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Nebakenezzer posted:Also can I just say that the disease for depopulation is obviously smallpox? After all, you need about $100,000 and some specialized equipment and knowledge to reconstitute it, but the skills are those of a microbiological undergrad---- Wasn't that the plot of The Division?
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Sep 16, 2019 16:53
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Smallpox had an overall mortality rate of like 30% and apparently they recently developed a new vaccine that's sitting around in national stockpiles. Sure it could kill a lot of people but it's not exactly apocalyptic anymore.
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Sep 16, 2019 16:55
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Don Gato posted:Wasn't that the plot of The Division? The division had a plot?
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Sep 16, 2019 16:59
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winnydpu posted:That level of targeting accuracy seems like it would be tough for even a tomahawk. I've only seem the one photo of the damage, but wouldn't 2nd tier Iranian cruise missiles basically rain down at random around the whole refinery? It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to imagine that some determined people could sneak into place a few miles away and use shorter range drones with visual targeting. I have no idea and that makes sense but the one hole smack in the middle of each of the bubble tanks seems awfully unlikely to be coincidence. e: they did hit the pipe spaghetti thing, check out the pic in this article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/16/iran-trump-saudi-arabia-oil-attack-assessment-latest aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 17:15
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Most oil tanks - and especially the tanks that'd be at that facility - are designed to 'blow out and burn' rather than explode. Look up oil tank fires on Youtube. You'll find *some* explosions, but most of them just show a tank burning from the top like a big tea candle. I wasn't specific enough with my question. Why is there just a hole in the side of the tank? I would have expected that the explosion from a cruise missile - ignoring the oil fire afterwards - would have caused much more structural damage. Based on the picture it would appear that the missile penetrated the tank without exploding (which makes sense), detonated inside and then all it really did was make a hole and start a fire which, as you explained, would have just burned like a "big tea candle"? Is this because the ordinance in question didn't have a lot of explosive power? I'm just not knowledgeable on this and when I hear "oil tank at refinery hit by cruise missile" I don't think "hole in the side" I think "crater where a oil tank used to be" or at least "half of a large oil tank". Is part of this that we don't know exactly what hit the refinery? Is part of this that I'm underestimating the amount of damage caused because the picture isn't doing it justice?
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Sep 16, 2019 17:27
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Mortabis posted:Clancy did have an ecoterrorist book and it was way, way better than blowing up oil facilities. It had greenpeace stand-ins genetically engineering Ebola to be more virulent and spreading it through the ventilation at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in order to kill humanity to save the planet I re-read that book not too long ago. The plot was actually even weirder: the initial outbreak at the Olympics was just supposed to trigger a global scare, at which point a biomedical megacorp would proudly announce it's developed an Ebola cure/vaccine and distribute it worldwide. Except whoops, the "cure" is actually super Ebola because the megacorp is run by ecoterrorists!
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Sep 16, 2019 17:40
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Smallpox had an overall mortality rate of like 30% and apparently they recently developed a new vaccine that's sitting around in national stockpiles. Sure it could kill a lot of people but it's not exactly apocalyptic anymore. Yeah, just in the past two decades thanks to bioterror threats, new vaccines have been developed. Huh. The more you know Also one specific fear was that the bioweapon smallpox would get released - that poo poo reportedly has a 95% fatality rate. (Reading the smallpox article on wikipedia, which I don't recommend if you are eating, makes smallpox sound like the worst encounter table in the most morbid RPG. TL;DR there's a smallpox progression that is almost always fatal, hemorrhagic, I think, and the Soviets naturally engineered a smallpox virus that almost always takes the hemorrhagic route.) Also I have to point out that while 30% mortality is true, you also have to figure on who's going to be seriously impaired for life by infection. Vacuoles (is this rite) on your eyes can blind, etc.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:43
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Good thing we eradicated it by vaccination program. We can do it again if it's truly out there weaponized.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:45
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Here's something in your wheelhouse, Mortibis: "Crude prices jump most on record in the single worst sudden disruption to the oil market ever"
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Sep 16, 2019 18:30
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Uh... https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/1173616559631343617 (No idea if this is a good source at all. I just liked the timing with this thread.)
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Sep 16, 2019 18:44
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Pandemic flu is where it's at. Airborne, notoriously contagious, marginal vaccine effectiveness, mortality rate pushing 20% in the 1918 pandemic. With modern genomics, a splice here and a base pair there and pretty soon you're cooking with gas. Book recommendation: Station Eleven.
