Here we are at the leading edge of the summer doldrums. Parvusimperator’s low on things to write about, and I’m in at-home productivity mode. So it goes. Happily, there’s a ton going on in the world, so we do have links for you. Lots of links.

Defense

• Oil tankers attacked (?) in the Gulf of Oman – This correspondent’s guess is naval mines which slipped their moorings.
• The BBC reports that it might have been limpet mines – Like it was in May.
• In earlier reporting, the WSJ said torpedoes – Maybe they just meant ‘torpedo’ in the old sense of ‘mine’.
• Close-up shots do suggest a mine hit
• CDR Salamander: it’s fun to follow, but it’s not our problem, either
• The IAF (Indian) wants to buy IAF (Israeli) missiles – Pakistani F-16s with AIM-120-C5s outranged the Indian Flankers with R-77s, which Indian sources claim can’t really engage targets at more than 80km. India wants to replace the Vympel missile with the extended-range Derby.
• H und K is in financial trouble – Because they hate you, and you suck.
• In pictures: a bomb bird on a bomb bird – You’ll just have to click it to find out what it is.
• Small earthquake near the China/NoKor border – … turns out to be caused by the Jilin Longye Blasting Company in China, rather than by the North Korean bombs everyone suspected. At least, that’s the official story.
• Iran will shortly breach its uranium stockpile limits
• Pentagon seeks laser-armed space drones – In response to questions about militarizing space, the Pentagon claims they’re laser-armed space drones for science. (This is not actually what they claim.)
• Big Army slows its roll on ground robots, buys 9,000 small drones – Aerial reconnaissance at the squad level is a compelling buy.
• Dreadnought v. Columbia: boomers of the future
• Big Army’s future tank: picture a factory stamping upgrades on an Abrams chassis forever
• The Navy launches one of the most awkwardly-named ships of all time: USS Minneapolis-St. Paul – Comment with your votes for more awkward names.
• Boeing line workers just can’t stop leaving tools, cigarette butts, lunches, etc. in KC-46 airframes – “Didn’t you have ten wrenches when you clocked in?” “Beats me.”
• Everything old is new again, naval strategy edition – In which it is argued that the fleet should be concentrated, Mahan-style, in the Pacific. The only problem is that I think it would require some cleverness with advanced basing and perhaps corvettes/motherships of some kind¹.
• Northrop and Raytheon are working on a 3D-printed hypersonic scramjet cruise missile – I just got 21st Century Defense Story Bingo.

Hong Kong Protests

• Citizens of Hong Kong are protesting a new extradition bill which would subject Hong Kongese2 to the Chinese justice system
• A huge crowd of protestors separates to let an ambulance through – Alternate title: “Things that would never happen in America”.
• Millions of people still hitting the streets daily
• Numbers estimated at 2 million—something like 25% of the entire population of the city

Science and Technology

• Starlink is mostly going to be for rural customers – Obviously. If you look at the bandwidth per satellite and the size of the constellation, it’s clear that even 12,000 satellites isn’t enough to serve dense populations. For myself, I’m glad to rub that in the faces of people (primarily Ars Technica commenters) who a) clearly live in cities and b) are so blinded by Ol’ Musky that they were looking forward to satellite internet.
• Chinese dissidents are being executed for their organs – This is a New York Post story I found via Zerohedge, so take it with a truckload full of salt from a Chinese dissident slave camp salt mine, but maybe Larry Niven wasn’t too far off in terms of timeline³.
• The Atlantic hypothesizes on the MH370 disapperance – Chilling and plausible.

Grab Bag

• SMS König is for sale – Along with some other German warships, too. Unfortunately, they were made historical monuments in 1979, so if you’re looking to buy them as a source of low-background steel, you’re probably out of luck.
• Everything old is new again, drugs edition – Evidently, cocaine is second only to marijuana in the arsenals of young British drug users.

It’s rare that I get the What We’re Reading story filed prior to our traditional 10:13 a.m. Eastern post publication time, but today, I’ve been more diligent than usual.

