Antonov

Looking through my miscellaneous modeling stuff drawer, I found that I have an extra set of Bra.Z resin correct winglets for that kit. I'd be willing to send them to you for basically just the cost of postage. PM me and we'll talk.

I don't think there will be a war with China at all, precisely because it would be nuclear and not conventional; everybody knows it, so nobody will be dumb enough to start it. We got through fifty years of the Cold War that way. We'll most likely get through whatever tensions there are with China before either we or they suffer a major Russia-in-the-1990s style collapse. Besides which, useful or not, losing that information is not a good thing. If your kid loses his Nintendo DS by leaving it on the school bus, it's still a dumb thing to do, no matter whether he really needs it or not. This c

There is actually a true story in this vein. Around the turn of the previous century, a group of Cambridge grad students found out that Rudyard Kipling was the highest-paid author in the world, getting a shilling per word for his writing. The adventurous students decided to mail Kipling a shilling, with a written request to send them back his single very best word. A couple of weeks passed, and one day a telegram arrived at their dormitory. Sure enough, it was from Kipling, who had pocketed their shilling and sent them back the one best word he could think of in reply: "Thanks".

"Staggering... breathtaking" losses of confidential information to China, reported to have saved the PLA "25 years of research and development" and resulted in "billions of dollars of combat advantage for China": http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/confidential-report-lists-us-weapons-system-designs-compromised-by-chinese-cyberspies/2013/05/27/a42c3e1c-c2dd-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_print.html Well... ouch.

Is that a 3 Terabyte drive in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?

You can't get English Muffins in England. Englishmen don't even know what the hell they are.

NASA Moffett Memorial Day Open House, featuring the Collings Foundation B-17, B-24, and P-51C:

If I recall correctly, there were F-105 units that had pilot attrition rates approaching 70%, and at least one squadron that had an aircraft attrition rate over 100% - meaning it lost every airframe it showed up to fight with, and some of the replacements as well. Anyhow, little-known fact: The clock was invented by Pope Sylvester II. Before he became Pope, he had been attached to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, who had requested that the Church send the most intellectual monk they could find to take charge of educating his son and heir, the future Emperor Otto III. People were

I doubt many. There weren't a whole lot of F-105s left by 1978. Out of the entire production run of F-105s - a number which includes early models that never saw combat - just about half were lost in the skies over Vietnam. Thud units took the brunt of the early air war against the North, and suffered absolutely appalling pilot and airframe losses. After 1968, there weren't enough of them left to put together into effective combat units anymore, so other than the specialized "Wild Weasel" airframes, they were withdrawn, with the survivors kicking around ANG units for a few years until they coul

So this past weekend I had a chance to attend Maker Faire, the Geek/Hippie/DIY event that happens every year in Silicon Valley, and sometimes in other places as well. One of the things that was all over the place at the Faire this year was 3D printers, with people turning out all kinds of things with them. I had a look at a few at work, and a chance to touch and play with their products. They're still a bit grainy, the printers take a long time to make things, the process is complex, and they're expensive. But they're also solid, good quality, and amazingly versatile. Besides this, of course,

Most of AQ's previous experience in the neighborhood comes from fighting us, and they didn't have much by the way of heavy weapons then. For good reason, too: American forces excel at destroying big point targets like tanks and artillery pieces. No big training bases for them, either; those are even bigger and better targets of the sort that Americans are good at blowing up. So having any of that would have been suicide - and not the kind that AQ is normally fond of. Assad's another story. He won't be as good at destroying their heavy weapons, so using them becomes an acceptable risk. Clear an

I don't think they were very well-trained. Al Quaeda doesn't really have an armor school, so most of their learning probably comes the hard way - trial and error. This crew gets to fight another day, doubtless a bit wiser for their close call.

There are a couple of very good and very overlooked Vietnam movies out there. The Boys In Company C is virtually impossible to find, but is very worth seeing if you can. 84 Charlie Mopic is another good one that a lot of people haven't seen. For something a bit more recent, The Sapphires is well worth watching, but not very well known outside of Australia.