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Sep 16, 2019 18:45
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I remember there being a lot of  and  at the Australian mousepox experiment to get their rodent population under control. This was pre-CRISPR and these scientists more or less created a monster without really understanding fully what they'd done, and attended a conference where they got way more attention than they were anticipating.Details: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/23/world/australians-create-a-deadly-mouse-virus.html BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 18:54
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Captain von Trapp posted:Pandemic flu is where it's at. Airborne, notoriously contagious, marginal vaccine effectiveness, mortality rate pushing 20% in the 1918 pandemic. With modern genomics, a splice here and a base pair there and pretty soon you're cooking with gas. The Dead Hand
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Sep 16, 2019 18:57
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There's also The Cobra Event, which describes a virus that's an engineered blend of the common cold and smallpox.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:02
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Smallpox is a dual strand dna virus whereas I think the flu is a single strand rna virus. I'm not the microbiologist in here but "combining" them doesn't sound like something that makes sense.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:05
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glynnenstein posted:Uh... Between this and Saudi Arabia I think we might actually be in the first chapter of a Clancy novel.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:07
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Mortabis posted:Smallpox is a dual strand dna virus whereas I think the flu is a single strand rna virus. I'm not the microbiologist in here but "combining" them doesn't sound like something that makes sense. From the WIki page: "The virus described in the novel is a fictional chimera that attacks the human brain. The infective agent, code-named "Cobra" by the protagonists, is a recombinant virus made from modified variants of the nuclear polyhedrosis virus (which normally infects moths and butterflies), rhinovirus, and smallpox."
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Sep 16, 2019 19:08
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Captain von Trapp posted:Pandemic flu is where it's at. Airborne, notoriously contagious, marginal vaccine effectiveness, mortality rate pushing 20% in the 1918 pandemic. With modern genomics, a splice here and a base pair there and pretty soon you're cooking with gas. The 1918 pandemic is terrifying yet has largely faded from public consciousness
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Sep 16, 2019 19:37
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Smiling Jack posted:The 1918 pandemic is terrifying yet has largely faded from public consciousness Of course it has. In today's world if it isn't from 15 minutes ago, or not related to a Conservative/Republican running for any office, it is old and useless info.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:50
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Smiling Jack posted:The 1918 pandemic is terrifying yet has largely faded from public consciousness "It happened before I was born therefore I don't want or need to know about it because I'm the center of the universe follow me on Instagram. #ambivalent"
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Sep 16, 2019 20:16
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Well the T-X is now officially the T-7A Red Hawk. Name after the Tuskegee Airmen... The more I see the T-7A the more I see a smaller, single engine F/A-18C. 
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Sep 16, 2019 20:18
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Smiling Jack posted:The 1918 pandemic is terrifying yet has largely faded from public consciousness If you want a good book on the pandemic, I'd recommend Pale Rider. It be gud Me and Donald Trump have something in common: a death in the family from the Spanish Flu shaped our family throughout the 20th century e: also according to Pale Rider a similar fading happened with the Black Death, with scholars only getting interested a few decades after the fact Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 20:21
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Nebakenezzer posted:
30% mortality is pretty high. even if its not as transmissible as other diseases, that'd be a lot of dead people.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:49
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Smiling Jack posted:The 1918 pandemic is terrifying yet has largely faded from public consciousness People were at the time largely preoccupied with the war that just ended, the question of figuring out how to put crippled veterans back into the workforce, and then there was a the 1929 crisis, and then a second world war. BIG HEADLINE posted:"It happened before I was born therefore I don't want or need to know about it because I'm the center of the universe follow me on Instagram. #ambivalent" People didn't wait until Instagram to largely forget about it.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:56
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Something like the 1918 flu would be really tough to occur again by chance. A new and totally novel type of Influenza could achieve a similar result, but influenza A isn't likely to ever hit us like that again. (Flu A is still a huge killer and woefully underestimated / underreported killing something like 10-80k people in the US alone each year). I'll try not to write a novel but basically Flu A has 2 main surface antigens (surface proteins that give it a unique look to your immune system). Those are the H and N proteins, there are different types, 1918 was H1N1, bird flu was (I think?) H5N1 etc. So, you've got a couple different versions of H and N and they all shuffle around each year as the virus mutates randomly coming back around to another H and N configuration. Your immune system builds antibodies to those H and N types if you got sick and vaccines also give you the most likely H and N types for a given year, giving you those antibodies in advance without getting sick with the actual virus. Because its always shifting, this is why you can get the flu every year. If you've encountered certain H and N types before in your life, you have some immune memory that provides some if not full protection against the flu up to decades later. Also usually Flu A kills the very young and the very old. It typically does not kill many people 18-60 yrs of age. So in 1917 H1N1 evolved. By random chance, one of the antigen types (forget which one) hadn't been in any of the prior flu strains for around 20-30 years, so literally no young person on the planet had ever made antibodies to it before. So, a younger person would be more likely to get hit harder by the flu whereas older people have some partial immune memory and were more protected. Now, combine that with a lot of people going all over the world faster than ever before, young people congregating in army barracks, camps, trenches, etc and you've got a perfect alignment of conditions for a fast spreading more intense flu that is most likely to encounter its least immune demographic. Today, we are basically living in the post-1918 flu ecology. Flu spreads faster ensuring that people get exposure early and often in life, meaning you're less likely to be surprised when something comes around less often. Also vaccines use a wider combination of antigens so people are more likely to have at least some partial immunity. For something like bog-standard Flu A I doubt it'll ever be as bad as it was in 1918 (famous last words).
