Another two-week gap, and this time, I’m writing it on Tuesday night so I don’t run out of time tomorrow.

WuFlu

• Is it spread by large respiratory droplets or aerosols? – Ars Technica reviews the evidence, and answers in correspondence with the best scientific evidence available right now: a big fat shrug.
• Some areas of NYC may have herd immunity – Given the speed at which it tore through New York in the early days, I buy it.
• Today’s coronavirus numbers by state and geographical region – Arizona is bad now, but past its peak, and looks like it’s going to peak at fewer deaths than New York at its worst.
• Do antibody tests really detect COVID immunity? – The human immune system is almost ludicrously complicated, and not particularly well understood. (Try Netflix-hosted anime Cells at Work for a cutesy take on it.)
• Some COVID vaccines have potentially-serious side effects – Which isn’t too terribly surprising. Bit of a rush job and all.

China-Watching

• Inside China’s gulags – A story from a Xinjiang Uyghur. (I almost spelled that right on the first try.) It is worth the time to read.
• Massive flooding in central China
• Three Gorges Dam ‘deforms slightly’, per China – China also says all is well. It isn’t that I don’t believe them, but…

Defense

• Navy to equip seven more ships with contrived-acronym laser system – ODIN.
• High-film-speed shots of a Shipwreck launch
• Bonhomme Richard burns – Fun fact: per our favorite naval affairs commentator CDR Salamander, the thing oft misquoted as ‘drywall’ in the press is actually ‘triwall’: heavy-duty three-layer corrugated cardboard product.
• French forces deploy to Lithuania – France: NATO’s MVP in Europe, 2010s-2020s? It’s certainly not Germany anymore.
• US rejects the nine-dash line – This is the kind of hawkish move that I don’t think we’d see under any sort of ordinary presidential administration.
• More on the above, in which Sec. Pompeo calls China a bully
• India likes the SIG 716i – Good for SIG; I suspect they’re going to have to pay out over the latest P320 safety oopsie.
• Big Army patents a new M4 heavy barrel design
• Large fire breaks out at Iranian shipyard – Perhaps they’re jealous of all the coverage the Bonhomme Richard fire is getting? Or maybe it’s the precursor to an alien attack.
• SoKor, having just bought some AEW&C planes, starts a search for new ones – Not wasting any time, certainly. They also just launched a communications satellite the other day, transport provided by SpaceX. (SpaceX refurbished the rocket in 51 days, minus a week or two for the barge to slowly putter back into its position out at sea, and stuck the landing again.)
• India, faced with provocation in the Himalayas from China, moves toward buying Sprut-SDs – China has a light tank. India discovered that its T-72s, T-72+s, and T-72+++s are not great in the mountains. India goes to World Armaments Mart-ski to play catch-up.
• India among the candidates for F-15EXports – Israel, too.
• PLAAF pilots speak English in the cockpit? – That’s what this video released by China seems to suggest.
• Golden Horde networked swarming munitions to begin USAF flight testing – Also, the Gray Wolf mini-cruise missile did some flight testing. ‘Golden Horde’ seems like a carefully-chosen name: a branch of a traditional anti-China baddie that never actually invaded China.
• Aping SoKor, RAF wants a better radar for the Eurofighter now that the Captor-E is available
• UK tech used in hybrid Bradley trials
• Big Army research lab develops smuzzle bressor – A muzzle brake/suppressor combo, which is impressive, given that the two things have widely divergent design requirements.
• Vietnam’s new AK-based service rifles look pretty cool
• Big Army wants to compete in the OMFV contest – Industry is, quoth Janes, “unnerved”. Frankly, I’m in favor of the armed services owning their designs, rather than farming them out to contractors.

Science and Technology

• At the dear old alma mater, scientists develop a catalyst used in processing seawater into fuel – The catalyst turns carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, a crucial step in the process. If you want to read more on the process, you can probably start your search from here: “In 2014, a Naval Research Laboratory team led by Heather Willauer announced it had used a catalytic converter to extract carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater and then converted the gases into liquid hydrocarbons at a 92 percent efficiency rate.”
• Moore’s Law is not dead – It’s a presentation video and parvusimperator’s link, so I can’t tell you quite what the thrust of the talk is.
• Ceramic spheres in aluminum foam: light-weight, cut-proof – The ceramic spheres create vibrations in power tools attacking it. It breaks an angle grinder before the angle grinder can cut through.

