WWRW falls on a Thursday again, because I was working from home yesterday, and that always throws off my groove.

This is the 32nd one of these. Yay, powers of two!

Defense

• Turkey says it’ll manufacture the S-500 locally – I must be behind on my air defense reading, because I can’t even tell you what an S-500 is. (Carlo Kopp can, though.) Also, Russia promises to sell Turkey Su-57s if the F-35 deal falls through. Growing up with teen-series fighters as I did, the two preceding paragraphs scan like something out of Next Sunday A.D. sci-fi.
• Pentagon threatens to withhold half of the $728 million LockMart requested for F-35 spare parts – Not out of spite, but rather because the Pentagon wants technical data so they can buy spares from other, more reliable suppliers.
• Upgrading the Chinook is the correct answer to the heavy-lift helicopter program – Approved.
• Speaking of, Boeing is going to flight-test the Chinook with the engines from the CH-53K – (Thanks to Kilo Sierra for the link.) Remember, in terms of lifting power, helos are pretty much universally power-bound, so add more oomph and you can add more collective before the engine governors stop you.
• Humvee vs. JLTV – Fun fact: I got in trouble at the Pittsburgh Auto Show for taking a picture of the JLTV dashboard.
• Still using Russian or Chinese weapons? The US will pay you to ditch them and buy American
• Young people are unqualified for everything – Including military careers. Apparently, a mere 29% of American youngsters hit the requirements, which amount to 1) don’t be obese 2) don’t have a criminal record and 3) finish high school. I find those numbers a little hard to believe, which is usually a good indication that they’re misleading or wrong somehow, but I’m already a day late with this and don’t have time to chase it down¹.
• Some call sign controversy brewing at VFA-106 in Virginia – A number of black aviators were given insulting call signs with some racial overtones, maybe? On the one hand, cool call signs are an invention of the film industry. They’re all insulting if you know the story behind them. On the other hand, the fact that the white pilots in VFA-106 talked about their black compatriots in a WhatsApp group called ‘Pure Bloods’ does rather speak to motive, doesn’t it?
• Airships for the military – Oh hey, the same article someone writes literally every five years, and nothing ever comes of it. I really like airships. Over at Many Words Main, I frequently write what amounts to airship fan fiction. I still don’t think they’re very much good for most modern uses. We have airplanes and helicopters now. The only thing a rigid airship buys you is fuel economy.
• Terrain-following radar for MC-130J special ops transports – Terrain-following radars are cool. There isn’t one in DCS yet to play with, though, so I can’t tell you just how cool.
• A report to Congress on airborne EW programs – Parvusimperator’s link. I haven’t read it, but I surmise that it’s mostly going to be, “We have airborne EW programs. No, Senator, that’s classified.”
• Remembering the attack on the USS Stark – Be sure to click through to the JAG investigation at the bottom of the article.
• FN’s going to unveil its MK 48 6.5mm machine gun at SOFIC 2019 – Which is currently ongoing. Perhaps some news for next week?
• Shipbuilders study adding more punch to LCS – Hmm. I wonder why? It was so well-equipped! An interesting, non-sarcastic point is that phase 2 might involve a Mk-41 8-pack, or newly-developed single Mk-41 cells spread around the ship (i.e., wherever they can cram one in).
• Laser weapons and rail guns and gun-launched guided projectiles, oh my – Another Congressional report, so don’t expect too much.
• Two presentations, one on the 2018 national defense strategy and the other a report from NSWC Corona on munitions – I think I’ve probably said it before, but a good way to win bar bets is to ask people where in the US the Navy’s largest facility is located. It’s NSWC Crane, in south central Indiana, notably far from oceans, or indeed large bodies of water at all.

Games

• Rule the Waves 2 is out – Rule the Waves, the 1900-1925 naval arms race/tactical battle simulator, is a Soapbox favorite. Does the sequel, which expands the scope to 1955 and adds aircraft carriers, stack up? The short answer is yes, and I’m very much enjoying trying some oddball ideas in my Japan game². The long answer is you’ll have to wait until I get through a game or two and can write a full review.

Grab Bag

• How Pixar lost its way – TLDR: bought by Disney.

WWRW falls on a Thursday this week. Yesterday was busy at work, then Avengers night at home, and today featured some dental work in the morning, so here we are, at last, with a somewhat lighter post than usual.

Defense

• May’s issue of Defence Technology Review – Parvusimperator notes with pleasure that a professional defense writer agrees with him on IFV weights; also, the issue has a good overview of IFV weights generally.
• Some historical TO&Es for Cold War Soviet formations – It comes from a wargame, but wargamers are nerds, so it’s probably pretty accurate.
• Tired: pay a local to knife your target in a bazaar. Wired: knife missile. – Great-Game-style espionage and double-dealing is for chumps. Bring on the technology!
• The Sahara is terror’s new front line – They couldn’t have picked a nicer neighborhood to wreck.
• Little Bird Down – A narrative after action report of the loss and recovery of Valiant 41¹ in the Iraqi desert.
• Three cheers for forward presence – TLDR: don’t skimp on carriers.

