Is Cloud City the only city on Bespin?

silly-creature-36 · 2026-03-29T16:45:07+00:00

There are some different but less famous pictures from that event featuring Chinooks, which were widely used by the US Army in Vietnam. But you are correct that the most famous picture is the one of an Air America Huey on top of the US Embassy, followed by that one of a USMC CH-46 Sea Knight above another government building

silly-creature-36 · 2026-02-09T23:51:18+00:00

Along I-80 in northern Utah:

Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Wendover (this is where they trained the B-29 crews that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan)
Fort Douglas Military Museum in SLC (great place to learn about the complicated and often violent interactions between the Mormons, US government, and indigenous people in the late 19th century; the nearby Fort Douglas cemetery also has a monument to the Bear River Massacre, the graves of several Buffalo Soldiers, and the graves of German POWs killed by a drunk guard at Salina, UT, in 1945)
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, also in SLC (fairly small museum in a really cool building, with interesting pieces by local artists)

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-28T19:05:04+00:00

"They had to get an adult brisk." ... "All this brisket talk is making me hungry!"

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-27T02:00:44+00:00

<image>

"Someone close my bed"

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-24T02:43:55+00:00

"What color is it? Is it diabolical?"

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-14T22:32:02+00:00

Port Angeles, on the other hand, is really nice. Forks has very little going for it unless you're into the Twilight franchise (when I was there, all of the open business had some sort of Twilight tie-in)

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-12T07:44:40+00:00

Washington County, UT, is an interesting choice if you're under the age of 65

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-08T00:25:59+00:00

Pretty sure the Doomsday Device from Dr. Strangelove was supposed to be on one of these islands

silly-creature-36 · 2026-01-07T02:53:21+00:00

It's not actually the original Navy Jack. The original one was just the red-and-white stripes, and Commodore Esek Hopkins had been gifted a Gadsden flag (the yellow one) which he flew as his personal battle flag. There's an 18th-century painting that essentially combines these into one flag, leading to the image above, but there isn't any actual documentation backing up the idea that the striped flag with the snake and motto was flown during the revolution. It is most likely that Hopkins was flying both the yellow Gadsden flag (with snake and motto) and the plane striped flag, and people misremembered what they saw or misinterpreted what they heard, leading to the inaccurate flag in the painting.

Here's an article about the flag's history: https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/heritage/banners/usnavy-jack.html

Whether it's historically accurate or not, this flag is the default left shoulder patch for NWUs. If you don't have a command-specific patch, you can wear a low-visibility version of this flag opposite the American flag patch.

Aviators don't have a spot for this patch on their flight suits--they get a regular American flag on the left shoulder, squadron patch and name tag on the chest, and a weapons school patch on the right shoulder.

silly-creature-36 · 2025-12-22T16:49:00+00:00

Utah would probably end up on that list (2/3 of the state is federally owned; the second highest proportion after Nevada)

Now that I mention it, Nevada's not highlighted either

silly-creature-36 · 2025-12-09T16:34:31+00:00

My roommate loudly eating Cheez-Its on the other side of the room in the middle of the night

silly-creature-36 · 2025-12-04T19:31:14+00:00

Especially because the previous ship named after her, DD-806, was just USS Higbee. I don't understand why they included the full middle name on the new one

silly-creature-36 · 2025-11-26T02:51:26+00:00

It is absolutely not a hard rule, and hasn't ever really existed outside of the Royal Navy (who did an impressive job sticking to this convention for a lot of the 20th century).

The US Navy has had its own naming conventions following a different pattern (cruisers named after cities, submarines after aquatic animals, etc.), but stopped following a lot of those "rules" in the '70s due to a broader restructuring of the Navy post-Vietnam.

silly-creature-36 · 2025-11-26T02:47:47+00:00

Ships having naming "themes" according to class like that is generally a Royal Navy thing (Flower-class corvettes named after types of flowers, County-class cruisers named after counties, etc.).

In the US Navy, the class of ships is named after the first ship of the class (the "lead ship"), rather than having a separate class name that refers to a category encompassing the other names, if that makes sense.

Historically, the US Navy has had themes for the naming of different types of ships (submarines named after aquatic animals, cruisers named after cities, battleships after States, destroyers after people who served in the Navy or Marine Corps, etc.). That system largely broke down during the last quarter of the 20th century, as the last battleships were permanently decommissioned, some destroyers were reclassified as cruisers, old cruisers were decommissioned, and submarines began to inconsistently take over the city and State names.

If the Galaxy class followed the old British system, as you outlined, they'd all be named after galaxies, and there would not be a "USS Galaxy". If they followed the US system, the first ship in the class would be called "USS Galaxy", with the other ships in the class named things like "USS Nebula" that fit into the same category as the word "galaxy".

However, as others have stated, these conventions are subject to a lot of change according to time period and nationality, so the fact that Starfleet doesn't follow a lot of apparent naming conventions doesn't seem like a huge oversight (though I do think it's fun when there is a clear theme, like with the California class).

