Again with the Skypirates! developer log in place of a what-we’re-reading last week, since the news folder was looking a bit light.

Not so this week!

The Cyberpunk Future

• Prospectus on Próspera – Astral Codex Ten’s Scott Alexander on a particular instance of the charter city movement, where a private company receives limited grant from the government of Honduras to compete with the government of Honduras. The typically clear-eyed Alexander says, “If you were a completely ordinary Honduran, making $1,300 a year, having a medium lifetime risk of being murdered, with the government occasionally taking your land and killing you if you complained – would you want the option of moving to Próspera? With its civil rights, property rights, strong security, good education, and higher salaries? I have these things right now in America and they’re great.”

Have you tried turning it OMFV and on again?

• Everyone’s favorite IFV program, after a brief cancellation, is back in the news
• BAE’s entry – Parvusimperator notes: looks like an Elbit UT30 Mk. 2 turret on an AMPV hull, which is a turretless Bradley hull with some mine resistance and layout changes.
• Oshkosh is partnering with Hanwha, to (probably) enter the AS21 or something similar
• Rheitheon/Raynmetall are back too, along with GenDynLandSys (the only entrant last time)
• There are some small business entrants, as well: MettleOps and Point Blank Enterprises – Since phase 1 is basically just concept art, you don’t need much to get a foot in the door. Both of the wee tiny entrants seem to plan to work with bigger manufacturing partners if their entries get the nod for further development.

Defense

• Meme #1: 2021 is as far from 1981 as 1981 is from 1941 – Looks like the link is broken. It’s an F-35, an F-14, and a Wildcat.
• Meme #2: the aircraft carrier alignment chart – Featuring a great dig at Big Kuz.
• Indonesia lost a submarine – Pour one out.
• The MAWL-CLAD – Clever name. It’s an IR pointer for guns, except in a different wavelength so typical NVGs can’t see it.
• Tracking soldiers’ phones is super-easy, and reveals an awful lot about what the US is up to – cf. the Huawei story a bit further down.
• PLAN intel #1: radar helicopter – With radar deployed! A rare spot.
• PLAN intel #2: identifying the members of the Liaoning battlegroup as it passes Okinawa
• Marines ditching RQ-21 drones – The new hotness is new and hot, I guess?

Science and Technology

• Northrop Grumman wee spacecraft docks with a satellite again, and this time it’s a live satellite – It’s a life-extension limpet!
• Huawei, network equipment provider to the Netherlands, has been spying on the Netherlands for a decade – Like, listening in on the Prime Minister’s conversations spying.
• Google now building its own custom video transcoding chips for YouTube – Each PCI-E card mounts 20 encoder cores, each of which can encode 4K60 in real time.
• How to use Tesla autopilot without being in the driver’s seat – But I was told this was impossible!
• Giving the Artemis lander contract to SpaceX is a big deal – In no small part because it’s funds for Starship development. SLS is planned to cost $2 billion. Throw $2 billion at an up-and-running Starship launch system, and NASA could launch something every other week for a year.
• Building Maxwell’s demon – Curiously imprecise for a Quanta article.
• Wokelash at BaseCamp – It was either ‘wokelash’ or ‘whacklash’ (cf. whackjob). The locals aren’t happy.

Games

• Gunner, HEAT, PC preview from Tally Ho Corner – Mr Stone at T.H.C. is perhaps the internet’s preeminent examiner of simulations and wargames, and seems pleased with the state of the game so far.

Guns

• DC’s Gun Recovery Unit already does everything pro-gun people say will happen if guns are broadly criminalized – Civil rights violations, invasive searches, the whole nine yards.
• In what can only be described as a Power Move, USPSA contender Christian Sailer wins an Area championship in a division in which he isn’t classified – That is to say, he’s shot it in matches with classifiers fewer than six times.

Grab Bag

• Lies about knife fighting – It’s recognizably a fight, you won’t get cut up, and other fun facts.
• Cop morale: low – Unsurprising.