Science and Technology

• Hackers steal almost $41 million in Bitcoin from a crypto exchange – On the one hand, enormous virtual bank robberies! On the other hand, I have a hard time believing you’d find ready buyers for $40.7 million in Bitcoin on short notice, so it’s very much paper wealth.
• Could quantum mechanics explain the existence of space-time? – Interesting conjecture (that entanglement is what makes space-time space-time), but very little attempt to support that claim in a way the layman can understand. If I see a Quanta article on it, I’ll share that too.
• Saudi oil stations attacked by drones – First those oil tankers, now this. Iran? Definitely Iran.
• China launches a pair of Type 052Ds – What’s that, like one a week now?
• Plans for the Virginia Block VI – Special operations, unmanned systems.
• A silent mortar for Russia – Piston-launched for quiet operation with little muzzle flash or smoke. Nifty. 1.2km range. Not as nifty.
• Raytheon’s SPY-6 is a gallium nitride radar, with huge sensitivity gains over previous radars – They say 100 times more sensitive. Assuming that’s only counting received power, it’s still something like a four-fold increase in range.

Grab Bag

• The life story of an Indianapolis Motor Speedway photographer – The Indy 500 is something worth seeing at least once in your life.

Interdisciplinary Stories

• Eagle Dynamics developer busted for shipping flight manuals to Moscow – This could have gone under any of the non-grab-bag headings or its own Games heading, so I gave it its own. It touches pretty much all of our topics.

Parvusimperator’s Open gun has indeed finally come in, so all we have to do is find a match which doesn’t fall on a holiday weekend.

The Continental loadout post from yesterday is a new Soapbox game, as you might have guessed from the achievements at the bottom. Mine should land tomorrow.

Headline Link: The Long Way Round

• The story of Pan-Am’s California Clipper – En route to New Zealand at the outbreak of the Second World War, one of Pan-Am’s twelve Boeing 314 flying boats found itself cut off from its South Pacific island-hopping route. Short on fuel, spare parts, and friendly bases, its intrepid crew had to make their way back to American shores the hard way.

Has this been turned into a movie? If not, why not? Who do I call about that?

Defense

• Cold launch is great until it isn’t
• Russia’s defense industry falls on hard times
• But Russia’s defense spending hasn’t fallen as far as it seems – The argument is that for a defense buyer like Russia, which buys from Russian manufacturers in rubles, purchasing power parity is a much better rubric than a conversion to US$. By that measure, Russia is still the third-largest defense spender in the world.
• Big Army wants a Chinook replacement – After many happy years of service, perhaps it’s time. Then again, the Chinook is the definition of Just Works.
• Will the J-20 be ready this year? – This guy says yes.
• The case for small airlift… – … ignores the existence of large helicopters.
• F-22s and F-35s having trouble meeting 80% readiness goals – Fancy planes always have that issue.
• Doing better than V-22s, anyway – Sorry about the paywalled article. I can’t read the whole thing either.
• Iron Dome knocks down some Palestinian rockets – It’s a pretty sensational system, Iron Dome.
• Zumwalts to get missile armament – On the one hand, hooray, they’re useful! On the other hand, I’m going to miss that classic twin-turret silhouette.
• LockMart concept art shows an F-35 carrying HAWCs – That’s a hypersonic cruise missile, if you aren’t up on the lingo (like I wasn’t until just now), whose acronym is straight from military science fiction.
• Other services expressing interest in the T-X – A modern trainer is on everyone’s shopping list, but only the Air Force had the clarity of purpose to buy one.
• But not in a sixth-generation joint fighter
• Navy watch stations apparently have built-in chatrooms? – As someone with a chatroom on his daily watch station, I have to say, it’s not great for focus.
• India’s artificial reef construction program continues – But really, they actually launched one of their Project 75 submarines.
• Chinese war plans still pay close attention to Taiwan – Not that I thought they’d stopped, but even so, it’s worth the reminder that the PLA sees capturing Taiwan as one of its major objectives.
• Speaking of which, here are some satellite photos of China’s Type 002 carrier in initial production – I love that we have commercial imaging satellites out there for the amateur spies and think tanks to play with.
• Pratt & Whitney’s F135 seems like a success story – You hear a lot about problems with F-35s, but very little about problems with their engines.
• The F-35 will probably never be cheap to fly – $35,000 an hour is the expected floor. I wonder what an F-15EX flight hour costs. … $27,000 an hour. Jane’s rates the Gripen at $4,700 per hour and the F-16 at about $7,000 per hour, as of 2012.
• US military depots are in bad shape – Some are undermanned or underfunded. Some are just poorly designed.

Science and Technology

• A NASA supplier provided faulty aluminum for decades, which caused mission failures in 2009 and 2011
• Apple continues to fight right-to-repair laws – Joke’s on them. With my magnifying nerd goggles, offset tweezer, and hot-air rework station, I feel like I can fix just about anything.
• Dassault’s Falcon 8X bizjet sets a new Santa Monica to Teterboro record – four hours, twenty-eight minutes. That’s a pretty solid transcontinental run by any non-supersonic standard.
• Ukrainian Ivan Deerski firmware is growing in popularity in the US – Because John Deere is engaged in what amounts to theft, using their software to brick fair-and-square-purchased farm equipment if the actual owners replace parts or do any repair work whatsoever.

