Wednesday What We’re Reading (Nov. 13, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

No votes were forthcoming on the Winter Wargaming topic, so I’ve unilaterally decided it’ll be Rule the Waves 2. I think I’ll probably post it over at Many Words Main, so as to avoid leaving it so barren.

Defense

Low-velocity 40mm grenade launchers are for wimps – This one shoots the full-fat version.
Concurrent Technologies Corporation to build prototype GCV hulls – They have some new kind of welding, Parvusimperator notes.
Twitter video: HMS QE launches an F-35 while receiving underway replenishment – Look at that! The Brits have a carrier again, even if they had to rely on the Americans to make a reasonable STOVL jet. (Yes, I know the British operate/plan to operate the F-35 as a pure STOL plane with that rolling vertical landing thing.)
Laser mounted on USS Dewey – Nobody’s quite sure what it is, but The Drive puts its money on ODIN, a laser dazzler system, rather than a full-on weapon-class laser. We did report on the Lockheed HELIOS, I believe, en route to Florida (maybe?) a week or three ago.

Science and Technology

Dysfunctional corporate culture a contributing factor in the self-driving Uber pedestrian death case – Shower thought: I bet there’s money to be made in being ‘startup X, except with morals’. The product isn’t (say) ride-sharing, but rather a warm fuzzy feeling in the hearts of riders.
“We made a profit last quarter if you ignore all the things we lost money on,” Uber says
Galileo, the EU GNSS system, had a long outage this summer – And this guy, a GNSS monitoring hobbyist, now knows why. In short: since Galileo is supposed to be very high-accuracy, it needs to do frequent ephemeris and clock updates, and if you fall behind on those, you can find yourself in a case where the issue might be either an ephemeris or a clock problem, and you can’t tell which. A full reboot takes a long time.
Computer people: why is AI so focused on race and gender?
People people: stereotypes are usually accurate
AIs which do unguided, random exploring can solve certain problems better – They don’t get trapped in local maxima, because they don’t have a conception of ‘maxima’ until the researchers decide to stop the random learning.
Wafer contamination at a Samsung fab loses it half a billion dollars – America got the happypunk dystopia, with friendly-faced private panopticons; East Asia got a more classic cyberpunk dystopia, with huge megacorporations with fingers in every pie. As such, Samsung is expected to shrug, clean out the bad wafers, and start again, and the only effect on the world market is a pause in the drop in DRAM prices.
Is Google’s quantum supremacy claim, which we reported last wekk, actually valid? – The thrust of this ZDNet article seems to be, “Mathematically, it might not be!” Which, to me, sounds like the answer is, “Today, practically, yes.”
Intel vulnerable to yet more timing-based data-leakage flaws – And this one has been around for a year. The consensus, as far as I’m aware, is not only that Intel is vulnerable to these kinds of issues (widely reported), but also that AMD, owing to some architectural decisions they made, is less so (not widely reported). As a longtime Team Whatever Color AMD Is Now booster, I’m maybe not the most trustworthy source, though.

World Politics

Bolivia’s socialist president is out – South America maybe turning a corner? cf. South American GDPs over time.
Hong Kong heats back up: pro-democracy protesters shot – Or never actually cooled off.
Widespread chaos across the city – Pictures from CNN.
The Beeb says on the ‘brink of total collapse’

Sport

The hometown Steelers are emerging as a playoff dark horse? – Defense doesn’t always win championships, but it sure does help.

Grab Bag

California’s housing crisis is entirely a density crisis – Well, except for the parts that are a land management crisis and a water crisis.
Iceland’s Bitcoin mining heist – There’s a lot of organized bitcoin mining in Iceland, because it’s cold and has a lot of cheap geothermal energy. Some enterprising crooks thought: why not steal the mining gear? That way you’re stealing a money-generating asset, for a given value of money.
The ‘Razzle-Dazzle Game’, a rolling-marbles scam – Proposed alternative name: the Fireball scam, because it amounts to rolling 8d6 (and you only win prizes only on very low or very high rolls).
Video: onetime jewel thief (or robber, per his stated preference) rates movie heists – It’s an intriguing watch.
Mooney Aviation ceasing production – Most worryingly for current Mooney owners, that’s production of planes and parts. In other news, Mooney is owned by Soaring American Corporation, a Chinese investment company which sounds like it was named by a committee of Chinese guys trying to pick an American-sounding name with no input from anyone who speaks English natively.

