Missile War

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Apr 052022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought guided missiles to the fore, to a very great cost of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and basically anything that moves. Anti-tank guided missiles have proven to be perfectly capable of turning kinda-modern armor into scrap metal. Swatting aircraft is a somewhat more difficult task, but it’s being done. The video below seems to show a Ukrainian-made “Stugna-P” anti-tank missile (a manually-controlled laser guided missile that can be set on a tripod and fired remotely) promptly deleting a Kamov KA-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter. The Stugna-P would seem a *terrible* missile for going after a moving aircraft, but this one was hovering… and I don’t care how armored your chopper is, if it gets hit with a missile meant to take out a modern main battle tank, your chopper will do like what this one did, and immediately fall from the sky as flaming wreckage.

For as long as there have been projectile weapons there has been armor. And since then there has been a constant competition between the two for supremacy. And right now, it’s pretty clear that arms (in this case ATGMs) have the advantage over armor. We don’t know how well a truly modern MBT such as the Abrams would hold up against missiles like these, but it’s safe to assume the answer would be “not well.” The traditional response of adding even more armor to the tank is likely not tenable; the M-1 is already so massive that merely transporting it is a problem. So the future of defending vehicles will have to be active: not just the reactive armor that Russian tanks are covered with and that doesn’t seem to be doing them much good, but point defense systems that use guns, lasers, missiles, jets of explosively generated molten metal, blast waves, hell, maybe even force fields. None of these will be “cheap.” This will put effectively-armored vehicles outside the reach of many militaries in the face of relatively inexpensive missiles. Perhaps for a time war will simply be cost ineffective. Won’t that be a hell of a thing.

Russian Defense Ministry denies biology

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Apr 032022

One of the more shameful facts to come from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is how many Americans on the political right are siding with Putin. It is a minority, but the fact that *any* American right wingers would side not only with a dictator, but one who clawed his way to power within a communist system, is to some degree baffling and to a large degree irritating and stupid.

One of the reasons why some right wingers are siding with Putin is because Putin is “against the gay Agenda” and such. Yeah, well… Hitler liked affordable cars, good highways and dogs, but that’s not reason enough to side with him. Still, here we are. One of the big points against the “LGBTQAWTF agenda” is that they deny biology: men are not women, women are not men, and they’re not interchangeable. This is a fact which cannot be rationally denied; those who argue otherwise are arguing madness. Fine, whatever. How is this relevant to Ukraine? Well, Russian forces were driven out of the Ukrainian town of Bucha and left a bunch of civilian corpses in their wake. This is backed up not only by video from the scene, but interviews with eyewitnesses and satellite recon photos showing mass graves while under Russian occupation. The Russian Defense Ministry, of course, denies it all, blames everything on the Ukrainians, because of course they do. The “statement” is HERE. Again, how is this relevant to this post? In amongst the expected nonsense that basically boils down to “nuh-uh,” there’s this gem:

“Of particular concern is the fact that all the bodies of people whose images were published by the Kyiv regime, after at least four days, have not stiffened, do not have characteristic cadaveric spots, and blood has not turned up in the wounds.”

The argument is, in part, that the bodies aren’t stiffened. What causes corpses to go rigid? Rigor mortis, a chemical reaction that causes the muscles to tense up. But… rigor mortis doesn’t last forever. It typically starts up within a few hours… and it fades away, leaving the muscles slack, within another 12 to 48 hours. So bodies left in the street for *four* days? Rigor mortis is *long* since over. The Russian government is arguing that rigor mortis operates in ways that science says it doesn’t. As to the lack of blood: I’ve seen a lot of videos of people getting shot. Sometimes people *fountain* blood. And sometimes they hardly bleed at all. If the first shot stops the heart… the blood stops flowing. And all the civilians in the street kinda seem like a message: they were probably shot somewhere else and dragged there. Beyond the psychological value to displaying the corpses of your slain enemies, it’s a dandy way to delay pursuing forces: Not only do you not want to run over human bodies, you don’t want to run over human bodies that may well have been boobytrapped.