Abusing Web Services

• A URL shortener which uses only AWS Lambda – ‘Only’ also excludes any data storage.
• A chat client implemented entirely in CSS

Guns

• A rebel pictured in Venezuela had an AR-57 upper – Does that mean he’s an American plant? Or just a Venezuelan firearms enthusiast?
• The NYT writes on Remington’s bankruptcy – I’m as ruthless a capitalist as the next guy, but there’s something fundamentally scuzzy about the leveraged buyout crowd. Also, the parts of the article about guns are crap, because it’s the NYT, but at least the parts about finance are interesting.

Grab Bag

• “The problem with insulin costs is that the government will shoot anyone who tries to make cheap insulin” – This is Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex poking gentle fun at a common libertarian framing of taxation, but he does so in service of a broadly libertarian point on the production of generic drugs.
• Sports Illustrated takes you inside the collapse of the AAF – Pour one out.

Spring has definitively sprung here. Coming soon is the first USPSA match report of the season from me. Parvusimperator might join in on the reports a little later into the summer when his Open gun finally comes in, but at the very least we’ll be shooting matches at the same time again.

Defense

• VT Halter Marine to build a new Coast Guard icebreaker – The first of six, three medium and three heavy. The picture in the article shows a gratifyingly large vessel, just what the doctor ordered for an era of enhanced Arctic competition.
• Remember that MiG-31 crash from a while back? Friendly fire – Red-on-red, I suppose you’d call it, given the Russian propensity to use red to mean ‘friendly’.
• Sen. James Inhofe recommends another review of the King Stallion program – The first of several items this week which don’t make LockMart look great.
• Seen on Twitter: you can fit two Type 23s side-by-side inside Queen Elizabeth‘s hangar – Obviously not from the keel to the tallest mast, but the footprint works out. There’s even a bit of room fore and aft. For the record, the twin superstructures still look weird.
• The first-ever video filmed in a B-2 cockpit in flight – Snazzy.
• China’s navy is big enough to control its coastal waters now
• Venezuela: a test of the Monroe Doctrine – Teddy Roosevelt would have invaded by now.
• F-35A makes combat debut, conducting an airstrike on an IS tunnel complex
• More photos, courtesy of The Aviationist – Also, they’re running the radar reflectors there.
• An F-35B does its first full air show demo – See also: radar reflectors.
• Stryker’s semi-automatic anti-drone targeting system – It’s a sensor fusion system which combines radar returns and camera data to identify drones and blow ’em up. Still man-in-the-loop, though, so we aren’t quite to Skynet.
• Mike Pence agrees with our comments section: no early retirement for Truman – And so the drama comes to a close.
• USAF no longer bombing Afghan drug labs with F-22s – Overmatch!

Science and Technology

• SpaceX lowers planned orbits on some of its high-altitude Starlink constellation – The FCC (which apparently has jurisdiction here) was unsure about SpaceX’s debris mitigation plans for the bits of its constellation planned to orbit at about 1,000km. So, SpaceX moved some of those satellites down to about 500km, where the orbital lifespan for a dead satellite is on the order of a decade rather than a century. For the record, the currently-approved constellation is 2,800 satellites at about 1,000km, 1,600 satellites at 500km, and 7,500 satellites at 340km. Launches are supposed to start this year.
• Facebook uses just-in-time compilation of C++ to use it like a super-fast scripting language – That’s certainly one way to handle scripting languages being too slow.
• Netflix, on the other hand, is a Python shop – Presumably because Python is the language of machine learning.
• Flash memory manufacturers to cut production in the face of a glut – Put another way, buy that big SSD you were looking for now.
• The French government had a homemade encrypted messaging service, which was found to be vulnerable to impersonation attacks – If your name doesn’t start with ‘B’ and end with ‘ruce Schneier’, you probably aren’t qualified to roll your own encryption system.
• The James Webb Space Telescope will run Javascript with an interpreter made by a company which is now out of business – In case you were wondering if defense projects are alone in how quickly technology seems to leave them behind.
• Continued pushback on the Air Force’s maddening two-operator-only five-year launch contract – As I said last time I linked to a story on this subject, it’s catastrophically stupid to prebuy five years of launches at a time when the space launch industry is in the middle of being upended and turned in a dramatically cheaper direction.
• Testing of 30mm Strykers went well, so Big Army is going to upgun them all
• LockMart having trouble keeping up with F-35 spares demands – That’s not a great sign. The F-35 fleet is tiny compared to the size it will eventually be.
• The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit lays out some of its plans for moving to USS America – They’ve been playing around with the Lightning Carrier concept on Wasp, too, but their usual fit-out is ten Ospreys, six F-35s, and four CH-53s, plus the LCACs in the well deck. Given that America does not have a well deck, they throw in two more Ospreys. (It’s nice to have extras, too, because the Osprey is the only thing aboard that can bring an F-35 engine with it.)
• B-2 pilots looking forward to the T-X – B-2 pilots spend a significant minority of their flight time in T-38s working on stick and rudder skills, because the B-2 is a) too expensive for very much practice flying and b) notably deficient in rudders.

