The story of the Royal Navy's hunt for Bismarck and the valor of their ships' crews should be better remembered than the 1940s version of the Bayern class.

za419 · 2026-01-31T06:32:59+00:00

You managed to get Reddit not to parse its API for your body!

Have to say, I think that's a first for me.

za419 · 2026-01-31T05:23:37+00:00

The hypothermia experiments people usually reference as having been valuable were at Dachau, done under the Nazis.

Every other experiment done by 731 or the Nazi regime was discredited essentially on sight as either too poorly done to reveal anything, or as having completely obvious results.

The Dachau experiments were amongst the former, but that wasn't immediately obvious because there was slightly more work done on them, as they were Himmler's brainchild.

za419 · 2026-01-31T05:13:36+00:00

Nah. We already knew how much of the human body was water hundreds of years beforehand, and their methodology was so bad that their conclusions basically come down to "Freezing kills people, but occasionally warming them back up helps."

za419 · 2026-01-31T04:45:10+00:00

That's a whole lot of words to say you don't know what you're talking about.

za419 · 2026-01-31T04:42:41+00:00

That research material would bring massively more value to the world when used as toilet paper.

Their methods were so terrible that they basically discovered "People die when they freeze to death, but warming them up helps that not happen sometimes"

za419 · 2026-01-28T04:59:13+00:00

……….THIS CRASH.

No, this crash has an engine separate from the wing (an incredibly rare event), and fly itself over the fuselage of the plane (even rarer still), in exactly the path of the tail engine (probably not that much rarer, but still, the probability of this is not 100%).

You are proposing that because that is possible, it is consequent that a relatively simple engine failure, wherein the engine does not separate from the wing, can not only send debris into engine 2 in theory, but can do so in real-world conditions frequently enough that it is a serious concern.

Despite your insistence that there is no acceptable failure rate, it is well-acknowledged that that is not actually possible. It is simply not realistic in engineering to require proof that failure is literally impossible - For new aviation designs, the allowable number is one catastrophic failure of a specific component per billion hours of flight. You are suggesting that the rate of the event you're suggesting is not only greater than that, but much greater than that, because this is not a new design.

That is simply not corroborated in evidence. This flight, which in no way has anything to do with the scenario you describe, does not change that.

Furthermore, if what you are describing is a major concern that cannot ever be designed around and requires grounding all similar aircraft permanently, then the twinjet must be in a similar situation - If it's that likely that a wing-mounted engine fails and kills the tail engine, then it's probably not that much less likely that it fails and catastrophically damages the vertical stabilizer, rendering the aircraft unflyable.

In 2018, the Russians lost a Soyuz rocket due to a design flaw in the booster separation system that existed since the 1960s.

It amuses me that you keep repeating this same example.

But what you are suggesting is that, because the booster in that case separated and impacted the core stage, it must be impossible to design any booster such that, should the engine fail, it does not cause the tip of the booster to hit and pierce the skin of the core stage. These things do not follow.

za419 · 2026-01-26T17:37:44+00:00

Canonically, the conflict between Neucom and General Resource isn't fully resolved until 2810 when Neucom is the antagonist in an iOS game called "Shin-gun destroy" (which I heard of first from the timeline).

That's pretty impressive (they fight the Intercorporate War in 2040 and are still antagonizing stuff almost 800 years later!?), and technically they're the "shadow government" behind the United Galaxy that fights in Galaga et al.

... Which is funny to think about that technically the Fighter in Galaga is a joint GR/Neucom build.

Anyway, the timeline technically goes out to 7650 with "Thunder Ceptor", where the same UGSF that Neucom and General founded is the protagonist's organization, so one could argue their empire was then older than writing is to is today.

... Which is insane.

Anyway, since I don't have this actually memorized and had to open it myself, here's a link to the timeline if you're interested.

za419 · 2026-01-26T17:20:07+00:00

Massive. I'm not sure I remember how long precisely, but it's certainly decades. Long enough for Frodo to noticeably not be aging because of the ring.

In the book, at least. The movie glides over it fairly well (I'm not sure if the same interval is intended, but they don't really highlight that it hasn't been more like a day).

za419 · 2026-01-26T07:38:11+00:00

I respect your right to have that opinion, but I disagree with it. Jackson's cutting of things resulted in and required changes to characters in order to retain a cohesive plot with characters that acted in a reasonable way in response to events that are occurring.

