DDE

Can maritime diesels and gas turbines use bunker oil? I'm seeing mixed signals, especially when it comes to, sigh, the procurement politics behind late Soviet Navy steamships.

It's not reactors but reactor cores. Most of them would be hopelessly contaminated with neutron poisons, and therefore the fuel would need full reprocessing to recover the usable uranium.

"What does [UDMH+NTO] smells like?" "It smells like a court-martial." - Sergei Korolev and the Baikonur pad chief during the Zond/UR-500 program

Something something, red ones go faster

Stability is also a much bigger concern for ships. Topweight bad.

John Clark

Random first thought? The locomotive can only get this tall before the existing bridges become a problem.

Auxiliary-propelled guns

Convair Pye Wacket was the same idea for XB-70, only flatter: That's when they had SAMs. Before that, they were developing a 100 mm main gun, the Grabin V-0902. Ostensibly they kept the reload time to under 2 sec. You also missed the proposal for a Tu-4 with an onboard reactor that would generate a large mass of highly radioactive isotopes, and would then use the aerial refuelling equipment to transfer that into armor-piercing radiation bombs carried by regular bombers. The Soviets were really desperate and tests near Leningrad suggested a dirty bomb strike on enemy warships would be devastatingly effective.

Phosphine is back in the news https://www.pnas.org/content/118/52/e2110889118

According to head of TsNII Prometheus, it's safe to lick titanium poles in wintertime.

They can improve anything.

There is zero codified rhyme or reason to the Soviet tank naming scheme. Hence in 1940 there already were heavy tanks known as T-100, T-150 and T-220, as well as the T-40 amphibious tank and T-50 light infantry tank - later replaced with T-60 and T-70... all of them commissioned between the "mainline" T-34 and T-44. Whereas this is the other T-34:

One of my pet ideas has been an artillery gunboat built to fit the physical envelope of an LPD's well deck. Might have to go with something small like a 105 mm main gun (both of these have 1-2x76 mm; the newer Buyan with a 100 mm is seen in the background for scale).

There definitely was a period when helicooters used ICEs rather than turbines. It was a pretty short one, though. Also, Su-25 is said to be rated for flying on diesel... for about 6 hours before needing a full engine overhaul. And that's before discussing German and Soviet experiments with dedicated avdiesels.

This book might actually kill you.

That propellant team can't catch a break.

If this former employer of mine can go into Russia's mandatory vehicle owner liability insurance, they can manage some explodey rockets. Hopefully they won't be like VEB, who managed to invest a solid chunk of Russia's federal pension funds into Greek bonds.

Russia's Sberbank wants into Chinese space insurance https://www.asn-news.ru/news/78275

This sort of positive displacement bags and bellows are generally not used at the scale of entire upper stages. Nothing impossible physically (Vostok's retrorocket used a bellows made of nitric acid-resistant rubber) but an engineering challenge.

Me who got up at 13:30 as usual on a Sunday:

Some descriptions of the Alcubierre drive I've passed over imply the warp pocket can be collapsed to have a frontal crossection of less than a proton. Besides, there's always the various alternative space drives and wormholes.

Rutherford isn't the first rocket engine with an electric pump.

In 1939 the Soviets hauled home a Type 95 Ha-Go tank captured in the combined-arms "border incident" at Khalkhin-Gol. The testing arm at Kubinka marked a grand total of three technologies worthy of "borrowing": Turret turning mechanism, turret bearings design, and this "rivet" on the aft end of the tank, which is actually a button similar in function to an electric doorbell. This was a clever alternative to the usual way of getting a tank crew's attention - banging on the outside with a wrench; the Type 95 didn't have a radio or an intercom (presumably the commander would communicate with the driver by kicking), and neither would small infantry units. The Soviets adopted the button, albeit not as concealed, for the IS series of tanks and SPGs (except for the IS-3, from which it was removed for some reason), and it also appears on T-34s of Czechoslovak post-war manufacture. The Western Allies began impromptu adoption of externally mounted field telephones patched into the intercom circa 1943, not sure where they got the idea.

Steep fee Now that I'm in the business of educating everyone on Russian political-adjacent personalities, meet Dmitry Peskov.