History

• Some menus from the Titanic‘s last day – The third-class supper was cabin biscuits, cheese, and gruel. “You know what you are, or more accurately are not, paying for.”

Guns

• ThinkProgress (not linked directly) worries that Pittsburgh’s illegal new gun laws will fall disproportionately on young black men
• Chaser: MSNBC contributor remarks that because Venezuela’s citizens were disarmed, they can’t effectively fight back against the military – Hmm.

Grab Bag

• Amelie Wen Zhao, young adult author and recent victim of a Twitter outrage mob re: her debut book, has decided to go ahead and release it anyway – Anything that reminds the shrieking hordes of Twitter than they have no real power is worth commenting on, in my book.
• Chicago frequently impounds cars whose owners are not guilty of any crimes, then charges the owners thousands of dollars to get them back – See remark above about disarmed citizens and no power. One highlight: some people took their SUV to a shop to get worked on. A shop employee took it for a test drive, but his license was expired. The police nabbed him and impounded the car. After getting the runaround from the city, the owners finally got an agreement in place to get their car back… and then, just before they could get the (lapsed, because the car was parked in an impound lot) registration expired, the city sold the car.

Defense

• Some sea trials footage from China’s new Type 001A
• F-35 cost going up
• Russia to decommission the Kirovs – Farewell to you, legends of the sea!
• Britain to upgrade only 148 Challenger 2s – The Royal Brigade Combat Team! The Times of London reckons that makes them the world’s 56th-largest tank operator. I’ve finally started reading Britain’s Future Navy, which parvusimperator loaned me a while back, and it’s similarly depressing—not only because of the Magic Shrinking Armed Services, but also because the Queen Elizabeths were supposed to carry F-35Cs when the book was written.
• In a bold move, Bell offers a purely conventional helicopter for Big Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft – Not a tiltrotor or a hybrid. Just an ordinary helicopter with enough zip to do 205kt.
• Air Force experimenting with two-piece flight suits – I feel like there are some good engineering reasons to stick with a one-piece suit, but then, what do I know?
• US Navy should be building ships to fit through the Panama Canal’s new locks – 440 meters by 50 meters is a pretty generous footprint for everything but an aircraft carrier.
• Japan’s locally-sourced F-35As: troublesome? – I didn’t realize Mitsubishi was building so many of them. I can’t help but think a Japanese F-35 cockpit is the most anime thing ever.
• Columbia project gets an audit – Just to make sure that the Navy’s oversight of steering and propulsion development is good, though, not of the budget.
• Air Force Magazine has a nifty comparison of the F-35A and F-15EX – There’s a link at the bottom of the article you have to click to go to the comparison graphic.
• Preparing for a digital Pearl Harbor – The most important point out of this one is that we should be training sailors, aviators, tankers, and others who interact directly with combat technology the casualty drills for computer system failures, not just physical world failures.

Science and Technology

• Minecraft with ray tracing looks so incredible it makes me want to reinstall Minecraft – Technically it’s path tracing instead, which uses many rays per pixel, bounces them around the scene a bunch, and uses the results to do some really cool reflections and diffuse lighting. I’ll give it a whirl tonight when I’m at my desktop—unsurprisingly, it’s fairly GPU-intensive.
• A guy from Google’s Chrome team writes about a performance deficiency in Windows
• And another one in Chrome’s Javascript engine – It’s a little rich hearing a guy from Google gripe about Gmail being slow, given that nu-Gmail (the story dates to before its introduction) is objectively terrible in almost every way.
• Real-world machine learning models choke when their input data changes – Granted that this is an advertising article from an AI consulting firm, but the point is still valid.
• US to set up facial recognition for outbound international flights – I keep on saying we’ve found our way to a cyberpunk dystopia without even trying. The only thing we’re missing is the 80s retro-futuristic fashion.
• A little frequency-modulated continuous wave radar board – Short-ranged, but still, when can I buy an Arduino-compatible one? Also, will the FCC mind if I crank up the power enough to detect airplanes?

History

• The Invention of the Salvator Mundi – On the history behind the most contentious painting attributed to da Vinci. The art world remains divided on its legitimacy, but private buyers certainly don’t—it recently went at auction for a few hundred million dollars.
• Notre Dame burns – This link isn’t a great story. I was hoping for something with more detail on the progress of the fire and its causes. It doesn’t really count as news, either, since I’m sure you’ve heard about it already, but it was a sad day for European history¹ and one worth noting.

Guns

• Some guy trashes the judge who overturned California’s magazine ban for writing his own temporary injunction – The counterpoint is, if you’re writing a pro-2A opinion in California and the 9th Circus is the next stop, you’d be insane to let them write the temporary injunction for you.