Virtue signalling time: most of the Russian troops I kinda feel sorry for. They didn’t sign up for this, and at least initially, you could see a reluctance on their part to screw with the Ukrainian citizens. But recently that reluctance seems to have evaporated. Whether that’s because the Russian troops have been traumatized by having their asses handed to them by Ukrainian forces, or because they’ve been forced into it by their leadership, or because the worst of what we’re seeing is actually being done not by run of the mill Russian soldiers but by Syrian, Chechen or other rather more barbaric forces, I don’t know. In any event, if the reports of slaughtering civilians and mass rapes are true… they gotta go. Off this planet, out of the food chain, evacuate the gene pool, ASAFP.

Bruce isn’t the only one with aphasia

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Apr 022022

There are other people out there with cognitive difficulties, unable to speak normally, spouting gibberish:

This seems a bit much

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Mar 272022

I have long bemoaned the fact that interesting aerospace history stuff sometimes sells on eBay at painfully high prices and sometimes even to people who aren’t me (the outrage of it all). Such is the case with this listing:

Vintage NASA Concept Art Frank DiPietro Martin Marietta SV-5D PRIME Lifting Body

Two nice vintage lithographs… one of the Martin SV-5D (AKA, X-23) subscale lifting body, and one of the NASA-Langley HL-10 (an early concept with a raised cockpit, possibly also a Martin interpretation). The initial bid price for these was $100; after a number of recent eBay expenditures, that was more than I was willing to go for. So it’s just as well that the final selling price was $384, which seems really, really high. Perhaps the bidders thought that these were the original paintings? Or perhaps the market for lithographs has skyrocketed.

Well, I guess it’s time that I unload some stuff. Not that I necessarily want to, but the bills lately…. uuuuugh. I recently saw a modestly cruddy Convair F-106 joystick go for well over $700. Well, guess what I have: a *really* *nice* F-106 joystick. Anybody want to bribe me before I put it on eBay? If so, send me an email with your insanely generous offer…

Cosmic horror explained simply

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Mar 222022

“Cosmic horror” is a genre of horror invented – or at least perfected – by author H.P. Lovecraft. Most forms of horror have the protagonists being menaced with death by knife wielding maniacs, weirdos with chainsaws, werewolves or sharks trying to eat them, vampires looking to drain their blood, aliens looking to wipe them out. Whether good or bad, that type of horror is comprehensible to the protagonist, at least after they’ve had a little while to process what’s going on. But cosmic horror is horror based on the protagonist being wholly *incapable* of understanding the threat, what’s going on, what the future holds. The alien or the maniac can be defeated in the end with a shotgun blast to the face, or a nuke to the homeworld… but the cosmic horror cannot be defeated. It might be avoided, evaded, delayed or bypassed… but the protagonist will never “win,” nor will the protagonist ever really grasp just what the hell is going on.

By definition, this one is tricky to define, trickier to pull off successfully. Fortunately (?), recent event suggested to me an easy to understand analogy for cosmic horror. Take, for example, the story of “Stepan,” a cat made somewhat famous on Instagram. Stepan seems a perfectly normal cat, in perfectly normal surroundings, with perfectly normal humans. The usual sort of photos and videos of Stepan looking cute made the Instagram account famous and popular. But it wasn’t cosmic horror.

Until very recently. Because Stepan is a *Ukrainian* cat.

