History, Politics And Current Affairs

I ended up watching the first couple minutes of the show, realized it wasn't my kind of music, and went and took a nap. I've not liked a halftime show for a decade or so. Do you by any chance find yourself saying that policemen are younger these days? :lol: And now for a truly Superb Owl: https://u...

MikeKozlowski wrote: ↑Tue Feb 03, 2026 10:57 pm

King George’s hair looks like someone melted down and hardened a plastic badger.

That right there is a keeper.

Mike

Can you think of a better description?

We need more tenders and other assorted ships to enable ships in forward operating areas can be maintained and refurbished in said forward operating areas, just as we did in WWII. Particularly as host nation basing is going to get a lot more unavailable over the coming 3 years, based on the past ye...

The issue is that civil reactors just accept that 135-Xe poisoning is a thing and live with the time constant (France for instance manages this with vast amounts of hydropower). Nuclear submarine reactors can't accept that, so they're designed from the start with much more neutron flux available. Us...

Lots. That sounds very big for a submarine reactor, and it will have serious issues with 135-Xe poisoning when changing power. Silencing the rest of the plant is non-trivial, and the benefits of a nuclear plant in the Baltic are very minimal.

Be interesting if so, my understanding is that weight doesn’t scale well at all for supercaps. Correct, in the same way that the number of charges without loss in capacity and power density don't scale well with batteries. There's two options here: Everything is as reported and this small start-up ...

Thanks Paul. So we’re talking essentially REEV aircraft with IFEP architecture? Varies by range: Short hops - up to 1h / 100 miles - battery only (BEV). Longer hops - up to 3h/250 miles (diversion requirements are very restrictive hence the mismatch between endurance and range, and smaller aircraft...

More suggesting it's actually a supercapacitor: Here is everything we currently know about the Donut Lab solid state battery! The claims for their cells include: ~100,000 charge cycles Potentially ~50 million miles of use (!?!) 400 Wh/kg 5 minute charge time (~12C) Here is what I saw at CES: Display...

No I'm not talking about little planes, I mean 500km+ transport for 100s of PAX. Yes, I mean ask him! That’s the end goal, he isn’t working on general aviation from what I recall. Sorry, missed this - haven't been on here much recently because the ICE debate is just getting too depressing. At the m...

Seems relevant... Yesterday, I wrote a very brief LinkedIn post about solid state batteries (SSB). I expressed significant doubts that a small, unnamed Finnish startup could develop SSB with such parameters: 400 Wh/kg Full charge in five minutes Designed for 100,000 cycles Lower cost than lithium-io...

Ehhhh.... The Monroe Doctrine was instituted to keep OTHER countries from making new colonies. Says nothing about the US forming new colonies. Effectively, "STAY OUT, EUROPEANS!" That being said, I don't want anything to do with trying to run Venezuela. Nation building might work better i...

Uh? The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for fut...

How the hell did they get THAT approved for use on an aircraft? Do the airliner standards not apply to military aircraft? Don't they have standards of their own? I'd like some of the chaps who do stuff with airplanes to chime in on this please. So it's for a cooling duct. If - as I suspect - that's...

The question is whether we can economically maintain said capacity in peacetime such that we don’t have to reinvent it in wartime. That's SAAB taking advantage of a capacity existing in the civilian economy. Divergent has grown out of the automotive sector, aerospace is just an exploitation opportu...

How does the C-390 compare to the Airbus turbo-prop tac-lift whatsit ? They're a different class of aircraft - the A400M is a LOT bigger, think of it as the difference between narrowbody and widebody commercial jets. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Size_comparison_military_trans...

Interesting point about an MSR is that it offers a route to the permanent destruction of high-level waste. The really hot stuff can be managed by hold-up and decay, while the very long-term stuff isn't terribly risky. It's the stuff that is dangerous for a few centuries that is a real pain, and it's...

Photos have emerged of the actual landing - good field selection there, I've carried people out of far worse! https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/572844629_10161806580692621_7485786747125384031_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=aa7b47&_nc_ohc=BKfKODkh2NwQ7kNvwHJw8al&_n...

Su-31 photo for reference in case anybody is thinking this is an obvious military aircraft.

Video here: https://youtu.be/C06yW0232Bc?si=yIflx9Ni44-1MMmd It sounds a lot like how Stuart described the piecutters, though apparently this one isn’t classified. It also doesn’t do what say the nukecalculators do, which is map out damage from a specific radius. But it does sound a lot like how St...