Grab Bag

• There was a secret private server for the late lamented MMO City of Heroes – I was more of a City of Villains man, myself. It stayed secret for six years—that is, from about 2013 to just recently, and was run by a group calling itself the Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers (SCORE for short). It’s hard to imagine a much more on-brand news story. In other lamented MMO news, I discovered that Pirates of the Burning Sea is still online and still active. That was one of my all-time favorites—enough depth to the sailing and combat models to appeal to me, while still being accessible enough to appeal to the average pirate fan.
• A librarian writes about the difficulties of being a librarian in a city with a large homeless population

As you might have noticed, we’re taking Holy Week a bit easier than usual—parvusimperator is traveling for Easter; I’m in the church choir, have had spring yard work to do, and am preparing for the first USPSA match of the season on Saturday.

Happily, there’s been a lot going on in the world, so we have a longer-than-usual WWRW (unless I miss my guess, the longest ever, in fact) to tide you over until we return to our usual pace.

Defense

• China releases pictures of a sailless submarine – Which buys you one or two knots of speed in exchange for a whole host of technical problems. This one’s about 150 meters long by 15 across the beam, which is small for anything beyond a technical demonstrator, but proportioned the same as e.g. the Virginias.
• Anti-jamming GPS antennas: how do they work? – A cogent explanation fit for laymen such as myself.
• XM913 50mm cannon test firing – Nifty.
• F-35C readiness rising – Clearly, my joke from last week about how the Marines would whip the project into shape is coming true.
• Speaking of F-35s, the ALIS maintenance/logistics system just doesn’t work – The story says something along the lines of, “Alice won’t be a popular name for children of Air Force technicians.”
• Letters of censure for Fitzgerald‘s officers, but no criminal charges – So, a big old torpedo going off under the keel of career aspirations, but no jail time.
• The Navy’s past decisions on holding off on building Columbias leaves no margin for error – At present, we build two Virginias per year. The ramp-up plan is for four Virginias and one Columbia per year, which (since shipbuilders estimate a Columbia is twice as much work as a Virginia) represents a request to triple submarine-building output. That’s fraught with risk.
• Book review review: The Hundred-Year Marathon – The book lays out a theory that China has a long-term plan to build itself up to a global hegemon. I don’t think this is all that controversial. The controversial parts, per the reviewer, are that 1) the book suggests that China’s long-term plan can be discerned by diving deep into Chinese history and legend, and 2) that it’s written like a Dan Brown thriller, with the author searching hidden archives for ‘secrets’ which turn out to be readily available in translated-to-English form in university libraries across the country. 2) is a valid critique. I’m not so sure about 1)—one or two thousand years ago, China already was a global superpower, for its definition of global at the time, and was dealing with similar problems to a modern superpower, and the ancient Chinese outlook on life is nearer the modern Chinese outlook than, say, the Roman and European outlooks. Chinese folklore from the Han dynasty bears more directly on modern Chinese problems than either Caesar’s Commentaries or Arthurian legend does on, say, England.
• Counterpoint to an article from last week: the USAF should not buy F-15EX – My counterarguments: 1) 22 AMRAAMs. 2) The most important form of stealth in the mid-21st century is going to be EW, not shaping, because it’s only a matter of time before someone works out the math for getting targeting-quality information out of a few long-wave radars working in concert. The fact that the F-35 is stealth-shaped and the F-15EX is not will matter less than the relative qualities of their EW fits.
• On that note, the USAF is refocusing on EW
• “Snipers are a bloody nuisance” – An ex-Commando of the British Army discusses spotting snipers.
• The Hellfire-replacing (and Maverick- and TOW-replacing) Joint Air-to-Ground Missile is coming soon – They made it to LRIP last year. Now they’re aiming to acquire 3,000 missiles in 2020 and 1,500 in 2021. Parvusimperator wrote about the predecessor project, the AGM-169. JAGM is the same project, just delivered over a longer period of time for annual-cost reasons and renumbered to fool the Congressional committees.
• UK recycles Greatest Hits Names, dubs next-gen fighter ‘Tempest’ – The actual story is that the project is attracting some potential partners.
• Cutting nuclear deterrence funding: unwise, and not a big savings in the first place
• Camo netting: a new spin on a classic technology – Namely, modern camo netting should not block vision alone, but also thermal and RF emissions.
• If USAF retires B-1s, give them to the Navy – A supersonic bomber with room for 24 LRASMs? Yes. Yes, I think that will do nicely. Parvusimperator says you could fit more if it weren’t for “some dumbass treaty”, too. Also, he’s written on LRASM before, too.
• A nifty picture of the M270 integrated crane
• The V-280 Valor tiltrotor (i.e., the next Blackhawk) hits a few milestones – 300 knots in flight, 200 hours of rotors-turning testing, 100 hours of flight testing.
• More on the Lightning Carrier concept – It doesn’t rhyme, but it’s still a cooler name than ‘Harrier carrer’.

