WWRW falls on a Thursday this week. Yesterday was busy at work, then Avengers night at home, and today featured some dental work in the morning, so here we are, at last, with a somewhat lighter post than usual.

Defense

• May’s issue of Defence Technology Review – Parvusimperator notes with pleasure that a professional defense writer agrees with him on IFV weights; also, the issue has a good overview of IFV weights generally.
• Some historical TO&Es for Cold War Soviet formations – It comes from a wargame, but wargamers are nerds, so it’s probably pretty accurate.
• Tired: pay a local to knife your target in a bazaar. Wired: knife missile. – Great-Game-style espionage and double-dealing is for chumps. Bring on the technology!
• The Sahara is terror’s new front line – They couldn’t have picked a nicer neighborhood to wreck.
• Little Bird Down – A narrative after action report of the loss and recovery of Valiant 41¹ in the Iraqi desert.
• Three cheers for forward presence – TLDR: don’t skimp on carriers.

Science and Technology

• Hackers steal almost $41 million in Bitcoin from a crypto exchange – On the one hand, enormous virtual bank robberies! On the other hand, I have a hard time believing you’d find ready buyers for $40.7 million in Bitcoin on short notice, so it’s very much paper wealth.
• Could quantum mechanics explain the existence of space-time? – Interesting conjecture (that entanglement is what makes space-time space-time), but very little attempt to support that claim in a way the layman can understand. If I see a Quanta article on it, I’ll share that too.
• Saudi oil stations attacked by drones – First those oil tankers, now this. Iran? Definitely Iran.
• China launches a pair of Type 052Ds – What’s that, like one a week now?
• Plans for the Virginia Block VI – Special operations, unmanned systems.
• A silent mortar for Russia – Piston-launched for quiet operation with little muzzle flash or smoke. Nifty. 1.2km range. Not as nifty.
• Raytheon’s SPY-6 is a gallium nitride radar, with huge sensitivity gains over previous radars – They say 100 times more sensitive. Assuming that’s only counting received power, it’s still something like a four-fold increase in range.

Grab Bag

• The life story of an Indianapolis Motor Speedway photographer – The Indy 500 is something worth seeing at least once in your life.

Interdisciplinary Stories

• Eagle Dynamics developer busted for shipping flight manuals to Moscow – This could have gone under any of the non-grab-bag headings or its own Games heading, so I gave it its own. It touches pretty much all of our topics.