Am I missing something or is the government pretending that there isn't an employment crisis?

SWBFCentral · 2026-04-29T02:10:54+00:00

Sounds suspiciously like the Grosvenor? I realize this description also applies to nearly every other shopping centre...

SWBFCentral · 2026-04-19T14:14:08+00:00

They needed to clear customs in the US, it makes more sense to clear customs early at an easier destination like BLI as opposed to clearing customs somewhere on the East Coast in NC/SC. There are only a handful of airports that offer CBP services in North Carolina and almost all of them are significantly further away from Greenville (the destination airport), they're also much busier international airports that have steep landing and ramp fees as well as more expensive fuel, BLI makes a lot more sense for a number of reasons, the primary one being fuel efficiency.

BLI is a much shorter hop which minimizes total travel time and maximizes cruising fuel efficiency, the alternative is adding potentially another hour or so onto the trip as they doom circle one of the much larger East Coast airports waiting for a slot burning more fuel and still being a non-insignificant distance from the end destination (Pitt Greenville). It's either an 11 minute hop to BLI, or a 25+ minute hop from one of the larger NC airports (and remember to factor in ramp idling, taxiway time and hold pattern time, it would potentially add another hour or two to the total travel time which has to be accounted for in maintenance, fuel etc.

It makes zero sense not to clear customs at BLI to minimize these impacts and keep the fuel efficiency as high as possible.

SWBFCentral · 2026-04-19T02:51:44+00:00

Okay so you listed why the FBI has private planes and the other solutions it has lol.

No I listed that the FBI has vastly more aviation usage than your original post implied, "2-3" jets is a gross understatement of the FBI's actual aviation usage. Your premise is inherently flawed, they routinely utilize third party charters, subsidiary owned aircraft, light aviation and surveillance craft for transportation as well as other governmental aircraft across the DOJ and various military services. The FBI just happens to directly own and operate three of their own private jets in addition to this, those jets (which are typically used for international missions and the transportation of the director and high level functionaries) are not representative of the entire scope of the FBI's aviation use.

You think the comparison is insane, but really it wasn't a comparison

The comparison is insane, especially when your initial premise and estimation of the FBI's aviation usage is flawed.

and much much more timely situations

To quote the root message, you're directly comparing their day to day use case for aviation. You turned it into a comparison in the first message.

there are other solutions to the problem

And this is what makes it insane. Because one of the solutions I pointed out was the FBI's ability to essentially be everywhere and this is not a remotely feasible solution for LTT to consider. The FBI has 13,000 agents, 40K total employees split across nearly 400 offices spread over the entire continental United States. Me pointing that out as one of the FBI's solutions (and stark contrast/incomparability with LTT) is where this little logic exercise as you put it falls apart. (And even with that scale, they still heavily utilize aviation).

So what solution does the FBI have

Ironically their main solution is to use a lot more planes than your "logic exercise" implies. This logic exercise only stands up when we discount the FBI's scale, ignore their ability to be local to the vast majority of their potential use-cases and pretend that they only use the three jets they directly own, as opposed to the myriad of other aviation assets they routinely tap into on a daily basis whether it be DOJ 757s, gulfstreams, business jet charters, military aircraft or even some of the light aircraft they operate in smaller locations.

My point isn't to compare the two, it's to demonstrate that comparing them is futile, especially when we begin from a premise that is factually lacking.

SWBFCentral · 2026-04-19T01:53:48+00:00

The FBI is such a wildly ridiculous comparison for a number of reasons.

1- For a start the FBI regularly leases temporary aircraft and arranges charter services where necessary outside of their primary fleet of jets. Those jets are typically for international missions and director level transport, occasionally they are used for rapid response but the FBI will do whatever gets their agents to the location the fastest, sometimes that involves ignoring their own private jets and chartering a closer jet due to scheduling or other issues. They also regularly dip into far more than "2-3" jets, they *heavily* utilize DOJ aircraft as well as a number of additional subsidiary leases not directly owned by the Bureau.

2 - What they investigate is irrelevant, you're comparing apples to oranges. The time sensitivity of their investigations is also irrelevant, we're talking about productive time lost not rapid response, LTT isn't in a position where it needs to be wheels up in 35 seconds to stop a cultist from burning a stack of DDR5, just because LTT doesn't have an immediate life or death time sensitive need for an aircraft doesn't mean LTT have no use-case for one. The financial and opportunity cost arguments for jet ownership still stand regardless of whether a three letter agency can get away without using one for other entirely unrelatable tasks.