Defense

• HMAS Perth stuck in drydock for want of a crew – For whatever reason, a software industry friend of mine in Australia is now also a certified general hand for near-shore vessels. Maybe time for a career change?
• Via Kilo Sierra, proceedings of the Robotics Capabilities Conference – Feel free to drop interesting articles in Discord or in comments throughout the week, and we’ll consider them for inclusion here.
• How the Navy plans to break Big E – The plan is that there aren’t really any solid plans yet. Also, the cost to break Big E alone is going to be about the cost of fielding a carrier group for a year.
• Taiwan to get tanks, Javelins, TOWs, &c., but no Vipers yet
• Those are the wrong weapons, though – With all the ink spilled about China’s A2/AD capabilities making it a headache to operate near Taiwan, maybe Taiwan should invest in A2/AD capabilities to make it a headache to operate near Taiwan the other direction.
• The Navy’s chance to return to Subic Bay – Given the difficulties in reloading VLS systems at sea (namely, we don’t have a way to do so right now), a good port close to China seems like it should be a gimme.
• In photos: the near-collision between USS Chancellorsville and Admiral Vinogradov
• Analysis of the Future Helicopter Engine competitors and selection
• Is cyber where radar was in 1942? – Yes, in the sense that nobody really understands it. No, in the sense that ‘radar’ actually described a specific technology, whereas ‘cyber’ is a meaningless buzzword.
• Understanding the F-15X purchase – I’m still for it, if only on the grounds that it behooves us to have two aircraft manufacturers with active fighter production lines. Also, jamming will be more important than stealth in the middle of the 21st century. You heard it here first.

Science and Technology

• Quantum leaps, assumed to be instant, actually take time – This has ramifications which I am unqualified to communicate. Quanta Magazine, absent from this series for some time, makes a triumphant return, with the usual endorsement that they’re great at explaining highly technical findings in physics for the average intelligent reader without physics training.
• A time lapse of Jupiter’s surface, presumably from the Juno mission – Behold the glory of creation.
• Large mass anomaly detected under the moon’s south pole – Possibly the remnants of the asteroid which blew it off of Earth in the first place? It’s a mass of metal, most likely, five times the size of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Culture

• PC games: the original creators of Star Control, Paul Reiche and Fred Ford, reached an amicable settlement with the current owner of the Star Control trademark, Brad Wardell of Stardock, by having a friendly phone call – The settlement also involves exchanges of honey (from Wardell’s beehives) and mead (from Reiche’s homebrewery), proving that end runs around lawyers are always worthwhile. I pity whoever, at the law firms involved, had to go tell everyone that the long, drawn-out IP case with billing expected to go on for years is suddenly resolved because the clients talked it out.
• Books: Barnes and Noble purchased by Waterstones – Buried lede: even with their Nook miscue and all the difficulties faced by traditional retailers, Barnes and Noble has been reliably profitable over the last few years.
• Music: in 2008, when Universal caught fire, almost 200,000 masters burned
• PC games: the official John Wick video game is an innovative take – If you asked me to write a brief for a John Wick game, I would have maybe sent back a Max Payne clone, or if I were having a creative day, a Superhot clone. A top-down, paused-real-time strategy game like Frozen Synapse would not have crossed my mind.

History

• British diplomatic cables suggest that at least 10,000 people died in Tiananmen Square
• The other major anniversary this week: Midway

Commodities

A new heading! It was originally ‘Finance’, but then I realized that every finance-related story I had was also commodities-related in one way or another.

• Millions of acres of US farmland to be out of service this year because of flooding – Apocalyptic Zerohedge warning. Maybe ten million acres will go unplanted; the US has ~370 million acres of cropland. It has been an uncommonly cool June so far here in western PA, although I remember it being wetter in 2015. That said, the way Zerohedge frames the story, it sounds like the way a Tom Clancy novel starts.
• Where will all the residual fuel oil go when ships are banned from burning it? – On January 1, 2020, ships without exhaust gas scrubbers will be banned from using high-sulfur fuel oil. The guy quoted in the article calculates that the marine fuel market’s consumption will drop from 3.5 million barrels of HSFO per day to 2.7 million, leaving about 240 million barrels per year unaccounted for.
• A tanker, loaded with Iranian oil in violation of US-led sanctions…
• …is probably part of a Chinese state enterprise

Grab Bag

Lots of headings today.