M1 CATTB Revisited

Posted by parvusimperator

A couple years ago, I wrote on the very cool experimental M1 CATTB. Having found some more information on the vehicle, I decided to revisit it.

We’ve talked a little about the new gun, engine, and turret already. Let’s look at the autoloader. The autoloader was the same chain-style autoloader found on Leclerc and K2, and it held 17 rounds of either 120 mm or 140 mm ammunition. 140 mm ammunition was two-piece, and was stored in its ready to fire configuration in the bustle, which accounts for a lot of its length. The new powerpack opened up more room at the rear of the hull, and this was used for reserve ammo stowage. The reserve stowage could hold 22 140 mm rounds separated into the two pieces, or 33 120 mm rounds. There was also a mechanical ammunition transfer system to refill the ready magazine from the reserve stowage.

The new powerpack was the AIPS, and it had a total¹ volume of 4.81 m³. This is a savings of about 3.5 m³ of space, which was used for the ammunition stowage mentioned above. The engine itself displaced 1,682 cubic inches, with an oil cooling system. It used a special oil to handle higher temperatures better. A key advantage of the oil-only cooling system was that it was much more compact than a water cooling system and used less power to run the cooling fans, needing only 120 HP for the cooling fans instead of 240 like most other 1,500 HP diesels of the time.

CATTB also featured a brand new track. The old track had two 9-inch wide track shoes mounted side-by-side, spanning the width of the track pins. Track guides (which travel between the roadwheel pairs) were bolted between the shoes. The new track for the CATTB had a single 25-inch wide shoe to span the pins and integrated the track guide with the shoe. This was intended to uniformly distribute pin loading and increase track life. The goal was 5,000-6,000 miles of track life, more than double that of the older tracks, which was approximately 2,500 miles.

CATTB replaced the torsion bar suspension of the M1 with an in-arm hydropneumatic suspension system. There were two designs that were being tested. Switching to a hydropneumatic suspension saved about 1,700 pounds in the vehicle, and frees up several inches of space in the hull, to lower the vehicle silhouette or to add extra belly protection. Being a test bed, neither option was selected on the CATTB.

In my previous article, I commented on the very large number of smoke grenade dischargers on the CATTB. These were for an early soft-kill active protection system. The sensors cueing it were a radar warning receiver and a laser warning receiver. It could automatically fire smoke to obscure the tank, or automatically slew the gun to face the threat. I’d be concerned about its effectiveness without additional IR or radar-based missile approach warning systems.

CATTB was also projected to test the Multi-sensor Target Acquisition System (MTAS). This added a low-power millimeter-wave radar to the tank, with a field of view of 180° in azimuth and 7.5° in elevation. Range was projected to be about 5 km.

Since this is a test bed, it’s not intended to enter mass production, so I won’t evaluate it as such. But I will review the new features:

I think the turret design is a pretty good one and it looks cool. If you’re going for a manned turret and aren’t trying to reduce the profile like Leclerc, I think it’s a solid design. But I’d prefer an unmanned turret like TTB/T-14.
Provided you’re ok with the two-man turret, the autoloader is solid. The really nice feature is the auto-resupply from reserve stowage to the ready stowage of the autoloader. And 39 rounds of 140 mm is a pretty good capacity. 50 rounds of 120mm is also a good loadout.
I’m kind of skeptical of the engine, since this hasn’t been tried anywhere else to my knowledge. There’s probably an SAE paper somewhere behind a paywall that would tell me why. Anyway, I’m also skeptical of the idea of needing ‘special oil’ for my tanks. Plus, there are some other smallish, proven 1,500 HP diesels available these days.
New track seems better than the old track. More life and fewer parts. Sold.
Hydropneumatic suspension is better than torsion bar suspension. More room in the floor for mine protection or more room for systems or less hull height is a really good thing. Active hydropneumatic even allows you to get a bit more elevation/depression out of your gun, which can help make the turret roof lower.
I love active protection systems, but this seems a bit early yet. It probably would have been worked out with more testing, but I’d like more ways to cue the system. Also, I strongly prefer having hard-kill capability. At the time, it’d be worth the work, but now there are a ton of off-the-shelf systems that just work. And are hard-kill to boot.
Radar tracking/targeting is a cool supplement to thermals. And if you set it up right, you can use it for missile approach warning too. I’d just want a way to switch it off sometimes.