Games

• A train sim that’s actually hard? – In a 2016 article (holy cow, has it been that long?), I perhaps snidely referred to games in the transport simulator genre as ‘podcast screensavers‘. I also slagged off Train Simulator and its fans as ridiculously easy and bad at games, respectively. So, when Flare Path chieftain Tim Stone said, “This train simulator is hard” (albeit in more words), my ears perked up. Not so much that I’ve bought the game yet, but nevertheless, it’s on my radar now.
• Can a Formula 1 car actually drive upside-down? – Unfortunately, building a test track for this in real life is still not feasible, so we have to settle for simulator runs.

Grab Bag

• NYC Transit chief says the MTA has no org chart, and doesn’t know how many employees it has – “Some MTA sources said an org chart might further complicate the agency because so much of its work runs on personal relationships.” Yes, such as the personal relationship where you get paid for not doing any work because you know a guy.
• Put down your Clausewitz, pick up your Pratchett – I won’t speak ill of Clausewitz, but I’ll certainly speak well of Sir Pterry.
• American suppressor manufacturers can now export their wares – One place where ‘buy American’ still means ‘buy super-ultra-premium’. Stupid tax stamps.
• We know nothing of our history, past a certain point – There’s a growing body of evidence pointing toward maritime trade in the Mediterranean… five thousand years ago.
• Some Stoeger-approved competition dry fire drills – I think I’m going to start running these.

Still busy here, hence the double delay in getting this done. Maybe when the project I’m working on at the office slows down? But then, I have several other ones lined up afterward, so maybe not. (I guess I’d rather be busy than the alternative.)

Hong Kong

• China forced an oppressive state security law through Hong Kong’s government, laying the groundwork to fully tear down the two-systems… system.
• UK offers British citizenship to three million Hong Kongers eligible for British National Overseas passports – We’ll take the ones who like guns, if Britain doesn’t want them.
• I saw it said on Twitter that one distinction we in the West should be careful about is this: the sentiment in Hong Kong is more in favor of autonomy (as part of China) than it is about independence (from China). … for now, at any rate. The seed that became the United States was an argument over representation. Look where we are now.

Defense

• King Stallion now flying from ships
• The Drive with a lecture on the F-111 and how it drove the design of the Tomcat
• Looking back at the A-7, the first digital jet – Along with the Saab Viggen, of which I have previously written, the other of the very early digital attack jets, the Corsair is a really cool piece of history.
• The military we need vs. the military we have – This essay comes down in favor of ‘build for the asymmetric warfare we’re encountering now’. I take an alternate position: the purpose of a military is to break the militaries of peer powers. Armed forces built with that goal in mind are handicapped in asymmetric police action Forever Wars. Armed forces built for asymmetric police action Forever Wars are useless against peer powers. It seems to me to be the same strain of thinking that people criticize in publicly-traded companies—”We aren’t encountering this problem today, and won’t for the next few quarters, so why bother preparing for it?”
• Wave-gliding vessel in the Florida Keys is probably an unmanned spook listening device
• Turkey the latest to realize that building high-performance aircraft turbines is hard – It took Russia a long time to get it right. China is still working on it. Turkey, I expect, has a bumpy road ahead.
• Speaking of Turkey, the US Senate has drafted a plan in which we buy Ankara’s S-400s in exchange for re-admission to the F-35 program
• South Korea to buy more AWACS, SIGINT planes – $2 billion worth.
• Big Army to get more jamming/SIGINT jobbers – Built on a Stryker chassis—the M113 for the 21st century.
• Big Army selects some anti-drone systems
• Big Army buying Infantry Squad Vehicles from GM Defense – They seem to have taken their design cues from Halo. Today’s 19-year-olds grew up in a post-Halo-launch world, steeped in the culture of that game, so I guess it makes sense to buy a Warthog clone as a way to draw attention.
• Big Army’s Stryker cannon project is still on track, Stryker chief assures us – Ooh, there’s a SHORAD version coming too.
• The ENVG-B is pretty cool – Pretty much science fiction goggles. They have a HUD and a thermal imaging mode, they integrate with weapon optics, and they zoom.
• House Armed Services Committee wants to stop year-end spending sprees – Operations and Maintenance money must be earmarked for spending by October 1 each year, or else any remaining amount is lost. HASC says, “Why not let them carry over 50% year to year, like every other department?” Seems like a simple enough fix to me.
• There’s a procurement battle brewing in F-15EX engines – GE vs. Pratt & Whitney.
• Navy to mothball first four LCSes if Congress will allow it – Especially with the much-more-capable FFG(X) looking like it’s going to see the light of day. Over in the Rule the Waves 2 Let’s Play I do find myself keeping little ships well past their best-by dates, but that’s mainly to use them as anti-submarine escorts.
• The ASALM, a Cold War anti-SAM/anti-AEW&C nuclear missile tragically killed by penny-pinchers and the demise of the Soviet Union
• An essay on ‘cognitive electronic warfare’ – Whatever that means. Parvusimperator’s link, and he can explain it more, if he wants—I saw a clunky passive-voice construction in the excerpted thesis at the top of the page and closed the tab.

