This is volume 105, an auspicious number for artillerists. I’ve been slowly working through the backlog of spam users I mentioned in last night’s post, and decided to turn off registration entirely after recaptcha failed to stop a few spam registrations last night.

Defense

• Reaper Pods: sonobuoys, wee PGMs, smaller drones – I heard you like drones, so I put drones in your drones.
• USAF’s new Black Flag – It’s like Red Flag, but secret-er.
• Australia looking at alternatives to its forthcoming French submarines – They are ludicrously expensive, and in typical dysfunctional government fashion, the Aussies are considering a local design of an updated Collins, instead of just calling up Japan and buying a box of Soryus off the rack. (Or maybe even the new Taigeis.) Either way, the Japanese boats are on the order of $500 to $600 million a pop, whereas the Frog boats are $5.7 billion each. Granted, the latter deal has technology transfer, but still! For the $70 billion USD the Aussies are planning on spending, I’d expect to get a whole heck of a lot more than twelve submarines.
• Actually, I’m not ready to leave this yet. If you’re allowed to buy at cost, $70 billion buys you: two Nimitzes, 180 Super Hornets, four Burkes, twelve FREMMs, and… 16 Taigeis. Even if you don’t do the silly thing and buy a pair of CVBGs, $70 billion at off-the-rack prices is more than enough to turn you into the second- or third-most powerful navy local to the Asia-Pacific behind China and maybe Japan. $70 billion is a ludicrously bad deal.
• Information on trials for the Kurganets 25 – It’s in Russian, and I haven’t had the time to translate, however.
• Why are there no good biographies of Xi Jinping? – Because the CCP comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tries to research his history. Next question. The contrast with Russian authoritarianism is interesting—the CCP is all about hiding information to guide the people’s thoughts in the right direction. Russians just don’t care: “We have the power and you don’t, serf. Now go farm mud, or whatever it is you do.”
• Coup in Burma; declared a coup after careful deliberation by American pols – My expectation is mass condemnation in American media, without respect to whether the Burmese military’s claims of voting improprieties turn out to be correct.
• See parvusimperator crow: he called the Namer engine replacement – The previous one was on the anemic side.
• Pictures: HMS Talent arrives, Gibraltar – Machine guns on the conning tower for entrance into a friendly port seems a bit over-cautious, but CDR Salamander likes it, so.
• Speaking of, here’s his brief lament on the USN killing small ships again – Where will our LTs and LCDRS get their first commands if not there?
• One of the better kind of LCS with a captured narcoboat – Not a submarine. Not really even a submersible.

Stonks

• Since the last update, Redditors pumped up the price of Gamestock in a perfectly executed short squeeze, then lost a ton of money as Gamestock cratered once the short sellers fled.
• Robinhood halted trading, and this alleged insider claims it was because of pressure from the White House and a big hedge fund – I’m not sure I buy that given recent developments, but here it is anyway.
• More on the Gamestockalypse
• Matt Taibbi on the subject – Taibbi is a bit of a curiosity to me, along with, say, Greenwald: I don’t think either of them have changed much in views over the years, and I don’t think I have either, and yet here we are on more or less the same side rather than shouting across the aisle.

Science and Technology

• Watch this old merchant ship break apart – Yikes.
• SpaceX is iterating on a new rocket, which means we get a few months of huge explosions – Spoilers, I guess.

Culture Wars

• Speech and sedition in 2021 – In the WSJ, in response to the WaPo’s piece “What the 1798 Sedition Act got right”.
• The Florida COVID whistleblower saga is not really a whistleblower saga at all

Grab Bag

• A cooking blog article where you should read the story before the recipe – “Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii”. You know that’s gonna happen at Fishbreath Kitchens.
• What European Language is This? A flowchart

As parvusimperator settles into his new work digs, he’s been a bit more free with the article-sharing. Maybe we’ll get back onto a once-a-week routine, instead of this recent every-two-weeks one.

