JoeSchmuckatelli

Yeah, that's just weird. (Note: reading into this a whole heap of scorn for the practice is the correct interpretation of the sentiment expressed)

There is a significant difference between doing something as service vs doing it for money. All the intangibles. I don't have any experience as a merc, nor serving in any other country - although I have trained with both conscripted and volunteer forces from other nations. But I do think that there is an element of restraint that professionals in service have that may not be present with the for profit folks. Similarly, I think that the concept of Duty is higher in the service group than the profiteer. Then there is the whole legality thing. Onlookers and outsiders may not recognize the differences I allude to - but I guarantee that the American Officer and SNCO classes do. It's something you can feel rather than articulate.

guessing:

Having been on ship - I'll bet that crews are agitating for greater access. QOL improvement. However, once the companies start finding that there is a benefit to them for more frequent and reliable comms... it will become universal. And they will pay. Oh yes, they will pay.

I mentioned Syria and my expectation that it would have proved to be a 'testing ground' for new ideas (for RU). In many ways, it seems it was. However, I also note the heavy reliance upon Wagner during those days. It dawns on me that there may be 'communication lag' in addition to inertia. Specifically, that people 'in the system' (professional RU military officers) don't have that high of a regard for their Mercenary compadres (a not uncommon feeling). Further - I wonder if Wagner held something back. HashtagPureSpeculation

"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…" - Sun Tzu

Makes you wonder how many shipping companies are buying. The Oceans can now be connected.

I think there was real sense of parity running up to '91. The US changes in force structure and use after Grenada, the effective integration of Combined Arms, Command and Control and ultimately, Logistics changed things dramatically. The introduction of the Abrams was a game changer for ground forces, sure, but it's the whole package. Let's not forget how dramatically the first Iraq war shocked everyone. 3d largest army going up against 4th largest army. In the aftermath, we like to look at weapons systems - but if we are honest... yeah they were good, but the way they were used and integrated made the difference. We can argue all day about US vs Iraq not really being a good proxy for how a US/Soviet non-nuclear contest would have panned out, but I think its safe to say that any contest in the 90s would have been shocking to the Soviets. Eventually, they'd have had to rely on numbers and depth. Thing is... It's never safe to count the Russians out. They have (like the US, frankly) a history of not doing well in the beginning of a conflict - but adapting thereafter. I honestly thought that their adventure in Syria would have been more informative, but you've also got to contend with Inertia. I would never expect another success like that again. Edit: @kerbiloid pointed this out in his response. The US has never, since 91, fought any war without absolute air superiority. Complete air dominance. That cannot be overlooked. It's also clear that the US and RU forces still fight wars very differently. As someone who's been to combat... I wouldn't want to fight against them WITHOUT air dominance. Because their 'fires' doctrine is brutal.

I finally realized that the Chinese Space Agency has copied my KSP habits. (Of course the core makes it to orbit! The only way to build a core is MOAR!!!)

Well played, sir

And I'm proof of that. Grin - no reason to ever fight fair. I'll agree, in principle. It can tank. For most places in the world, they're efficacious.

American and British viewers of the Arab-Israeli and other proxy wars using Western vs Soviet tanks noted 'design flaws'... we weren't particularly interested in convincing them we were correct. This really is one of those 'they just didn't know how to tank' things, IMO. Institutional blindness. Every Soviet Tankboi I've run into in WOT has argued vehemently that there's 'nothing wrong with T-72...80...90 + variants, and they're inherently better than all others'. Don't get me wrong; they're capable tanks. And the Soviet philosophy was always 'good enough, cheap enough and in enough quantity'. They just weren't as good as they believed. Re: BMP-1... it was kind of a prototype. Ripe for improvements based on its first fielding, and the lessons learned when the specialist crew (meaning trained, not conscript cargo) were killed.

Papers about the lensed galaxies in Webb's first image are starting to come out. Dazzling James Webb Space Telescope image prompts science scramble | Space

News Flash Dark Matter STILL NOT DETECTED!!! A new dark matter experiment quashed earlier hints of new particles | Science News Unknown at this time whether this is a new article about the last News Flash - or an article that the last News Flash failure to detect dark matter is confirmed by a new lack of detection...