Engine, transmission, cooling system, final drives, power generators, batteries and fuel for one battlefield day ↩

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Nov. 6, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

With the Armored Brigade review now posted, I can ask a question I’ve been waiting to ask: for Winter Wargaming this year, what’s the commentariat’s feeling on Armored Brigade vs. Rule the Waves 2?

Defense

Russian schoolchildren taught how to assemble AKs in class – I guess it’s a sort of shop class, and also makes it really easy to change the placard from ‘Primary School 3357’ to ‘Small Arms Factory 3357’ in case of war.
Correction alert: last week’s Challenger 2 photo did actually have a Brimstone launcher on the turret – A two-missile box on top of the turret. We aren’t sure if it has any capacity for reloads, but it’s quite a large missile and not likely to be easily manhandled within the confines of a tank. We did a little further digging, and could find no information whatsoever on ground-launch range, and only turned up the very vaguest information on penetration, but it’s definitely better than the gun.
What happens if China gets old before it gets rich? – CDR Salamander¹ ponders.
USAF ponders arsenal plane options – A B-52 for the modern age?
A puff piece on the Navy’s next-generation jammer – Still, it points out how it’s better than the old one, which is better than nothing.
A bog-standard concerned-about-A2AD-missiles article with an interesting metaphor at its heart – Namely, that such weapons systems take us back to the Age of Sail relationship between ship and fort.
Navy cuts next batch of Virginias from 11 to 9
Laser-guided Carl Gustaf munition gets a test – Coool.
Small fleets of aircraft have a big impact on USAF budgets – There are high fixed costs to operating a type of aircraft, of course, and the Air Force operates a lot of types.
How can we build force structures to be resilient in the face of battlefield surprise?
LockMart cuts F-35 prices
Deploy the Ford, shock test a later ship – No reason to delay it any further, and shock testing the first ship in the class has been the exception rather than the norm ever since the requirement went into place.

History

The US rushed an MG42-to-.30-06 conversion through following the war – Here’s the report on the trials.
Petrel finds USS Johnston (probably) – Or something else from the same class. Either way, it’s the deepest shipwreck ever located, at 24,000 feet down.

Science and Technology

Modern open source is largely corporate philanthropy – That is, the bazaar mostly comprises people being paid by the cathedral, to revive an old metaphor.
What is quantum supremacy, and why is it important that Google demonstrated it? – This guy is evidently one of the better commentators on the subject.
Super-optimized dirt keeps racehorses safe – Unfortunately, it’s a story that looks like it’s going somewhere and stops before it does.
Voyager 2 reaches interstellar space – Scientists are fascinated by the sharpness of the heliopause.

Hong Kong

Xi Jinping still backing Carrie Lam

Grab Bag

New York City homeless services are too expensive, so NYC rents apartments for its homeless population in different cities – … without telling the different cities.
Whatever happened to Internet atheism? – Not the quiet sort where atheists use the Internet like the rest of us, but the loud, argumentative sort prone to blaming organized religion for all the evils of the age. Scott Alexander at SSC speculates that, ironically, it was a competitor to become the civic religion of left-leaning culture, and lost to the social justice movement.
Why is California on fire? – Well, power lines, primarily. Witness these aerial photographs from similar altitudes, one over our native Western Pennsylvania and one in California. Here, we clearcut around power lines. There, they do not. (Granted, in California there’s typically a lot of dry brush on the ground, and here there isn’t, but still.)
Taran Tactical range burns down – Speaking of.
Whose fault is Eastern European nationalism? – I don’t think I quite agree with the premise of this article, but I share it nevertheless.
What happened to Toys R Us? – The ‘leveraged buyout’ answer is accurate but, evidently, incomplete.

I’ve always enjoyed this bit of wordplay, which only makes sense if you expand ‘CDR’ when reading. ↩

Fishbreath Plays: Armored Brigade Review

Posted by Fishbreath

As the annual treachery of daylight saving’s close casts its pall over Many Words HQ here in Western Pennsylvania, we turn our attention to another hilly part of the world of somewhat greater interest to wargamers and the broader defense affairs community: the Fulda Gap.

Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm is my current recommendation for the definitive Cold War armored combat command experience. Can Armored Brigade unseat it? Read on to find out!

Continue reading →

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 30, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

Busy morning at the office. Commentary status: limited.

Defense

Richard Spencer maybe doesn’t want to be SecNav anymore? – The real headline: he blasts Congress and shipyards.
A Chally 2 Streetfighter prototype – Regrettably, the Brimstone launcher is on a vehicle parked behind the tank, not the tank itself.
Al-Baghdadi down
Navantia unveils Joint Support Ship design – Does a little bit of everything—70% of the fuel capacity of the recently-retired Australian oilers, 70% of the load capacity of HMAS Choules (an LPD), a full hospital, and so forth.
Dutch military police find 11 kilos of cocaine on a Dutch LPD – Evidently, someone decided to take a little side trip during a deployment to the Caribbean.
Navy backing down from 355-ship plan – Why 355? we found ourselves asking. It turns out the number comes from a force structure assessment conducted in 2016.

Games

A pre-alpha tech demo of Task Force Admiral, a really good-looking WW2 carrier command game – Items of particular note: cloud physics, seamless map zoom.
Blizzard writes a buffer overflow emulator – Highly technical article, on how Blizzard emulated a bug in Starcraft which was used to create most of the Starcraft custom map ecosystem.

History

Grab Bag

How Scientology bought downtown Clearwater, Florida
Certain AMD processors’ high-quality random number instruction always yields -1 – The problem with randomness is that you can never be sure.
Didn’t we try this once already? – Mortgages for anyone with a pulse!
The collapsing crime rates of the 90s might have had something to do with cell phones – If you can sell drugs to anyone, anywhere by telephone, you don’t need to hold turf. If you don’t need to hold turf, you don’t need to kill people to keep it.
California is on fire again.

On the OMFV

Posted by parvusimperator

We’ve had some recent news on the OMFV program, with Rheinmetall being disqualified for not showing up for the Engineering & Manufacturing Design (EMD) phase, so let’s dig in.

First, let’s laugh a bit at the “competition” now with a single entrant. Even though, technically, someone else could enter a bid in 2023. If the program stays around that long. Those competitors wouldn’t get US Army funding and feedback from the EMD portion of the program, so they’d be at a significant financial disadvantage.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten our snark out of the way, let’s get serious. Yet again, we’re trying to replace the Bradley. What are the problems with the Bradley? So far, I’ve found the following three commonly cited (in no particular order):

1) Insufficient protection against current and near future threats, even with existing up-armor kits installed.
2) Insufficient power capacity for all current systems, let alone future upgrades.
3) Insufficient dismount capacity.

That said, OMFV only seems to worry about (1) and (2), since it does not require entrants to carry a full, nine-man dismount squad. And the one entrant from General Dynamics (which I believe is called Griffin IV), has capacity for the minimum required dismounts only. I think we’re still waiting on the DTIC or RAND corp. study on “Why Six Dismounts is Sufficient”, after they so kindly wrote a bit on why it’s so important for the GCV to carry nine dismounts.¹

Anyway, the current requirements are tough enough. The following three are probably going to be extremely tough to meet:

Entrants must provide excellent protection (details are sparse, but presumably superior to that of the Bradley)
Entrants must have a 20% growth capacity
Two (2) entrants must be transportable in a C-17

I’m not entirely sure that this is doable. BAE didn’t think so, which is why they didn’t bother to enter anything into this phase. But GDLS seems to think they can do it.

I would have liked to have seen the Puma entered into the EMD to compete with the Griffin, but since its made by a collaboration between Rheinmetall and KMW, there’s little reason for Rheinmetall to enter it when they had their (now disqualified) KF41.

Of course, Puma was a GCV alternative that the GAO looked at, and was recommended over developing the higher-risk GCV prototype vehicles, despite holding fewer dismounts. Two can fit in a C-17 in the stripped-down configuration that is used to get it into an A400m. And the protection is pretty fantastic.

Obvious problems include that it’s very expensive, I have no idea how much growth capacity is in the design right now, the turret would have to be redone to carry the US-Army preferred 50mm XM913 autocannon, it’s expensive, there’s no provision at present for a hard-kill active protection system, the coax gun is still 5.56mm, the MELLS ATGM launcher isn’t done and did I mention it’s expensive? At a minimum, competitors are required to demonstrate an upgrade path to the 50mm gun. Oh, and the US Army would have to be okay with having to transport and install the rest of the armor before they used their air-transported Pumas.

