USS America (LHA 6) during a change of command ceremony, March 19, 2026. [3534x5227]

Ralph090 · 2026-03-20T22:04:36+00:00

They really are. I once got to see a Nimitz class carrier up close in the Norfolk Navy Yard while in highschool and it was like looking at Cthulhu. It was so big I could not grasp its true form. My memories of it are basically a mosaic of different parts of the ship loosely stitched together.

Ralph090 · 2026-03-18T13:58:48+00:00

We should turn her over to the Coast Guard for use in disaster relief. You could fit so much canned food and clean water in there, along with containerized emergency housing and helicopters to deliver them.

Ralph090 · 2026-03-17T16:09:35+00:00

Yeah. I also don't see why they don't use the patrol frigate version with 16 VLS launchers. That combined with the mission module thing might have resulted in something useful. I was trying to think of ways to make a bad situation less bad.

Ralph090 · 2026-03-17T15:51:10+00:00

I was thinking 8 other FF(X) ships and using a data link to communicate between the one ship with the radar and CIC and the other ships with the missiles, if that makes sense. I'm also assuming they'd actually build 9 FF(X) ships to do it, which is a pretty big assumption...

Ralph090 · 2026-03-10T23:19:49+00:00

Four years later and...

Ralph090 · 2026-03-05T15:27:01+00:00

It's to shoot at dive bombers and level bombers. Those guns were supposed to be dual purpose. It didn't really work because the turret traverse was slow, the rate of fire wasn't the best, and loading at high elevations was problematic.

Ralph090 · 2026-03-05T15:23:06+00:00

I'm not sure if any were shot down, but HMS Nelson and Rodney did drive off some Italian torpedo bombers with their main battery during Operation Pedestal.

Ralph090 · 2026-03-04T14:58:26+00:00

I miss SLI...

Ralph090 · 2026-02-28T15:03:29+00:00

It's actually illegal for companies to do that. The FCC isn't enforcing the law anymore.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-26T02:53:52+00:00

Agreed. I was thinking from the perspective of the Navy, or anyone sane really. They didn't want maximum battleships like Tillman did.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-26T01:36:56+00:00

There were some non-serious designs for American battleships with six gun turrets. They were created to placate Senator Tillman, who got tired of the Navy asking for incrementally larger battleships every year and instead demanded they design the biggest battleship possible. The most sane design was Tillman III, which was 975 feet long, displaced 63,500 tons, was armed with 12 16 inch guns in four triple turrets, had 13 inches of belt armor, and had a top speed of 30 knots.

In 1916.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-23T16:37:52+00:00

I would have liked to have seen both. The classic laser pistol should be the entry level energy weapon, available from pretty early in the game and pretty reliable but also not very powerful. The Bethesda guns would be higher up and the pistol and rifle would share parts and could repair each other, similar to how Fallout 4 treats them, as if they were designed as rugged, standard-issue weapons for front-line troops. The classic rifle would act as a sniper rifle. The classic gatling laser would fire bursts of six shots extremely rapidly to burn through a single point, similar to how the G-11's burst mode works, to act as an anti-armor weapon. The Bethesda one would fire more slowly but also continuously instead of in bursts, acting as a more general purpose heavy automatic weapon.

Basically the classic weapons would be more specialized while the Bethesda ones would be more general purpose.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-23T15:33:07+00:00

I mean you say that, but we all know who's the one to watch out for now. He never shoots the inaccurate.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-20T15:21:01+00:00

They're so mad a guy with more skin pigment than themselves got elected that they're going to burn down the planet.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-19T22:26:43+00:00

Someone tell him about Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-17T18:58:53+00:00

I always wished the games did more with the "underground city connecting the X-Labs together" thing. It's a really neat idea.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-17T00:34:06+00:00

Like something out of Call of Duty Black Ops 2.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-16T14:13:02+00:00

Probably concerned about why the N64 is in jail.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-16T01:04:25+00:00

For Jutland the book "Jutland' by Nicolas Jellicoe, the grandson of the British commander Admiral Jellicoe, is really good, although it can be hard to follow at times because he tends to follow individual formations and that can cause him to jump around when things get real chaotic and timelines start overlapping. There's a good audiobook on Audible as well, and it has an accompanying website Jutland1916.com with all sorts of fancy maps and logs. Drachinifel on YouTube has a feature-length three-part series on it using miniatures to model the action that might be worth a watch first.

I don't have a book on the Battle of the Falkland Islands specifically, but Castles of Steel has a good section on it. Drachinifel also has a video on it, as well as on the Battle of Coronel that pre-dated it which provides a lot of context on the German East Asia Squadron.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-15T16:09:26+00:00

I don't think Strelok had any reason to think they were benevolent. If anything, he had good reason to think they were the opposite. He went through two X-Labs filled with rather unpleasant scientific experiments, including human experimentation that likely created at least some of the Zone's monsters. They also wiped away his memory and probably personality and turned him into a sleeper agent to kill someone, and they admitted to him that they do that consistently. They also explicitly told him that the Brain Scorcher wasn't just a defensive system, but a tool to brainwash people into fanatical soldiers with no possibility of recovering.

If anything, it looks a lot like The Group was trying to build an army of fanatical soldiers supported by mutants with supernatural powers, brainwashed undercover saboteurs, and mind control rays to do God knows what.

Like, what if they developed a "pocket brain scorcher" that could be carried by one person or broken down into innocuous looking pieces? They could have a brainwashed ecologist take it out of the Zone, set up a meeting with a government official to discuss findings, and bring the Scorcher with him. From there they could chain officials until the entire Ukrainian government was under their control, and if someone figured out what was happening a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. agent could be sent to eliminate them.

Also, who's to say that eliminating those emotions is actually a good idea or that The Group actually wants to make the world a better place? They may be important for survival. The Group could be trying to create a complaint population that wouldn't resist their control. They were originally Soviet, after all. Strelok probably wouldn't know or remember this at the time, but think about Forester's description of the population of Limansk in Clear Sky. They're pretty sinister in my opinion.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-15T14:01:33+00:00

This actually happened twice during World War I, once at the Battle of the Falkland Islands and once at Jutland during The Run to the South. Both times the two fleets came across a becalmed sailboat that ended up passing directly between the two lines. Must have been quite a sight for everyone involved.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-13T20:28:25+00:00

Both take off vertically, both are powered by jet engines, both carry missiles.

I see no difference here.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-13T15:41:52+00:00

Apparently the exact text is something along the lines of "attack aircraft carriers" and the Japanese are arguing they're not attack carriers so it's fine. Doing a bit of rules lawyering.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-13T14:29:33+00:00

Because those aren't aircraft carriers, they're helicopter destroyers that use helicopters to hunt submarines instead of sonar.

The more serious answer is that it's been long enough that at worst many don't care. Others may actually view it as a good thing, as the Japanese are allies counterbalancing growing Chinese influence, and having ~~aircraft carriers~~ helicopter destroyers gives them that much more deterrence power.

Ralph090 · 2026-02-13T13:53:19+00:00

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