AIRPOWER/Cold War - Its literally the first two lines of their hymn

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > AIRPOWER/Cold War - Its literally the first two lines of their hymn

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Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

A.o.D. posted:

Does the rule of law exist even as an idea in China?

Meh, the people doing the gaming are gangster but likely very well connected gangsters, so.......I don't feel smug

# ¿ Jan 2, 2020 20:04

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 08:42

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

SimonCat posted:

In the Army risk is associated with level of command, I'm assuming the Marines work the same way. So someone had to assess the risk and the appropriate level of officer signed off on it.

That said, in Iraq I literally had my Company Commander tell me to re-work the risk assessment values so that fewer of our missions came out to medium risk missions requiring the BN CDR's signature.

10 years later in Afghanistan and every mission we did was assessed as "high" risk and required an O6's approval, even though it was the same mission set and basically the same amount of expected opposition.

The assessment process is supposed to identify risks and come up with ways to lessen those risks. In reality it's a bunch of CYA eyewash. And don't get me started on the Army's new digital aviation risk assessment.

Having never heard of this until now, can I say that sounds awkward and non-trivially pointless

Like, doesn't the command structure do this anyway? A fire team can be risked by a lance corporal (or whatev), but whatever constitutes a full armored formation can be risked by a Colonel - if it is not already being risked by a decision above them?

# ¿ Jan 2, 2020 20:39

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

Hexyflexy posted:

As someone that's done a bunch of work for science labs, reverse engineering old equipment so they could keep doing experiments, I have seen many Radiums, or at least I've seen their work. I think the sacrifice was my soul - on the plus side, the science still gets done.

Just out of curiosity, what is a Radium in this context? Can make poo poo work but only in a way intelligible to them and no one else?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2020 18:24

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

I support the wall coming down in 1991.

Got a lot of good memories ITT. My personal favorite is when we were talking about volcanic eruptions and a climate scientist kindly educated me on some stuff I'd been wondering about

Vahakyla posted:

The new OP should probably include Cold War-as-gently caress stories of various equipment or tactics, from various countries, to get the mood right. Nebucadnezzars effort posts, for example.

OK, well, here are some of mine. There are fuckin' scads of good effortposts ITT. One that leaps to mind is a British dude explaining WTF nuclear weapons and why MIRVs kinda killed gigantic bombs and that's not a good thing

list of SSBNs, historical and current

Beloved Doc: 1970s ICBM basing options

The tenth time I was put on a government watch list

CNN's official video to play in case "the world ends"

Kirov class battlecruiser infodump 1

Kirov Class Battlecruiser infodump 2

Kirov class the Third: plus the Ural, one of many peaks of 1980s USSR rot

Nebakenezzer posted:

Sad news, friends: The Nuclear Security Administration Lost a Film Titled 'Skull Melting Demonstration'

JcDent posted:

A maybe more on topic question: so USSR has T-64, T-72 and T-80 being produced at the same time. What should be cut out/left out to optimize the tank production?

Nebakenezzer posted:

A few months ago, Xerxes17 in the mil history thread did some excellent effort posts on Soviet tank development. While the products were sometimes revolutionary (T-64) or quite useful (T-72) the story does talk about a poo poo-ton of needless competition, political shenanigans, and a process that has the Soviet Union fielding three MBTs with nothing common between them.

The T-64

Object 172 Aka, T-72 �Straight outta Nihzny Tagil Ft. Leonid Kartsev�

The T-80: Explosion at the Soviet Haywire Factory

If that's all TL;DR:

Stairmaster posted:

Don't bother with the T-80 at all in the first place. Stop the T-64 production once the T-72 variants are on par(So around the T-72B).

On why Zombies are dumb, a microbiological perspective:

That Works posted:

I'll try not to write a whole essay on it but it's a fun teaching tool.

Your 1st assumption is right, without energy, cells die. Muscle fibers need ATP to contract to let things move. To make ATP you need mitochondria to undergo respiration. To undergo respiration you need oxygen and glucose (for human cells). To get oxygen and glucose to muscle cells you need a circulatory system. But, that's not quite correct. Muscle cells can undergo fermentation (producing lactic acid) instead. However, this only lasts for the most part until blood glucose supply is exhausted. Actually, you can start breaking down proteins and other components into short carbon chains to ferment as well.

