having been here since v0.25, before the beta, before planetary biomes, before Valentina, crew specialties, most of the Mk 3 parts, back when flying sideways made no difference with regards to drag...

The history of Soviet and post-Soviet aviation is instructive: Tu-22M and similar trickery (e.g. Su-27KM) was intended to avoid the bureaucracy of designing a new aircraft, whereas post-Union, spawning as many numbers as possible became a marketing ploy (e.g. Su-25T becoming Su-34).

Is it, though? Wuhan is by no means "in close proximity" to the suspected reservoir of COVID precursors in Southern China and Indonesia. Transport by lab samples begins to look simpler than a mine worker's cuddly pangolin. Hardly. Swapping spike proteins between coronaviruses (the pangolin are singled out because there's a known coronavirus with the same kind of spike protein), altering the spike proteins for lethality in a deliberate fashion (including insertion of furin cleavage sites), or passing the virus through human or human-like tissue (including the simulation of the air-liquid interface of human lungs) in order to force it into developing greater infectivity are all common research techniques that have been in use for decades. The parts are there. https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

Yeah, the authors seem to exercise excessive caution. I've seen research elsewhere that, predictably, belief in conspiracy theories and related cookery correlates with belief in other cookery, even to the point of believing in multiple contradicting conspiracy theories - and ego-stroking is one motivation of conspirologists. Combine that with the known greater occurence of crime among lower-intelligence individuals, and you do have a validation of most such stereotypes.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-new-home/202112/the-surprising-link-between-narcissism-and-belief-in-astrology "Surprising"

It likely evolved in bats and then jumped through humans having contact with copious amounts of bat... guano.

KSP lore is pretty patchy. NovaSilisko once - in forum posts evidently lost to time - indicated that Laythe was supposed to feature Io-like levels of volcanic activity and radiation; this is info is on the similar level as Eve's ocean consisting of Liquid Fuel. Breaking Ground apparently graced it with geysers. Modmakers have been trying to fill these gaps, such as with bioluminescent clouds. Saltiness as described by @RealKerbal3x is virtually consensus fanon, and various science instrument mods throw in a lot more. For example, ProbesPlus has this to say

Apollo data is "tainted" by the bulky, inflexible suits. Hops seemingly involve less movement than walking. People may be confused as to your intentions.

And the cars usually also fly, so there's plenty of overlap in capabilities.