Science and Technology

• Amazon contractors listen to Alexa conversations – Feeling real good about my lack of smart home technology right about now. Until I can run my smart home entirely on a server in my basement under my direct control, we’ll get up and turn lights on and off with switches, like cavemen.
• Wifi’s new WPA3 standard is… already badly insecure – Oops. Maybe if they’d developed the standard out in the open, like security researchers suggested…
• Intelsat 29e exploded? – It’s a geostationary communication satellite, which looks to have flared up on telescope views, then shed a bunch of debris. Also, evidently there’s a company out there which points telescopes at objects in geostationary orbit. Also also, the comments mention a Russian accusation of an American satellite which roams geostationary orbit, photographing things there. Not necessarily implausible—such a thing would be easy to build, and a cell phone camera at 1km has better resolving power than a 10-meter telescope peering from ground level to geostationary orbit, so it would have its uses, too.
• SpaceX sticks the Falcon Heavy landing, but loses a booster to the sea – The barges have grabbers which can snag the booster by the ‘octaweb’, the bit of framework which holds all the engine nozzles in their appropriate places, but the Falcon Heavy center core has a different octaweb, so the grabbers can’t get a good grip. The barge encountered 10-foot swells on the way back home, and the center core went over the side.
• More people streaming movies rather than buying physical copies – See my above Luddite-hood on smart homes for my opinion on this practice; see parvusimperator’s DVD stack for his.
• The future is here, and it’s a cyberpunk dystopia – Satellite-based advertising is on its way, courtesy a Russian company and PepsiCo.
• Pepsi clarifies: we’re only testing the technology, by running an orbital ad once – Pardon me for not jumping for joy. The only good thing about this is that it’s a Russian space company, and they never deliver on their promises.
• Declassified U-2 photographs are helping archaeologists find canals, roads, and other features hard to spot from the ground – In terms of count per unit area, there wasn’t a lot of military interest to find in Central Asia, but evidently there’s at least something of historical interest.
• Don’t call it PlayStation 5 yet, but Sony releases details on their next console – The spec list may look like an ordinary gaming computer, but remember that one of the huge advantages with console hardware is the integrated memory architecture—there’s no conception of separate graphics memory like there is on your average computer, so you don’t have to worry about getting something from system memory to video memory like you do on a PC. (That’s why bus width is so important on computers and not really mentioned for consoles; it isn’t really a concept worth bringing up for the latter.)
• Google Fiber’s divorce from Louisville is complete – In other words, don’t trust Google with your stuff in the long term, because they don’t care enough about marginal products to bother keeping them around. I read a good article on that subject this week, but didn’t stick it in our WWRW chat, so I can’t link it here.
• OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beats human players, but shows the weaknesses of machine learning – See the section titled, ‘A rudimentary Chinese room’.
• Stratolaunch takes flight – We have a new record-holder for ‘largest wingspan on an airplane’! I would even go so far as to say that it’s not useless, either, which is a bit of a spicy take. There are two main arguments against the flying-booster-launcher: 1) it doesn’t save you much fuel; 2) reusable rockets make it moot. In re 1), the bit which takes the most fuel is precisely getting off the ground and to altitude, because your rocket is the heaviest and you’re moving through the densest atmosphere. Skipping the densest atmosphere lets you design your first-stage nozzles for more nearly vacuum conditions, which means your first stage can burn effectively for longer. In re 2), reusable rockets still require a lot of launch infrastructure, whereas a plane-launched rocket can dodge weather and get you on track for nearly any orbital direction or inclination with minimal steering losses.
• A security researcher drops three 0-days against… WordPress plugins… – Just a minute. … Okay, we’re good. … drops three 0-days against WordPress plugins to protest “the moderators of the WordPress Support Forum’s continued inappropriate behavior.” Grudge-based webserver-pwning! What a world we live in.

History

• Building the System/360 mainframe nearly killed IBM – Also includes photos of real, straight-from-central-casting 1960s computer programmers.
• Have a crated P-47 on a truck, but lack a hangar, hydraulic jacks, cranes, and power tools? – Here’s how you assemble it, using only hand tools, the truck/trailer it drove in on, and 50 of your friends.
• Historical public transit systems (and transit system proposals) vs. their modern counterparts – Content warning: The Guardian.

Sport

• Baseball twitter is usually good for a few laughs
• Baseball should end service time manipulation – Unfortunately, doing so would require both the players and the teams to sacrifice something for the benefit of Baseball As A Whole, which is not the typical aim in CBA negotiations.
• Sports leagues embrace gambling – It’s fan engagement! Pennsylvania is one of the states which legalized sports betting; the local sports talk hosts have lately been singing the praises of the sports book at the local casino. A showdown between the gambling operators and the leagues is brewing; the NBA, MLB, and the PGA Tour want a percentage fee on every bet placed on their games—initially, they said 1%; lately, they’ve said 0.25%. Of course, illegal sports gambling was recently estimated as a $150 billion industry, so…

Grab Bag

• Restaurants are too loud – As it turns out, the modern industrial-chic style absorbs zero sound, which is unpleasant. There’s a sushi joint near my mother’s house that has some sort of magical sound-dampening technology—every seat can be full, and yet it’s never loud enough to disrupt conversation at your table, and it’s one of the most pleasant dining experiences in the area.