So a couple of assumptions, zombies don't need a circulatory system, they don't 'bleed out' so, they must be undergoing fermentation. Queue an entire segue into how your body processes fermentation end products and cleans up stuff from that out of your cells via the liver and kidneys. Again, this kinda doesn't work well on a system level without circulation and breathing. So, without those its up to the individual cells to function and last as long as they can, cannibalizing themselves. Some back of the napkin math works out to even a slow moving shambling zombie only lasting an hour or less at absolute maximum conditions before so many individual cells cannibalize their own contents down into inactivity. This would require an aggressive reprogramming of normal cellular metabolism that we currently don't do.

There's a lot of sidebars there I use to get into other metabolic stuff, ie how the body uses CO2 normally to buffer the blood and ensure a fairly constant pH, and how your breathing rate affects that to keep that pH balance in a very narrow range.

The end result is that if you forced cells to individually do something they are evolutionarily not built for they could run for~1h in overly ideal situations but would leave behind a completely destroyed husk of half pickled dead human flesh.

Nebakenezzer posted:

To get away from depression and Trump:

https://twitter.com/wyatt_privilege/status/919173846015594496/photo/1

Why in the name of God does the Air Force have official anime swords?

Nebakenezzer posted:

Hey, *I* was going to post a very long article, in this case, Russia's fascist inspiration:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/16/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism/

I don't have a bead on who Putin is aside from an increasingly sloppy megalomaniac, so seeing him recycle an Orthodox Russian philosopher that was super into Hegel, taught by the originater of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, became ideological buds with friggin' Lenin after the revolution, endorsed a form of Christianity that said "truth is a lie, and God is a feeble fuckup" then went fascist, (first Italian, later Nazi) and then had the good sense to move to Switzerland before the war started, and who throughout WW2 was cheering on the Germans as they attacked the USSR, and if anything became even more extreme after world war two is, ah, interesting.

Nebakenezzer posted:

OK, so Ivan Ilyin, this intellectual managed to combine fascist-style mystic Russian nationalism, fascist hostility to law and rational government, some assumptions that make communists nod in agreement, and a incredibly bizarre religious take. Here is a fascist who never really understood the joke of "there being no truth, and that is a Truth." The cash value of this insanity is that the dude believed "the ends justify any means" and "human life is as worthless as truth" (and that is a truth.) I've no idea how much Putin and co actually believe in this poo poo, but if you want to justify government-less authoritarianism combined with mythical nationalism and justification to do literally whatever you want , his thinking is useful, right down to his sex anxiety. His essays have been given to officials, and Putin has quotes him frequently in speeches. If you think fascism is an aesthetic political movement, then Ilyin appears to be a major style influence in the current government.

Nebakenezzer posted:

It's totally true that the only reason the type hasn't been given up is that it allows shorty carriers of dubious utility

A few years ago now Mr. Chips in the AI thread posted a neat but sadly incomplete history of VSTOL:

The Triumph of Thrust Over Gravity (and Sense) � A Brief Account of the (Unfortunate) History of Vertical Takeoff Aircraft

Part One � The First (Mis)Steps
Part Two - More Engines, Many More Problems
Part Three � Lots of Money Chasing Lots of Bad Ideas

Maybe if we ask nice Mr. Chips will talk about acceptable bribes to get him to finish part four, "Everyone Loses Their Minds (Especially the Soviets)"

Nebakenezzer posted:

The Cold War thread, a few years ago talked about this. There's a 1950s training film on youtube called "A Day Called X", a full dress rehearsal evacuation of - Portland, Or? A city on the West Coast. Anyway, by the video's account anyway, the evacuation was successful. Even people in hospitals and such were evacuated to designated areas - the entire municipal government also had a nuclear hardened shelter in under a mountain to coordinate, with several officials having the full-time job of evacuation planning. As part of the planning, they also evacuated all the city's utility trucks to help in disaster relief and reconnection of services.