Discord Shout-Outs

• Our readers on the Discord (link’s in the sidebar) have come through with some fascinating stuff lately.
• boomerang-pigeon shares some archival documents from Bovington, on British tank development in the early Chieftain era.
• Kilo Sierra shows off some pretty woodworking.
• NATO/OTAN translates some R&D budget line items for the PLAN’s Type 076 LHD.
• It’s cool stuff. If you like what you read here, you should come on by.
• I have a few things in mind for alternate chat systems, if Discord ever decides to clamp down on tiny defense-affairs communities.

Defense

• Declassified Trump administration Pacific plan – I think it’s extremely unlikely that history will look kindly on Trump, but at least in the realm of foreign policy, I think that’s a bit unfair.
• Master Chief Douglas Healey’s recollections from his time aboard USS Long Beach – A delightful read.
• In the same vein, an interview with a Rhino backseater
• Big Navy’s plans to stop failing at shipbuilding – “the Navy will move forward by designing hulls around fielded systems with room for upgrades […]” Shocked Pikachu face! You mean that thing we’ve been pushing here for about as long as we’ve been writing defense commentary?
• UK Land Power: learning from how our allies’ armies are organized – Where “we” are the British, for the duration of the article. Like many articles written from a given nation’s point of view, it’s scathingly critical of that nation, and less so of that nation’s peers. Still interesting, and a pretty good overview of the organization of NATO armies.
• CDR Salamander, leader of the Paint Your Frickin’ Ships party – I’d vote for him, but I suspect there’s not much home in 2020s American politics for the kind of Southern gentleman who keeps a subscription to Garden & Gun.
• Pantsir Heist: America nabs one from Libya – Moscow notes that this is not actually much of an intelligence coup, because we’ve been able to get our grubby hands on the UAE’s Pantsirs.
• Speaking of which, Biden freezes F-35 sales to the UAE – Repeat after me: not everything your political opposites do is bad.
• Boeing and LockMart unveil their helo for the Blackhawk replacement program – It looks like something out of Call of Duty: coaxial rotors with a pusher.

Science and Technology

• Windows 10 bug causes NTFS corruption when viewing a certain file’s icon – It’s fixable corruption, but nevertheless, quite the bug.
• Electrodynamic tether testbest satellite to launch soon – Much as it sounds like witchcraft, “A satellite which can maneuver by running an electric current through a wire passing through a planet’s magnetic field” is a well-established concept.
• A transgalactic travel guide – How far can we go, given how fast we can go?
• CollapseOS: an operating system for After the End – I explicitly disagree with the guy’s prediction about the global supply chain collapsing by 2030, but it’s still interesting.
• CDR Salamander on Elon Musk – Mostly talking about how Musk’s style of leadership is explicitly anti-institutional, in the sense that he isn’t afraid to tear down rules when the rules are dumb.

gestures The World and Such

• Everything is Broken – COVID has convinced me of nothing so thoroughly as the utter decay of Western institutions generally.
• The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class – “The first major speech pattern between the characters is Posturetalk. Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling. This is the language of living inside a construct; where your entire world lives within arbitrarily drawn boxes, and you have nothing concrete to attach to. It’s the only language that Michael knows how to speak.”
• In happier news, Redditors are screwing over hedge funds with a short squeeze on Gamestop – Are there any good guys in this story? Well, maybe the Redditors doing it for the lulz, but that’s about it, and even they aren’t the most sympathetic characters. Here’s a Twitter thread on the same topic.
• The new national American elite – Used to be that regional elites competed for national leadership. Now there’s an elite monoculture, and like most monopolies, it’s led to corruption and decrepitude.

Grab Bag

• A classic of the filk music genre – Filk: what happens when musically-inclined fans get together at science fiction conventions. This one could be a folk anthem for the Imperium of Mankind.
• A joke from Russia, badly translated: “The police reported a few hundred protestors on Sunday, and a few thousand were arrested.”
• A remark from a Russian wag, recounted third-hand: “In every joke, there’s a little bit of joke.”

Happy New Year! 2021 is already off to a flying start, but you’re not here for commentary on that, presumably.

