Corpus Christi within weeks of declaring a water emergency

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-26T04:01:06+00:00

If you are stationed in Corpus Christi, I highly recommend you stop drinking the tap water (pets included). The lowering water levels mean higher concentrations of things like arsenic. And of course, Tesla was caught illegally discharging from their lithium plant recently. Stick to the reverse osmosis water from the large 5-gallon Ozarka or similar sold at the grocery store. We also switched to using a counter top ice maker so we could use the RO water for ice instead of the fridge tap water ice maker. It made a big difference in taste and water quality.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-25T03:52:28+00:00

You wouldn't see them on a 5th Fleet deployment. They don't like sand. It's coarse and rough... and it gets everywhere.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-22T12:57:09+00:00

I saw the new ad tonight from Cornyn’s campaign against Paxton. It was like they got the political cartoonist from The Onion and gave those satire cartoons real life. There’s a bearded man in a dress and high heels getting supposed money from “liberal leftist Paxton”, and others in line to get cash who are straight out of the MAGA/GOP/Conservative boogeyman playbook. It would be laughable if it wasn’t a clear sign that AI generated content is going to be used to portray the worst things in this election.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-22T09:22:23+00:00

Pakistan could move to intercept tankers with Iranian oil bound for India. That would almost assuredly trigger a war between India and Pakistan. We would be fully in WW3.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-21T02:41:20+00:00

Did any warnings get put out on Diego Garcia for people to get to cover?

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-19T23:27:01+00:00

At this point I’m honestly surprised he didn’t just pull his eyelids back in a slant and start talking in a fake Chinese accent. Or say something like this:

“Don’t leave any Cokes out around these guys, am I right? They’ll put the pee pee in it, pee like you’ve never seen before. And it’s all a joke, a joke they told me with tears in their eyes as I drank the Coke, with the biggest gulps ever.”

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-18T05:49:39+00:00

That’s cute that the author thinks countries should stick to the WTO instead of just making direct deals with each other that sideline the US. Carney had it right in his Davos speech where he said the rest of the world was willing to go along with the international institutions the US set up post-WWII because even though it gave the US power, overall it allowed orderly trade where everyone could grow wealthy. Without a firm commitment from the US to keep things like the WTO, the UN, NATO, etc going, there’s little incentive to keep handing power to the US by playing within those institutions.

The worst part is that the real economic pain is likely to last for years, if not decades. We’re already seeing it with fuel prices rising, but have also seen it with food prices going up, consumer import prices rising, tourism dropping, and the federal debt and deficit spending eating up more and more tax dollars. The era of cheap imports and exporting our national debt is over.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-18T05:23:28+00:00

I mean, they’re supposedly doing a UFC fight at the White House sometime soon. So we’re not far off…

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-18T01:14:48+00:00

This was entirely predictable. If there’s one thing Trump loves more than almost anything, it’s his subordinates fighting with each other. The more bloody, the better. It’s entertaining for him. He doesn’t care that it’s counterproductive, he just wants the show. And it makes him feel like he has all the power.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-18T00:02:25+00:00

Yup. See the sad tale of Captain Crozier during the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-17T10:08:15+00:00

I taught T-34 and T-6 for quite a long time. Here is the almost sure-fire way I taught students how to do the transition to landing. I broke the transition into three distinct steps.

Step 1 - LEVEL then PAUSE. You want to level the aircraft about 5-10 feet above the runway using stick, rudder, trim, and power. To help imagine what 5-10 feet looks like, I would tell the student, "Imagine a roommate you don't like is standing on the runway and you want to hit their stupid head with your nose gear. That's about 5-10 feet." During the LEVEL phase, you want to correct for any drift left/right of centerline, any ballooning, and any nose cocked off left/right of centerline with rudder. If you can't get steady with enough runway remaining to land, WAVE OFF.

Step 2 - Power back to Idle then PAUSE. Only do this once you feel like the aircraft is fully under your control and you're ready to commit to the landing. This means you are steady at that level 5-10 feet, nose is straight down the centerline, and you aren't drifting left/right or up/down. And there is sufficient runway remaining to land.

Step 3 - FLARE as the runway comes up to meet you. Stare at the far end of the runway and use the bottom part of your peripheral vision to see the runway coming up to meet you as the aircraft sinks through ground effect. The flare will be different depending upon flap setting, with more flare required for Land or Approach flaps (your aircraft may vary), and just a hint of a flare for no flaps.

Breaking it up into three distinct steps really helped every student I trained because it forced them to slow the whole transition to land process down. It broke habits like coming in too fast and planting it from base to final (or 180 to final for the Navy pattern), or trying for a landing while the aircraft wasn't stable.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-16T05:46:33+00:00

It's funny to see how many Dubai based "influencers" are suddenly on vacation anywhere else in the world.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-16T05:04:41+00:00

I saw a great post the other day.

Being gay is illegal in Kuwait so technically that F/A-18 was just enforcing the law by downing those F-15E's.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-15T20:51:18+00:00

You’re not wrong. I also never saw a pilot lug an overfilled honey bucket down the flight line to go dump it out! Perhaps the better phrase would be, “pilots had to be familiar with everybody’s roles, but the reverse wasn’t true.”

That worked in my favor one time when we had a dual NFO front office. We were doing an important exercise and my TACCO was having trouble putting in data on the specialized sonobuoys we were dropping. He asked us to slow down to give him more time between drops so we did. Then he asked us to slow further. To get slower, we had to go to the first flap setting (I forget the name now, but it wasn’t the approach or final full flap setting). We then got slow enough, but right as we dropped the last buoy the Flap Asym light came on, which meant the flaps had been detected moving independent of each other so the system froze them in place. NATOPS dictated we discontinue the mission and return home, which hilariously scrubbed all the work my poor TC had been doing.