• On the charging of one of the Stoneman Douglas deputies
• Arfcom purchased by the Brownells of Brownells – I had no idea that Brownells was actually owned by a family with the surname Brownell. The more you know.
• Obligatory baseball story: on how swings have changed in these, the early years of the Flyball Revolution – The received wisdom in baseball (that you can’t radically remake your swing) is, as with much of the received wisdom in sports, wrong, as anyone who even remotely follows golf would have realized. Golfers remake their swings all the time, and they have the same obstacle (that they’ve swung so many times that it’s deeply ingrained) that baseballers do.
• USPSA stage videos – It’s match season, and we’re always talking about USPSA stuff here, so I guess we kind of owe you. Next time we’re at a match together, I’ll have to get one of parvusimperator.

It’s almost but not quite the anniversary of D-Day, and is precisely the anniversary of my marriage¹.

Between that, travel, finishing Britain’s Future Navy (depressing) and starting Massie’s Dreadnought (exciting), it’s a short one this week².

Defense

• LockMart withdraws the Freedom-class from FFG(X) – Good. Let the other defense contractors have a go. Parvusimperator and I still think the F105 is the best choice, but also not the most likely (I think). Probably time for a re-handicapping, now that the field has narrowed.
• CDR Salamander writes at USNI blog about the FFG(X) voluntary downselect and the perishable nature of industrial capacity – Put another way: don’t go the way of the Dutch.
• Reintroducing theater-range missiles in a post-INF world – It’s a brave new world.
• In pictures: the best Harrier on a merely average carrier – Spain’s Juan Carlos I, to be exact. The Harriers are the American Plus model, the only extant variant with a radar and AIM-120 capability, which makes them almost real fighters.
• Congress upset over the Ford class’s inability to deploy with F-35s – Because Congress imposed cost caps on the first two Fords, there’s been an awful lot of ‘fit for but not with’ going on. For instance, one of them is deploying with two of eleven weapons elevators operational.
• USAF has a solid lead in number of operational F-35s – 400 F-35s of all types have been delivered, and they’ve also now passed 200,000 flight hours.
• USAF also thinking about laser missile defense
• Superconductor degaussing system to be installed on some Navy vessels – I really, really want to know what kind of superconductor we’re talking about here, but the story does not relate. It does, however, suggest that the weight savings are substantial: 10 to 100 tons, depending on the size of the hull.
• Corvette carriers: a littoral combat strategy – Missile boats are awesome, but short-legged. So, build a ship to fuel them and shepherd them to wherever you want them to be. Britain’s Future Navy had a similar idea, although built to merchant standards rather than military, and for minesweepers/pirate hunters/subchasers/etc. with a logistics support/helicopter carrier mothership.
• For missile boats, the Skjald-class is a good buy; for patrol craft, why not buy the German Gepard design? – Well, because it’s retired? On the other hand, an updated, NSM-equipped design would be pretty cool, and a Gepard (at 437 tons) outguns an LCS by several times already. Both?.
• Wouldn’t you know it, the Navy already planned to do a missile ~boat~ hydrofoil with a logistics support ship! – Also, the support ship was to be a repurposed LST, which is a cool class of ship.
• Big Army wants to modernize its ammunition plants… – Most of which date to the 1940s.
• USAF has 62 Lancers, of which often only ‘single digits’ are mission-ready at any given time – Not great. B-21 isn’t here yet, guys!

Science and Technology

• Another open-source project switches to a license which excludes resellers – An interesting problem. The norm in the software industry used to be this: if you develop an open-source project, you have dibs on selling that project as a service. The Big Three cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) broke that norm, reselling open-source-projects-as-a-service. The open source projects have now fired back with a new breed of open-source licenses that permit users to do everything but that.

