SunlitZelkova

Just a hour and half from where I live. So when the AI activate the nuclear weapons, I should be shielded from the bombs, because Oregon will become the base of the AI army. I, for one, look forward to serving as the human advisor to the new apex predator of Earth. Long live the People’s Republic of Cascadia!

Congrats to my American comrades on our nation becoming the second country to successfully return a sample from an asteroid Next stop: Mars!

The Dr. Strangelove in me wishes the Cold War continued so we could get cool pieces of engineering the the Ulyanovsk class carriers, Yak-41, LOSAT sabot ATGM tank destroyer, and SIDAM 25 SPAAG with Mistral missiles.

Doe! So would be possible to damage the neutron protection with an HE shell or near miss from gun or rocket artillery and thus “poke a hole” for a nuclear weapon’s radiation to hurt the crew?

The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway by John Lundstrom covers this nicely. Having read this book, I think there were two the key things that made USN flyers ultimately prevail over the IJNAS, rather than aircraft themselves- 1. The USN practiced deflection shooting. This is when you shoot at a target while it is turning. It seems like an obvious thing if you’re like me and play combat games like War Thunder a lot, but very few air forces did this at the time. The IJN was stuck trying to get on the tails of fighters before they could fire a shot. 2. Radar ground control intercepts. The IJN had nothing like this, and it gave the USN a huge edge in intercepting incoming strikes. Both sides were a really interesting bunch though. The First Team details the profiles of each pilot, and gives a fair bit of detail on the Japanese side too. If the late war was characterized by masses of Hellcats and Corsairs flying against inexperienced kamikazes, the early war had some of the finest airmen to ever face off against each other. At the same time, I think superior tactics and intelligence on the part of the Americans leveled the playing field more than the average history accepts.

Earth and Moon taken by SLIM’s landing camera. https://x.com/slim_jaxa/status/1705042659075854484?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A

From what I’ve read the goal was to prevent the enemy from finding the target in the first place. No consideration was given to helping down the attacker if it actually found the target. In the case of the modern day, you might want to keep the lights off. I’m not sure about the launch parameters of EO weapons like the KAB-500Kr, but if the opponent did happen to attack with such weapons, you wouldn’t want to illuminate the target for them. I wonder just how vital the targets the DShKs are defending. If the really important stuff is protected by Gepards, it seems like it wouldn’t be worth it to risk an TV guided weapon attack (as unlikely as it is).

My mom calls it Taco Hell.

Actually most Soviet tanks since the T-55A mod. 1970 have had a liner built within the armor to stop neutron radiation. It can be. One of the crewmen of the Fukuryu Maru succumbed to radiation sickness after being exposed to fallout from the Castle Bravo test. I’m just saying it can be. The other 15 crewmen recovered.

It’s so weird to think a super heavy lift launch vehicle will be launching so often, considering how little the Saturn V flew. It’s a shame the Soviets couldn’t launch N1s at the same rate they did R-7s. SpaceX will have to avenge them and the 30+ engine design!

Thank you for these words of wisdom.

There are at least some similar activities in Thailand too. I recall an NHK report last year on a scam calling center that got busted, and a lot of the people were Chinese immigrants who were forced to work there. They were targeting Japan.

I don’t think every single case can be reduced to a simpleton misidentifying Venus. There is some phenomena out there causing (some of, that is, the most bizarre and unexplained of) these reports. But the claims are so fantastical that even when there is some shred of evidence- like depressions in the ground where a UFO purportedly landed- it’s impossible to take seriously from a scientific POV. I disagree with Jacques Vallee’s 1975 call for open minds and better data gathering methods. This phenomena will always evade scientific understanding. If we want answers to the UFO mystery- why these things keep happening- we need to study the history of the phenomena, the details of the cases past and present, and the emotions they generate. We must turn to the humanities. The curiosities and desires generated by the UFO phenomena should not be brushed aside as silliness or reduced to a biological mechanism. It must be understood and treated from a philosophical (and maybe psychological) POV. If we never do this, the conspiracies and pseudoscience are never going to end. The NASA investigation is just on track to produce more conspiracy theorists once it fails to produce any new findings as previous physical research attempts have.

Ok I just had the weirdest dream. I was watching For All Mankind Season 4, and Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen were part of the cast. Hayden gets drugged by a NASA official and forced to fly to a moon of Jupiter. So Ed (Baldwin) goes after him and they apprehend the drugger. But a fight breaks out on the base between the North Korean cosmonauts and the Americans, so a Japanese Soyuz rocket is launched to bring the veteran NK cosmonaut from Season 3 there to calm things down. Then everyone returns to Earth and the shows ends. I decide to take a giant N1 rocket model back home because I want to keep it, but it is rusted and covered in UDMH (!!!). I try to figure out how to clean it but it catches fire so I rewind the dream (!) and put it on a boat. I’m walking around this floating restaurant thing trying to figure out how to store it and restore it, and it was creepy because of my submechanophobia. But as the TV set is closing down, I and some other people get in EVA suits to go play on the fake Moon, one of whom was @steve9728. He and another dude drop like 50 meters down a ravine but survive. Meanwhile I walk along the ridge to the base. Some lady finds some odd biological specimen, and I hurry back off the set (which was located on the grounds of my elementary school!) and find a needle floating around. Even though it’s all fake, I try my best not to get punctured by it so I don’t die. The lady decides to do some tests on the biological specimen by putting it in a puddle and it begins to grow rapidly, and I freak out and run away knowing it could be a monster. As I leave the school grounds I see soldiers fighting zombies in the neighborhood nearby, and assume they are from the biological specimen. I head back to the school to find these Utapaun, Squidward like creatures trying to eat everybody. I head along the school hallways and see everyone evacuating, and me, a black detective dude, and the lady run away from the monsters for awhile before finally escaping in a truck. We make it back to a military blockade, and the monsters who were chasing us were destroyed by lasers on Portland class LSDs… which were somehow in the river near the neighborhood. Then I woke up!