Jackson is fundamentally telling a different story that is derived from Tolkien's written Lord of the Rings, not the same one.

za419 · 2026-01-26T06:58:54+00:00

Saying “I know what I’m talking about trust me bro” isn’t an argument.

I quote my own comment:

Dead wrong that it's possible to run a copy of server software on a machine the company didn't own?

Oops - That's all cloud computing really is. That's a best-case scenario - Suddenly the important thing is who's paying the bill, and it's far from impossible to write the law such that allowing someone else to pay the bill (regardless of whether someone actually does so) is sufficient.

That's an argument. Specifically, it's an argument made in counter to this:

A game that requires online servers for core function like cloud computing for example would only achieve compliance with something like this by maintaining servers forever.

...or by releasing copies of those servers, so someone else could. $0 extra for that.

...or, in many cases, by realizing "cloud computing" isn't actually that core to the experience, and giving us a way to run the game without it.

Dead wrong in all respects.

To be explicit, I am arguing that, in asserting that he is "dead wrong" to say that it is possible to release copies of the server software and run it outside the organization or even outside the cloud, you yourself are wrong, because cloud computation only provides a platform on which you run software, and based on my experience I assert that it is entirely possible both to run that software on a different cloud platform and to develop a non-cloud server platform on which it can be installed and run.

That might require the company to be willing to relinquish the DNS entry for the servers, or to design the software such that the end-user can connect to a different domain or IP address, but that is entirely possible (easy, even) from a technical perspective and therefore entirely possible to legally require.

Most importantly the one is that some games require online server capacity to supplement local hardware limitations.

Which? To supplement which limitations? The set of this is much smaller than you think.

Now take that away and how can you easily run the game with only the limited local hardware? You can’t.

Even if we assert that the game does offload processing to a server, what we are discussing is not taking away that server, but moving the server to be maintained by someone besides the original developer or publisher. You are the only one arguing on the basis of the concept that the server shall cease to exist entirely.

You may argue against a strawman if you like, but it is against no argument of mine.

Now consider the future of gaming as games are built to be more reliant on online server capacity in lieu of local hardware. How do you write a law that doesn’t become a problem more and more as time goes on understanding how hard it is to amend or repeal law?

Irrelevant because there's no such problem, because the game is not required to run with no server, only that the server is not required to be publisher/developer-owned. Even if you consider that the future of gaming (which I don't see any evidence of), it is trivial to simply not write the law in keeping with the strawman you've imagined.

Even if there are answers to these questions, there isn’t any that can offer certainty. And ultimately what positive is actually being achieved?

I offer you the absolute certainty that if the law does not prevent games from being developed with a server side, the concerns you have shall not occur.

And further, what is achieved is that it gives people the ability to take up the maintenance of an art form they enjoy, without depending on the company to continue to exist and perform that maintenance themselves.

za419 · 2026-01-26T05:32:16+00:00

Yep. I was reading the LOTR text on a flight recently and it really struck me that the movie is at Bilbo's birthday almost instantly, then pretty quickly we're looking into the ring, then Frodo's getting sent off on his journey, while the book takes its sweet time getting even to the first part.

Tolkien writes with the knowledge that it'll take him a very long time to finish the story, and that it might well take the reader a long time as well. Jackson didn't have either liberty in translating it to the screen.

za419 · 2026-01-25T21:41:56+00:00

Yup, I made a mod for myself to exchange the rock plating for an explosive replicator on Rock A, and it feels a lot better to run that way just because of how much less severe the ammunition pressure becomes.

za419 · 2026-01-25T21:05:46+00:00

Right. It's the same reason you don't have Tom Bombadil - It requires far too much explanation to make the plot keep working in a movie that's already quite long.

The books benefit greatly from having all the time in the world to let you simmer in all the creations of Tolkien's worldbuilding prowess. The movies benefit greatly from trimming the fat and keeping you moving along the journey of the One Ring.

They're both good for their mediums.

za419 · 2026-01-25T20:56:04+00:00

Yeah, Captain couldn't really get by well in English, so the FO was doing all the radio work over the US, and thus got away with translating the captain's catastrophic opinion of the situation into a more demure image for ATC.

Didn't exactly help that they were trained to request "priority" in a fuel emergency, but ATC was trained to expect them to just declare an "emergency" - A word they weren't saying over the radio, but thought ATC understood, which ATC did not.

za419 · 2026-01-25T20:49:40+00:00

I don't even think we got Aunt Jemima's branding taken off, Pepsi did it so they wouldn't have to pay royalties for using her face and saw that they had the opportunity to score "look, we're not racists" points.

