Coronavirus

• Seroprevalence studies in France and Spain indicate about 5% Wuflu penetration – Which is… not great, and neatly scotches my pet theory about vastly greater prevalence than we realized. (If the result holds up, anyway.) Estimates of about 20% in New York still strike me as a bit high, given that Madrid, the epicenter of the outbreak in Spain, only hit 11%. I guess we’ll see.

Venezuelan Coup Attempt

• The Drive breaks it down

Defense

• On Boeing’s loyal wingman drone – A marvelously cool idea. Can Boeing pull it off? That remains to be seen—they don’t exactly have the best track record lately.
• US Navy needed target drones to mimic supersonic missiles… so they bought real supersonic missiles from Russia – “Hey, it turns out this is actually pretty hard. Where’s the cheapest place to get some premade ones?” Or, as an alternate snide remark, this Mitchell and Webb sketch.
• Yuma Proving Grounds still working on ERCA – 70 kilometers of social distancing.
• The Navy got its first two Superbug Block IIIs
• Syria’s MiG-29s are in rough shape – It seems to be the fate of a lot of Russian export hardware: they’ll sell it to you, sure, but the maintenance costs over time’ll kill you. Granted, Syria’s MiGs are probably the hardest-worked set since Vietnam.
• Iran, in a move signifying growing belligerence in the Gulf region, sinks an Iranian auxiliary with a missile – Sparking a discussion in the internal Soapbox chat about missiles, warhead sizes, and destructive effects.
• Raytheon researches ramjet round – XM1155 plays nice with ERCA, but also with other artillery platforms. It’s a fancy guided round, too, although I’m not entirely sure I’m on board with that. In a big shooting war, how important are precision munitions vice munitions you can turn out a few million of in a month?
• The next frontier in the hider-vs-seeker battle: unwanted RF emissions – Having done some work at… work with radio systems, I can attest that a lot of radio systems leak.
• Russia’s finally going to get a Project 955A into service – Some of the Project 955s are already prowling the seas, but the 955As have taken a lot longer.

Guns

• USPSA matches look like they’ll be starting back up in June, so you can expect some content relating to practical shooting as we get deeper into summer.
• Ahmaud Arbery: good shoot or bad shoot? – I think the opinion among your correspondents is ‘bad shoot’, at least with the information we have at hand. The way I see it: leaving aside all the surrounding circumstances, I don’t think a three-on-one fistfight the easy way rises to the standard required for lethal force.
• The 3D printed armaments crowd answers the ‘BuT tAnKs’ people… – … with initial work on a 3D-printed disposable anti-tank launcher. I love this country.
• Innovative Arms has a waiting list for Welrod pistol clones – Instead of the quick-wearing rubber baffles from the original, it has a more modern, long-lasting setup in the innards. Innovative Arms estimates a price in the $1200-$1400 range. A bit much for something as simple as the Welrod, but then, pretty cheap for a custom-CNC low-volume replica of an oldtimey curiosity.

Science and Technology

• Microwave power beaming experiments to be carried out on the next X-37 launch – Parvusimperator: “Now we can make bad burritos lukewarm FROM SPACE!” My only quibble is that if a microwave made a bad burrito uniformly lukewarm, that would be great. It seems, however, that your choice is ‘warm and cold at intervals’, or ‘nuclear’.
• The guys at Epic Games, in between making a subpar store with admittedly excellent freebies, have also made a superb tech demo for Unreal Engine 5
• HTTPS everywhere will slowly kill the Old Web – Not just sites that don’t have HTTPS in the first place, but HTTPS sites that aren’t updated. The author says that’s bad. I’m inclined to agree, and honestly, I’m not entirely sold on HTTPS everywhere in the first place. Useful if you’re concerned about being spied upon, not as useful if you aren’t, and aren’t doing anything that involves sending data to the Internet. Bit of a big windmill to have a tilt at, though.

Grab Bag

• USS Nevada found – By ‘Florida-based archaeology firm SEARCH Inc.’, among others, which sounds like it could be the subject of a series of modern archaeological adventure novels. Someone needs to take up the Clive Cussler mantle, and I’m fresh out of time, so consider this idea a freebie.