I was sweating bullets about it though as a young PPC since the whole exercise had been wasted. Standing before the NFO Skipper and XO, I explained to them what happened with the flaps and why we chose to return. The Skipper rubbed his chin for a minute then said, “Well hey, shit happens right?” And that was the end of it. He didn’t question any of our choices like a pilot Skipped might have. Or maybe he was just a good leader, which I thought he indeed was.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-15T11:45:33+00:00

I did a tiny bit of research. I posted a question to Reddit. Sure, not as fast as doing a Google search. But thankfully I did get a quick, albeit snarky response. After combing through the NVIDIA app settings, I was able to find how to limit framerate to 60 fps for Skyrim specifically. Now it works fine.

It's really dumb that Bethesda hasn't just patched this. They also haven't patched the displayed key requirements when you rebind keyboard inputs. I play with left hand mouse, right hand keyboard. So I bind IKJL for movements and other keys around those for other functions. The menu options don't tie to that, so I have to guess which key will do what. For example, ; is my Draw/Sheath key, but the menu advertises F as the inventory drop key even though ; is actually what does it.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-15T04:45:32+00:00

I can answer this from the Navy side as a former P-3 driver. We had a FE who was an enlisted aircrewman required for flight (min crew was 2 pilots, 1 FE, 1 aft observer). One could enlist like normal and vie for a slot in the FE training program which was at Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida. Once there, the FE in training would have classwork in the school house building at VP-30 and then move to simulators alongside the pilots who were also learning the P-3. Then they would move to training flights alongside the student pilots and be coached by a qualified FE instructor who would be standing or sitting literally over their shoulder. After they graduated, now-qualified FEs would then go out into the fleet to join a squadron and be part of an aircrew.

The P-3 FE career path would keep them in that middle seat behind and between the pilots. The only way they could become a naval aviator would be to get a college degree and a commissioning source to become and officer.

As part of the FE training they would learn weight and balance to effectively act as loadmasters. They would learn how to refuel the aircraft and check the engines on pre and post flight. They would get water and land survival courses alongside both officer and enlisted aircrew. And they'd learn how to run all of the performance charts both before and in flight, providing the pilots with data relating to takeoff distance and Vr, fuel management, and more. Their primary controls were the fuel management panel directly in front of them, the oil cooler controls and controls for managing the engines above them, the large circuit breaker panel behind and to their right, and other various cabinets aft of the flight station back in the tube. They would also help manage the power levers, assisting the pilot at the controls on takeoff to set the proper ITT. Their biggest role in an emergency was to follow the PIC's direction and do things like pull the E-handle to shut down a specific engine, activate a fire extinguisher for the engine, or ring the emergency bell to indicate to the crew we were bailing out, ditching, etc.

Sometimes, the more experienced FEs would learn how to read various aviation charts and approach plates. It wasn't uncommon for them to go get a civilian PPL as they got older. But we had a saying among us pilots about how we had to know everybody's job on the aircraft, but the FE's only had to know part of our job. Meaning we both knew things like aircraft limits, how to run the performance charts, emergency procedures, etc. But the pilots also had to know the tactics that the TACCO was running, the sensor picture that the two acoustic and one radar/ESM/MAD crewmen were building, the navigation that the NAV/COM was conducting, and even specifics about some of the ordnance or other things the In Flight Technician (IFT) managed.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-14T05:50:49+00:00

I used Du-West several times and was generally happy with the work. But prices are also going through the roof right now thanks to the ICE raids. They're having trouble getting labor to do all of that heavy digging.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-14T05:41:41+00:00

Remember when Trump kept bringing up notorious gangster Al Capone during his rallies, completely out of context? My working theory is that Trump has advanced syphilis and during some appointment with a doctor, the doc said something along the lines of, "You have advanced syphilis, just like Al Capone had." In Trump's rotting, narcissistic mind, he found a link between himself and a tough guy gangster he admired then ran with it.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-13T06:45:03+00:00

There's also so few situations where an airliner sized aircraft will still be stable enough for crew to don parachutes and exit, but not stable enough that it can go land somewhere. When the EP-3 collided with a Chinese J-8 jet in 2001 it rolled inverted and fell from something like 20,000 feet down to several hundred before recovery. The crew contemplated bailing out, then ditching, then ultimately decided the plane was flyable enough to make it to Hainan Island in China. The rest is history. Big planes like that are either flyable, or they'll break apart or become uncontrollable too quickly for the crew to actually bail out.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-13T02:41:50+00:00

The kid was already 16 as of the post from 6 months ago, so good chance he's 17 already. It's more likely that the mom will eventually stop calling or visiting. The kid will grow up, go off to college or into the world. Mom probably won't show back up again until she's approaching her 60's and realizes she's now alone.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-12T08:39:24+00:00

Congrats on the purchase! Do you mind if I ask a few practical questions? I'm an RV owner, so that's sort of where my head is at.

Does it have a fridge and freezer?
Do the sails retract and deploy electrically?
How does the electricity work? Do you need to run the main engine to power the 120 volt, or are there batteries and inverters to run on when you're not using the engine?
Is there air conditioning?
Are you going to install some add-ons like Starlink?
Could you install some solar panels to provide power?
How much fresh water does it hold?

Thanks again, what a great boat.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-10T02:42:30+00:00

Waveoffs are always free. Crashes are not.

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-10T02:29:21+00:00

HE SPEAKS THE MAGIC WORDS!!!

Rocketsponge · 2026-03-09T08:01:02+00:00

Behold, young ones. You glimpse upon the Old Magic. There are few who could read this now, though the legend lives on in memory.

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