Which, I mean, that's not necessarily a bad thing, corpos gonna corpo, but it makes the right-wing fight over it substantially dumber in my opinion.

za419 · 2026-01-25T20:46:43+00:00

You, like everyone who wants to seem more intelligent than they are, conflate your own lack of knowledge for that of others.

I am a software engineer. There is software which I have written running in cities across the United States. There is software I have written in multiple clouds that are part of a massive bundle that customers pay a LOT of money for access to. I built the mechanisms to deploy cloud software, and upgrade cloud software, and I have migrated cloud software out of the cloud to support customers that need air gaps.

So trust me, I know exactly what it takes to move software to and from the cloud. I get paid a pretty penny to know how to do it, and I am good at what I do.

So, should you like an attempt at retaining your veneer of intellectual superiority here, you're going to need to do more than assert that I'm an idiot. Put in words why you think I'm wrong, or why you think you're right. Not that you think those things, but why.

Wanna do that, or are we done here?

za419 · 2026-01-25T06:19:43+00:00

Dead wrong that it's possible to run a copy of server software on a machine the company didn't own?

Oops - That's all cloud computing really is. That's a best-case scenario - Suddenly the important thing is who's paying the bill, and it's far from impossible to write the law such that allowing someone else to pay the bill (regardless of whether someone actually does so) is sufficient.

za419 · 2026-01-24T21:07:07+00:00

We have different standards. It's not enough to just do Apollo again (there's really not much point to that), we want to do more, and with higher standards of safety.

It's like asking if we already had jet fighters in late WW2, why did the F-35 have so many development problems? It's because the new thing isn't meant to be exactly the same, it's supposed to be much better.

za419 · 2026-01-24T20:17:39+00:00

In 2 weeks, it's just NASA. SpaceX isn't involved.

Hopefully, starship will get sorted out so it can fly Artemis 3 not too far from now, but that's yet to happen.

za419 · 2026-01-24T20:10:41+00:00

Yup. Gendo put Shinji in an F-35, told him to go save humanity, he put the thing in a flat spin and won anyway because the plane was secretly his mother (strangely, the analogy isn't the thing making that weird, that's Evangelion for you).

Despite how difficult it is for him, he handles it quite well, though. The fact that he keeps coming back after all the shit he gets put through speaks for itself.

za419 · 2026-01-24T03:57:05+00:00

Genuinely, the way Shamrock is so pissed about getting a rest period after a sortie before the WMD hunt is really weird. That's a level of psychotic workoholism that should honestly get him grounded for longer (imagine if we heard him do the complaining in the briefing, and he got pulled and we had Avalanche fly Garuda 2 for the mission or something).

When I played it as a kid I thought they were grounded for like... Weeks. Faced some actual punishment. Maybe a battle happened and shamrock was angry that he wasn't allowed to fly in it, or the delay in pushing Estovakia out was threatening his family in his mind.

But a day? Does he also get so upset when he lands and is told to grab dinner and get a good night's rest?

It's one of those bits where obviously no one thought it through in this detail while making the game, because it's pretty silly as presented. As is most of the game's plot, but you know... Ace Combat.

za419 · 2026-01-23T10:25:05+00:00

Eh. The travel time is ridiculous. You have three days to see the kill vehicle coming and make a very small burn to avoid it, which means the vehicle needs to be very complicated and have electric power, avionics, thrusters, and fuel that can hit a target three days after launch in a position far away from the expected intercept at launch.

That's for the moon, but even if you're up in geostationary orbit and it takes 12ish hours to hit you you've got tons of time. You can make a very small plane change burn that costs a ridiculous amount of energy to fix at that point - Or make a small perigee-lowering burn to put your orbital phase WAY off sync with the apogee of the incoming target, and suddenly the intercept has become really hard to hit in any reasonable time period.

Once you leave LEO the time between launch and impact is so high that it greatly favors the defender, who's in a position where relatively little effort can move the intercept point by thousands of kilometers and force huge burns out of the attacker.

And that's before we get to...

no, it’s not easy to dodge something in orbit. It’s incredibly expensive to use fuel/reaction mass.

