Thanks to church choir obligations, Winter Wargaming will likely start in early January, or possibly late December.

Defense

• Will plasma thrusters help next-gen satellites dodge attacks? – Probably, but I still lean toward large arrays of cheap satellites, thanks to the American cheap-launch strategic advantage.
• Related: the SpaceX Starlink satellites generate about as much power (3kW) as the old Soviet RORSATs, orbit only 90km higher (350km vs 260km¹), and can be launched 60 at a go.
• Chinese defector speaks out on China’s strategy – He’s currently in Australia.
• China bans US military vessels from Hong Kong – parvusimperator wondered when the last visit was. The BBC says April.
• RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft spotted with a strange new antenna – For those, like me, who weren’t in the know, the RC-135 does all kinds of signals intelligence.
• How good is the Visby’s stealth? This good – A merchant watchstander caught one visually, then followed it on radar up to 15 miles away. The results are pretty spectacular.
• The Great Game in the 21st Century: the scramble for Africa – Three poles instead of two this time around, though—Russia, China, and, broadly, The West.
• PMCs and private security companies in modern warfare
• Some modern Polish tank destroyers – Content warning: Polish text.
• Slides from a PLAAF presentation following some J-11 vs. Gripen training – The Gripen fared poorly in dogfights and well outside of dogfights, which isn’t too terribly surprising.

Science and Technology

• How to mitigate a DDNS attack: a guide for webmasters of small and wimpy websites – Such as this one. Granted, we’ve never been attacked (knock on wood). Anyway, the more interesting fact from this story is that a federated Twitter-alike exists.
• The rise and fall of PS3 supercomputers – A chapter in computing history I’d almost forgotten.
• An e-waste recycling expose – The pictures are pretty wild—piles of ash and burning plastic by the side of the road in China.
• Rent a powered exoskeleton for a year – It’ll only cost you $100,000 annually, and runs for two hours on a kilowatt-hour of battery. In a very BattleTech move, they offload balancing to the human, which saves some on computing power needs.

Grab Bag

• An army fights on its stomach – The Landing Barge, Kitchen reflects this fact.
• Is corporate debt the next big bubble? – I just read about some rumblings in the Chinese bond market this morning.
• Cruise lines are stretching old ships instead of retiring them – It’s cheaper to add amenities and cabins to an old hull than it is to build an all-new one.
• Sig’s 2020 firearms lineup
• New England Patriots caught cheating again? – There’s an awful lot of uncertainty around this story, but at the same time, the excuse the camera crew used (“I work for Kraft Productions, doing a series about the Patriots!”) was on the list of ways Patriot cheater-teams were to try to evade capture uncovered during the last Patriots-filming-signals scandal.
• Glock releasing the Glock 44, which is a .22 pistol – It’s the closest to numerological sense Glock has made in a while!