I had to dig into this a bit, as aviation history isn't my strong suit. What I'm gathering is that in the years leading up to Vietnam, the Century Series aircraft were part of the Cold War 'equation'; specifically designed to intercept nuclear bombers or deliver nuclear weapons. That seems to me to be the US deciding on both an internal strategy and a 'turn the map around' expectation of what the Soviet's might do - with the designs supporting that. The advent of Vietnam is that the US and Soviet Union got to engage with each other in a proxy war. Proxy wars are interesting things. Each side gets to see their technology in action; but they don't always get to personally apply the tech (and your tactics/employment) against the intended/anticipated adversary. Thus you get analogies of the classic Soviets' claiming that their 'tanks are good, but Arabs can't fight' arguments coming from the Arab-Israeli wars. (Anyone who's been on the WOT forums knows this well). Interestingly, while Americans and Russians of the time might have claimed the Vietnamese weren't as scary or disciplined as the Russians... the Soviet fighter jets proved formidable against Americans fighting in American equipment and applying our tactics. The efficacy of the Soviet equipment in anyone's hands was sufficiently devastating that the Vietnam experience forced a sea-change on the American design philosophy. Thus, as far as I'm concerned - absent Vietnam, what happens? Does the US and Soviet Union find another proxy-war 'playground' in the intervening years, or not? Part of me wants to think that it would be almost inevitable for the two powers to not find some place to fight in the intervening years... but it's entirely possible that it would have played out like the Arab-Israeli conflicts - with Nuclear War fears restricting any conflict to proxy wars - with proxies doing the fighting on both sides. (One can argue that the Soviets learned nothing from the Arab-Israeli conflicts and other proxies, as they did not radically change their tank designs after seeing the sub-par performance... c.f. the current vulnerabilities retained in Soviet designs.). I'm going to go with my gut on this. Americans are every bit as arrogant as anyone else who's ever been a super power... and seeing as the Soviets did not learn much or adapt from their proxies' experiences... I'd say neither would the Americans.* So absent a proxy war in which the Primary had to go up against a thoroughly armed Proxy** (a Vietnam analog)... the wars between respective proxies would be viewed as 'bush wars' and thus any lessons learned would not be determinative of possible super-power competition. So the result is that each side would continue to develop a peer-to-peer best guess/expectation and what do we want to do to them strategy. Meaning, everything would have gone towards missiles, standoff systems and maybe IFF (universal implementation driven by Vietnam frustration/failure***) to support the Cold War peer-to-peer expectation. Thus - would we have seen the Teen Series? I think not. I think you'd see faster, stealthier, farther flying nuclear strike/nuclear deterrent craft with a few things like A-10s for ground support. * It was the American fighter pilots' personal experiences with losses against Soviet Aircraft and SAMs that drove the sea-change. They DEMANDED the change, and were listened to. Back to the tank analogy: had Soviets in Soviet tanks gone up against American/British armed Israelis and fared as poorly, I suspect the Soviet tank design of the 80s would have been significantly different. ** Soviet vs Afghanistan doesn't count; the SAMs (Stinger) and TOWs were part of an infantry-heavy fight, and very few places in the world are analogous to the extreme mountainous terrain. ***Remember, in Grenada the US Forces were embarrassed by their lack of Joint communications strategy and poor Joint Ops planning... Edit: going to add this... The Russian 'Equation' is/was far different from the American one. The American, self-centered pre-Vietnam / NATO posture is one of having to fly or sail long distances across oceans to combat a nuclear powered foe. The Russian self-centered equation is completely different. They not only had to anticipate / deal with the US threat... but they've got all of Western Europe to contend with as well. Thus, their fighter development philosophy was clearly different in the pre-Vietnam timeframe, producing aircraft that were significant performers vs American designs in Vietnam. Had the US and Soviets not had a proxy war in the 60s / 70s... the extension of design likely means that Soviet aircraft would have continued a more lethal air-to-air path than that of the Americans going into the 70s-80s.

I was looking for Vaya space's aerospike engine... before I realized HyPr is a different company. Have they completed an engine? Do we have a thread on them - or are they just a white paper company?

How come the smaller rocket carries more than the middle one?

(Laissez-faire is working so well, n'est cie pas?)

There was a period of 'heightened sharing' by the devs. ...And like some do with the girl who smiles when selling a coffee, they convinced themselves that more was there than actually was. Thus, "FRIDAY!!!" became a thing. But like that girl - she was just selling coffee and smiling at all customers - the KSP2 team shared but made no promises. And like the hapless customer who won't get a clue...

Gawd - NO!!! This is not the idle 'what are you eating' thread: this is the DEDICATED COOKING thread: the what did you MAKE for dinner thread. No 'I nuked burritos' No 'a bag of chips on the couch' if merged... the actual art of cooking will be subsumed by hordes of Cheetos posts. (cries) From the first page...

When looking at military hardware, you should often consider its application or intended use. Clearly this is the new SuperMega coffee cup. Looks like I'd need two. Just saying. ... Edit: real answer (I don't know) - but if it's an AA missile, remember many are MANDPADS and so have to be relatively light and small. If the source of the image is Ukraine - I'd suspect the latter. Which makes me sad. We all need moar coffee!

SMH... the person who takes just a second or two for PPE?

Yup I read the accuracy part and scoffed at the terrible Soviet missile. ...before remembering that 'm' in Soviet is 'meters', not 'miles'.

Looking forward to the pictures!

At its most basic, our summer marine layer is those low lying grey clouds over L.A. that are particularly prevalent between May and September. At a little less basic, the clouds are much bigger than a dreary day at the beach. They're just the edge of a giant atmospheric system called a stratocumulus cloud deck that stretches hundreds of miles out into the Pacific. Marine layer While it is most common in the month of June, it can occur in surrounding months, giving rise to other colloquialisms, such as "May Gray", "No-Sky July", and "Fogust". Low-altitude stratus clouds form over the cool water of the California Current, and spread overnight into the coastal regions of California.[1] June Gloom