Another two-week gap, but happily, I don’t think we have very much breaking news to turn into yesterday’s news.

Projects

• For some reason, my 3D printer is still having a devil of a time with miniatures (after having worked perfectly previously). Maybe it’s the nozzle. I plan to switch it back to a larger nozzle, with which to print some more Little Wars bits and bobs, before I eventually go back to miniatures.
• If you’ve been following the video half of my content production, you will have noticed the revolver reliability problems. I think I’m finally almost done with that. We’ll see sometime next week, most likely, when Bowen sends me the Ruger double-action revolver bushing tool I ordered.

Defense

• Why do F-16s carry wingtip AMRAAMs? – Reduces wing flutter.
• NATO exercise in the Black Sea includes all littoral countries except Turkey and Russia – Except for the two largest, most important countries with a Black Sea border, everyone was there!
• China builds villages inside Bhutan – Has been for five years.
• Why Kiribati and Kanton matter – Salamander points out that the great circle route from San Diego to Brisbane goes within 30 miles of the island of Kanton. Guess who wants to rebuild an airfield there?
• Army’s new fitness test fails 7% of men, 44% of women – Dog bites man more than man bites dog, to use the news analogy.
• The French generals wrote a second letter
• DTR writes some ad copy for Hanwha and Rheinmetall – Some pretty pictures.
• Iraq’s F-16 fleet may fall to the greatest enemy of all – Lack of maintenance. Lockheed contractors are on the way out.
• Strike Eagle ships JASSMs
• While the F-15EX will carry an oversized air-to-air missile
• Old experiments sadly abandoned: helicopter operation from submarines – The nice thing about having so much obsolete hardware around after the Second World War is that we could use some of it to experiment with random things like troop carrying submarines with a helicopter deck.
• The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon has a range of 1,725 miles
• Australia drops Elbit’s Battle Management System
• Perennial Soapbox favorite DCS is good enough for VR training Warthog pilots – There was a recent A-10C Block II or whatever in DCS. Maybe this is why?
• Army joining us in the 21st Century and building modularity into tank computer systems
• Biden administration caves to Kremlin on a Russian pipeline – Shortly before a German election likely to scupper the project anyway, but still.

Non-Breaking News

• Oh yeah, something did happen – The Colonial Pipeline thing!
• There was a state of emergency
• Why is there no shortage in Pittsburgh? – Because we have at least three major sources of fuel—pipelines from the Gulf, the Midwest, and the East Coast.
• Krebs on Security looks at the criminals behind the pipeline ransomware attack
• Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million ransom, part of the $90 million the crime gang took in before shuttering

Iron Dome

• Palestinian rocket attacks are bad for Israel… – … but they do make for good Iron Dome in action footage.
• Also good for long-exposure photography
• IDF dupes gullible media by reporting a ground invasion of Gaza, which drives fighters into tunnel systems, which Israel then bombs

Grab Bag

• The mysterious case of the Masters pimento cheese sandwhich – Augusta National fired a caterer, who kept the recipe secret. The next caterer, at great personal difficulty, figured out the secret ingredient. The club then fired that caterer.
• Patents filed: the Glock Rifle? – On the one hand, it’s literally just patent filings at this point. On the other hand, it’s pretty detailed patent filings.
• Historical photo: lowering a 16″ naval gun into a furnace to finish it
• Neural implant lets person type by imagining writing – Curiously, the implant requires retraining every few weeks. I wouldn’t have expected that.
• Progressive prosecutor presides over homicide spike – Water still wet, sky still blue.
• Are plate tectonics critical to life? Scientific American investigates

A bit late on the draw this week: work has been ridiculously busy, as has been the pattern lately.

I did at least fix the occasional ‘your IP address has been blocked’ message you might have been seeing: that page was getting cached as the homepage when spammers visited. It’s not fixed in the sense that the anti-spam plugin and the homepage play nice, but I turned off the anti-spam plugin and cleared the cache, so it looks solved from your perspective, non-logged-in readers.

Onward!

Defense

• NSM box launchers on unmanned trucks: the future of Marine aviation – The second part is maybe unwarranted snark, but they have been talking about giving up the baby carriers just at the point when baby carriers get useful with F-35s, haven’t they?
• Private aggressor aircraft provider Top Aces, not satisfied with having the coolest job in the world, now have the coolest Skyhawks – AESA, IRST… I wonder if you can stick AMRAAMs on?
• Oh, they also own 29 F-16s – I repeat: coolest job in the world.
• The technical alignment chart – These keep getting more niche… and I am on board.
• FNH builds a new lightweight machine gun – The “EVOLYS”. Just rolls off the tongue. It has some neat features, though, which I won’t spoil.
• Belgian farmer moves rock, expands Belgium – The former border dated back to the Treaty of Kortrijk (1820). “We should be able to avoid a new border war,” said the mayor of the neighboring French village, displaying an alarming lack of certainty. If the farmer doesn’t return the stone, the case goes to the Belgian foreign ministry, which would then summon a Franco-Belgian border commission inactive since 1930. European history is hilarious sometimes.

Sport, Motor, Formula

• After the 2014 rules changes, Mercedes F1 had an ‘idle mode’ to keep from destroying the field by too much – Relevant meme. The current team boss denies it, but then, of course he would.

China, Coronavirus, and Other Related Topics

• Here at the Soapbox, we like to demonstrate our editorial independence by honking off the Chinese government at every opportunity.
• The Chinese property market looks to me like some kind of scheme, perhaps one shaped like a three-dimensional triangular solid – Deposits from new buyers are being used to finish old construction, claims a guy on Twitter.
• Brazil rejects the Russian vaccine, which contains a replicating cold virus – Oops. Well, my Made in Russia Soviet Union pocket watch stopped working in pretty short order, and also, I spent enough time in Russia to develop an appreciation for all the nuance of на ремонт, so I can’t claim I’m totally surprised that something made in Russia would be of less than the best quality.
• It only took a year, but we finally figured out how COVID spreads! – Respiratory droplets. Shame that the lesson (avoid large groups in poorly-ventilated spaces) is now almost irrelevant, thanks to the widespread availability (in the US, at least) of vaccines.
• The lab leak hypothesis: increasingly likely – Not to say it was engineered, but any sober or even slightly tipsy examination of the evidence has to allow the possibility.
• Contractor with the PA health department leaks PII for 72,000 people – I don’t think I’m one of them, at least.

Twilight of the West

• We also like overwrought headings under which to sort articles.
• 20 French generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 men signed an open letter expressing concern over ‘mortal dangers’ that face the Republic – They don’t quite call for a coup. Quite.
• A Day in the Life: South African armored car driver – The armor holds. Late breaking: dashcam footage!
• Eviction moratoriums: both sides – For a commie rag, the Washington Post is slightly more sympathetic to the landlord side than I would have guessed.

Grab Bag

• Excavator shoveling slag – It’s the most metal thing I saw last week. … don’t forget to tip your waiters and waitresses.
• Ars Technica slobbers all over Invincible, the Amazon animated superhero series, which is good but not quite as good as the ArsTech review says – Issue 1: ‘fun’ is the wrong word for it. It’s very rarely fun in the traditional superhero sense, and when it is, it’s quickly interrupted by ultra-gory realism. Issue 2: the voice cast is extremely uneven, because there aren’t a lot of people in it with serious experience doing voice work. (J.K. Simmons is, as always, worth the price of admission.) Issue 3: there’s an attempt at young adult drama, which is deeply tonally inconsistent with the rest of the show, and mostly just drags.