Miscellaneous Entertainments

• I had cannily planned to hold off on watching The Mandalorian until all the episodes had released, then binge it during the free trial, only to discover that there is no longer a free trial deal. Oops. Well, season 2 has been good so far. No spoilers.
• Also, since we had to subscribe to Disney+ to see The Mandalorian, and we get as many blocks of one month subscription as it takes us to finish it, I also got to see The Rise of Skywalker, which is the only thing worse than irredeemable crap: redeemable crap. I’ll be turning a conversation I had with parvusimperator into a review in the coming days.
• On the PC games front, I’ve been playing From the Depths, a block-based vehicle building. Think Minecraft meets Waterworld meets Friedman’s U.S. Battleships. A pretty good buoyancy simulation and some well-designed, if not entirely realistic, ballistics and armor math makes for interesting shipbuilding, and the presence of several game modes with actual beginnings, middles, and ends (as opposed to the standard block-builder ‘survive and build’ mode) gives you something to do with your ludicrously large naval guns. Weighing against it is the jankiness in the UI.

The ‘Rona

• The lab leak hypothesis gets its moment in New York Magazine – Republicans are out of power, so now media lefties are allowed to say obvious things without risk of being associated with wrongthink.
• Kind of a shame we used up our collective capacity for tolerating restrictions over the summer, when it was not bad, instead of now, when it is.

Defense

• The RAF’s first Wedgetail AWACS is being built on an ex-Chinese 737 bizjet – In particular, it belonged to Deer Jet, a charter provider out of Beijing.
• Naval Strike Missile boxes coming to the San Antonios
• Swarming SDBs – They communicate with each other to detect, sort, and engage targets. Fly over the bad guys, drop a wingful of bombs, and let the machines sort ’em out!
• Entry #2 in Will Roper’s campaign for the full Secretaryship of the Air Force – You may remember the name from last year’s story about building a sixth-generation fighter in a year. Here, he talks about the design and engineering process.
• And, from the other end of the procurement success/failure spectrum, the Navy – Salamander in rare form.
• Here’s the LCS problem he refers to – The transmissions represented by the A in ‘CODAG’ have a way of crapping out.

History

• A tour of R-100 – The old British zeppelin. It’s a little on the cozy side, but! A zeppelin! Also, and this is why I’m not a zeppelin designer in real life, arranging the cabins so that they can get natural light from the windows despite being inboard of the promenades and balconies is delightfully clever.

Science and Technology

• American media continues Russophobic attacks – Blaming the (Czech-developed, though by Russians with ties to Russia) JetBrains tool suite for hacks in the US. JetBrains, of course, denies it, and nothing further has come of it.

Guns

• Kel-Tec to make perhaps a double handful of a 5.7mm, 50-round pistol – Cool, but just try finding one.

Grab Bag

• Demonic portal— I mean, Hudson Yards Vessel closed after yet another suicide – Doesn’t it just call to you?

I’ve been trying to sell a light horror story on and off for a year or two, and have had nibbles but no luck. It’s one of my best, and I want to get on to writing more in the same universe. I’m thinking about serializing it over at Many Words Main instead, and going for a once-per-week update schedule again. Thoughts?

Defense

• Broke: invading for oil – Woke: invading for lithium. (Nobody has been invaded for lithium yet, but it seems like it’s gonna happen at some point? Maybe?)
• The Navy’s UFO patents went through internal review, and there was a demo – It has to be a psyop, right? Or did some random scientist actually invent the future all in one go?
• Big Army gets over Not Invented Here bias, takes Israeli, Serbian, and Swedish self-propelled howitzers to Yuma for a shootout – We like Archer, but it’s a bit spendy.
• Want radar ground surveillance planes? The UK is selling its Sentinels – … for parts, though, so it’s a bit of a DIY project.
• Russia’s Predator knockoff fired its first guided missiles – Possibly the Russian laser-guided rockets? They’re pretty nifty for precision attack, as any DCS player will tell you, although the issue I have is usually running out of gas before running out of munitions. The DCS JF-17 has a 20-rocket laser-guided pod, and one pod per external fuel tank is about the right ratio.
• Japan joins the Church of Long Range, developing a 2000-km anti-ship missile

The ‘Rona

• Craft distillers hit with $14,000 fee for making hand sanitizer – Happily, after a loud and deserved outcry, the FDA (poster child for libertarianism in 2020) reversed course.

