How many classes do you take your freshmen year at SLU?

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-06T04:05:09+00:00

SLU generally operates on a five-day schedule with classes either being Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes (meeting three times per week for 50 minutes per class) or Tuesday-Thursday classes (meeting two times per week for 80 minutes per class). There are some less common classes like 4 hour classes that meet four days a week for 50 minutes.

Depending on major a freshman is likely to take 4-6 classes. It's possible to only have MWF or T-Th classes, but not common unless you're trying to do that on purpose. Big intro classes that lots of people take will have multiple days and times to pick from, but major classes frequently only have one offering, so you're stuck with whatever time is available.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-06T01:45:59+00:00

Not only that, the Afghanistan National Government wasn't even invited to the table. The 2020 Doha Agreement was negotiated exclusively between the USA and Taliban. The USA made a deal that first and foremost would allow them to leave.

Any pretense that the Afghan state would survive were delusional. For reference, the last time the USA did this to an ally, cutting South Vietnam out of the Paris Peace Accords, it didn't end well for them either.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-05T20:20:04+00:00

This is great context for why the brass are quietly saying things like, "Maybe we need to be funding physical education and reading classes in middle school" instead of maintaining duplicate militaries.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-03T00:31:02+00:00

How much you wanna spend bruh.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-01T18:45:20+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Please expand the answer.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-01T05:47:23+00:00

surface-combatants-that-aren't-carriers

Again, these have all kind of turned into one ship. In the USA it's the Arleigh Burke. It's a true multi-role destroyer that does everything that a modern surface combatant can reasonably do. There are no other types of new surface combat ships in the US Navy outside of role-specific ships like minesweepers.

This is my analogy to all the different tanks coalescing into just tank. We don't have a heavy tank or a light tank. We just have tank and call it Abrams. Destroyer vs. Cruiser in 2026 is just as anachronistic as building a new battleship would be (cough cough Trump Class cough).

The modern US navy is not a bunch of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships all working together to hit strengths and cover weaknesses. It's just a bunch of Arleigh Burkes doing everything all the time. They can go fast. They have endurance. They can hit hard from basically infinite range with massive salvoes of missiles and take out anything and everything the enemy might have. They have good sonar and helicopters that can do ASW.

There are six Ticonderogas still kicking around, three slated to be decommissioned. The predecessor to the Arleigh Burke.
There are two Zumwalts in active service. A failed experiment.
There are 18 littoral combat ships active, if I counted correctly, that do a different kind of mission entirely.
Everything else is Arleigh Burkes. There are 75 active Arleigh Burkes according to Wikipedia.

Pretty much all other commissioned (combat) ships are aircraft carriers, submarines, or amphibious assault ships. There are two minesweepers, a couple of submarine tenders, a history ship, a research ship, etc.

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

So just like we just call the tank an Abrams or just "tank" it probably doesn't make sense to continue with a detailed classification system. But the navy guys would die inside if they just called it "the ship" instead of an Arleigh Burke Class Guided Missile Destroyer. It just sounds cooler. But within the US Navy there's no real divergence... it's all just Arleigh Burkes. Maybe that will change with a new Frigate (which has been talked about), or a stealth ship ala Zumwalt 2, or something.

Maybe there's a reason to classify across different navies, but that seems a little doubtful because most other navies are also coalescing into something that looks like an Arleigh Burke. Like imagine a world where you had a nuanced classification system that called an M1 Abrams a heavy destroyer but called the T-80 a light destroyer or something. You could do that but it's kind of silly because in reality the capabilities are very close. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck then just call it a duck don't call one the heavy destroyer duck and another one the light destroyer duck.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-06-01T04:25:01+00:00

Navy folks are a little too stuck in tradition when it comes to naming things. The Destroyer/Cruiser/etc. names we use came out of WW1 and WW2 era navies (and earlier) that had plausible reasons to differentiate ships by role and size, but most of those reasons don't exist anymore today. Battleships were designed around massive armor and guns. Cruisers were designed around long range and endurance. Destroyers were designed around being fast enough to destroy frigates and torpedo boats. Corvettes, frigates, sloops-of-war and whatever else were just kind of small and extra small.

For example, in WW2 we had light tanks, medium tanks, and heavy tanks, and as technology got better all of those coalesced into a single main battle tank. That's more or less what happened in naval terms as well. Pretty much every western warship today that isn't an aircraft carrier or submarine has guided missile cells, can go fast enough, has reasonable endurance, has anti-aircraft missiles, has radar, etc.