As it is, we’ll see how the program goes. I’m not going to hold my breath.

You may find the Rand GCV paper to be a good read. ↩

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 23, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

This week, the ‘approximately Fishbreath’s birthday’ edition.

Books

Given that it’s me, my birthday presents were primarily books.
Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, courtesy Parvusimperator: widely regarded as the best of the bunch when it comes to golf books, or at the very least, the one everyone who plays that game should read.
Castles of Steel, courtesy my in-laws: I’ve read this before via the War College Library, but I’m delighted to have my own copy and to read it again, just as soon as I finish Dreadnought.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, also courtesy my in-laws: I enjoyed the TV series and like the worldbuilding that seems to have gone into it. The book should be a delight.
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, courtesy my wife: making bread is a hobby of mine, but I’m not very good at it right now. This will help with that.

Defense

The Coast Guard ought to be more combat-ready – …argues this Coast Guard blogger. Not that we disagree.
Tankograd’s BMP-2 post is as excellent as all their other content – This isn’t news, but it is something I read this week.
A Leclerc crew wins the shooting competition at the Iron Spear exercise
CDR Salamander takes a heterodox view on the CVL concept – Namely, that it isn’t trash. I have no issue with building amphibious assault ships that happen to work well as baby carriers, too, but the numbers don’t work out for replacing big carriers with small ones. (A lesson clear to players of Rule the Waves 2!)
HMS QE‘s hangar – Quite roomy. High ceilings.
The Visby-class remains one of my favorite corvettes – Warship of the future, today!
Report to Congress on the state of FFG(X) – The warship of today, tomorrow!
Northrop to install a laser on USS Portland – A 150kw laser. That’s some serious oomph.
Update from last week: the NorK SLBM looks real – Thanks to Chris Bradshaw for the link.

Science and Technology

Remember the SuperMicro story, about spy chips placed on server motherboards? – As much as that particular story has fallen apart, my opinion of the plausibility of the general concept has done nothing but rise.
Remember that story about galaxies without dark matter? – I think we might have shared that one, and possibly a refutation based on distance measurements¹. Now, new Hubble data drives a refutation of the refutation, which suggests that NGC 1052-DF4 is as far away as originally thought, and therefore actually deficient in dark matter.
On netcode design for fighting games – An interesting read, which goes into some depth on the subject.
Annoyed software engineer hacks ransomware gang after falling victim to ransomware attack, posts decryption keys on Pastebin
Doctorin’ is hard – The modern scientific system is biased toward discovery over reproduction, so it’s easy to get a novel treatment into broad usage, but hard to pull it back if later studies can’t confirm that it does anything.
Elon Musk sends Tweet via Starlink broadband – SpaceX is targeting mid-2020 for initial customer service in the US, which realistically means sometime in 2021, by SpaceX’s usual deadline inflation.
NordVPN compromised – They lost control of their private keys, the fools.

Guns

The curious case of Joseph Roh – Who got off with a super-light sentence for running an 80%-lower-finishing operation because his lawyers convincingly argued that an AR-15 lower isn’t a firearm by the ATF’s own definition.

Grab Bag

Preliminary report on the Collings Foundation B-17 crash
Car and Driver likes the mid-engine 2020 Corvette – $60,000 for a car that can go 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. What a world we live in.
Had you heard about how Mexican cartels defeated the Mexican military in pitched battle? – Mexico is falling apart.
Cities are less happy than suburbs or exurbs – Water still wet. Sky still blue.
‘Amazon Synod’ in Rome causing strife among Catholics – There’s a bit of a flap over a display of what are pretty clearly fertility idols in the Vatican Gardens. Some Catholics of a more traditional bent stole them and threw them into the Tiber. I’m pretty much on board with that.

Something along the lines of, it was closer than the dark-matter-free paper authors thought, so it wasn’t strange at all. ↩

Open Gear Retrospective: Year One

Posted by parvusimperator

I’ve been having a blast in Open, and thought I’d take a bit to talk through some of my gear and the small changes I’ve made. My gun has been running great, and I’m super happy about that. Let’s look at some of the other stuff, and one gun part swap.