Science and Technology

• A very large amount of social science is based on surveys, and is thus garbage that doesn’t say anything valid – Story checks out.
• Large natural language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 memorize personal information – Makes sense.
• Reading computer code isn’t the same as reading natural language – It uses similar, but not identical, parts of the brain as does doing crosswords or solving math problems.
• A variety of corn from Mexico grows aerial roots that support a microbiome which makes nitrogen – That is, it’s self-fertilizing corn.
• NASA’s Commercial Crew program was a great deal – Even counting the Starliner entry, which makes SpaceX look worse by averaging.
• “Now that the Arecibo radio telescope is gone, we should replace it with a radiotelescope on the far side of the moon” – I like the guts in the presentation of this idea. A far-side-of-the-moon observatory sounds awesome to me.

Guns

• Polymer80 raided by BATF – On the one hand, boo BATF. On the other hand, under the bogus constructive possession rule they’ve somehow managed not to have slapped down in court, an 80% frame plus all the tools and parts to turn it into a gun could well count as a firearm. Happily, the Firearms Policy Coalition is on the case.
• ATF also tried to push stricter regulations on pistol braces, which a loud and FPC-backed comment campaign seems to have shut down for now.
• The St. Louis prosecutor who campaigned on prosecuting the McCloskeys got booted from the case for impropriety – Up yours, lefty DA.
• IPSC history: minutes of the Columbia Conference, which founded IPSC and eventually led to our current USPSA – It’s an attachment in a thread at Enos, so I think you’ll probably need an account there to view it?

Grab Bag

• Jason Whitlock writes for Outkick the Coverage now? – Or maybe he just wanted to say something that most sports outlets would have regarded with about the same attitude as a block of plutonium.

The spammers in the spam queue have gotten a lot less creative lately, but with better grammar, they’re sneaking through the automated filter a bit more often. Fascinating tradeoffs in spam design.

Word of the Week

• I used ‘boustrophedonic‘ to describe a neat, even winding on a spool of 3D printer filament.

Defense

• Battlefield lasers: fact and fiction – An interview.
• Azerbaijan seems to have engaged in some war crimes – Repatriated Armenian remains are coming back beheaded, which a) seems like a great way to get another war in 10-20 years, and b) doesn’t bode super-well for the reasons behind Azerbaijan’s slow-rolling of prisoner exchanges.
• Armenia to rejoin the Russian orbit? It’s not that simple, maybe – I have speculated that Armenia would end its attempts at ingratiating itself with Europe and turn back to Russia. Except it seems that the Westernizing wasn’t as far along as I had thought, and there is anger in Armenia at Russia for being such a passive ally (contra the Turks, who did an awful lot of helping on the other side). Of course, it could just be the Russians sending a message: “You wanted to ditch us for Europe, and look where it got you.”
• Havana syndrome caused by directed, pulsed RF energy – Creepy, but at least it’s resolved.

Science and Technology

• Video of Arecibo collapsing – Scott Manley has some analysis on Youtube.
• FDA regulators are the picture of awful bureaucracy – American-developed vaccines are now approved for use in two non-America countries because American bureaucrats are the worst. Repeal the Pendleton Act; bureaucracy as political spoils at least solves the problem that bureaucrats think they should have a cushy lifetime gig.
• Long read of the week: iPhone iPwned – The problem is fixed now, but it was an extremely powerful attack while it was available.
• Late breaking: a software engineering war story, in Twitter thread form – It’s about Uber, and required a cask strength single malt scotch.

Motorsport

• Goodwood Speed Week: 1920s Grand Prix cars – Decade may not be quite right.
• Goodwood Speed Week: 1930s Grand Prix cars – See previous comment. These ones sound a bit more car-like in the modern sense, revving a bit more than the really old cars (which embody the idea that there is no replacement for displacement).
• Romain Grosjean escaped from a fiery crash at the Bahrain Grand Prix two weekends back – This is his description of escaping, which is pretty heavy stuff.

Grab Bag

• On the Pentagon’s unidentified aerial phenomena task force – So is it Actually Aliens? The USAF spooking the spooks? A psyop to confound the Chinese?
• Remember the spiked Hunter Biden story? Yeah, there’s something to it

And we’re at issue #100!