Stepan the Internet-Famous Cat Escapes Ukraine, Finds Safety

The shelling of Stepan’s town of Kharkiv caused Stepans humans to pack up and unass themselves and their cat to France. Now, a war, even a bad one, is something humans can understand. A human adult can understand it quite clearly. A human child will have difficulty, perhaps, but unless the child is stupid or incapable of communication, the war can be explained to him/her. The idea that “fire bad” and “bombs bad” and “incoming rockets bad” can be impressed upon them, and rockets and bombs can be explained as to what and why they are, how they work. But to an animal? Sorry, no. Explain all you want, a cat is never going to grasp the first damn thing about a war. All the cat knows is that their life was going along pretty well, then their food-monkey-butlers started acting strange. Then they started running around, then there were loud noises and the big warm cave they live in crashed down and burned, one of the monkey-butlers burst open and stopped moving, the other started making really loud noises then ran away, now the world is rain and snow and fire and wind and loud noises and other monkey-butlers running around making loud noises and sometimes falling over and stopping, and sometimes kicking at them and what is the foul smelling black goop that spilled on my fur and why is it suddenly bright red and why does it hurt and why when I run away the red crackling pain stays right on me ow ow ow…

Yeah. To a cat, a dog, a horse, war is *never* going to make the first bit of sense. It will always remain incomprehensible chaos and madness that will pursue them into their dreams, years after normality has returned. War (or an earthquake, or a house fire, or a tornado, or a hurricane, or one of their humans suddenly going insane due to booze or meth or bad news, or…) is simply beyond an animals ability to begin to comprehend. It is the very essence of cosmic horror. The trick for an author who wants to capture cosmic horror is to do for human characters what war would do for an animal character. The idea is straightforward enough, simple to understand, like “add one extra dimension to a line, you get a square; add one extra dimension to a square, you get a cube; add one extra dimension to a cube, you get a tesseract.” But while the concept is straightforward enough, that last step can be a doozy to really pull off.

By the way, here’s Stepan while being evacuated. This is the look of someone who has peered into the abyss and come away uncomprehending, hope and joy drained from them, refilled with a new fear. This cat has seen some ᛋᚻᛁᛏ. If your human protagonist looks like this at the end of the tale, you *may* have successfully introduced them to some form of cosmic horror. On the other hand, if real-life humans or animals end up looking like this due to actions you have taken… please consider that you may be the baddie.

Should Boeing be broken up?

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Mar 212022

So yet another Boeing 737 crashed, this time in China, taking more than 130 people with it. little is known yet about the cause, but the thing seems to have lawn darted straight into the ground. Unless Russian separatists whacked it with a Buk or the Chinese operator *really* bungled maintenance or the pilot decided that Today Is The Day, the chances are real high that once again this one is on Boeing.

Chinese Boeing jet crashes in mountains with 132 on board, no sign of survivors

Boeing was for a long time the premier American manufacturer of jetliners, with “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” being a sincerely held opinion among many. And then… Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas. In the process, the successful Boeing management approach, which was engineering-centered, was replaced with a more management-centered approach. Since then, Boeings ability to get *anything* successfully done, from the 787 to the 737 Max to the Starliner capsule to the SLS, seems to have been seriously compromised. Boeing is unlikely to produce a new jetliner within the next *generation.* They, the designer and manufacturer of the B-47 and B-52, are unlikely to ever again build a fighter or a bomber. The Delta IV launch vehicle is yesterdays news; the SLS is a hideously overpriced and underuseful dinosaur, the Starliner is so far behind schedule and over budget that if it ever carries out a manned mission it’ll be a miracle. All of this is Boeings fault.

Nobody else in the US is likely to build a jetliner anytime soon. Lockheed stopped trying with the L-1011, decades ago; Northrop-Grumman aren’t into jetliners. Nor-Grum are building the B-21; Lockheed is building the F-35. And… that’s pretty much it for the foreseeable future. Boeing is, for all intents and purposes, done. if this crash turns out to be the result of more Boeing incompetence, they could well find themselves is *serious* trouble quite soon. The phenomenally successful 737 line might end up a sky-pariah.