Technology

• iPhone and iPad apps love snooping on the clipboard – To be fair, I’m sure underhanded Android apps do just the same thing.
• The rise and fall of Adobe Flash – Bitter, because Flash games were a big part of my youth. Sweet, because Flash websites were a pox upon the world. Also, the Flash-based video player was the Youtube default through 2015, which feels like the better part of a century ago.
• On the May 12 Slack outage
• There’s a SpaceX launch supposedly scheduled for tomorrow at around 11 a.m. Eastern – Originally planned for Wednesday, SpaceX scrubbed it because of weather concerns. This is the third time now that they’ll be launching a booster for the fifth time. It’s crazy how fast we went from ‘rockets don’t land’ to ‘rockets that don’t land are not competitive in the global launch marketplace’.

Guns

• John Jovino Gun Shop in NYC closes – The oldest gun store in the nation, it closed up for the last time after 109 years of continuous operation. Worth a read in full.
• TFB Reports: a new world record in 12-gauge speed shooting – 12 shots in 0.72 seconds, which comes out to the coincidentally-round figure of 1000 rounds per minute. With his finger! Out of a semi-auto shotgun!
• The same dude, I believe, tossed a stack of 14 clay targets into the air and hit them all before they touched down – It’s nice to see that the art of the trick shot is still alive.
• The second June match video – I’m getting better at this revolver thing, slowly. Dry fire helps. I think it’s entirely possible I’m the only person a) shooting USPSA revolver and b) posting videos.
• Remington is bankrupt again – Parvusimperator asked if we should scrape together spare change from our cars and under couch cushions and buy it. I said no, on the grounds that they seem to go bankrupt an awful lot.

Is it time to officially move Wednesday What We’re Reading to Thursday? No, but you could be forgiven for thinking so.

The ‘Rona

• Our native (adopted-native) Pennsylvania has about 65,000 recovered COVID cases and about 5,000 deaths. Neighboring New York has about 65,000 recovered COVID cases and about 30,000 deaths. Take that, Cuomo.
• COVID immunity may only last two or three months – Based on blood antibody counts.
• The ‘Rona and social cohesion – Twitter thread, but by an epidemiologist who I trust to be correct on these things.
• Italy had coronavirus in the sewers as early as December – Well before China announced it to the world.

Defense

• Last week, Australia saw a cyber-attack from an unnamed assailant – i.e., China, who they aren’t naming because they don’t want to make China angry.
• Post-fire photos of the French SSN Perle
• The Bundeswehr readiness report 2020 – In German, but parvusimperator says it isn’t good.
• Russia backs India in the India-China standoff – What a strange way 2020 has devised to bring us around to the plot of The Bear and the Dragon. I guess India is an important arms market for the Russians, and China is mainly known for knocking off Russian arms, so maybe it’s purely mercenary.
• Stealth destroyer, hypersonic missile? – So we’d have a bunch of refreshed 1980-vintage destroyers, new frigates to someone else’s design, useless frigate-sized patrol boats, and… three sci-fi destroyers with hypersonic missiles.
• Clash between Turkey and Egypt possible in Libya? – How very Ottoman of Turkey to be inserting itself into North African affairs.
• Shipyard capacity: it’s not just the raw numbers – If you’re not an Asian power and you’re at war with China, your shipyards are probably out of its reach. If you’re China at war with anyone in the Pacific, your shipyards are in play.
• Big Army’s new thermal sights
• AK-203 delayed

Science and Technology

• A long article on static code analysis, and the difficulties therein – Most of them are difficulties in customer interactions rather than difficulties in the actual process.
• A 3D-printed camera – Not a 3D-printed camera body, an entire camera, lenses included, made with 3D printing. I find that much more impressive than 3D-printed guns, which are pretty impressive in their own right.
• How did The Mandalorian film on location in so many cool-looking places? – They didn’t, or at least not the way you’re thinking. No green screens—they built their scenery in Unreal Engine, and filmed in front of an array of enormous LED screens.
• Broke: Earth is special. Woke: Earth is an average planet circling an average start. Bespoke: Earth is special again – I’m relatively strongly in the Rare Earth camp. I don’t find the anthropic principle to be a very compelling counterargument—sure, we wouldn’t be able to observe a universe if it wasn’t compatible with life, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be unusual that, out of all of the possible values for all the possible cosmological parameters out there, we happen to have a set that’s compatible with us.