I’ll level with you: I didn’t end up doing anything special (although maybe I will as the year winds down). I’ve been consumed instead with a fabrication project that will definitely yield an article or two on the process, and will hopefully yield a few articles on the underlying reason for the project over the next year.

That cryptic statement aside, here’s the news.

Defense

• Mathematical history: modeling the Luftwaffe’s chances in the Battle of Britain – I should see if I can get Battle of Britain II working again, avoid the frustrating campaign bugs which make all your AARs and data useless, and game it out. Well, first I should finish the Rule the Waves 2 playthrough, but that’s on my desktop computer, which is in a room I’m slowly painting.
• Test-flying the world’s most advanced F-15 – That’s the one for the Qataris, so presumably they’re not counting any future designs.
• Laser weapons: sci-fi ten years ago, commonplace now – How did it happen? Read on, find out.
• Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, father of Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions, assassinated – Was it Israel? Probably.
• The weapon? A remote-controlled machine gun mounted to a car, which shot up Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle, then exploded when the job was done

Science and Technology

• AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine data is not up to snuff – They did do all the testing they say they did, but they also did some no-nos in reporting it—using certain subgroups of the trial participants, combining unlike tests, and so on.
• The mechanism of COVID destroying your sense of smell
• Anecdata: Amazon reviews of scented candles have fallen one full star since the start of the pandemic – “This candle doesn’t smell like anything!”
• DeepMind attacks another intractable problem, this one more practical than ‘beat the world’s best Go players’: protein folding! – Maybe next they’ll tackle predicting plasma instabilities in tokamaks, and 2020 will be the start of the Fusion Age.
• Lessons from 20 years of Linux kernel work – “Don’t annoy your users.” Also, APIs are tricky to design, because you don’t know if they’re good until people start using them, and you can’t change them after people start using them.
• It’s going to take LockMart a year to replace a failed power unit in the Orion capsule earmarked for Artemis I – If I were king and could make a race happen, I’d lay approximately even odds on SpaceX soft-landing something on the moon before LockMart can tear their capsule down and put it back together.
• Arecibo’s instrument platform has collapsed – R.I.P. (radiotelescope in pieces).
• As always, it needs a big IN MICE disclaimer, but scientists have reversed age-related vision loss in mice – Via epigenetic programming, or in essence telling the old mice to sort themselves out.
• The best measurement yet of the fine structure construct – IN MICE! … No, just kidding.

Guns

• My new favorite cartridge on the basis of name is the .22 Eargesplitten Loudenboomer

Grab Bag

• The adventures of a Brooklyn beekeeper

Issue #99! Thank you for following along for the two-ish years we’ve been sharing what passes for our reading list. I’ll maybe try to do something big for the next one of these—going back and finding predictions might be fun.

Books

• I’m in the middle of Brian Enos Practical Shooting Beyond Fundamentals, and finding it useful. He’s gotten past the Zen-iest bits at the beginning, and some of his notes on grip and sight focus have stuck with me. Hopefully they pay off at the range.
• Parvusimperator is probably reading things too.

Defense

• What we’re selling to the UAE, in the brief period between now and when US Middle East policy goes back to ‘what failed novelists in the early 2010s though would be cool’ – F35s, Reapers, and an awful lot of air-launched munitions.
• Canada’s next frigate is a hull wrapped around VLSes – An unspecified number of Sea Ceptors (possibly 24, quad-packed in six midships VLS cells), a 32-tube Tomahawk-length Mk 41, and the increasingly-popular Naval Strike Missile box launchers.
• Italy is building effective ships at a pace the US should mimic, if we’re serious about holding the Western line against China in the 21st century: Salamander – In a quiet, workmanlike fashion, the Italians are over there building good ships.
• China to build An-225s – I think, in an older post where I planned some Luchtbourgish air landing forces, I worked out that an An-225 can plausibly fit six BMP-3s.
• A patent on non-explosive reactive armor – It’s basically rocket fuel.
• Nagorno-Karabakh War 2020 ends: Azerbaijan wins – The big takeaway? The vulnerability of ground forces to loitering munitions and drones. Also, that sentence (… fragment) is very nearly word-for-word ripped from a book of War in the Future™ sci-fi I had as a teenager.
• Photos: a B-1 carries a JSOW externally