We’ve been doing this for half a year now (slightly more, given that we took a Christmas break; 26 entries in total).

Defense

• Civilian on Rafale fly-along ends up getting the ejection seat experience – “Merde, I cannot take zis guy any longair…”
• Some information on the Navy’s shipyard modernization plans
• Putin’s security detail routinely spoofs GPS – Joke’s on them; INS- and laser-guided munitions still work just fine.
• USAF accelerating B-21 buys – I’ll believe it when I see it. “Let’s build a bunch of B-2s, but cheaper!” seems to be the rallying cry here, and I’m not sure how that’s going to work. Anyway, we’ll get them delivered just in time for Russia to announce some kind of synthetic aperture longwave radar that renders shape-based stealth obsolete.
• Sea Stallion-K deficiencies are fixable, say Marines – parvusimperator observes that almost every deficiency is technically fixable. The two big ones called out in the article are exhaust gas ingestion, which is not great for helicopters, and not having enough airframes to do testing, which doesn’t bode well for future availability.
• A little more on the Sea Stallion-K program – And also on the reductions in readiness the extant Sea Stallions are working through.
• USAF working on a gender-neutral physical assessment – There’s no way to do that which doesn’t either let in wimpy men or exclude fit women, but I suspect 1) they’ll err in the former direction, and 2) nobody will notice, because most Air Force jobs aren’t especially physically demanding.
• Congress should fund another National Security Cutter – As we discussed in the comments a week or two ago, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of a cheap hull you can pack a bunch of technology into later. The Legend class is a good candidate, as is the other modern Coast Guard cutter project, whose name escapes me right now. Medium something or another.
• Virginia procurement plans change – Rather than buying 9 of the next 10 with the extra Tomahawk VLS section, we’re buying 8 of the next 11 that way. It’s funny that we ended up with the same pattern as the 688s: “Ooh, land attack missiles are great; let’s add more.”
• Lake City ammo plant prepares to make 6.8 – parvusimperator observed over coffee that this is most likely just calling up Union Lead Castings Co. and Consolidated Swage Products LLC to make sure they have the right stuff on hand or in stock.
• Having whipped the F-35B into shape, the Marines shift focus to the F-35C – “Commander Smith, Captain Johnson, this is Sergeant Sledge. He’s in charge of the program now.”
• F-16 service life extension program details – Structural repairs to get airframe expected lifespans from the current 8,000 hours to 12,000, along with packing the F-35’s radar in. The Viper flies on.
• Is this the end for Big Kuz? – After his¹ drydock sank, Russia doesn’t have much in the way of repair options. They’re openly discussing scrapping him, which is new.
• The Columbias may cost more than expected – Cost inflation? On a boomer project? Perish the thought!
• More on Textron’s cased-telescoped ammunition – It’s basically a sales brochure, but cool to see nevertheless. Is that the 6.8 that the ammo plant is gearing up for? In thirty years, will all the cool kids be building the civilian version of the 6.8 cased-telescoped rifle?
• The USMC’s aviation plans – The SHORAD section is nifty. They’ve got a Leonardo/MOOG Stinger/gun system on a JLTV, and they’re buying Iron Dome. Evidently the Marines get all the best toys. Except the cased-telescoped squad machine gun, that is.
• Dutch F-16 hits itself with cannon fire during training exercise – Oops. The article notes this kind of thing has happened before.
• One of Japan’s F-35As has crashed
• Teach the controversy: don’t retire Truman, mothball her! – The author references Ian Toll’s excellent Six Frigates in support of reviving the ‘laid up in ordinary’ status, to include building a new laid-up-in-ordinary drydock for Truman. Easier said than done, I say, especially since (as a nuclear-powered vessel) Truman‘s skeleton crew requirements are probably larger than, say, Constellation‘s were.

Space!

• VP Pence to NASA: “Moon landing by 2024!” – I suppose the theory on the aggressive timeline is that we’ve already done it once, so why can’t we do it again but faster?
• Hayabusa 2 science schedule – Last week, the Hayabusa 2 asteroid-sample-return mission shot a shaped charge into the asteroid it’s visiting to make a new crater. Science!
• Midmorning edit: there’s a Falcon Heavy launch tonight, with the corresponding triple-landing attempt – Launch window is from 1830 to 2030 and the weather is good; I have a Lent thing at church for almost exactly that window, so no spoilers.

Science and Technology

• TSMC begins 5nm fabrication – ‘Risk production’, they say, which I assume means you-the-customer assume some of the risk.
• 737 Max preliminary crash report from the Ethiopian aviation authority
• More than you wanted to know about 737 stabilizer trim and control forces
• Does Google forget old websites? – No, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. They just have a very strong recency bias in search results, except in cases where you’re literally the only substantial Internet source. (Thanks, 50mm Supershot article.)

Sport

• Arizona Cardinals: revolutionizing the draft? – Taking a page from baseball’s book, the Cardinals seem to be of the opinion that players on rookie contracts are better than expensive players at the same position, which seems sensible. They’re stockpiling draft picks and aiming to take some players in high-impact positions even if they don’t need them, on the theory that they’re either trade bait or the next man up when the current guy hits free agency.
• Baseball records: Chris Davis sets the new mark for most consecutive at-bats without a hit – He’s up to 49 right now. His last hit was September 14, 2018; he’s only walked four times this year. And they say the record book is closed!