Games

• A new tank sim approaches: Gunner, HEAT, PC – Parvusimperator’s beat, so although I get the credit for the find, you’ll have to lean on him for detailed coverage. Evidently, multi-crew and co-op are in the offing.
• A brief design history of Ricochet Poker – That is, a poker-based casino game in the blackjack mold. It also has a fairly sneaky house edge. See if you can spot it.
• An interview with the dynamic campaign designer on Falcon 4.0 – From 2011, but it’s still a talk with the one guy who’s done the most for dynamic flight simming out of anyone in the world.

Grab Bag

• A quick piece on the joy and wonder that is the Costco hot dog combo – Costco sells more hot dogs than every MLB stadium combined.
• Anti-Castro Cuban expat: “Hey, all this is a little worrying, based on my experiences in Cuba”
• SlateStarCodex deletes blog – Scott Alexander was to be the subject of a New York Times article. They refused to grant him pseudonymity, which they’ve been happy to do for other Internet figures known mainly by pseudonyms. Mr. Alexander then deleted his website (so there’s no story), or at least made it private. I like SSC even if I occasionally think that the rationalist community must be half aliens and half robots trying to convincingly pretend at being humans, so I’m a little sad to see SSC gone.

I’ve gotten stuck a day late, it seems.

USPSA

• The first match of the year is in the books – Here’s the video with commentary, if you miss the podcast, and here’s one without.

The ‘Rona

• Beijing clamps down as new coronavirus cluster emerges

Defense

• France just test-fired a new SLBM
• Indian and Chinese soldiers fight with rocks and sticks – I don’t think it’s quite what Einstein meant when he said that thing about the weapons used in the fourth world war. Fascinating nevertheless. “We can’t use guns, because it’ll start a bigger war, but we still have to fight,” is an interesting tactical position. Odds on a bigger China-India spat in, say, the next five years?
• Canada to upgrade its CF-18s with AIM-9X, new radars – That guy with the private air force must be devastated to see that a good source of jets is not yet on the table.
• Stryker cannon competition still healthy, Army boss says – Two of the six companies contracted to provide 30mm remote control turrets are confirmed to have dropped out. To be fair, the design contract spots you a Stryker and a 30mm cannon, but makes you provide the turret and all the control electronics, and unless you think you’ve got a good shot at winning, the $150,000 figure for the initial design contract seems a little skimpy.
• Surprising nobody, Chinese shipyards could probably outpace American ones in replacing warship losses – In the Chinese column: a lot of indigenous shipyard capacity not currently being used for warships. In the Allies-For-Democracy column: three of the five largest civilian shipbuilders in the world. (South Korea: 1st. Japan: 3rd. Philippines: 4th.) We might also secure ‘Nam, in 5th, depending on the nature of a hypothetical war with China. Back in the Chinese column: all of those shipyards are in easy strike range of the mainland.
• Cato: how dependent is the US on foreign supply chains, anyway? – They answer three questions: what percentage of US GDP comes from foreign trade? (A low one, relative to the world at large—only Cuba and Sudan get a lower percentage of GDP from trade.) What percentage of US manufacturing inputs are sourced from foreign suppliers? (9% from China alone, but they don’t say which 9%, exactly¹, or what kind of inputs we’re talking about.) What percentage of US exports depend on foreign inputs? (9.5%.) Not as dire as I might have thought.

Science and Technology

• Do you remember QuadrigaCX, the Canadian crypto exchange which mysteriously lost all of its users’ money before its CEO vanished in a part of India notorious for faked deaths? – Turns out it was definitely a fraud from day 1. Are they watching the widow?
• Saturday morning’s SpaceX launch stream had some really good shots of a booster descending toward sunrise on Earth
• Slow regexes and you – The algorithmic-complexity points still stand, but it’s also some fifteen years later, and I wonder how much better regex-matching algorithms and better processors have ameliorated the original issue.