1) Holster: Double Alpha Alpha-X vs. Everglades Magnetic Race Holster
I started with a purchase of a ‘belt kit’ from Double Alpha, which included their Alpha-X race holster. This holster requires inserts to fit the trigger guard of your firearm. Since I’m using the relatively new Lone Star Innovations Outlaw grip on my race gun, which doesn’t have an insert explicitly made for it, I guessed and got the insert for the Phoenix Trinity Evo grip.

Was this module the right choice?
Yes. Or, at least, it was retained correctly and drew (mostly) fine.

Why did I switch?
Sometimes I found that I could get my gun to snag a little on the draw. I also wanted something with a bit more positioning change options, so I gave the Everglades Magnetic Race Holster (MRH) a try.

Is the MRH better?
Yes. Much smoother draw, nicer adjustment range for holster position, and the adjustments actually stay in place without a bunch of loctite. It also has a much bigger lever for the lock to keep the gun retained when moving, which is easier to sweep off on the draw. The only downside to the MRH is that its only for hi-cap 1911 platforms.

Which should you buy?
If you’re shooting a hi-cap 1911/2011 type platform, get the MRH. It’s just better.

2) Mag Pouches: Double Alpha Racemaster vs. Alpha-X
I opted to go for the Racemaster mag pouches in my belt kit.

Why did I switch?
I decided to give the Alpha-X a try since forum reviews indicated they had a superior mounting system design and I found that my mags could drag a little when drawing from the aluminum-bodied Racemasters. The Alpha-X pouches have plastic liners to try to correct this.

Which is better?
The Alpha-Xs are better. The belt attachment is a lot more secure, and only requires you to tweak/torque/loctite one screw instead of two. The plastic liner really does allow you to get a clean, slick mag draw even after you’ve messed around with tension. Plus, if you like to run your pouches bullets-out like me, the Alpha-Xs are way easier to set up that way. I’ll slowly switch out the Racemasters for Alpha-Xs, but being an open shooter, extra mag pouches are a seldom-used item anyway.

3) Magwell: Dawson ICE vs. Limcat V2
My awesome open gun came with a nice, big Dawson ICE magwell on it. This is a pretty typical choice and it’s been around for a while. It’s got an aluminum top with a replaceable plastic liner, so when you gouge it up after practicing reloads, you can just replace the liner rather than the whole magwell.

Why did I switch?
I noticed sometimes during reload practice that there was a way I could actually get my mag stuck in the grip if I didn’t rotate it correctly to align it with the grip. Some googling showed me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem, and Limcat made a magwell to try to fix it. The Limcat V2 magwell has an aluminum top and a hardened steel liner, which isn’t easily replaceable, but it should be resistant to getting all gouged up by reloads as you try to get faster.

Which is better?
The Limcat by far, even if I had to spend some time fitting it with a file. It’s got a shape that helps push your hand up higher on the grip, and the magwell’s narrower mouth and convex shape really does mean that you can’t get the mag to jam up. If you don’t miss the magwell, your reload is gonna happen. It’s a fantastic magwell design, which is probably why everyone is trying to copy it. And the hardened steel liner is, in fact, resistant to gouges.

4) Which helped more, minor kit tweaks or consistent practice?
Consistent Practice. Duh.

5) Do I want to try any other minor changes?
Of course. In no particular order, I’m considering trying the following:

Some kind of thumb rest, mostly because this is open and I can have one.
The Atlas ‘Ape Hanger’ racker, because it looks cool and it won’t smash your thumb if you flag it (old habits die hard).
The Limcat Heavy Brass V2 magwell, because I kinda like my current heavy gun, so why not try more weight low in it?
Possibly the SIG Romeo 3XL red dot, but that’s a lot more expensive than everything else on that list, so I might wait.

But really, the big thing is just get more practice.

DISCLAIMER: I paid my own money for all of the above parts and received $0.00 in compensation from any of the manufacturers listed here.

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 16, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

After the raging kegger we threw to celebrate the 50th WWRW, we needed a week off.

Actually, it was a busy week at work and I just forgot. Enjoy this special double edition.