Having Boeing either go belly-up, or turn into an ossified tax-dollar sink that provides nothing usable in return are both bad results. This would be bad for Boeing employees, Boeing stockholders, American taxpayers, the US military, the US economy as a whole. So is it time to consider breaking Boeing up? Instead of one complacent conglomerate, take its various parts and pieces and separate them, give them separate and unrelated managements set them to compete with each other. Make the Phantom Works – formerly McDonnell Douglas turf – into its own thing. Turn Boeing HQ in Chicago into… I dunno, a WalMart or something; can all the business majors who have turned Boeing from a rampaging engineering success story into a freakin’ joke. Boeing has factories in Everett, WA, Renton, WA and North Charleston, SC. Make them separate companies. Set them to compete against each other for the next generation jetliner… BWB, LTA, electric, what-the-frak-ever. If one fails spectacularly, it doesn’t mean the others will suffer at all; indeed, a failed company could be seen as instructive. The failed former division could be picked up for a song by, say, the USAF and DARPA; the people responsible for the failure can be fired, better people brought in and the division set the task of cranking out experimental types.

The US used to have a *lot* of major aircraft manufacturers. Perhaps the days when the economy could simultaneously support the likes of Boeing and Convair and Lockheed and McDonnell and Republic and Grumman and Douglas and Martin and North American and Bell and Curtis and Sikorsky and Vought and Northrop and Hiller and Fairchild are over… but now we have *one* jetliner manufacturer, *one* fighter company, *one* bomber company. This is intolerable.

Behold: A Boeing.

That Star Trek/Star Wars crossover we’ve always wanted has happened!

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Mar 202022

Well, not *exactly* the one we always wanted. Starfleet vs Star Destroyers? Nah. But the Federation being taken over by the Dark Side? Yup, we’re there, thanks to the season 4 finale of STD which saw the President of Earth portrayed by current political villain Stacey Abrams. Her claim to fame is working for “voter rights,” which in the current usage is a euphemism for getting rid of any ability to maintain election integrity. Because she apparently believes that black people cannot be bothered to get and hold onto state IDs such as drivers licenses, her platform boils down to voting should be open to anybody, no matter who, where they’re from, whether they’re alive or not, citizens of the country or even if they are cross-dimensional multiversal copies of themselves. In a Star Trek context, when it comes down to a clash between the Federation fighting for survival against the Borg, her position would be that the Borg would get to vote on whether or not the Federation citizens should be marched off to assimilation.

At this stage, STD has been such a tragic parody of Star Trek for so long that this sort of nonsense is largely being met with shrugs of “well, what, am I supposed to be surprised?” from actual Star Trek fans. Of course the fake fans who think that STD is actually good are having a field day thinking that casting Abrams is some sort of historical coup. Witness, for example, the top comment at that wretched hive of scum and villainy, gizmodo, in an article on the cameo:

“I like my Trek finales the way I like my elections — garnished with conservative tears.”

There are two takeaways from that:

The commenter actually thinks conservatives are crying about this
The commenter is happy to see cultural icons being trashed as a way to hurt the feelings of those who disagree politically with him/her/it.

That latter point is hardly something new. Fellow travelers of this sort have spent several years committing acts of cultural and *actual* vandalism as a way not to improve society, but just to hurt people they don’t like. That’s a very Dark Side philosophy.

Anyway, here’s the scene. Having not actually seen the episode, I have the sneaking suspicion that the audio here might not be precisely what was broadcast, but, hey, it works.

There are those who argue that STD is canonical with actual Star Trek, that it’s in the same universe/timeline as TOS and TNG. This despite all the tonal differences, the fundamentally different Klingorks, the technology a century in advance of what was shown before, the different *history* on display. The season 4 finale, however, provides a final nail in the coffin to the idea that STD is set in the canonical Star Trek timeline. That detail is this: Earth is geographically, geologically a different *planet* than the Earth of reality or of actual Star Trek. In STD-verse, Africa is something like 50% bigger than elsewhere, stretching from nearly the arctic to nearly the antarctic. You can’t have continents being vastly larger and not have that make major changes to the timeline, going back millions of years. One might argue that this is due to lenses and the distance at which one films a sphere; if you photograph the Earth from the ISS, Nebraska about fills the view of Earth from horizon to horizon. But as you can see here, the “camera” has pulled back to several planetary diameters away, at which point the distortions become minimal. Earth in STD is a *very* different place.