Grab Bag

• Thousands of used cars melting in fire aboard container ship in Florida – Or at least, they were still melting as of last Friday. The fire might be under control now.
• File under ‘needs a flight sim’: DC 10 fire bombers attack Arizona blazes – Parvusimperator’s link; strong agree from me. Sims are more fun when you have objectives. I might review F1 2019 to that effect sometime soon.

How is it already the end of early June? April and May just sort of vanished, after March lasted eleven thousand years.

Coronavirus

• Local hospital says the Wuhan coronavirus is decreasing in virulence, and COVID patients are presenting with lower viral loads – Social distancing working? Virus mutating? Nobody knows.

Defense

• US Navy test-flies AARGM-ER – Leaving aside the HARM, one of the things that I miss on behalf of the US military aviation community is the Sidearm. It’s a hoot in DCS.
• Trouble brewing in Norway over AFV sensors – The Norwegian government is mad at Rheinmetall-Norway for not getting the sensors done, and gave the contract to Navantia (of Spain) instead. Rheinmetall-Norway says the spec wasn’t sufficient.
• Greece is buying Bradleys – Parvusimperator really working out my Google Translate-Fu.
• USAF buys some prototype ARRWs – Said ‘arrow’, no doubt. A good name for a hypersonic missile.
• Photos: Ford vs. Nimitz
• Bradley A4s delivered to the US Army – Snazzy.
• Europeans upset about having to defend themselves – Trollish headline? Maybe a bit.
• Are you a writer of a fictional bent? The USNI is running a fiction contest judged by a panel of luminaries – Winners will be published in Proceedings. Deadline September 30. I might have to cook something up.

Guns

• SilencerCo now shipping their Salvo shotgun silencer in an 8-inch configuration – It’s a modular thing. 8 segments is a popular configuration that was not previously available standalone.
• CZ is now listed on the Prague Stock Exchange – They aren’t publically traded yet, but this is a move in that direction.
• Measuring primer sensitivity with a Smith and Wesson strain screw – The data is from 2010, but nevertheless, it’s the first actual, quantifiable data on the sensitivity of commercially-available, non-milspec primers I’ve been able to find.

Science and Technology

• Starlink: a quick technical guide – The coolest bit is the animation of how launching a stick of 60 satellites can fill multiple orbital planes.
• Are foxes self-domesticating in our midst? – By ‘our midst’ the author means ‘the UK’, but it’s still a good read.

Grab Bag

• Missing live racing? Why not try the 3dbotmaker Youtube channel, where they race diecast cars with all the trappings of real racing broadcasts? – A rare The Drive article which is not from The War Zone.
• Lost Maxis SimRefinery prototype is now available for download – Or maybe it used to be? It’s one of those up-and-down-and-up-and-down kinds of things.
• Will the banks collapse under the weight of CLOs as they did under CDOs in the last crisis? – CDOs are financial instruments based on mortgages. CLOs are similar instruments based on corporate loans. On the one hand, this whole ‘risky assets bundled together are in aggregate less risky!’ assumption seems to rest on very shaky ground. On the other hand, I saw an argument that said that CLOs are not, in fact, a ticking time bomb, and I’m not qualified to evaluate technical arguments for correctness in the realm of finance.
• Employee of pollster fired for noting, correctly, that historical race riots have reduced Democratic vote share

Relatively quiet week again. That is, in terms of stories we have to share, not in terms of world affairs.

Projects

• Since I’m shooting revolver in USPSA this year (or at least that’s the plan, when it actually starts around here), it makes sense to reload – What with the clips retaining the spent brass and all. I got a Harbor Freight ultrasonic cleaner, too, which I’m filling with a solution of Five-Star Powdered Brewery Wash from one of my other hobbies. Sixteen minutes of ultrasonic cleaning power yields a nice shiny result.

Coronavirus

• Is the Wu-Flu a blood vessel disease? – We previously shared a story about a possible interaction between the Wuhan coronavirus and red blood cells, which we walked back when evidence piled up against it. Here is an alternate take on why the disease has effects all around the body.
• Italian doctors: coronavirus losing potency? – The story is extremely light on science and, indeed, definitions of ‘losing potency’, but curious nonetheless.
• Graphing the changes in human activities due to coronavirus lockdowns

Protests 2020

• Arresting members of the media is bad optics – Also, this story was back on Friday; since then, several more reporters have been either arrested or attacked.
• Antiracism: the new civic religion

Defense

• B-1s fly with Flankers and MiGs – And the lion shall lay down with the lamb… although these are Ukrainian, so less conflict there.
• Taiwan wants land-based Harpoons
• USMC Squad Common Optic goes to Trijicon – We missed this a week or two ago.
• Historical photo of the week (colorized) – Swordfish over Ark Royal.