This whole thing took four hours of course, and I'll let you and other readers ITT decide if that's remotely plausible. In the early/mid 1950s, the weapons were intercontinental bombers which would drop one or two massive multi-megaton bombs. Four hours was really a worst case scenerio - likely warning would have been even longer than that. What's more, you had additional things playing in your favor: Air defense with NORAD had a realistic chance of knocking down a fair number of attackers, and bombs can of course be mis-aimed, making even an actual realized attack less effective.

Two things changed about this 'rosy' scenario: ICBMs and the consequent miniaturizing of nuclear weapons. (This is why nuclear bomb research post 1960 switches from 'bigger bombs' to 'smaller bombs, both in yield and size.') Now, your warning shrinks to...well, it depends, Half an hour seems the norm, though a percentage of missiles were kept on 15 minute alert. Certain scenarios (like a 'decapitation strike') have an 8 minute warning? Even the president is getting killed by that one unless he's on an idling AF1 ready for takeoff. Also as ICBMs carried more warheads and the numbers of weapons went up to the thousands, every city and target of value is getting plastered with warheads; accurate targeting and the number of warheads on a given city means that everybody is gettin' killed as it turns out 6-8 near simultaneous strikes is much more efficient at putting people in the 'pray for swift death' zone of the blast then 15 megatons liberally applied.

If you look up Life magazine in Google books, you'll see that in the early 1960s, people are still scheming for civil defense plans (and just FYI, I think a lot of the illustrations they used ended up influencing the original Fallout artists/designers.) Knowing what we know now, it's clear that the people making these plans really only expect something like 10-15% of the people properly sheltered to survive. And this was in the early 60s.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Thyre be dragons:

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 18:26

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

I think I can make a good first post, so if people could msg me:

effortposts they remember
Curtis LeMay quotes
times cyrano said "I don't care if trump and putin are giving each other reach arounds on tv, keep that poo poo out of this thread"

I think I can make it good

Also, if you want to rehost the images in iyaayas01's first post, that'd be good as fuckin' photobucket is a curse

# ¿ Jan 8, 2020 16:17

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

priznat posted:

A new contender for the CF-18 replacement has appeared!

A newly elected MP, a law school prof from the University of Toronto who's an expert in corporate governance and shareholder rights, has been cabinetified for the job of buying military and coast guard poo poo for the Government

# ¿ Jan 9, 2020 02:55

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

bewbies posted:

pretty sure none of the cleared posters in this thread are ever going to discuss anything classified on the Something Awful Forums, even if asked politely

And I've msg'd them about Aurora and Brilliant Buzzard/SR-75/XB-70 motherships so many times

# ¿ Jan 10, 2020 02:28

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

So guys, I was writing the new OP and I discovered that the Typhoon submarine fired a SLBM that was bespoke to it, the SS-N-20 Sturgeon. The Soviets developed a new SLBM *just* for the Typhoon class, and at peak strength, the Soviets had six of the fat bastards, carrying 120 missiles with ten warheads each of 100-200 kT yield, or 1200 warheads. Which all by itself I think is larger than every other nation's nuclear deterrant, setting aside the USA.

Also in the recommended books section I've several Non-fiction but only On the Beach for fiction

# ¿ Jan 11, 2020 04:18

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

Dante80 posted:

Some more. Really dig the lines on this ship, especially around the bow.

So why do modern warship designs favor obelisks instead of sensor masts?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 16:27

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

One got stuck in Montreal last year when the St. Lawrence iced up. Condo owners complained about the INTOLERABLE RACKET* it made running at idle.

*By which I mean noise > 0

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 18:44

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

So guys, the new first post is in reasonable shape.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 23:07

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

Cyrano4747 posted:

So you're saying we're in the final countdown?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 23:15

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

We're oscar mike

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 23:21

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 08:42

Nebakenezzer: Sep 13, 2005; The Mote in God's Eye

MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS MALL

# ¿ Jan 12, 2020 23:25

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > AIRPOWER/Cold War - Its literally the first two lines of their hymn

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