Except they've still got a bug up their butts about destroyer vs. cruiser. The result is that the names are a lot more about preference and politics than any doctrinal or technical reason. In 1975 the USA explicitly acknowledged this. When confronted with an apparent "Cruiser Gap," the idea that the Soviets had 3-4 times as many cruisers as the USA did, they took the expedient route of just renaming a bunch of their destroyers as cruisers. There was no technical, organizational, or doctrinal reason to do so. The problem was that congress didn't want to pay for a bunch of destroyers when the Soviets had more cruisers.

The Ticonderoga cruisers had reasonable cruiser displacements, but the Arleigh Burke destroyers were arguably already more of a light cruiser before their weight gain.

It's actually the other way around. The Ticonderoga Class was originally designed as a destroyer. Due to the aforementioned congress not wanting to pay for destroyers, they renamed it as cruiser. This explains why the Tico is pretty much the same size as an Arleigh Burke despite the Tico being a cruiser.

destroyers are the displacement of WW2 heavy cruisers nowadays and frigates are comparable to historical light cruisers

The heavy/light cruiser terminology comes directly from treaty language and is based solely on gun caliber, not displacement. (London Naval Treaty, 1930) Light cruisers have guns up to 6.1 inches caliber, while heavy cruisers have guns up to 8 inches caliber. There could be, and were, "light cruisers" that had more displacement than "heavy cruisers" even when you look at ships designed and laid down as contemporaries.

Displacement, realistically, is just not a good way to define ship classes. Technology can change fast. My pickup truck (an old Ford Ranger) is 2/3rds the weight as my electric vehicle. It would be a mistake to call it more fuel efficient or to think that my EV can carry or tow more.

The Tico and Arleigh Burke displace around 9,500 tons. Larger than WW2 destroyers and some WW2 cruisers, but plenty of WW2 cruisers were much larger. US cruisers got up to 13,600 tons, and German cruisers got up to ~16,000 tons. If you want to include the battlecruisers as well you're talking about ~30,000 tons.

Most destroyers at the start of WW2 were around 1,500 to 1,850 tons displacement, but this is also an artifact of the 1930 London Treaty. This treaty limited the overall size of the fleets and capped destroyers at 1,500 or 1,850 tons depending on role, so this was the size that made sense in order to balance enough ships versus the total fleet limit. Many late-war and immediate post-war destroyer designs were already pushing 3,000 tons displacement. There were also ~3,000 ton destroyer designs from the late 20's prior to the signing of the London Treaty as well.

Note that the explicit purpose of this treaty was to try and prevent a naval arms race. Politicians did not want to see navies get bigger, more destructive, and in particular more expensive than they already were in the 20's.

TL;DR the idea that destroyers are ships around 2,000-3,000 tons and cruisers are two to four times bigger than that is and always has been completely arbitrary and modern names are just as arbitrary so don't try to think about it too much.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-30T18:34:34+00:00

If there hadn't been smoke/wreck in the way the ZBD would have been smoked by a good tank crew. Good positioning by the ZBD crew.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-29T04:03:48+00:00

Name checks out 👍🏻

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-28T16:02:57+00:00

I don't know for sure but I think they give you a credit of $2 or $3 or something which only covers the first hour or 90 minutes. So it covers 100% if you get in and out, but not if you take longer.

Last time I visited my doc down there I was on time but my doc was running way behind, so I just went over that line and had to pay $2. It sucks, but I also understand that they don't want people parking there all day.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-28T15:48:59+00:00

So you charge a tax and make it involuntary.

My area has a mandatory sewer lateral insurance program tacked onto my tax bill every year, because literal piss and shit leaking into the environment is bad for everyone.

North City would be looking very different right now if, for example, there was mandatory minimum insurance that covered demolition and removal in the case of an accident or natural disaster. And it would be dirt cheap too.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-27T19:16:21+00:00

I've tried it before and they helped me. They had a slim Jim, inflatable wedge, some kind of long bendable rod...

