The last two updates were 109 and 110, fun numbers if you’re a Messerschmitt fan.

Last week’s Skypirates! developer log was a calculated choice, to give us time to build up a list of interesting stories for you.

Defense

• The Germans are installing Trophy APS on Leopard 2A7A1s – That’s quite a model number, isn’t it? Anyway, it seems to me that it barely matters, in light of the recent chart we shared calling Germany a NATO freeloader.
• Israel receives new Oron ISR plane – Looks a bit awkward, as do many of its competitors in the genre, but good aerial surveillance is the substrate of modern warfare.
• A Burke and a Zumwalt under construction at Bath Iron Works – The missus and I, on our delightful vacation to Maine a few years ago, saw Bath Iron Works from the front—we were on the right side of the picture, from one of the two docks upstream of the little headland.
• Battle Order with a video on Japan’s Rapid Deployment Forces – The fiction that Japan’s military is purely for self defense grows thinner by the moment. Coming soon, the Japan Ground Self Defense Force Rapid Overseas Expeditionary Response Team, or something similarly silly.
• The Diehl Defense IRIS-T-SLS Mk III SHORADS – A pretty cool system behind an alphabet soup of acronyms.
• Big Army to replace TOW – But not with Spike, because it wasn’t invented here.
• ‘Accident’ at Iran’s Natanz atomic site – What do you think? 500lb Joint Direct Accident Munition, Small Diameter Accident, ground-deployed satchel accident?
• Improved plate carriers in a constrained fiscal environment

Science and Technology

• Supreme Court punts on API copyrightability claims, declares Google’s use of Java in Android fair use
• Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider and Fermilab point toward the Standard Model being incomplete](https://www.quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermilab-finds-hint-of-new-particles-20210407/) – Different anomalies: the LHC is seeing unusual decay in b-mesons, while Fermilab is looking into the magnetic moment of muons. Complicating the latter story, a new calculation of the expected value matches the observed value more closely than the presently-accepted value.
• A real-time map of Evil Genius Elon Musk’s satellite network – Spoiler: he has a lot of them up there.
• Ford studying prechamber ignition for gasoline engines – Deep into The Secret Horsepower Race, I find stories like this extra-fascinating.
• Build your own wire EDM machine! – It only takes some custom-machined parts and a €2995 arc generator.
• Citibank loses $500 million on a misclick – UI design is important. We might have shared this already, but it’s a good one.
• Mathematician disproves the unit conjecture – Parvusimperator, former math grad student, said it was interesting.
• A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would wreck the global economy for years – Because even if TSMC’s fabs survive undamaged, and even if TSMC retains its employees, and even if China can immediately get a state-owned TSMC back into operation, it’s still a dead company walking, because its supply chain is deeply dependent upon Western technology and equipment.

Guns

• Making a short-barreled shotgun from a Remington 870 – A fun DIY project.
• It’s match season again – The wheelgun has been giving me some reliability problems to start the year. Going up to the range with parvusimperator and company this weekend, in the hopes of confirming my diagnosis.

Grab Bag

• Los Angeles has had a backlog of container ships for six months – The backlog is not six months long—the wait is only a week or so—but there’s been a wait for six months. Imports have been way up in the past year.
• How Brexit saved Britain: a COVID story
• Ever Given to remain in the Suez Canal until restitution is paid
• France to use ancient oaks, planted with the aim of supporting Age of Sail naval ambitions, to rebuild Notre Dame’s spire – Smart! The environmentalists are, of course, up in arms.
• Late frost in France hurts vineyards – The wife and I prefer Italian wines anyway.
• Archaeologists find “the lost golden city of Luxor” in Egypt – Not a Skypirates story; actually happened.
• Censorship, indoctrination, and actual-race-hatred racism in modern schools