Defense

• China’s desert mock-ups of US warships – Presumably as practice targets.
• New York semiconductor fab goes out of business, Pentagon scrambles to stock up – Bring supply chains home?
• Roundup on what we know about the alleged Russian ASAT test – Or at least, what we knew on November 15.
• CDR Salamander dances on LCS’s grave
• The Calidus B-250 is what happens when you scale up a Super Tucano by about 150% – Or lock your designers in a room wallpapered with diagrams of the Skyraider.
• USAF to buy Wedgetail to replace Sentry – New AWACSen!
• Big Army buys Britain’s Sentinel radar planes – My dreams of a mercenary JSTARS outfit, crushed.
• Textron now out of the NGSW project – Parvusimperator: “Can this stupid waste of money (the NGSW) die yet?”
• Taiwan’s F-16Vs are now operational – The thing they refer to as the F-16V is broadly similar to the C/D Block 70 planes.

Grab Bag

• Grumman Albatross comes back – Now with turboprops! Maybe this should have gone under the ‘defense’ section…
• The bee dance language, which no one understands, is perfectly described and predicted by complex six-dimensional mathematics, for reasons no one understands
• A national divorce would replace some small problems with larger ones
• Armoring spacecraft is hard – Headline picture: the damage from a 14-gram piece of plastic at 6,700 meters per second.
• Novel idea from a progressive author: what if we stopped giving addicts drug paraphernalia?
• Tesla owners locked out of cars due to an offline server – SpaceX is cool. Tesla… eh.