Ukrainian pro-Putin political parties suspended

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Mar 202022

Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia

I’ve seen the usual suspects claiming that the fact that Zelenskiy suspended parties that support the destruction of Ukraine means he’s a fascist. Let’s look at a little bit of history. Prior to World War II, there was a political party in Britain called the “British Union of Fascists.” What happened when war broke out between fascist Germany and democratic Britain? Britain banned the BUF in 1940 and interred some 700 or more of it’s officials for the duration of the war. Was Churchill a fascist? Nope. Kind of a ruthless bastard to be sure, but hardly a fascist. When your nation is being attacked by a more powerful enemy, you fight them. And that means fighting their supporters within your own borders. During the Cold War, the United States – which is pretty unique in its determination to not ban much of *any* political party – still sicced the FBI on our own commies… and rightly so.

I’ve seen some commentator claim that Zelenskiy has banned all opposition parties. Untrue: unlike the US, where you’ve got the DemRep uniparty and virtually nothing else of any real consequence, Ukraine has a *lot* of parties. See the list on Wikipedia. The only ones that got banned are the pro-Russian parties. For a nation under martial law currently being ground underfoot by a massively larger military constantly carrying out war crime after war crime, this is a perfectly reasonable response to the situation. Is it the *American* response? No. The US did not ban the Commies during the Cold War; did not ban the fascists during WWII (they, unlike the commies, had the good graces to evaporate on their own when war broke out); the US didn’t even ban the Democrats when they started a Civil War. But everyone who is not the US is not a fascist, despite what the lefties and the Putinfluffers will try to lead you to believe.

If the Cold War had gone differently, and “Red Dawn” or something like it had come to pass, it’s interesting to contemplate whether the US would have banned the communists.

Inflatoplane

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Mar 192022

An ok-quality youtube documentary on the Inflatoplane (it caused me to twitch a few times, such as when the “airmat” material was several times called “airman” for some reason). The Inflatoplane was pitched as a way to rescue downed pilots, a role it could still serve. Also potentially useful as a way to infil/exfil special ops forces; if it could be made practical with a quiet propulsion system (electric motors? distributed propulsion?), then it could probably be *really* good for that role. At the end of the mission it could be fairly easily destroyed to keep it out of enemy hands. Another proposed role was as a light aircraft for the commercial market; this one I’m less thrilled about. A rubber aircraft would be necessarily not a long-lived aircraft; basic wear and tear, everything from scraping on the ground to repeated inflations, temperature cycling and ultraviolet light would cause the rubber to degrade over time. if the rubber parts could be made *really* cheap – a few grand, perhaps – such that the owner could swap out the rubber bits and retain easily-swappable propulsion, controls, avionics, seats and such, then maybe it would be ok. Might make a dandy battlefield recon/ missile platform if made to be unmanned… a sizable aircraft with a decent payload that is small on radar and IR, difficult to shoot down shot of a direct hit, and dirt cheap. Replace the original nylon and rubber in the original airmat material with kevlar, carbon fiber and, say, teflon, and you could have a *really* tough little airplane you could fold up and stuff into the back of a car. Might be interesting to study the design pressurized not with carbon dioxide and water vapor engine exhaust, by *hydrogen* for added lift. Sure, it’d be a risk of catching fire, but if enemy action is already poking it full of holes it’s lost anyway. Might as well have it burn up before the enemy can get to it.

Blyat suka: Indian edition

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Mar 182022

Anyone who has watched videos from Ukraine – or, let’s face it, Russian dash cams – could be forgiven for thinking that the Ukrainian and Russian languages are composed of nothing but the sounds “blyat” and “suka” arranged in various artful ways to convey the full range of human ideas and emotions, stretching the gamut from “angry” to “enraged.”

English has that same capacity, as these two Indian fellers demonstrated. This is far and away the funniest thing I’ve seen in *days.*

And the captioned version:

And because why not:

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