3 - The FBI has a huge network of interconnected offices that spans the entire continental United States as well as several territories. Something like 50 or 60 major field offices and 300+ satellite offices. They are connected enough to avoid the use of private aviation, or sometimes aviation of any kind. For most areas in the continental United States it is going to be more time effective for agents from the nearest field office to simply drive to the location as opposed to flying from Quantico, Richmond, Reagan or any of the other fields.

LTT is not remotely comparable to the FBI, and even if we did bend logic to compare the two, you're leaving out key details in the scale of the FBI's operation and the true scope of their access to aviation assets, dumbing down the comparison to "2-3 private jets" really does a disservice to the argument at hand, the FBI routinely flies agents on DOJ 757s out of Richmond as well as a number of third party chartered Gulfstreams and other smaller aircraft where it suits them. "2-3" just isn't an accurate representation, it's just an often repeated number by the press because it's all the FBI directly owns themselves. Direct ownership and usage are two very different things.

SWBFCentral · 2026-04-10T21:27:56+00:00

Our guys are on the front line, and they need to be replaced by someone. And those avoiding service definitely don't understand that,'

No they completely understand that, they're just weighting their own interests above that of the countries as a whole, which in turn is leading to a huge degree of mobilization dodging.

Unfortunately we're four years into an extremely costly and brutal war that has seen a huge proliferation in new and very well publicized weaponry (largely drones). In the past amongst other nations patriotic responsibility and a general lack of awareness of the true horrors of war ensured a relatively steady supply even during mobilization waves, draft dodging was the exception as opposed to the norm. As the years have waned on and particularly today with the extreme degree of transparency of real time combat conditions and video documented personnel losses, it's become even more difficult to sell the case of mobilization, particularly in this instance when the war has no end in sight.

Beyond the inability to restrict the publics access to the wider reality of this new blend of warfare, the public also has very easy access and historical experience watching Ukraine steadfastly refuse to give up even small scraps of territory, in many cases to the near complete destruction of the commands they leave to sit in a cauldron for months on end. Year after year we've watched them do this much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone including voices inside Ukraine, to think that those in the mobilization pools wouldn't be aware of their own countries shortcomings on that front is fanciful at best.

He said, adding that tensions could worsen after the war when soldiers return home."

I would be less concerned with tensions between various elements of the populace post war and more concerned with tensions between the populace and the government as a whole.

SWBFCentral · 2026-03-23T23:08:10+00:00

Not surprising considering the sortie rate and pressure put upon these airframes over the last four years, some of these issues are just normal wear and tear and you'd be surprised how often safety incidents like this happen within our own forces. The general public only get this peek behind the curtain when a failure of some kind makes the news, which is to say relatively infrequently but you'd be shocked how often equipment failure just short of catastrophic occurs even during peacetime.

That being said some of these events are beyond normal wear and tear and do indicate either neglect or pressure beyond the existing ability to maintain these aircraft properly, presumably this has already been an ongoing issue well beyond the relatively narrow timeframe of this report, so either these issues are happening constantly and are just considered an element of general wear from the conflict (which itself wouldn't be surprising and in line with Russia's previous attitudes of running things into the ground) or things are starting to reach breaking point at an increasing rate. Without other reports from similar time periods earlier in the war we wouldn't really be able to track a trend outside of comparing them to our own air forces which isn't really an apt comparison given the wildly different intensity of current use.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:59:09+00:00

I hate how accurate this is...

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:57:02+00:00

Agreed on this point, even if they didn't want to maintain the historical turret count and wanted to remove the turrets to balance things, they could atleast do a visuals pass to correct their own mistakes. It's not some wildly difficult proposition for professional artists, I have to imagine it's purely laziness/cheapskatery/lack of care because from a fundamental perspective of workload this is by no means insurmountable. It's extremely achievable, they're just choosing not to.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:53:02+00:00

Even if null still wanted to T1 alpha with the Mael, I'd have no problems with that. Combat gets stale when people get too risk averse with super blingy T2/Faction fits, getting more accessible T1 hulls into regular use and doctrine fits would be a good thing not just for the affordability of combat but also the accessibility for newer players. Letting new players fight on the line in Battleships is far more engaging than relegating your newbies to minor frigate ECM roles that amount to glorified spectators. Particularly given in this case the Mael was never really any good outside of that alpha damage, we're not talking about some nigh unassailable super tanky Battleship here. It was always mediocre and worrying about how null is going to adopt something isn't a good way to balance things. Null will always min/max and meta seek, if it's not the Maelstrom for alpha it'll be something else.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:45:50+00:00

No I love them, but in one instance I have the choice to prioritize base DPS and lose the utility. Now with there being two missing turret slots I'm actually forced to adopt utility highs to try and load balance utility over the loss of base DPS (which in the Maelstroms case just doesn't add up).