Science and Technology

• We might get a negative leap second – This will, of course, blow up a large amount of computer timekeeping infrastructure, because we computer people didn’t think of that.
• Arecibo radio observatory to be decommissioned – Sad to lose an awesome piece of engineering as well as a big radio observatory, but Arecibo was also the biggest active radar dish in the world too, which will leave us still more vulnerable to alien invasion.
• There are now three COVID vaccines in the home stretch. AstraZeneca’s, which is (probably; sample sizes are awful small) less effective than the first two candidates to pull out of the final corner, is also substantially cheaper ($3 per dose against $20+) and requires no more cold storage than a minifridge, and AstraZeneca says they can manufacture about 1.5 billion double-dose courses in 2021, against a few hundred million of the others.

History

• The truth behind the Rolls Royce vs. Packard-build Merlin debate – The story, as ever, is slightly more complicated than the ‘Packard laughs at Rolls-Royce, saying, the design is too hand-fit to work in a factory’ version I have hitherto been fond of telling.
• The AGM-122 Sidearm – It’s a hoot in the DCS Harrier.

Grab Bag

• Violence in Minneapolis surges; cops quit en masse – Whaaaaaaa? Whoever could have predicted this?
• Bengals QB Joe Burrow blows out a knee – The poor guy. The Bengals did not do a great job keeping him safe.
• America’s invisible pot addicts – This is one of those places where a clearly bad policy (aggressive enforcement against a relatively harmless drug) yielded whiplash to an opposite but also bad policy (pot everywhere!).
• China’s one-child policy: a brief history – Also, a tragic history, ultimately.
• Ever wanted to play a game of H. G. Wells’ classic Little Wars, but balked at spending a factory Glock’s worth of your hard-earned money on antique toy cannon? Well, I’m working on a 3D-printed option.

I’m a few weeks late in mentioning this, but Parvusimperator no longer works in the office next to me. He’s moved on to greener pastures; he requested I not say exactly where, but I will remark that you’d recognize the name.

Defense

• Armenia loses – Azerbaijan’s ties to Turkey, with its F-16s and native drones, proved too much to overcome. It is also another indictment of the West; after Armenia spent a lot of effort escaping the orbit of Russia, Europe and the US did exactly nothing in terms of material aid. Expect some soul-searching in that part of the world, and some wondering whether co-religionists in Russia will be better allies than democracies in Europe.
• On a lighter note, the tank alignment chart – I think I am an Or Purist—as long as it’s in one of the pure columns, I think ‘tank’ is appropriate.
• Taiwanese citizens panic on news of Biden’s election – Say what you like about Trump, but his first term featured some big successes in the foreign policy realm that a Biden administration is not likely to continue.
• Big Army officially selects the SM-6 as its Mid-Range Capability missile – It seems like a slightly odd choice for a ground-to-ground missile, but two thumbs up for buying something already in service.
• Northrop Grumman to replace the Reaper with something stealthy and autonomous – Fun. Reaper would have been a good name for a stealthy second-generation drone, but alas, it’s already taken.
• Video of the week: Hellfire seekers searching
• Biden to start war with Brazil? – A tongue-in-cheek summation of a rumor that a Biden administration will name certain countries ‘climate outlaws’.
• Moltke’s Matrix of Officer Attributes – It generalizes well to other fields, too.

Science and Technology

• Spanish scientists in China are making promising … human-money chimeras?! – For the love of God, China, crack down on this sort of thing! What good is it being a bunch of commie dictators if you aren’t going to use that power?