Your correspondent has been whammied with a cold for the past week, so this roundup does not contain all the interesting stuff we’ve read in the past seven days.

Defense

• Textron shows off their cased-telescoped Next-Gen Squad Weapon Technology Demonstrator – Shows off privately, that is. Per TFB, no new photos are available.
• India shoots down a satellite – Welcome to the club!
• Next-Gen Combat Vehicle competition to open up soon – Parvusimperator notes that it’s silly we’re both planning to replace the Bradley soon and planning new vehicles which use the Bradley chassis.
• An additional story on the NGCV competition
• Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle RFP coming soon – These are parvusimperator’s submissions, and I’m so poorly read-up on ground vehicles that I’m not even sure what the relationship between OMFV and NGCV is, so if you want smart commentary on this subject, you’ll have to convince him to write an article.
• The future is now: F-35s on the USS Wasp
• See also: The Drive reports on future plans to turn amphibious assault ships into light aircraft carriers, offloading air assault to other ships in the group – The F-35B is the biggest paradigm shift resulting from the F-35 program, because it means that a STOVL carrier is suddenly more than just a base for light attack planes.
• Pilots on flying the F-35
• China on the lessons learned from Guadalcanal – How the other half thinks.
• HMS Queen Elizabeth next to USS Enterprise – That’s NCC-1701D, not CV/CVN-whatever. She’s bigger than I realized.
• Air Force halts KC-46 deliveries again, as foreign object debris found inside – Boeing to give line workers stern talking-to about leaving wrenches behind?

Science and Technology

• Casino industry remains cutthroat – Also, ethical hacking is a hard sell to the targets.
• Cruise ship loses engine power off the Norwegian coast – I would consider the helicopter evacuation a free bonus, myself.
• India’s satellite shootdown poses a potential threat to the ISS – In which India learns that, when you add energy to an object in orbit, it goes higher. I wouldn’t expect the debris to stay in orbit very long, given that it’s still dipping down into the low-orbit, high-drag region of space, though.
• Fungal disease is wiping out amphibians across the world – 501 species in serious decline, 90 entirely extinct. If it were mammals and the proportions were the same, the 500-species count would represent ‘everything with hooves and everything with flippers’.
• Flooding in the Mississippi basin to drive beef prices higher – Buy and freeze now for the summer hamburger season.
• More on the QuadrigaCX coin exchange story – Which remains one of my favorite cyberpunk future stories of 2019.
• GPS week counters reset to 0 this week – GPS satellites use a 10-bit field to count weeks, so every 1024 weeks, the counter loops back around to 0. Happily, it’s not a Y2K-style problem, because it’s in the spec, and the last loop happened right around 2000, when counter overflows were on everyone’s mind.

Guns

• Nikonov AN-94 hyperburst accuracy testing – The AN-94 is one of the oddest firearms designs in modern history, so much so that it’s difficult to concisely explain its operating mechanism.
• US District Court for the Southern District of California enjoins enforcement of CA’s magazine ban – The injunction will almost surely be overturned soon, so California readers should get while the getting’s good.

Grab Bag

• Jussie Smollett’s Chicago PD case file – If you don’t know about this one, count yourself lucky.

Sport

• The AAF suspends operations – This one will take a paragraph or two.

One of the AAF’s intentions was to be a football minor league—a place for players not quite up to NFL snuff to grow and perhaps become useful to an NFL team. This included NFL practice squad players and down-the-liners on active rosters—get your third-string QB some playing time, the sales pitch went, so maybe he’ll develop further! This had two flaws. First, the NFL Players’ Association was never big on the idea for player safety reasons. Why risk injury playing for a minor league? Second, the AAF was never going to survive solely on the name recognition of NFL third-stringers. They had to make a watchable, entertaining on-field product.

They succeeded at the latter goal. AAF football was recognizably football, and in the last few weeks was good enough to be enjoyable on its own. The 4th-and-12 onside conversion and the must-go-for-2 rules injected some extra offensive fun into the game. So, why did it fail?

First: investor Tom Dundon, who swept in at the last rumor of financial trouble swirling around the AAF, seems not to understand that nobody is going to pay any more to watch Danny Etling (Tom Brady’s understudy’s understudy) throw passes than they will to watch Garrett Gilbert (the Orlando Apollos’ QB) do the same. Failure to reach an immediate agreement with the NFLPA isn’t financial doom.

Second: the AAF was too expensive for what it was. Minor league baseball is cheap, and so also should be minor league football. If you can’t take the family to a game and buy everyone hot dogs for, say, $50, you’re not going to get the random, “Eh, why not, it’s a good way to spend an afternoon” traffic you need to drive attendance for a minor-league sport.

I didn’t do week 8 picks on account of being sick, but my week 7 picks went 1-3, for a lifetime AAF pick’em record of 12-12. I’m no worse than a coin toss!