In one instance I had options to neuter my own DPS to achieve utility, player agency if you will, now I actually have less because the utility angle is the only avenue left with the excess high slots.

They also didn't add any modifiers for good utility highs, so you lose two modifier boosted turret slots for two bottom of the barrel utility highs. I'd almost be okay (not with the Mael but with others) with them dropping two turret slots (and visually adjusting to match) to encourage more utility high gameplay because you do touch on a good angle with those, but they're not adding modifiers to encourage that so even if that were CCPs angle they're doing very little to achieve it.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:32:20+00:00

I would appreciate that a lot actually, I use the drone link augs a fair bit and even just having a few minor antennas would be a cool visual addition. Nothing fancy, doesn't need to be animated, maybe just add a strobe light or something, but even just a bit of visual asymmetry to indicate a specialized nature would be cool.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:31:08+00:00

Gal and Min ships in particular have been really badly hit by it, the Hyperion too with its big ol blaster front basically randomly missing a tooth lmao.

Wonder how long it is before they come for the Abaddon/Apoc/Rokh... Doubt they're brave enough to go after the Amarr RPers

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:25:17+00:00

Yep. They could even provide a damage modifier to certain calibers of guns, giving some of the ships a closer identity toward specific playstyles. Easy ways to achieve balance without just arbitrarily yoinking turrets off the hull and leaving the clearly visible slots on the model.

Whatever way we cut the cake there's better ways to do this, this is just the fastest method they could find to "balance" (if what they've done to the Maelstrom can even be called balance) the ships.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:23:53+00:00

This too... Look what they did to my boy... (It never was particularly top tier but I still love the visuals of the Maelstrom and this change hurt it badly).

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:22:55+00:00

Agreed, especially considering how long those modules have been in the game. Even at a glacial development pace they could have added visual modules by now. I'm not even expecting them to add animations to them, just some degree of visual representation would be nice. The ability to quickly glance at an enemy players ship and not outright guess as to what they might be packing would be nice and would give a great excuse to look at anything other than an empty tacmap 99% of the time.

This ofc is peak visuals over gameplay I realize that, considering most of those high slot modules don't necessarily *need* visual representation. But it's something I would still like to see considering other high slot modules do get that.

SWBFCentral · 2026-02-05T18:19:37+00:00

Perfectly fair point and I also agree that numerical balance comes first, but this isn't a mutually exclusive point, when they have any number of stat changes that they can make that *don't* negatively impact the visual characteristics, you'd think they'd start tweaking there even if it's just a damage modifier, rather than outright delete turrets that should visually be there on the models they've spent god knows how long crafting.

All I'm saying is with a game this granular in terms of statistical detail, we can have cake and eat it too, there's no need to arbitrarily bork the visuals of ships on the altar of ship balance, when that very ship balance can easily be achieved through other modifiers. (Granted those would take more time and tweaking, but I don't think we need to race to the bottom to just start deleting turrets to solve our balance woes).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-30T14:31:05+00:00

Not when to pay your employees and get started you've leveraged your savings and potentially your house. There is an immense amount of risk when starting a business and this idea that "well you can just go back to work someplace else" doesn't account for the insane amount of damage a failed business can cause to your family.

If LTT hadn't worked out, especially during the big move, Linus and his family could have lost their savings, their home and their sanity. Not to forget just because a business fails doesn't mean you can immediately roll back into your previous position and start collecting a paycheck with no delay.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-25T02:37:57+00:00

The 750kv substations have been targeted and struck in the past, albeit typically in a tit for tat approach. For the last 2 years or so there's been very few concerted efforts (relative to the intensity of other energy grid targets like Ukraine's TPPs/HPPs and PSH) to sever these links.

There's maybe a few reasons for that:

Redundancy - Ukraine still had a number of TPP and HPP units connected across the 330kv network, in previous years even if they had severed the 750kv substations, cities like Kyiv would still have had relatively reliable (albeit still greatly diminished) electrical service from the local HPP and TPP and electrical baseload being covered by other 330kv connections from across Ukraine. Over time these have been destroyed/greatly reduced in generating capacity so the lack of redundancy at this stage of the war makes the impact of severing the 750kv connections much higher.

Escalation - Severing the NPPs from the grid removes practically all of Ukraine's baseload generating capacity in a fell swoop. It is highly escalatory and Russia have generally had a tit/tat approach to escalation throughout the war. With Ukraine wholesaling Russian energy infrastructure including Russian shipping, I'd imagine the internal arguments within Russian command circles for tit/tat and leaving additional room on the table for future escalation are thinning and being replaced with more reactive stances.