Long Reads

A Chinese martial arts master travels the country, challenging and defeating those whose kung fu he perceives as weak – Plot of a wuxia movie? Well, yes, the plot of every wuxia movie, but also a true, ongoing story in modern China. The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks.

Quiz of the Week

Which of these two force hierarchies pictured on Twitter is attacking, and which is defending? – See the spoiler tags at the end of the post for our guesses and the answer key, respectively, but I encourage you to take a look, think about it, and give your answers/justifications in the comments before checking the answers.

Defense

Check out these goofy anti-flash goggles – A view of a B-52 flying a nuclear alert mission. This week on the Many Words Discord (see sidebar at right): a discussion of antiflash paint on bombers, and why it may have gone away.
Bell is trying to cast ~~Raise Dead~~ True Resurrection on the Comanche – It’s the purest helicopter of the new scout helicopter competitors, so I like it, even if it does have wings. Also this week on the Many Words Discord: a discussion of tandem vs. side-by-side seating for military aircraft. Ars Technica reports they’re calling it ‘Invictus’ this time..
Let’s play parade analysis – By which I mean, let’s let someone else play parade analysis. What’s the news from China’s National Day parade?
Boeing’s why-you-should-buy-Chinook-Block-II website – The nice thing about helicopters is that you can slap new engines and a new gearbox in, and even without doing any work on the hull you’ve suddenly created a new, more compelling product.
Iran says it foiled an assassination attempt on the commander of the Quds Force
A video on the BAE Amphibious Combat Vehicle – A much less cool vehicle than the previous attempt to replace the AAV. 2700hp in the water by using open-circuit seawater cooling!
Speaking of the Marines, they’re working on ways to fight China – We shared a story a few weeks ago on the planning document for same.
Zerohedge: NoKor tests sub-launched ballistic missile? – The question mark is mine, because I don’t know if I fully trust Zerohedge’s reporting, and don’t have the time to run the story down myself.
CDR Salamander is not happy about the Navy permitting fatigues in DC – Honestly, I’m against letting anyone with a staff job wear anything besides a proper uniform.
Lynx 41 disqualified from the Bradley replacement game – Why? Because of bureaucracy and bad requirements, that’s why.
… and the program is at risk of three failures in a row
Iraq is in flames – Self-inflicted this time, though.
Germany proposes ‘European’ aircraft carrier – Me: “Maybe Graf Zeppelin?” Parvusimperator: “What’s the German for ‘dock queen rustbucket’?”
Defence Technology Review has some good articles this week, in particular on speculative amphibious assault ship designs
Norway’s F-35 drogue chutes aren’t working right
The AS21 rollout in photos – As AFVs go, I think it’s quite handsome.
Big Army looking to replace the Longbow radar?
Rheinmetall brought a 130mm gun to AUSA
Puma Czechs out – I had to use Parvusimperator’s punny headline. The Germans decided not to submit the Puma to Czechia’s IFV program, but they have three other bids.
Baby flattop all grown up – USS America has 13 F-35s on deck.

Sport

Science and Technology

The scientist behind the Navy’s UFO patents has filed one for a compact fusion reactor – A two-meter box capable of generating between a gigawatt and a terawatt of thermal energy. Naive back-of-the-napkin math suggests 2600 gallons per second of cooling water at one gigawatt, and five Rhines or two-thirds of a Mississippi at one terawatt.
Science takes another crack at a reactionless thruster – This one uses relativistic mass change to get more impulse from a forward-moving particle than a backward-moving one. Nobody’s built one yet—rather, it’s a ‘the concept seems plausible’ thing, by a NASA engineer, who admits it’s a long shot.
Update your Linux boxes – An exploit in sudo! It’s less serious than I thought, though, and basically only affects users/groups with a RunAs (ALL,!root) configuration).
Teslas run Linux, Linux writes a lot of logs, flash memory in Tesla ECUs is not rated for a lot of writes, flash memory problems are bricking Teslas – ‘About four years’ seems to be the lifespan. Ol’ Musky says on Twitter that it’s better now.

Grab Bag

Why is Costco so good?
UN may run out of money by the end of October, says SecGen Guterres in letter to 37,000 employees – The headline is its own punchline.
Washington Center for Media Self-Aggrandizement to close – That is, the Newseum.
Blizzard suspends Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong – With this story, you can see why I try to do these weekly. The story’s advanced a bit. Anyway, isn’t it refreshing to see traditionally leftist media outlets calling out a company for suppressing unpopular speech, rather than shrugging, saying something about freedom of speech not meaning freedom from consequences, and forgetting about it a day later? $10 says they forget the lesson again next time it’s identifiably conservative speech.