Guns

• A USPSA range officer died after a competitor dropped a gun, which went off on striking the ground.
• It was a Shadow 2, which was dropped on the hammer; here’s a test of a similar scenario – There are two kinds of dropped-gun discharges: the hammer-strike ones like this, and inertia-related ones, where the change in velocity on hitting the ground either trips a sear (a la recent P320 troubles), or drives a floating firing pin into the primer against spring tension (usually only with lighter firing pin springs, extended firing pins, or both).
• Here’s an eleven-page thread on the Enos forums about same
• Here are some examples of other dropped-gun discharges from Tactical Life

Grab Bag

• Stock exchanges relocating to Texas? – Data centers, at least; New Jersey (where the data centers are based now) wants to implement a one-cent financial transaction tax.
• The New York Times has always been a liberal rag with purported good intentions, but now the second half is going away
• On Big Tech censorship – That’s why we’re (largely) independent of Big Tech here at the Soapbox.
• On the collapse of empires – A chilling vision of things to come, to quote Kent Brockman. Morlock is one of those folks who I don’t always agree with, but who always makes me think (like Putin, to my SPBGU professors circa 2010). Unusually for that crowd, he comes at me from the neoreactionary direction, rather than the center-left one. Anyway, go for the chilling vision of things to come, stay for the astrophysics metaphors.

If you’re the kind of person who looks at the URL bar, you might have noticed we went from a URL ending in 95 to one ending in 95-2 to one ending in 97. Getting real close to that centennial now.

Defense

• 492nd Fighter Squadron has some fun with nose art for Halloween – Yes, it’s been a little bit since we did a What We’re Reading.
• Pour one out for HMS Bristol, the Royal Navy’s biggest surface combatant – I think, at least.
• Inside the Special Boat Service, or at least as far inside as The Drive can get
• Japanese F-35s train with USS America – Japan’s F-35As, however, not their Bravos. That would be a bit too on the nose, having American F-35Bs fly off of their not-carriers, and flying their own off of our pseudo-carriers.
• Integrating AI into tanks: ATLAS and how it works – Kind of like a batman. “I say, Jeeves, what would you recommend for that T-80?” “Why, sabot, I should think, sir.” “Jolly good.”

Games

• Lawsuit claims EA’s loot boxes are an illegal gambling system – Alas, only under the laws of Canada.

Science and Technology

• Inertia demonstrated by dust on a tennis racket – High-speed cameras are the best.
• The Starlink Terms of Service require you to recognize that Mars is a free planet and that Earth-based governments have no authority or sovereignty over Martian affairs – Baller move.
• The Starlink terms of service are attached to the Starlink public beta, which provides service comparable to low-tier fiber at a slight premium – Suddenly, living in the country and working remotely is a whole lot easier. Except when it rains.
• Right to repair: a rare gleam of bipartisan agreement – It’s not left vs. right, it’s the people vs. the cyberpunk megacorps.
• A funeral for Google Play Music – Guess it’s time to get that lifetime Plex Pass so I can host a lesser service myself.
• Weirdo bubblehead slang – There’s a lot of it.
• What it’s like to be locked out of your Google account – I really ought to run some preparedness drills and make sure there’s nothing in my Google account that I can’t get at some other way.

Guns

• Glock 26 Grandmaster Tony Wong speaks – He’s a very unusual character, the epitome of ‘the gun doesn’t matter’, and probably not giving super-useful advice in the same way that Usain Bolt probably isn’t going to be able to teach the average joe how to run that fast. Talent matters.
• Kimber flees North Cuomostan for greener pastures – Troy, AL.
• Shooting drill of the week: The Challenge

Grab Bag

• Sidewalk vaults and true obsolescence – I shared this story instead of the one about the New Yorker who fell through a sidewalk into an abyss of rats.
• COVID was great for the Cannonball Run – What a story this is.

Decision 2020

• There is, at the time of writing, still an election on.
• Class in America is divided by this question: do you shower before work, or after?

Disregard the calendar. For the next few minutes, it’s October 21.