Grab Bag

• SlateStarCodex reviews a book about cultural intelligence – As ever, a long and interesting read³.
• Crime doesn’t pay in Venezuela: muggers can’t afford bullets for their guns
• Crime pays in Venezuela: small planes used by cocaine smugglers are often burned after one use – The difference is that the cocaine smugglers have the support of the military controlling the border crossings, because being a marshaling yard for drug smuggling is the only growth industry in the country.
• John Wick is saving action movies – I enjoy a CGI superhero romp more than parvusimperator does (much more⁴), but importantly, you watch a superhero romp for the characters, not the action scenes. John Wick (and the approximately contemporaneous Mad Max: Fury Road) dispense with the CGI in favor of watchable, clearly-shot action, not the shaky-cam quick-cut mumbo jumbo you see so often today⁵.

Defense

• F-35C bumped from four to six internal air-to-air missiles – The story does not, as far as I can tell, indicate what the mix is.
• Ominously-named Skyborg program to provide perfidious drone wingmen to F-35, F-15EX as the aerial wing of the AI uprising
• Russia’s big UCAV might already be playing sidekick
• Loren Thompson on the NRASM – Loren Thompson is the biggest DoD shill who regularly makes an appearance in these pages, but the articles are still usually fun. (Also, if DoD shilling pays, is there a signup sheet somewhere, or do they come to us?)
• Flooding in Oklahoma refloats USS Batfish – The old girl’s looking pretty good. Unlike Pittsburgh’s own USS Requin, Batfish appears to have a WW2-appropriate cut-down sail.
• A drone you can shoot out of a 40mm grenade launcher – It can move up to 10km from the launch site or loiter for twenty minutes, and it can carry all kinds of payloads, from the ever-popular camera to a variety of bombs.
• Sig’s next-gen squad weapons – Their 6.8mm cartridge is just a 6.8×51.
• On the M-1A2C – Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a built-in Easy Eight-style nickname.
• Steam catapults by presidential decree? – I’m pro-electromagnetic-catapult, given the advantages. I also think the fact that Donald Trump has an opinion on aircraft catapults is amusing and humanizing.
• Poland buying 32 F-35As

Science and Technology

• Artificial general intelligence is hard to define, much less build – The key insight is that when people talk about machines driving The Singularity, they’re talking about artificial general creativity. We have an awful lot of non-artificial general intelligence already, and much of it goes unused.
• Used IBM mainframe buyer’s guide – In case you’re looking for a fun hardware project. All you have to do is spend about as much as you would on a cheap new car, and be prepared for an extra $170-some per month in electricity¹.
• Arm2 is the latest to suspend business with Huawei – That’s terrible for Huawei, given that they do a lot of ARM-architecture processors.
• Google stored unhashed G-Suite passwords for over a decade – It’s fixed now, but this is your weekly reminder that even the big players in tech are actually terrible at their jobs.
• Offset graphene sheets superconduct at -25C – Also, about a million times atmospheric pressure, but what’s a megabar or two among friends?
• SpaceX succeeds on another launch – This one to deploy the first 60 satellites in their proposed, uh, 12,000-strong Starlink constellation. They stuck the landing, which means they’re up to 40 of 47 on landing attempts.
• No link for this one, because I forgot to pop it into our chat, but given how many Starlink satellites are planned, the FCC’s standard satellite-hits-someone-or-something calculation suggests that it’s even odds after six years that reentering debris will bonk something more important than dirt.

Baseball

• Breaking balls in MLB break more than ever before – FiveThirtyEight with its typically excellent nerdy sports coverage.
• It’s not the movement, the Washington Post retorts, but the miles… – Per hour.

Grab Bag

• France is a late-stage aristocracy – According to a French guy on Twitter, anyway.
• On the deeply comic-book-inspired animation of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – Which is up there with Homecoming in the ‘best Spider-Man movie’ category. It’s a twelve-minute video, and absolutely worth your time.
• Recent entrant to the PC game storefront thunderdome Epic suspends accounts for buying too many games during a sale – Why? Because Epic does not have a cart, and repeated small transactions look suspicious to fraud monitoring systems.

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.