Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[DDE]

So, I think the British design firm AvPro has had some  some influence on the Command and Conquer and Ace Combat folks... As well as any other military nerd in the 2000s.

Just a reminder that they weren't sci-fi illistrators, they thought they were predicting the future.

EXINT passenger pods was actually something that reached mockup stage.

You get VTOL, and you get VTOL, and the C-130 successor gets VTOL!

Now I'm not saying it's aliens...

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

You have to admit, FSW looks BassAd! 

[magnemoe]

21 hours ago, DDE said:

So, I think the British design firm AvPro has had some  some influence on the Command and Conquer and Ace Combat folks... As well as any other military nerd in the 2000s.

Just a reminder that they weren't sci-fi illistrators, they thought they were predicting the future.

EXINT passenger pods was actually something that reached mockup stage.

You get VTOL, and you get VTOL, and the C-130 successor gets VTOL!

Now I'm not saying it's aliens...

Forward swept wings has handling benefits if you have fly by wire. Lost out as stealth is more important than twitch dog fighting. 
Top an bottom looks more like star wars and is the top an seaplane? 
Aircraft carrier with outriggers, as long as you don't need to pass trough canals like Suez.
And you want it so large you can have an hangar deck in the outriggers. Then it get a bit fun, you need an top attack to seriously hurt it, the outriggers is fuel, storage and anti air. 

[DDE]

21 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Top an bottom looks more like star wars and is the top an seaplane?

The Marauder is some sort of a Swiss Army Knife, VTOL, wing-in-ground super-modular attacker / ASW / AEW / transport.

24 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Aircraft carrier with outriggers

Judging by their other ship design concepts, they must've really, really liked the Independence-class.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Aircraft carrier with outriggers,

A bit longer and it would be a Battlestar, considering that that last pic kinda looks like a Cylon Raider attack…

[Beamer]

On 2/23/2023 at 11:25 PM, DDE said:

EXINT passenger pods was actually something that reached mockup stage.

I can just imagine one of these landing on a carrier and hooking the arrestor wires as the lids pop off and the 2 troopers get launched off the other end of the flight deck. It's one of those things that looks good in the concept art but when you think about it is a totally bonkers idea

 

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Beamer said:

I can just imagine one of these landing on a carrier and hooking the arrestor wires

Well, you're looking at Boeing's competitor to the F-35B, so no arrestor wires.

[AckSed]

Tintin's Professor Calculus was based off a real person: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/06/auguste-piccard-man-who-flew-to.html

[steve9728]

How to prove evolution in the shortest way as possible (just kidding hahahahaha).

[AckSed]

When strapped in a chair in zero-G, humans naturally rest their arms such that their arms are bent but parallel with their chest, and their fingers are level with their chin. This fact brought to you from the livestream of the Crew-6 mission.

...This means that the astronauts in Crew Dragon perpetually look like they are seconds away from making the Gendo pose (or the Mr. Burns "Excellent!" pose, if you prefer).

[DDE]

Soviet/Russian tanks are the only ones to (still) have the gunner to the left of the gun, and the commander to the right.

Originally, this was the normal arrangement, because the small guns of early tanks would be elevated and traversed by the gunner's muscle power alone, and would have a shoulder stock and a pistol grip, so naturally the gunner would be on the left.

Problems began when turrets got big enough to require mechanised, hand-cranked traverse, which would naturally end up near the left hand... and a full rotation would involve 40-80 turns of the crank, which quickly became a problem for the non-dominant hand.

Britain's Vickers just moved the cranks, but the Italians tried to fix this by moving the gunner to the right. The US then got in on the game with the T6 medium tank, the proto-Sherman with a cast hull; US WWII heavy and medium tanks all shared this improved layout, and the benefit made itself really felt as the loader found it a lot easier to handle the increasingly heavy shells. Light tanks were a bit of a mess - in the Stuart, the horizontal traverse would be on the right and operated by the commander, and the new seating arrangement wouldn't be "canonized" until the early 1950s. The Germans and the British would follow soon afterwards.

The Soviets, meanwhile, were ahead in adopting electric-powered traverse - others would adopt hydraulic traverse, and with a significant delay; this greatly negated the issue with hand fatigue.  The newer seating arrangement was duly noted - what's with thousands of lend-lease Shermans - and loader convenience mattered as the Soviets were already ramping up to 100 mm and 122 mm guns, but attempts to copy it were mainly bundled into Grabin's tank gun projects and would not luck out. The issue would last unaddressed long enough for autoloaders to make it go away, and so T-64/72/80/90 retain a de facto archaic seating arrangement.

[kerbiloid]

The loader should sit to the left from the gun to push the things into the barrel with strong right shoulder, and should have some space for maneuver.
So, he buys two tickets and occupies two seats.

Thus, the tank-commander-in-chief and the gunner are sitting to the right, one-by-one.

In MBT-70 the loader was fired, and his place in the turret was occupied by the driver.

In 3-seat tanks with automated reload the gunner sits to the left, instead of the gunner, to save place.

In 3-seat tanks with manual reload (PT-76) the loader sits at his place to the left, and there is no gunner.

And only in Armata they finally have a comfy office room with game displays and a toilet (professional gamers would understand that very well).

Edited March 3, 2023 by kerbiloid

[Codraroll]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

And only in Armata they finally have a comfy office room with game displays and a toilet (professional gamers would understand that very well).