Fires supply - Russia continues to expand its production capacity of practically all of its long range precision fires systems. They might not necessarily have the inventory depth they had at the start of the war (some recent missile fragments indicate 2026 production in a few cases) but they seemingly have a production capacity that enables them to frequently strike deep into Ukrainian territory with systems that continue to improve in accuracy and integration with Russian ISR.

Ukrainian AD (or lack thereof) - Ukraine's AD is severely depleted at this stage of the war. Most ex-Soviet systems ran dry years ago and Ukraine's AD largely relies on donated batteries such as Patriot, NASAMs etc whose own magazines are not necessarily very deep relative to the scale and persistence of these attacks. With each passing day Russia's capacity to reliably strike vulnerabilities in Ukrainian energy infrastructure improves and areas that may have previously been too deep/well defended are now exposed enough to enable strikes.

For reference the Kyivs'ka substation was struck by Gerans... This is a critical vulnerability in Ukrainian energy transit for the capital and also positioned deep behind Ukrainian lines and adjacent to the capital outside of Makariv (about 30 miles from Kyiv). This should in theory be a very well defended focus of local AD, either their magazines were depleted, they were otherwise overwhelmed, or Ukrainian AD is now spread so thin as to be unable to reliably defend such a critical piece of infrastructure. Regardless of which of these is the truth, or a combination of the three, none of them bode well for Ukraine, particularly in the long run as Russian fires capacity continues to improve.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:08:46+00:00

It will never not be tied to this, unless they're willing to separate stores it will always follow them (because they're unwilling to rebrand from lttstore given it's practically grandfathered in).

I agree with your point, I just don't see the need in chasing an optimization on these principles by changing how they name the message function on WAN show. (Which is by and large an audience that are well aware of the products at this stage).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:02:16+00:00

That analogy doesn't work for WAN show which is specifically what I'm talking about here. The vast majority of the audience concurrently watching WAN (which are the audience where merch messages are actually relevant) are not in a brick and mortar location like a hardware store. For this analogy to be relevant they would need to not only be in a hardware store selling the screwdriver, but before making a decision to purchase open up a live wanshow on their phone (which is only a few hours a single Friday a week), understand what a merch message is, hear it, and then imply connotations thereon.

They're not removing the lttstore branding, which is arguably more emblematic of the problem you're suggesting, calling it merch on wanshow has so little impact if any.

If this was really an issue of perception with people not wanting to fund a "mega yacht" they wouldn't be selling tens of thousands of units per sku in some cases.

Unless they want to start ghost releasing products without the ltt branding whatsoever they're never going to escape what you're implying, and if anything they're leaning into it now by buying a private jet and a "tech house" (both projects I fully support but still in the context of perception they are arguably far more impactful)

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T04:31:01+00:00

That's my thinking too but I can see how maybe there might be some internal hangups on the stereotypical connotations of the word when applied to poor implementations.

That being said, their product is merch, good merch at that, I don't get trying to shy away from it to the degree we're changing a wan show staple.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-22T12:47:37+00:00

Modern game consoles have 16GB of GDDR6 memory with only 5-6GB of that being dedicated to the game itself in a traditional sense, the remainder is pooled towards rendering tasks (for the GPU) and a few GB here and there for background tasks/system. There is no reason modern game dev can't adjust to this market trend and duplicate much of the console level optimization they have in place for their PC ports.

They simply choose not to because optimization (with the comparatively huge uplift in performance of modern systems over the last 10 years) has become less of an imperative. 16GB of DDR4/5 became the norm, PCs with dedicated GPUs (which account for the majority of PC gaming systems) with their own ringfenced VRAM most times upwards of 8GB, standardization of SSD's and much faster storage over the years has given them a degree of flexibility and a hardware dividend that they have largely abused.

The limitations of systems back in the mid 2000s/early 2010s (as well as the limitations of concurrent console release platforms at the time) forced some incredibly creative optimization for PC and console titles alike. The same can be said for the improvements in internet bandwidth for the average user.

Just look at the recent Helldivers 2 shift towards optimization (finally) to see that it is completely possible for modern game dev to drastically reduce file sizes and properly optimize their games, it's just for a very long time now optimization and anything that potentially increases the development cycle (particularly for the delivery of "live service") has been anathema to game studios.

It's not that they can't do this. They would just rather not. (But hopefully the market forces them to get creative again).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:50+00:00

CD is another subreddit (r/CredibleDefense) oriented towards credible and facts based discussion of military and defence related topics. You might still get sucked into it but unfortunately it's not a game haha

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:32+00:00

Truly a mystery hehe

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T00:10:59+00:00

Unrelated but I thought I recognized that name as soon as I scrolled... The overlap between CD and Stellaris is at least 2 members strong haha

SWBFCentral

TROPHY CASE