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Sep 16, 2019 22:43
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Regarding the Saudi attack this seems important: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/attack-major-saudi-oil-facility-was-launched-iran-us-intelligence-n1055101?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma quote:American intelligence indicates that the attack on a major Saudi oil facility was launched from Iran, three people familiar with the intelligence told NBC News — an assessment that is likely to escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:46
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That Works posted:Something like the 1918 flu would be really tough to occur again by chance. A new and totally novel type of Influenza could achieve a similar result, but influenza A isn't likely to ever hit us like that again. (Flu A is still a huge killer and woefully underestimated / underreported killing something like 10-80k people in the US alone each year). It also doesn't help that a lot of populations were under a lot more stress. Even being just slightly under nourished can make a disease hit a lot harder, and doubly so when you're not talking about the individual but aggregating across a population. A lovely harvest or political situation that leads to some import not coming in might not cause a famine or directly kill anyone, but you'll still see an uptick of a few tens of thousands of deaths from illnesses that don't really stand out as a huge killer on their own.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:53
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perhaps they should have been more careful testing their prototype nuclear-powered Ebola virus
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Sep 16, 2019 23:22
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MrChips posted:perhaps they should have been more careful testing their prototype nuclear-powered Ebola virus Guess their Odd-Man didn't make it to the disarm substation in time.
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Sep 16, 2019 23:46
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Mortabis posted:Regarding the Saudi attack this seems important: Just to repost this: As it has a lot of detail about the missiles used. It seems that there is a *similar* missile built by the Iranians, but that the Houthi might've engineered some mods to it. Most importantly, the Iranian Soumar/Hoveyzeh missile is a copy of the Russian KH-55, which has a turbofan engine to give it that 1300 km range. The Houthi missile in question, the Quds 1, uses a much less efficent turbojet motor, very likely a copy of a Czech company's design. Nobody knows the actual range, but the ~650 km distance from Iran, Iraq, or maybe a ship in the Persian Gulf is more likely. There's some very unverified stuff on social media that hints at Iraq being the launch area. This engine difference may be what's behind the noise of a launch point north, not far south, of the targeted refinery.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:18
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Shouldn't the Houthis be flooding YouTube with videos of carrying out the attack by now?
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Sep 17, 2019 01:28
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Nebakenezzer posted:Just to repost this: It uses a Czech company's turbojet engine that just happens to have copies produced by Iran for use on drones. It looks like a scaled down Iranian missile, using an engine known to be produced in Iran, but nobody has seen that particular missile in Iran yet so you can't really 100% say it's an Iranian missile yet. They've smuggled the Qiam and a bunch of large drones into Yemen so it wouldn't be impossible to smuggle those in. If they are Iranian built it would certainly make the Iran/Iraq launches more likely - could either mean it's become prohibitively difficult to smuggle in the missiles or simply they didn't have the range to hit the target so they just launched them from elsewhere and claimed they came from Yemen. Either way super reckless and almost guaranteed to be the IGRC idiots behind it if true. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 02:07
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Warbadger posted:It uses a Czech company's turbojet engine that just happens to have copies produced by Iran for use on drones. It looks like a scaled down Iranian missile, using an engine known to be produced in Iran, but nobody has seen that particular missile in Iran yet so you can't really 100% say it's an Iranian missile yet. Yeah, not arguing the Iranian connection. Though I have to say if the IGRC wanted to send the message "Don't start a war with us" it's a successful one, with the subtext being "look what we can do with these crazy bodged cruise missiles. Now imagine the oil disruption with real military hardware."
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Sep 17, 2019 02:38
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Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, not arguing the Iranian connection. Though I have to say if the IGRC wanted to send the message "Don't start a war with us" it's a successful one, with the subtext being "look what we can do with these crazy bodged cruise missiles. Now imagine the oil disruption with real military hardware." Attacking KSA is a pretty crazy way to say "don't start a war with us (P.S. You don't have to because we're starting the war right now)". At best they're gonna destroy the opposition to the sanctions and at worst they're gonna start a huge goddamn war. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 03:46
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Hm. If war with Iran breaks out, I wonder if Israel will take the opportunity to join the dogpile? The risk for them is that it invites war with Hezbollah. But something worth considering. Imagine how much worse this would be if they had nuclear weapons.
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Sep 17, 2019 04:30
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No way. If anything there would be a repeat of the Gulf War where we're desperately trying to keep them out in order to hold an Arab coalition together. Relations have thawed between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not to the degree of an open alliance.
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Sep 17, 2019 04:44
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Maybe my knowledge of Mid-East politics is really off, but who would they be pissing off with an open alliance? Don't all the other Arab countries that oppose Iran have pretty much the same relations with Israel as the Saudi's do?
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Sep 17, 2019 05:21
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Israel could hit Iran without cooperation from the gulf states. Apparently, they have some kind of deal with Azerbaijan.
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Sep 17, 2019 05:27
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Jordan too I thought
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Sep 17, 2019 05:49
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If Israel really wanted to throw something at Iran, they would do so regardless of cooperation agreements.
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Sep 17, 2019 06:14
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