Lorindól

My grandma’s drunk cousin built an airplane from scrap wood and old farm machine parts in a barn in his 70’s. There were no suitable fields or roads to act as runways, so the crazy bastard installed skis on the plane, so he could take off and land on lake ice.

The plane looked like a real plane and eyewitnesses have confirmed that it actually rose to 1-2m height on short trial runs, but he never really got to fly the thing. His wife was rumoured to actively have been sabotaging the project so he wouldn’t kill himself, but I believe he just didn’t really trust the plane to be able to handle the stress of actual flight maneuvers.

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Russian doctrine of advancement on tactical level engagements seems like madness, but there is an effective method behind it.

First they send small groups of decently equipped fighters to seize a new patch of land. If/when these succeed, they instantly send in the diggers. These may not even have weapons, their only purpose is to dig foxholes and entrechments while the first wave holds the ground. Once the diggers have the first holes ready, they send second rate troops to hold the new positions and relieve the first wave to prepare for the next attack

And since they do not seem to care about casualties, this method works like a very slow meat grinder. Simply and effectively.

Destroying the planet you are travelling to with a massive release of energy on arrival is one of the problems of Alcubierre warp drive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

I’d say this is the most likely source of inspiration for the Elborean drive.

Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.

I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any

~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.

I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.

The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.

After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.

IMHO, I vastly prefer the TOS Romulans. The TNG --> era Romulans with the bumpy foreheads and 80’s super-shoulderpaddings look just ridiculous. I remember reading that the network specifically wanted the TNG Romulans to have a distinct look from Vulcans, so that “the viewers won’t get confused who are the baddies”.

PIC had both Romulan incarnations and did a great job retconning this by just mentioning the “bumpy forehead northeners” out loud.

Movie/TNG Klingons were an unquestionable upgrade, though.

We haven’t and we won’t, unless the “poor lost plane” would be heading directly towards some critical infrastructure. Then it would be blown out of the sky.

Russia has been playing this stupid game of theirs for years, their plane violates our airspace and we send our F/18’s to signal them to GTFO.

They play the same game with on-off GPS-interference, which is annoying but has very little real effect.

By responding to these petty provocations with lethal force would only result in a diplomatic crisis and more importantly, it would reveal the true effectiveness of our defensive capabilities. And Russia would love to learn that, for a low-low price of one Sukhoi fighter/pilot. Yeah, we’re not falling for that.

That’s a very good question.

I checked the specs of the TM-62, the standard fuze should require a pressure of 1500-5500N (150-550kg) to detonate. So the dragging should not have triggered it, unless the fuze was faulty - which would not be impossible considering the subpar quality of the Russian gear.

You may be right. My friend was trained as a sapper and he often talked about the importance of positioning the charges correctly. Even the simplest AT mines are designed to direct the most of the blast on the up-down - axis, to maximize the damage.

And like somebody already wrote, the cameraman could judt have been a dead man walking his final steps. The blast should have caused massive internal damage at that range. Maybe someone just salvaged the memory card of the camera/phone afterwards.

I thought it looked just like a TM-62 too, but the blast made me think again. I’ve seen those things go boom, I just can’t believe that the cameraman could be walking after that.

If if had been a TM-62, at that range the blast would have quite certainly made sure there would be no footage left to view. It had to be a directional mine.

If these daily numbers are close to correct, Ukraine’s counterartillery capability has increased dramatically in the last weeks. Even with Russias large material reserves those losses are bound to be at unsustainable levels.

Russia and Trump lied ?

Inconceivable!

I fear they won’t. They’ll just try to do the trading in the dark.

Getting cheap energy and tightening Russia’s leash for the same price is just too good deal for China to waste.

Yeah, that map shows the borders of the Soviet Union. It was the first I could find in a hurry, It’s old but helped to prove my point that their landmass east of the Ural mountains is mostly wilderness. Here’s a more up-to-date version that tells the same story:

https://www.geo-ref.net/pdf/russia.pdf

Here is a map showing where the majority of Russia’s population lives:

https://maps-russia.com/maps-russia-geography/russia-population-density-map

The largest part of Russia is the vast Siberia, which is basically just endless forests, mountains and arctic tundra with few cities here and there - and the winters can be extreme. If not for the rich resources and the jobs that extraction of those resources creates, not many would choose to live there.

Yes. Casualties are soldiers who either die in battle or get wounded badly enough to be taken out of action for a longer time.

Exactly the same situation here. I’ll wait for a while and see what happens.

Trump negotiating wirh Putin is like a clueless kindergartener playing chess with national master.

They’re going to force Ukraine to give up on Crimea and the eastern occupied terrritories, but Ukraine gets back some strictly defined areas where rare earth metals can be exploited.

Trump will consider this as an absolute victory and in the near future Europe will pay the heavy price if Russian aggression is rewarded this way.

EDIT: Changed “Krim” to “Crimea” to avoid misunderstandings.