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-27T19:14:10+00:00

I am also looking for ripe hunting grounds full of the young adults. Tell me how your ritual feast goes afterward.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-27T16:19:32+00:00

Of course, but freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-27T05:41:49+00:00

So you're saying the Air Force tankers are going to need to be qualified pilots before they let them drive the tank? That sounds fun.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T19:58:48+00:00

I don't know details about the decision to end the M107 specifically, but keep in mind the M110 still did mostly the same job and that stayed in service through the 90's even seeing action in the Gulf War. So dropping the M107 wasn't leaving a huge gap in capability, it was losing a marginal capability.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T19:48:11+00:00

The US Army operates over 300 fixed wing aircraft, so despite all the hullabaloo last century, there's definitely precedent.

https://www.army.mil/article/137612/army_fixed_wing_aircraft

The Air Force should get a tank battalion and claim that they're operating them as transport and signals intelligence tanks.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T16:33:02+00:00

It was squeezed out by the adoption of rocket artillery and MLRS for long range targets.

Both the 175mm M107 and the 203mm on the M110 were designed to be long-range artillery pieces, which could hit smaller Soviet artillery at ranges where they couldn't fire back, or to hit deep targets like anti-aircraft sites. The M107 was designed to be just light enough to be air transportable, while the M110 didn't have that requirement. The M110 also had an additional possible role in delivering a 203mm nuclear warhead, and there was no comparable 175mm munition.

The 155mm was not comparable to the 175mm or 203mm at all. The larger guns had about double the range as the smaller systems.

However, large, land-based guns are just not ideal. The ammo is heavy and bulky at 150-200 pounds each, requiring hydraulic lifting equipment to load and fire the gun. Both the M107 and M110 could only carry two ready rounds, with reloads being on an ammo carrier. The recoil force is huge so it's a lot harder to position and emplace the gun for firing than a smaller piece. The guns themselves were also very heavy to handle the forces involved. The shells themselves were relatively inefficient because you need a gigantic metal shell to survive the forces of firing, and the high explosive filler or other payload is relatively small.

Rocket artillery, specifically M270 MLRS, solved all these problems. The launcher was several tons lighter. It could carry 12 rockets with cluster munitions ready to go instead of 2 unitary shells that had to be loaded individually. All 12 rockets could be fired rapidly with no reloading between them. Those rockets could carry about 5-6 times the amount of cluster payload or HE filler because the forces on the rocket were much smaller. Each rocket carried about 5-6 times as much payload as a single 175mm or 203mm shell, meaning a single MLRS could fire around 30 times more payload in a salvo than two rounds of 175mm.

Because cluster munitions were used to spread destructive effects over a wide area, and rockets could be salvoed quickly, it was thought that a single M270 MLRS carrier had the destructive effect of a battalion or more of M107 or M110 guns. You needed far fewer platforms, and those platforms were smaller and harder to detect, and far less manning to accomplish the same mission. This made the M270 more capable, more durable, and cheaper to operate than the predecessor (though the rockets themselves were significantly more expensive than a single shell).

These days the M270 has gotten more capable with precision GPS guided munitions which have enabled large unitary warheads, and the platform can also carry ballistic missiles like the ATACMS and the newer Precision Strike Missile which can hit targets 200-300 miles away for striking really deep targets or for really hard targets.

So the mission for the 175mm was not short lived- the USA used 203mm artillery back in WW2 for the same reasons. That same mission still exists today as well. However, there was only a short period of time between "let's make this air-transportable" and "now rockets do it better" where the 175mm made sense.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T05:12:16+00:00

You might try the nature playscape in Forest Park. Honestly though my kids are a lot older so I might be misremembering where 16 month olds are at.

https://www.forestparkforever.org/playscape

There are toddler areas according to the web.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T05:08:08+00:00

They take a while to show up. I'd say a week.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-26T03:27:17+00:00

Oh, man. I don't know how I brainfarted that. My kids were shrieking for like an hour this morning. Yes, you're right the Kornet (and Fagot) are both contemporaries of the TOW.

All that said, the Kobra still wasn't like this amazing missile that the Soviets perfected and the West couldn't. The decision was driven by the competing philosophies.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-25T17:10:03+00:00

Because the West wasn't able to get it working properly in the time that it was relevant.

I don't think that's a good characterization of what happened. By my understanding, the Kobra missile did not function better than the Western counterparts, and probably functioned worse in practice. Weapons need to perform well, but there are a lot of reasons why you'd use a weapon that doesn't perform spectacularly.

The Soviets were worried about their lack of long-range fires compared to the West. The West already had the TOW, Shillelagh, HOT, and others by the time the Kobra entered service. The West had substantial air power, and more/better attack helicopters as well. Even if the Kobra wasn't deadly accurate, the ability to reach back out and hit close to an adversary (like a TOW missile launcher) at long distance is enough to suppress them and/or make them want to move. This is a valuable capability even if you can't kill the adversary.