I once had an email correspondence with one of the authors of Shattered Sword. I was only 13 at the time and my question was kind of dumb (“what would have happened if Yamamoto survived his shoot down?”) but he kindly provided a response. I later joined their online forum called Tully’s Port. Lots of nice discussions there about the book and other topics related to the Pacific War.

I stole this link from @kerbiloid https://www.interfax.ru/russia/921100 “Russia is ready to learn and launch a cosmonaut from DPRK, but the details were not yet discussed, said the Roscosmos director Yuri Borisov.” Called it!

That’s why I am saying it should become a subject of study for psychologists and folklorists. There are no pics of hallucinations happening and yet they exist, and there are no pics of various supernatural phenomena and yet the stories exist. It is a folklore, or even religious events. Not something you can capture with a camera.

As “aliens in physical spaceships”, “actual sea creatures”, “actual somehow physically existing entities”, and “actual primate species”, I would agree. But these reports do continue to occur. This comic ignores that sightings are still happening. But as I said over in the UAP thread (where this piece of news belonged, it has little to do with “general” discussion of NASA) I think all these things should be classified as religious/psychological phenomena rather than something physical. If NASA is so certain it isn’t alien spacecraft, and no other convincing theories have been put forwards to naturally explain the remaining unexplained cases, it’s about time they hand this over to psychologists and folklorists.

Jacques Vallee created an interesting table showing the prospects of a report actually being made, circa the 1970s. Category 1: Nothing more than an unusual looking series of lights but not immediately apparent as a UFO | Probability of Report: 1 in 10 | Reported to: Anyone Category 2: “ball of fire” clearly something unusual but still not quite a UFO | Probability of Report: 3 in 10 | Reported to: Police Category 3: Bizarre looking aircraft | Probability of Report: 4 in 10 | Reported to: Military [usually by phoning the local Air Force base] Category 4: Bizarre looking aircraft lands | Probability of Report: 2 in 10 | Reported to: local UFO kook Category 5: Something steps out of the bizarre looking aircraft upon landing | Probability of Report: 1 in 10 | Reported to: close family only Category 6: The craft shines a beam of light on you and gives you and epiphany | Probability of Report: almost nil | Reported to: no one Category 7: After the experience, what seems to have taken place over the course of 30 minutes actually took 4 hours (“reality gap”) | Probability of Report: almost nil | Reported to: the event is not even consciously registered by the witness I think a problem with “UAP” research is that it ignores a couple facts- 1. No matter what the government does to distance it from UFOs (you know, the connotations of conspiracy geeks and such) UAP are UFOs. 2. UFOs have a huge stigma around them. In the 20th century when they were first reported it primarily pertained to disbelief in academia, but nowadays it is clearly a sore subject because of the nut jobs it attracts. Because of this stigma, I highly doubt they are going to get a good volume of reports to accurately gauge how widespread the phenomena is. Nowadays, UFO reports in Category 3 are treated like Category 5. It’s a real shame they don’t take advantage of and learn from previous attempts to study UFOs, like Project Blue Book and the Condon Report. Not necessarily taking the results of those efforts as something to build off of, but reviewing their data gathering methods and seeing what could be improved. In addition, I think a lot could be gleaned from the philosophy surrounding them from authors like Jacques Vallee, categorizing them as a religious phenomena of sorts rather than saucer men from Mars. UFO investigations should also involve folklorists and psychologists, not just physicists. Radars and satellites alone are not going to solve this mystery.

Actually I was planning to write a story where NATO and Russia destroy each other in a nuclear war in 2014, so Japan buys the ISS and continues operations. The concept never took off though and remains relegated to nothing more than a thought.

Wow. So we actually did get some space news. I can’t post the article because it contains politics, but according to NHK, Russia made a verbal offer to North Korea to help build satellites and SLVs. Kinda sad considering one of the goals of the ISS was to prevent the proliferation of Russian missile technology.

Rumor has it that a meeting of... ahem, *government officials* may occur at Vostochny. North Korean cosmonauts soon TM? To be honest, it's pretty unlikely, but I wanted to put the idea out there for fun. Unlike with China, there are no laws preventing North Korean scientists from working onboard the American modules of the ISS. Or are there some obscure security checks non-program astronauts (like from Saudi Arabia and UAE) have to go through before boarding the Western section of the craft?

You forgot the fake target test town in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Disagree on how it effected kids or the reason we've seen so much scifi in Hollywood? If the former, I would disagree, at least for my peer generation (born 2000-2002) as none of the people I know really knew about those shows at the time they became interested in science. Not to say that the MCU was the key reason most of my friends have gotten engineering degrees either, but I did notice a strong push on STEM themes around 2013-2014 in the stuff I watched, both on TV and in the theater (and in school curriculum). If the latter, don't disagree, but at the same time I can't say I find your point plausible, just because I don't know how much the TV industry and movie industry affect each other. In their defence though, video games are kind of for kids. Are more "mature" titles really that "kiddy-ized"? Loot boxes are just evil though. They've been banned in some European countries due to basically being gambling.

I have built a replica of the satellite (called VALIS) in KSP1, in case anyone is interested. It is based on the cover art of the first couple editions of Radio Free Albemuth and thus does not conform to the characteristics it would need in real life to remain undetected for so long