Update: The X-47B made its first cat shot today, off the USS GHW Bush:

Wow... that's definitely some different engines on EP-AJD: http://www.airliners.net/photo/Islamic-Republic-of/Boeing-707-3J9C/2259526/L/ Quite a nice paint job too. Here's the same airplane a couple years ago: http://www.airliners.net/photo/Islamic-Republic-of/Boeing-707-3J9C/1707049/L/ I wonder what anyone might know about these new engines. Also, that paint job has to be the hardest-to-airbrush one I can think of...

I'm not questioning whether drones do the job they're designed for, just whether, in doing so, they cause more problems than they solve. Maybe they do and maybe they don't - good cases can and have been made both ways. The point is that having a certain tool available to them might make certain politicians do foolish things because it doesn't seem at the time as though there will be a high risk involved. One is reminded of what P. J. O'Rourke once said about giving liquor and car keys to teenage boys. No, the drone won't send itself into an unwise war, any more than the liquor will drink i

Both sides have a point here. Drones are of questionable value in the wars we're fighting now. Not that they aren't effective - there's just a strong case to be made that they cause more problems than they solve. In addition, the fact that no pilot is put at risk may cause a politician who understands that the public is casualty-averse to figure that using drones poses no risk of casualties, and therefore to use them to get involved in conflicts in which American involvement of any kind is inadvisable. You know what Robert E. Lee said - "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow t

Maverick and Iceman's days may be numbered - the completely autonomous X-47B Navy combat aircraft demonstrator made its first successful shore-based arrested landing on a runway at Pax River this weekend: Full story from Wired: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/watch-out-maverick-navy-drones-practicing-their-carrier-landings/

Again, what politics? It's not being "political" to say that long delays in getting our servicemen new equipment are unacceptable. It would be political to say: "This is Obama's fault!" or "This is Bush's fault!". What I'm saying is: "I don't give a damn whose fault it is - get it fixed". That that's the plan doesn't mean it's a good plan. 40? Really? How much of the active USAF fighter fleet was manufactured in 1973? Also, the fact that I think that one new aircraft is unnecessary and a waste of money doesn't mean that I think that all new aircraft are unnecessary or a waste of mone

There's a first time for everything, and while they're well-maintained, they're not magically maintained. Military aircraft crash for mechanical reasons all the time - way more than civilian airliners do. I don't mean any insult to military mechanics here, but being owned and maintained by the military does not offer magical protection against an airframe getting old and worn out. That's what happens to machines eventually - they get old and worn out, and you have to replace them. Uhm... you have heard of the 707, right? I don't mean to be a jerk here, and I do know who I'm talking to, but

Airplanes - especially pressurized aircraft - do have limited lifespans, and do wear out and need to get replaced. Airlines don't send older airplanes to the scrapyard because they're not fashionable anymore. They do it because any airframe wears out eventually. That's simply what you do - you phase out older airplanes and replace them with new ones. You can upgrade them to keep them going for a while, but even that has limits - who here is still using any piece of the computer they owned in 1996? As for your list, we are saying goodbye to all of those airplanes except the B-52 - the C-5 is ge

I'll say the obvious: the aircraft was half a century old, the Pentagon and Congress have been d**king around playing politics with a replacement for years, and we could have had those replacements by now if not for factors that, if they aren't actually massive corruption and/or incompetence, certainly do a startlingly good imitation of them. For now, we have no idea whether this was caused by anything relating to the age of the airframe. Maybe not. But I've been saying for years that Congress and the Pentagon's inability to get their act together on the replacement tanker contract was going

There's a lot to be said for that idea. Aircraft flying out of Bagram have been doing dramatic initial climbs for a long time now - this scene from 9th Company, a Russian film released in 2005 about their own war in Afghanistan, does a good job of illustrating why: That's what you want to avoid when you're departing Bagram. So a steep initial climb may have set some not-very-secure cargo loose that might have stayed where it was in a more standard climb. That's not an NTSB report or anything, but it's a decent enough initial guess about what may have happened.

So, I've been seeing these thin metal strips every so often in the streets since I was a little kid - they're a few inches long, maybe 1/16" wide, and made of some kind of rather hard iron or steel. But in all this time, I still have no idea what they actually are or how they end up in the street. With a lot of mechanically-inclined guys here, I thought I'd ask - does anyone know exactly what these things are?

Today: City tour in an Mi-8: http://englishrussia.com/2013/04/30/mi-8-flight-over-the-snow-covered-city/