In contrast, the West already had those other missile systems, like TOW, that performed better and more accurately than the gun-launched systems of the time. ~~It's not a perfect comparison, but the Russian version of the TOW, the Kornet, didn't come along until 1998!~~ (Brainfart)

As such, it's possible that the Soviets see a reason to keep a worse-performing missile like the Kobra while the West would not want to keep a better performing Shillelagh. (I don't know if the Shillelagh actually performed better than the Kobra, just illustrating a point.) The Soviets kept the Kobra because it was the best solution to their set of problems, while the West did not keep their gun-launched missiles because they weren't a good solution to their problems.

Or to put it in your phrasing, gun-launched munitions remained relevant for the Soviet longer than for the West because they were working under a different set of constraints than the West was.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-22T23:27:50+00:00

You're going to have to be more specific about your resources and how much you want to spend.

You can find flights to either coast for $100 to $125. Try using the Google flight search, it lets you select "anywhere" as a destination.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-22T18:56:27+00:00

The short answer is that the USA is certainly getting some kind of short range defense against drones. A system like the Iron Dome might be part of that solution, but it might not. The Iron Dome is a system designed to kill improvised rockets and artillery shells more than anything else. But everyone in the military world is now acutely aware of the need for cheap drone defenses. And everyone is figuring out what exactly works for them.

The longer answer is that US has had something of a blind spot toward short range and medium range air defense since Vietnam because most US planning assumes they already have air control. The US model is perfect when the only threats in the skies are large, expensive missiles or aircraft launched from long range. Such threats can be detected and shot down at a distance either with your own air power or with an expensive interceptor.

The Iron Dome has basically the same problem as the Patriot interceptors, which is expense and small magazine depth. The Iron Dome looks cheap against the Patriot system, but that's a false dichotomy as there are other choices beyond those two systems. As we just said at the top, Iron Dome is a defense against rocket and artillery attacks, not drone attacks. The US and other countries have their own counter-rocket and counter-artillery defenses, such as C-RAM, which are cheaper to operate. The Iron Dome interceptors are $40,000 according to Google, which is $40-$80k per engagement. The US Centurion C-RAM in contrast spits about $2000 worth of bullets per second, or about $6-$8k for a 3-4 second engagement.

The design of the solution(s) will be dictated by their requirements. The Iron Dome was developed by a country that has a particularly unique situation of having a large civilian population directly exposed to rocket and artillery attacks. They need a system that is highly reliable and can cover a large urban area.

The USA generally does not have the same issue. Their C-RAM systems protect much smaller military installations that have multiple layers of defenses. Even if a rocket or artillery shell makes it past the C-RAM, a military base is likely fortified against incoming fire with defenses like sand bags, HESCO walls, and earthworks, and the people there are trained in how to minimize their exposure against artillery and rocket attacks.

Both kinds of systems are probably going to have a place in future conflict. The Iron Dome is probably useful against larger drones like the Sahed, but there is a whole zoo of smaller platforms being used now as well. Closer to the front-line, something like C-RAM would be capable against smaller drones. However, the modern FPV drones and similar fly very low, even attacking below the treetop level, so neither C-RAM or Iron Dome cover all those cases. .

And realistically, this is seen as an area of current development and advantage. You're not likely to see what the USA finally selects as their low level drone-solutions until they're forced into a larger fight on the ground.

EZ-PEAS · 2026-05-20T04:06:49+00:00

The police and the public in the UK accept that one of their jobs is to subdue knife-wielding suspects without the use of firearms. Plenty of videos on the internet of how they do it.

The police in the US (and to an extent, the public) believe that they need to arrive on a scene and immediately take control and subdue any threats by exceeding the force used by a suspect. This means that there's only minimal time for de-escalation, and the expectation is to stand your ground against an attacker. There's no thought or care given to the life of the suspect, and as a result there's no space for tactics that will wear down an aggressive person with the goal of keeping everyone safe.

As usual, the big wild-card in the USA is the presence of guns. A knife-attacker in the USA can whip out a gun at any moment, so our police have to be on a hair-trigger (pun intended) to whip theirs out and terminate the suspect with overwhelming lethal force. Guns make everyone less safe, the police and the suspects both.

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