Grab Bag

• Aston Martin to produce 25 limited edition DB5s – But not just any DB5s—James Bond-themed DB5s as seen in Goldfinger. Your $3.5 million US buys you, among other things, a functional smoke generator, simulated front machine guns, and a removable passenger seat roof panel (BYO ejection seat).
• A SlateStarCodex book review, on a hypothesis about the development of the theory of mind – Like all SSC articles, it’s fascinating reading.

Apologies for the delay on this week’s what we’re reading, and on the Rule the Waves Let’s Play. I had a death in the family recently, and although it wasn’t a very surprising one, it’s nevertheless occupied a lot of my time.

I should be back to regularly-scheduled posting going forward.

Coronavirus

• Lyman Stone with an analysis of recent infections-and-trajectories data – He’s also all in on centralized quarantines, which are admittedly good infectious disease policy, but not the kind of policy I’d like American governments to get a taste for.

Defense

• Japan is picking a new rifle and pistol – Parvusimperator submitted a link to the Japanese MOD website, but TFB has the translated version of that page, so here it is.
• USMC to adopt NGSW – Is there an acronym for ‘plans to acquire’ or something? If so, I’ll edit this headline to include zero real words.
• WW2 training film of the week: flak
• That palletized-munition arsenal plane concept has already been successfully tested

Science and Technology

• Improved algorithms are 43 times more important than faster processors – At least, for very difficult problems.
• Are cities making animals smarter?
• Raymond Chen, key member of the Windows 95 team, writes on all the ways you can make your MS-DOS program incompatible with Windows 95

Guns

• STI is now Staccato – I too enjoy renaming widely-known brands for no discernible reason!

Race and Culture

• Parvusimperator shares this on the Ahmaud Arbery case – I don’t quite buy the analysis, in that it assumes facts not in evidence and draws parallels which may be inappropriate with the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin dust-up. That’s a smaller story, though, behind…
• Minneapolis burning

Grab Bag

• Why would a Taiwanese not-a-consulate want a US state legislator to introduce a non-binding resolution in favor of Taiwanese membership in the WHO? – The story was posted in early April, but dates back to the early 2000s, and it sure is a wild ride.
• Thanks to regulations in LA, affordable housing costs more to build than luxury condos

The ‘Rona

• 15% of Wuhan’s cats were infected, against a reported 0.1% of the population, and other spooky signals in the post-corona age – I’m not saying a big war is coming, but…
• SlateStarCodex’s May Coronalinks has a bunch of good stuff
• These guys are estimating R for COVID-19 in real time – I’m a little foggy on the exact math they’re using, but it seems plausible enough. Also, most of the US is currently at R < 1, which is good news. Also also, they’re correctly using R vice R0.

Defense

• Submarine countermeasures: a roundup – One of the best parts of the experience in arcade-ish submarine game Cold Waters is learning how to make knuckles, drop noisemakers, and launch decoys in such a way as to trick a torpedo into going the wrong way.
• North Korean small arms: a roundup – Aren’t all their arms pretty small, on account of the malnutrition?
• F-117s find a second life as low-observable aggressors

Science and Technology

• Commercial space has saved money? Quelle surprise! – Also within: the best yet of the ‘Sci-Fi or SpaceX?’ bar bet photos.

History

• The Yasser missile, as carried by Iran’s Tomcats – It’s a Hawk SAM with a 750lb cluster bomb attached to the front.
• Five prohibited maneuvers in the Tomcat – If I had the DCS Tomcat, I would be trying all five of these right now.

Guns

• Yet another 3D-printed AR lower – Deterrence Dispensed is doing great work. I also saw a guy working on a 3D-printed receiver that uses a U-bolt to reinforce the buffer tube attachment point.
• Gun Twitter pic: the strangest rifle/carbine/pistol-with-stock I’ve ever seen – It’s a side-folding rimfire? revolver, which I have not yet been able to ID.
• Want a Han Solo blaster, but don’t want to ruin a C96? – Here’s a .22 version based on an AR which you can build for under a grand.

