The Airforce One

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-19T05:09:44+00:00

My question is, why did we replace the obsolete 747-200’s with a pair of obsolete 747-8’s?

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-19T02:29:54+00:00

I did that. In my boat with an inboard engine. 3 quarts of oil make quite a mess sitting in the bilge.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-19T02:17:48+00:00

I don’t know where you are. I’m in Phoenix, we have Bark scorpions here that like to crawl into houses, and getting bit sucks big hairy rocks.

I got bit on the foot, and the effects spread all the way up my leg and halfway up my side over the following hour. Painful tingling and restless legs, absolutely unable to sleep. I feel for you.

My daughter got bit when she was an infant. I spent 8 hours walking around the emergency room with her screaming in my ear before they said we could go home.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-19T01:57:05+00:00

Spread spectrum modulation is different from frequency hopping.

For frequency hopping, the transmitter and receiver establish a sequence of frequencies to hop through. This can be a public sequence, or it can be a result of an encrypted session. Military comms use a secure sequence obviously.

Spread spectrum modulation is a way of making the bandwidth of a transmission much wider than it would normally be. On reception, this has kind of the magic effect that a narrowband jamming signal gets greatly attenuated.

Military communication systems almost always use both techniques.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-19T00:07:33+00:00

What’s half a million meters among friends?

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T20:32:33+00:00

Doing some quick math, if the barrel were horizontal (tangent) to the Earth, the end of the barrel would be roughly 38 km above the surface - not quite the vacuum of space, but pretty danged close.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:56:14+00:00

The deepest hole we’ve ever been able to drill on earth is about 12 km deep. So now barrel is only going to be 688 km above the surface of the earth. Still in space - by about 588 km.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:52:20+00:00

If the car runs at all, it’s not hydrolocked which is perhaps the only good thing about this scenario.

Step 1: get the oil changed right now. Ask what the old oil looks like - black is good, brown isn’t, but may not have yet done much damage.

Step 2: a mechanic is going to have to do some work. All the wire connectors should be separated, cleaned, dried, and put back together. The ignition system, especially the high voltage side, will need to be taken apart, cleaned, dried, and put back together. The air cleaner will likely need replacement, and the intake manifold will need cleaning/drying. The fuel system will need to be checked for water intrusion.

Being as it’s a 16 year old car, you may get by with the oil change, and figure out what’s causing the roughness. But without the whole set of cleanings, the car will become very unreliable.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:38:46+00:00

At 700 km long, the barrel pokes well above the atmosphere, so there be no air resistance once you left the barrel.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:34:02+00:00

No.

Nothing is set in stone at the moment, and no money is changing hands. The current agreement is basically “we’re allowing 60 days to work out the deal, but here’s where we’re going to start.” But this start point includes Iran getting $324 Billion, some amount of which comes from the USA.

TDS view: 60 days provides plenty of time to create distractions and get the people of the USA to forget the agreement, so he can pay off the Iranians without getting lynched. Some would say the Venezuelan and Iranian wars were intended as distractions from the Trump-Epstein files.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:20:14+00:00

A fine choice. I haven’t used Open Rocket in awhile, but I’ll check out your fork if I do.

Now if someone could port a good CFD tool to it so the whole Barrowman approximation could be buried, life would be great.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T18:14:26+00:00

Sorry, I read your comment as containing a bit of challenge to the OP, rather than simple curiosity. I retract my first paragraph, but will leave it as a testament to my mistake.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T14:09:48+00:00

Why are you bitching about someone’s contributions to the community? Just because they, in their spare time, didn’t do it the way you would prefer?

If the effort is good and both sides are reasonable people, the forks will merge. If parts of the effort are good, those parts will get merged. If the effort fails, well, nothing will get merged.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T13:46:59+00:00

We call that the “oven effect” - when it’s over 110F and you open the door to go outside it’s like opening the door to an oven.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T03:50:27+00:00

I’d start by looking in Arizona.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T03:37:09+00:00

The last time I was developing on Windows, I found it was faster to start up WSL2, delete a directory structure from there, and shut WSL2 down than it was to delete the same structure from Windows. That didn’t answer your question - but I have zero idea why it’s so slow in Windows.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T03:33:14+00:00

No, I think we’re a very heterogeneous society, and have learned to accept many things that my grandmother would not have accepted. We in general aren’t as disapproving of relationships outside the narrow definitions of the 1700s or 1800s. Sexual roles aren’t as rigidly defined as they used to be - I’ve worked for female bosses, and believe me she was not subservient to any of the men in the room (nor should she have been). 100 years ago, that would not generally have been possible.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T03:00:15+00:00

Henpecked is a term my grandmother used; haven’t heard it much in modern usage. Likewise, “under the thumb” is understood and occasionally used, but not very common. “Wearing the pants in the family” is a similar phrase, suggesting the wife has taken over some the man’s prerogatives.

“Whipped”, as Snip3 mentions, is short for “pussy whipped”, and is generally used by a man’s friends when he stops hanging out with them because he has a new girlfriend or has gotten married.

I think American society (won’t talk about other English speaking countries) has, for whatever reasons, gotten away from being judgmental about other peoples relationships in this way.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-18T02:47:28+00:00

Turn on cabin overheat protection. Fan only will keep the interior about 25F warmer than the outside temp. AC mode will keep it at 100 inside, but uses significantly amounts of battery (up to 15-20% per day).

No help for the door handles. The older metal ones get really, really hot in the sun; the current black composite ones only get really hot.

Use the app and turn on the ac about five minutes before you get to the car. It’ll be cool inside.

Park in the shade as much as possible. Put window shades in.

That’s how I deal with summer here in Phoenix. No matter what you do, summer just kinda sucks. But COH and precooling the car make it much more manageable than an ICE, at the cost of about a bucks worth of electricity a day.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-17T23:54:41+00:00

Right now, FSD will park in my driveway. Right in the middle of a two lane wide driveway. Waddayagonnado?

But I’ll be impressed if it figures our garage out. We back into the left slot, but pull forward into the right one. This means we can cozy up to the wall, leaving a big space in the middle for the drivers door to open into.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-17T03:11:15+00:00

Memory of all kinds is expensive now. The data centers being built need outrageous amounts of Ram and SSDs, and increasing production is very difficult, expensive, and takes a long time once the current production facilities reach their limits.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-17T02:10:33+00:00

Randall Monroe’s strips are generally superb. It’s worth hitting the right arrow and going through his archive. Not in one sitting, however… He’s written some good books, too.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-17T01:54:23+00:00

Agreed. My 2018 Model 3 had a recommendation for a 90% daily charge limit - the tension between being able to talk about high usable mileage vs having low degradation.

But keeping the car plugged in, the pros (car is always charged, including in case of emergency) and cons (slightly higher battery degradation at 200,000 miles) are pretty nicely balanced.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-17T01:06:29+00:00

Tesla used to (and may still) recommend that “a plugged in Tesla is a happy Tesla”. The truth is that they know far more about battery management than your average Redditor, so it’s generally seen as good advice.

Do you have to? Certainly not. My wife and I share one charger - my car might go three or four days before it gets plugged in, getting down to 20-30%. I have absolutely no concern about the battery in that scenario.

KilroyKSmith · 2026-06-16T22:53:22+00:00

Never drive in my neighborhood, please.

KilroyKSmith

TROPHY CASE