Defense

• Two weeks into the second Nagorno-Karabakh War – For some reason, I’m reminded of the repeated wars in the Balkans immediately prior to the Great War.
• Beretta Defense Systems gets the nod to manufacture the next-gen squad weapon – Go pasta gun guys!
• Remember how H und K lost that G36 replacement contract? They aren’t taking it sitting down – HK alleges that CG Haenel infringed patents, and the Germans cancelled the contract after the news dropped.
• Growler drivers get their own Top Gun school, except for EW – Don’t get caught nearby with a software-defined radio stick.
• BAE offers the Archer wheeled howitzer for Big Army’s next gun system
• Fun with loitering munitions – For a value of ‘fun’ that supposes you’re on the right side of them.
• Brazil’s F-5s are undoubtedly the most capable Tigers on the planet
• Zumwalt fires a missile for… the first time? Really? It took this long?
• Prince of Wales springs a leak – A bad’un, flooding an engine compartment to a depth of at least a meter.
• Japan to build lithium-ion-powered Soryus – The Drive notes that thermal runaway in a submarine battery pack is a Very Bad Thing.
• Patriot battery deploys to regional Texas airport – Evidently, it’s an exercise to train the skills needed to deploy on short notice to new places.
• Did an RC-135W fly over Taiwan? USAF plays coy – I’m all for supporting Best China.

Science and Technology

• Cigarettes don’t burn in submarines – You’d expect that either parvusimperator or I would have known this already, but we did not.
• Another Starlink launch – The fact that SpaceX can launch and recover rockets and is rapidly outpacing the rest of humanity in number of satellites operated isn’t really news anymore, but this one has some really cool photos of a landed booster returning to port.
• Phonics is hot again – Good. Reading instruction has long been the subject of educational cargo cultism: “The smart kids don’t sound out every word, they recognize words, so we’ll teach all the kids that way!” Without realizing, of course, that the reason the smart kids can recognize words is because they put in the time sounding out words to the point where they got burned in.
• The sun emits gamma rays in inexplicably large quantities – I was going to see if there was a Quanta article on this, before I realized it was a Quanta article.
• Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene – It’s the ArXiv preprint of the paper about harvesting energy from graphene. I should have checked if there’s a Quanta article about this.
• There isn’t, but here’s one about the room temperature superconductor – Cheating a bit; it is decidedly not room-pressure.

The Rona

• The next economic crisis: commercial real estate – For obvious reasons.

History

• Tallboy earthquake bomb blows up during defusing attempt – Surprisingly, nobody was hurt, including the divers.
• Also, you can watch it blow up – Cooool. Also, a reminder that e.g. DCS gets its bomb hits wrong, in that the visible disturbance lasts a long time. I recall reading something from a Viper pilot in the Bosnian intervention about how a 500lb bomb made a great marker, because the dust column lingered for a useful amount of time.
• In 1978, some think tank (probably) suggested a 500,000-ton ‘ultracarrier’ – A cool 26 knots on 400,000 horsepower.
• Reagan to Thatcher: “Hey, want in on this cool stealth bomber thing? – The British said ‘no’. We almost got an F-117B out of it, though.

Guns

• Why does owning a gun make a judge’s Second Amendment rulings suspect? – Because a large cohort of Americans thinks the right to keep and bear arms is a second-class right. Imagine the same question asked about speech: “Judge Fishbreath has a blog. How can we be sure he’ll rule fairly on speech cases?”
• 20 minutes of Ruger revolver disassembly to put you to sleep – It was actually extremely helpful for me.

US Politics

• Obligatory share of the NY Post’s Biden bombshell – There has been sufficient FUD spread about this story that I no longer feel entirely certain of its meanings or implications, but it’s in the news, at least.
• November 3rd is going to last approximately eleven years – PA and Wisconsin both only start to count mail-in and absentee ballots on election day.
• JD Vance on government of, by, and for the elite – Which, granted, I’m a member of, at least by most ways you’d care to measure.
• Everyone, including Trump, misunderstands Trump voters

Grab Bag

• Why do zebras have stripes? – The answer is not, as I would have confidently told you one week ago, camouflage. It’s insect resistance: flies find it hard to land on a striped surface, and Africa is full of little flying things carrying equinocidal diseases.
• Door Kickers 2 is still on the way – Door Kickers the First comes with the Genuine Patent Soapbox Seal of Editorial Approval. We’re split 50-50 between hopeful and cynical on the next entry.
• Red Bull could quit Formula One – They’re pitching a fit because Mercedes can’t sell them engines (no factory capacity left), they burned their bridges with Renault during the 2018 split, and even Ferrari doesn’t want Ferrari engines right now.
• Surprising nobody, Wikipedia has a leftist bias – Just wait until I tell you about universities and the press!