Spoiler for Guesses

Spoiler for Answers

Wednesday What We’re Reading (Oct. 2, 2019)

Posted by Fishbreath

It’s the 50th anniversary edition of Wednesday What We’re Reading, in which we… don’t really do anything out of the ordinary.

Defense

Lightweight stainless/aluminum ammunition coming? – See also discussion on Discord of how much extra volume you get in a cartridge of the same size.
Thrym invents beer gut replacement for operators – It’s an electronics case which fits, at least optionally, to the front of a plate carrier, so you can open it up and look down at your phone, or what-have-you.
The US still needs carriers – Roughly a year in to What We’re Reading, and it’s as true as it ever has been.
F-35 testing delays continue beyond its combat debut – Thinking face emoji.
The Columbia boomers are on track for their scheduled delivery… – … but 2028 is a long way off, and more problems like the one with missile tube welds recently could push that date.
The Navy Reserve is broken – Not as an organization, but in terms of actually paying its reservists.
China builds an amphibious assault ship/baby carrier in a year or so, probably – Pictures of its keel under construction appeared late this past spring. It’s unclear how much work was done before then, at least in sources I can get at.
Branch of service which operates boats beats branch of service which operates airplanes to airplane readiness goals
Good Loren Thompson alert: five reasons the Digital Century series is doomed to failure – The most compelling reason is that, by and large, the original analog-era Century Series failed.
Winchester selected to operate Lake City ammo plant – Is it a tell for the next-gen squad weapon? After all, Winchester is working with one of the competitors.
Useless Camo Pattern retired today
Armata program continues to deflate – Down to 130 tanks, and much of the fancy technology from the original demonstrator vehicles is gone.
First photo of the new Chinese rifle – Not a bullpup, American-esque barrel lengths.

Science and Technology

LockMart gets another cost-plus contract for the Orion spacecraft – After 15 years of development, this is a cost-plus contract to deliver six units, which will presumably be renewed even after we’ve all died working in Grand Overseer Musk’s Marsium mines.
Our county uses hackable surveillance cameras – Time for a campaign of guerilla camera vandalism?
Tesla debuts summon mode – No-driver Teslas immediately start hitting things in parking lots.
Samsung Galaxy Fold lasts at least six days – More on this record-breaking performance as we have it.
What can you solve with a quantum annealer? – Ars Technica explains why you might want one of those big D-Wave jobbers.

Nerd Culture

Spider-Man back in the MCU, at least for now – This is a good thing. Tom Holland is the best live-action Spidey to date, and Sony’s track record, box office takes notwithstanding, is mixed at best¹.

Grab Bag

Brexit and the British judiciary – Parliamentary government is weird. At the same time, the institution of Parliament, with shouting and dramatic speechgiving, is better than the institution of Congress.
The article I meant to link with the above summary
President Xi’s power grabs have cost China a great deal of stability
Kickstarter laughs at coalition of leftist magazines who want it to be more union-friendly – All of the greatest successes of unions came in the days when they had Pinkertons and fire hoses to deal with anyway.
Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys – The effects of red meat and processed meat consumption are so small that they only show up in analyses of vast populations. Nutrition scientists were angry at the journal which published the paper because it’s going to damage public confidence in nutrition science.
Measuring wealth by orders of magnitude – Top-down space game Starsector uses a similar system for measuring population.
$172 red light camera ticket in Delaware represents is less than $100 and can’t be challenged, court says

Let’s see. Raimi’s trilogy is good, great, meh, and gets sad-sack Peter Parker right but doesn’t give him much time to be wisecracking Spider-Man. The Andrew Garfield movies are meh, I-didn’t-see-it, and make Peter Parker too cool. Spider-Verse is one of the best comic book movies of any kind ever. I didn’t see Venom. That’s maybe half good? Two-thirds? Anyway, the two MCU Spidey movies have been superb and great, respectively, because a) Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is still a dorky kid, and b) Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is properly confident. Some complaints about how Far From Home took him too far from home aside, Marvel Studios has a better record so far. ↩