Making up for a light week last week, a heavier one this time around.
Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague
Defense
- Marine Corps marksmanship test to get harder – Appropriately, in the parlance of competitive shooters, they’re moving to Trooper Class.
- Raytheon gets the nod for a 360-degree radar for Patriot batteries – It uses three AESAs, one main array in the direction of greatest interest and two small ones facing off-line.
- Video of a South Korean exercise – Whatever Korean for ‘hooah’ is, it makes me want to say that.
- Raytheon’s advertising video of Griffin missile testing looks like it was ripped off a VHS from 1986
- Amazon’s lawyers interrupt Microsoft’s JEDI celebration – A judge halted further work until a court can shake out whether the contract was correctly awarded.
- What’s an expeditionary force? – Spoiler: the current official definition (“Expeditionary Force: An Armed Force organized to achieve a specific objective in a foreign country”) is over-broad to the point of uselessness.
- How can small units prepare for large conflicts? – The short version is, do what they always do but more so.
- On the GAU-5/A – Which, if you recall, is the Air Force’s new M4-like survival carbine. It fits under an ejection seat.
- In the mid-2020s, the Royal Navy will be smaller than the French Navy and the Italian Navy – Not combined, smaller than each one individually. The heroes of the past roll over in their graves.
- QC problems plague the M109A7, the AMPV – Deep cuts in the 2021 budget will hopefully give them time to get back on track.
- What do US military missiles and bombs cost? – Thanks to this helpful article from The War Zone, you too can play budgeteer!
History
- Ever wanted posters on how to maintain a T-62 or BTR-60? – Now you too can buy them! They’re even originals.
- Want to help save an F-117 from the scrap heap? – The Air, Land, and Space Museum in Vegas has a line on one. Shipping and restoration is a $45,000 task, though. Share it around.
- AirCorps Aviation, producer of warbird parts and restorer of warbirds, has acquired thousands of original North American Aviation manufacturing drawings – Thanks to one engineer who said, “Maybe we shouldn’t just shred all of these?” in the 1980s, when short-sighted managers were in a tidying mood. Some of them duplicate the microfilm versions already available, but with dramatically higher quality.
Guns
Science and Technology
- App-based car rentals don’t work if you take them off-grid – You’d think they would have thought of that, but nobody in Silicon Valley making hardware is big on making hardware that sees much testing outside of Silicon Valley, so I can’t say I’m surprised, strictly.
- Will Boeing make a full recovery after the MAX crashes? – This opinion writer thinks the answer is yes.
- The UAE gets the Arab world’s first nuclear power plant
- Scientific American with a long, detailed, and helpful summary of the ongoing Hubble Constant cosmological crisis – News to me: there’s now a third method of measuring that number which provides a third, non-overlapping answer to the question. (Or, perhaps, an answer which overlaps with the other two, based on a response paper, but the two classic methods still don’t agree.)
Sport
- Every NFL team’s record against winning opponents – That is, opponents who finished .500 and up.
- And against losing opponents – Your hometown Steelers sitting pretty in the #2 spot in the link above, and a few further down the list here.
- Who wants to play for the Cincinnati Bengals? – Not top prospect Joe Burrows, that’s for sure.
Grab Bag
- Intranecine wrangling between Democratic presidential candidates ongoing – There’s something about watching a train wreck in slow motion…
- Buy-the-White-House Bloomberg pays influencers to post 2020 campaign memes – Of course, I very much doubt he’s the only one.
- The complete list of everything banned by Mayor Mike
- Getty Images represents that people can’t use public domain photos without paying Getty – Photographer responds with a billion-dollar lawsuit.
- Counterfeit products: scourge of Amazon customers everywhere – There are some things I’m happy to buy online, but safety-critical items are not among them.
- 56% of the world’s companies founded more than 200 years ago are located in Japan – There’s a story about a construction company which went bankrupt in 2006, bringing an end to 14 centuries of continuous operation.