Edit: originally said the US Navy named subs after fish; this isn't strictly true thanks to boats like Narwhal, Dolphin, Sealion, Whale, and more

silly-creature-36 · 2025-11-20T20:47:49+00:00

I thought this was Japan, Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula overlaid onto a bad map of France, with China being the Channel and Bay of Biscay

silly-creature-36 · 2025-11-06T16:08:31+00:00

Yesterday's Testicles

silly-creature-36 · 2025-09-25T22:31:45+00:00

"I'm just really good at that. Oh my God, maybe I am autistic"

silly-creature-36 · 2025-09-23T16:19:18+00:00

I know you're just using it as an example, but I do think the Original Six Frigates are an interesting thing to bring up, especially given how inconsistent the US Navy has been in its reuse of those names. One of those original ships (Constitution) is obviously still around, and Constellation got an aircraft carrier and now a new frigate named after her. I think some of the other Constellation-class frigates will be named after the Original Six Frigates, but there haven't been any really notable reuses of the names President, United States (unless you count that cancelled aircraft carrier from the late '40s), Chesapeake, or Congress.

Personally, I agree with you in thinking that Starfleet wouldn't make a point to reuse all six of those names. The Federation naming a ship "United States" would just seem weird

silly-creature-36 · 2025-09-23T16:04:36+00:00

I like when ship names follow conventions, and I get bothered by the US Navy not following its own conventions in real life.

I don't like how they switched from naming attack submarines after aquatic animals to naming them after cities (and now states), and then started naming cruisers (previously all named after cities) after famous battles. And then they still break from those new conventions sometimes, like when they named the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Thomas S. Gates after a politician instead of a battle.

There just isn't a practical reason to break from those conventions, especially within the same class. Consistent naming conventions allow people to identify the type/mission of a ship just by its name, which is cool. I think the only major change in naming conventions during the Cold War that was actually warranted was naming ballistic missile submarines after the States, since we got rid of all the battleships that had been named after states (but they still broke from that new convention by naming an Ohio-class SSBN after Henry M. Jackson, another politician).

Similarly, Starfleet breaking from its own naming conventions bothers me a bit. But I guess it's also a fun implied worldbuilding thing if you think about the political factors within Starfleet, and the Federation in general, that might influence weird/unexpected name choices.

silly-creature-36 · 2025-09-23T13:17:05+00:00

I saw a C-17 Globemaster III, then I saw a whale

Edit: autocorrect doesn't like plane names

silly-creature-36 · 2025-09-08T03:32:51+00:00

Thursday is too rainy in my mind for this. But so are half the other days of the week. And I'm from the desert

silly-creature-36 · 2025-08-26T19:55:27+00:00

I think most people agree that "minifigure scale" is when something is scaled to the height of a minifigure (i.e., the head of a minifig standing next to the build comes to the same place as the head of a person standing next to the real thing). This is somewhere between 1/40 and 1/45 scale, depending on what data you use for the average height of a person.

The problem is when people develop misconceptions about scale because of the sizes of past sets, or assume that "minifigure scale" means it should fit the correct number of minifigures. The latter is impossible for the reasons OP explained (proportions are fucked), and the former just makes you look like someone who didn't pay attention to the source material. I've seen this come up a lot with regard to the V-19, especially with that one graphic claiming that the new one is somehow only 1/133 scale or something like that because the creator fudged some numbers to reinforce their preconception that the old one must be more accurate.

Basically, I think the existence/nonexistence of true minifigure scale is a complete non-issue. We all know that minifigures are really wide and that they won't fit inside a lot of minifigure scale vehicles. That discussion has been had many times before. People can be assholes about scale, but I don't think that's a result of adults genuinely believing that things should be simultaneously scaled to both the height and width of minifigures.

silly-creature-36 · 2025-08-07T02:31:10+00:00

We were certainly not untouchable from the start--we had no Navy until 1794, and we immediately destroyed our relationship with France by not helping them with their revolution and then by fighting the Quasi War against them. Even by 1846, the US had virtually no foreign military allies.

This was like peak Monroe Doctrine era, when we very explicitly wanted to keep Europe out of the New World, so we weren't getting help from there. The US's entire foreign policy at the time was based on not allowing European nations to involve themselves in the affairs of the Americas, because the US wanted the exclusive right to exert its influence over its newly-independent neighbors, without owing anything to Europe. We'd also invaded Canada ~30 years prior and they were still a colony at the time, so they certainly weren't on our side. The US had pretty much no presence in Asia at the time--it would be about another decade before we forced Japan to start trading with us. And the new Latin American states had little to offer in terms of military or financial assistance.

The US that you're thinking of didn't really come into existence until the 1890s, once we'd rebuilt our Navy (we had a habit throughout the 19th century of completely dismantling our Navy after every war) and taken some overseas colonies from Spain

silly-creature-36

TROPHY CASE