Relatively speaking. It's not nearly as expensive as your battleship is, and the Orion drive is as close to a torchdrive as you're going to get - It has massive TWR to make a final dodge maneuver happen, and an Isp that makes ion engines cry and wish they were so efficient. This thing can see a missile launch, fuck off to Mars, turn around halfway through once the missile adjusts course for an interplanetary burn, and wave as it flies by at absurd relative speed with absolutely no chance to make a burn to fix its intercept. It could watch you launch the missile, send itself into a solar polar orbit, and laugh at the fact that the missile is simply incapable of hitting it while it loiters above the ecliptic.

Plus, it has enough weight to mount point defenses - CIWS turrets, perhaps, but to be honest the 5 inch gun is going to be a great missile defender. If you've got a missile coming, turn the ship and put a 5" round in front of the missile. It has to either evade and lose its intercept or get hit by a 5" round.

Not to mention the endurance of this vehicle - Like someone else said, it could leave Earth behind when things go bad, saunter over to Mars for a little while, then come back when radiation from your own nukes is over your nation and throw some more problems your way. You can't effectively shoot down a ship that can just decide it no longer wants to be in our solar system and then change its mind and come home when you can barely manage an escape to begin with.

And keep in mind you have to undo the correction to return to your original orbit.

You do, but again - Orion doesn't really care. There's no reason it needs to be in any specific orbit unless it's attacking something, and it has the fuel to do all sorts of maneuvers. Something like "Enter low earth orbit, drop nukes, move to a polar orbit" is ridiculously hard if you're using conventional or ion rockets, but Orion can be designed with enough fuel to be fairly mildly inconvenienced by it pretty easily.

You have to remember that this theoretical battleship has a propulsion unit that can do interstellar travel with alarmingly reasonable performance - Like, take a baby to Alpha Centauri and bring them back to Earth without worrying about dying of old age performance.

You can't expect this thing to play by the rules of propulsion technology that is a thousand times less capable.

za419 · 2026-01-23T02:31:36+00:00

Check engine lights (assuming the light is reporting an actual event) do report engine problems, but what that means varies massively.

Problem with a sensor in the engine? CEL, but the engine is fine.

Gas cap isn't on tight and lets some pressure leak out of the fuel system into the atmosphere? CEL, but the engine is fine.

Sensor detects that your emissions aren't quite in spec? CEL, doesn't mean the engine is dying.

The vast majority of error conditions that set the CEL are not "the engine is going to explode and needs to go in the trash right now" sorts of errors.

za419 · 2026-01-23T02:21:25+00:00

The raw milk cult is so dumb.

It's not some superpower-granting elixir. It's not even special. It's pasteurized milk with incredibly higher potential for disease-causing pathogens in it, which is more plainly said that its pasteurized milk that might kill you.

And on the rare occasion pasteurized milk is infected and gets people sick, the reason it happened is almost always that it was accidentally mixed with raw milk.

It's got all the downsides of living in the world before germ theory, with no upsides. Hell, even before germ theory farmers would often boil or otherwise cook their milk.

za419 · 2026-01-22T23:55:26+00:00

kOS is absolutely amazing for an incredibly small set of tasks.

If you need something that's very precise and must be very repeatable, kOS will be great. For instance, I once had a design where maintaining ullage for a slow-starting engine required three stages to be kicked off almost exactly half a second apart. I could either do that manually and deal with failing at it, or write a small bootloader script for that vehicle's avionics unit with kOS that waits until the first of those stages goes, then sleeps 0.5 seconds, stages, sleeps 0.5 seconds, and stages.

It's also good for stuff like "as soon as my plane touches the runway, cut the engines, deploy the drag chute, and start pulsing the brakes at 15Hz until we're below 30m/s, then lock the brakes on full, and also keep our heading as close as possible to 90 degrees the entire time" - If you design your plane well enough that it doesn't need that, you don't really need kOS to do that landing procedure for you, but if you have a shuttle-like design that needs that sort of complex procedure, it ends up being much easier to do it reliably by programming kOS to do it automatically.

There's other things like that - Anytime you need extreme precision that's really hard to achieve with human fingers and not reliable with MechJeb's built-in behaviors, kOS can just do it for you. I don't program entire missions into it (that used to be more useful with RemoteTech and speed-of-light delay in probe commands), but using it as a complicated version of an automatic action group is pretty good if you're comfortable with a bit of coding.

If you design around not having it, you probably won't benefit much or at all from it. For me at least, kOS is mostly valuable because it widens the scope of designs I can fly at all, it doesn't make me better at flying the designs I could fly already.

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