Grab Bag

• Want a 2019 Z06 Corvette at a steep discount? – Hertz is selling off their stock of special-edition 100th-Anniversary-of-Hertz in anticipation of a possible bankruptcy.
• The Cannonball Run record has been broken seven times in five weeks – Turns out, ‘nobody on the road’ is a great precondition for ‘drive across the country as fast as possible’.
• Justice Department likely to bring antitrust suits against Google – In what would be nearly as big a case as Ma Bell’s breakup.
• Electronic Arts hires former Stasi agent to police speech in online games – I can certainly argue with the goal, but if you take the goal as a given, it’s hard to think of a better candidate for the job.

Coronavirus

• Seroprevalence studies in France and Spain indicate about 5% Wuflu penetration – Which is… not great, and neatly scotches my pet theory about vastly greater prevalence than we realized. (If the result holds up, anyway.) Estimates of about 20% in New York still strike me as a bit high, given that Madrid, the epicenter of the outbreak in Spain, only hit 11%. I guess we’ll see.

Venezuelan Coup Attempt

• The Drive breaks it down

Defense

• On Boeing’s loyal wingman drone – A marvelously cool idea. Can Boeing pull it off? That remains to be seen—they don’t exactly have the best track record lately.
• US Navy needed target drones to mimic supersonic missiles… so they bought real supersonic missiles from Russia – “Hey, it turns out this is actually pretty hard. Where’s the cheapest place to get some premade ones?” Or, as an alternate snide remark, this Mitchell and Webb sketch.
• Yuma Proving Grounds still working on ERCA – 70 kilometers of social distancing.
• The Navy got its first two Superbug Block IIIs
• Syria’s MiG-29s are in rough shape – It seems to be the fate of a lot of Russian export hardware: they’ll sell it to you, sure, but the maintenance costs over time’ll kill you. Granted, Syria’s MiGs are probably the hardest-worked set since Vietnam.
• Iran, in a move signifying growing belligerence in the Gulf region, sinks an Iranian auxiliary with a missile – Sparking a discussion in the internal Soapbox chat about missiles, warhead sizes, and destructive effects.
• Raytheon researches ramjet round – XM1155 plays nice with ERCA, but also with other artillery platforms. It’s a fancy guided round, too, although I’m not entirely sure I’m on board with that. In a big shooting war, how important are precision munitions vice munitions you can turn out a few million of in a month?
• The next frontier in the hider-vs-seeker battle: unwanted RF emissions – Having done some work at… work with radio systems, I can attest that a lot of radio systems leak.
• Russia’s finally going to get a Project 955A into service – Some of the Project 955s are already prowling the seas, but the 955As have taken a lot longer.

Guns

• USPSA matches look like they’ll be starting back up in June, so you can expect some content relating to practical shooting as we get deeper into summer.
• Ahmaud Arbery: good shoot or bad shoot? – I think the opinion among your correspondents is ‘bad shoot’, at least with the information we have at hand. The way I see it: leaving aside all the surrounding circumstances, I don’t think a three-on-one fistfight the easy way rises to the standard required for lethal force.
• The 3D printed armaments crowd answers the ‘BuT tAnKs’ people… – … with initial work on a 3D-printed disposable anti-tank launcher. I love this country.
• Innovative Arms has a waiting list for Welrod pistol clones – Instead of the quick-wearing rubber baffles from the original, it has a more modern, long-lasting setup in the innards. Innovative Arms estimates a price in the $1200-$1400 range. A bit much for something as simple as the Welrod, but then, pretty cheap for a custom-CNC low-volume replica of an oldtimey curiosity.

Science and Technology

• Microwave power beaming experiments to be carried out on the next X-37 launch – Parvusimperator: “Now we can make bad burritos lukewarm FROM SPACE!” My only quibble is that if a microwave made a bad burrito uniformly lukewarm, that would be great. It seems, however, that your choice is ‘warm and cold at intervals’, or ‘nuclear’.
• The guys at Epic Games, in between making a subpar store with admittedly excellent freebies, have also made a superb tech demo for Unreal Engine 5
• HTTPS everywhere will slowly kill the Old Web – Not just sites that don’t have HTTPS in the first place, but HTTPS sites that aren’t updated. The author says that’s bad. I’m inclined to agree, and honestly, I’m not entirely sold on HTTPS everywhere in the first place. Useful if you’re concerned about being spied upon, not as useful if you aren’t, and aren’t doing anything that involves sending data to the Internet. Bit of a big windmill to have a tilt at, though.