And blackjack! And ladies of negotiable affection! Actually, forget the tank and the blackjack!

Speaking of the Armata, apparently its chief problem is engine-related. Nearly all Soviet/Russian tanks since the 1930's have used an iteration of the V-2 engine (not related to the rocket), but Armata was designed around an entirely different engine. However, it hasn't worked as expected, and since the tank is a different size, they can't just throw in a V-2 variant instead. The tank is built around the engine, and the chosen engine doesn't work. Neither is there a good supply of the necessary microelectronics, and because of the two aforementioned problems, there is no established production line for it, which again makes it prohibitively expensive to produce. It seems mass production of the Armata is still a long way away. It might even be shelved altogether.

https://wavellroom.com/2023/02/10/armata-the-story-is-over/

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Codraroll said:

And blackjack! And ladies of negotiable affection! Actually, forget the tank and the blackjack!

RQ-21 Blackjack is Boeing's, and there are no women in the Russian tank crews, so learn geography.

[DDE]

On 3/3/2023 at 9:16 PM, kerbiloid said:

and a toilet

BMP-3 wants a word

Spoiler

 

[kerbiloid]

10 minutes ago, DDE said:

BMP-3 wants a word

BMP-3 doesn't have a game monitor for everyone.

[Maria Sirona]

Now to completely different topics, there is an unique- and objectively more correct- nickname for the Eurovision Song Contest in finnish- Euroviisut. The reason it is objectively more correct is because it uses the word viisu, which is finnish slang for "song".

[Codraroll]

7 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

Now to completely different topics, there is an unique- and objectively more correct- nickname for the Eurovision Song Contest in finnish- Euroviisut. The reason it is objectively more correct is because it uses the word viisu, which is finnish slang for "song".

In Norway, the contest is known as "Melodi Grand Prix". It probably stems from the original official name "The Eurovision Song Contest Grand Prix", which was in use until 1968.  "Melodi Grand Prix" is a nice rhyme in Norwegian that rolls nicely off the tongue, so it has been retained even if the EBU changed the international branding more than fifty years ago. The commonly used abbreviation is MGP, which is much less of a mouthful than ESC.

Edited March 5, 2023 by Codraroll

[kerbiloid]

(skipped a joke about 'x' letter spelling).

[Codraroll]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

(skipped a joke about 'x' letter spelling).

It's originally French. That language has no rules.

[Maria Sirona]

14 hours ago, Codraroll said:

In Norway, the contest is known as "Melodi Grand Prix". It probably stems from the original official name "The Eurovision Song Contest Grand Prix", which was in use until 1968.  "Melodi Grand Prix" is a nice rhyme in Norwegian that rolls nicely off the tongue, so it has been retained even if the EBU changed the international branding more than fifty years ago. The commonly used abbreviation is MGP, which is much less of a mouthful than ESC.

Wait i thought that Melodi Grand Prix is the name of Norway's national final??? (And Denmark's too???)

[DDE]

"Encyclongs" is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and settled throughout parts of Europe.

This is, sort of, what articles looked like on enci.ru / Большая Советская Энци.ру (the Cyrillic domain suggested it was an online Greater Soviet Encyclopedia). It was a copied-over Russian Wikipedia with ads.

However, to conceal its origins, the site owners ran a simple regex script for "вики" (wiki/viki), which ended up affecting not only the Vikings, as seen above, but also the plural form of the nouns (-viki) with the extremely common Russian suffix combos "ovik/evik" (to use an example of a word loaned into English, 'BolsheEncyclo').

There had been an English-language counterpart a few years prior. Barnes & Noble were promoting their e-reader Nook, and so they were selling a War and Peace e-book that appears to have beeun run through a regex that replaced 'kindle'  with 'nook'.

https://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2012/05/nookd.html?m=1

[Ben J. Kerman]

Aeroflot, Russia's flag carrier/main airline still has a hammer and sickle as part of their logo. They went with something different in 2003 (I think around then) to separate themselves from communism, but they returned to their old logo after a little while. as it had been an iconic part of the company for years (Aeroflot is also quite an old airline, founded in 1923). I believe in 2019 there were some issues with Aeroflot's advertising campaign in Estonia due to their logo and historical impacts of communism in Estonia.

Old livery:

I guess post 1991 livery (Going by the flag) but still using winged hammer and sickle:

Aeroflot livery without winged hammer and sickle:

Current livery with (tiny) hammer and sickle logo:

 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

Aeroflot, Russia's flag carrier/main airline still has a hammer and sickle as part of their logo. They went with something different in 2003 (I think around then) to separate themselves from communism, but they returned to their old logo after a little while. as it had been an iconic part of the company for years (Aeroflot is also quite an old airline, founded in 1923). I believe in 2019 there were some issues with Aeroflot's advertising campaign in Estonia due to their logo and historical impacts of communism in Estonia.

The (winged in case of Aeroflot) sickle-and-hammer is an emblem of labour, not of a communism, regardless of what do they think in Estonia or anywhere else. ^*)
It was never replaced, just was a short period of common style redesign, then this silly attempt was rejected, and the well-known emblem was established.

*) In East Germany they added a caliper, but it's just because they can't measure by eye.

[Maria Sirona]

In finnish there are two words for diameter. The first one is "läpimitta", literally "throughmeasure", while the second one is significantly more BadS: "halkaisija". Literal translation: "splitter".

Edited March 19, 2023 by Maria Sirona