Grab Bag

• USS Nevada found – By ‘Florida-based archaeology firm SEARCH Inc.’, among others, which sounds like it could be the subject of a series of modern archaeological adventure novels. Someone needs to take up the Clive Cussler mantle, and I’m fresh out of time, so consider this idea a freebie.

I feel like we’re not closing in on WWRW #100 nearly as quickly as we used to be. Maybe it’s quarantine time dilation.

Coronavirus

• This Week I Learned: what ‘gain-of-function research’ means in an infectious-diseases context – It means manipulating pathogens in labs to explore how they might be better at infecting humans. Oh, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing gain-of-function research. Oh, and the (US) National Institute for Allergy and Infections Diseases provided grants.
• COVID and social consequences: a Twitter thread – I wade into the cesspool that is Twitter in the interests of fishing out something interesting from the oozing dreck so that you don’t have to!
• On the same note as the item above, I once read something that mathed out the frequency of major wars on US soil, and found it was somewhat less than the average lifetime, or at least that the 95% confidence interval included less than the average lifetime. I didn’t have enough time today to run it down.
• University of Pittsburgh Medical Center researcher, on the verge of making significant coronavirus discoveries, murdered by associate – The researcher’s name? Bing Liu. The murderer? Hao Gu.
• Pittsburgh reporting says it was a dispute over an ‘intimate partner’ – I don’t want to sound too conspiracy-minded, but… Mr. Liu was a Chinese national. Mr. Gu was a naturalized US citizen who works for Eaton, exactly the kind of place you’d want to have a spy. The police aren’t talking about the alleged relationship. Have I been too deep into the spy dramas, or is that all more than a little suspicious?

Reader Projects

• Lurker Navaronegun, a.k.a. Patrick Mullen, is the designer behind upcoming Vietnam wargame A Hot Dry Season – Here’s a written interview, here’s a video intro, and if you have further questions, you can probably ping him in the Discord server. One-mile hexes, company-size units. I was going to try a prerelease version on Vassal with parvusimperator, but we might have missed the window for that. Oops.
• If you have something big you’re working on, readers, let us know! If it’s of interest to us, we’ll plug it for you. We don’t get a ton of traffic, but hey, any press is good press.

Defense

• FREMM WINNS – Back in 2018, I laid odds on the various FFG(X) contenders (albeit with a bit of sign confusion). I’ve always been fond of FREMM, but I didn’t think it had a chance.
• Royal Navy working on a fix for the Type 45 powerplant problems – Integrated electric propulsion is super-cool in theory, but seems a little less trustworthy in practice. Which is odd, because we had turbo-electric ships in the early 20th century. I guess adding diesel generators is Hard™?
• Photos of the P-8A’s top-secret radar pod – Along with some discussion of its known capabilities.
• USSOC might be buying some Bronco IIs – No relation to Bronco I, beyond general shape and low-and-slow light-attack mentality.
• US to pull F-35s and spy planes of various types from Britain over Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G networks? – Good move, if true.
• French buy a German rifle, Germans buy a French 20mm cannon – Dogs and cats hanging out!
• American mercs involved in Bay of Pigs 2: This Time It’s Venezuela – No word on whether the US government had any involvement.
• Another story where the contract life didn’t end well – Fun to think about, but man, for the risks, the pay’s pretty awful.

Games

• This year’s Flare Path community Combat Mission game is a hoot – Try this (fictional movie synopsis) on for size, if I don’t turn it into a Nathaniel Cannon story over at Many Words Main first: “This year’s challenge conscripts Combat Mission: Fortress Italy and is inspired by the final fifteen minutes of classic Seventies war movie Colonel Croesus (aka The Montaretto Millionaires aka The Tiger Under the Mountain). We join the story on the night following the double-cross. The ragtag band of Allied treasure hunters, deserters, and lotus eaters led by Colonel ‘Croesus’ Cresswell (Robert Duvall) is poised for action outside the ‘abandoned’ Italian sub pen where Hauptmann Otto Steiner’s (Wolf Kahler) equally disreputable Kampfgruppe of chancers is busy loading the stolen bullion onto a waiting U-boat. Unless Croesus acts quickly, the Germans will escape with the loot!”

Science and Technology

• Engineers around the world are different on the surface, but deep down we’re all the same
• SpaceX test-fired a Raptor engine mounted to Starship SN4 the other day – Finally, they got the welds right, and this time it didn’t implode during fuel loading. Coming soon: a test flight up to about 500 feet.
• Octopuses: not really that smart? – You may debate plurals in the comments, if you so desire.