The Zero's Chinese performance was ignored by the U.S. command prior to pearl harbor, dismissed as exaggeration. That's actually the crux of my point.

Exceptional moments do not change the rule.
Yes on occasion a wildcat would get swiss cheesed and not go down, but 99% of the time when swiss cheesed they went down.
Yes, there were wildcat aces that did fairly well (and Zero aces that did even better), but 99% of wildcat pilots were just trying to not get mauled.

Hellcat didn't enter combat till mid 1943, and it is the correction to the mistake. The F6F should have been the front line fighter at the start of the war... and could have been made sooner had Japanese tech not been ignored/dismissed as exaggeration.


Russian quantity as quality? At the start they were shot down at a higher ratio than the manufacturing counter ratio (by a lot). It was a white wash in favor of the Germans.
It took improvements in Russian tech to turn the tide in the air. Lend-lease only constituted about 10% of their air force at the peak. Russia had to improve their own forces, so they did. By the end, planes like the yak3 were par with the best.


The Mig31 is a slower Mig25 with a digital radar. Their version of the F14, not really ahead of the times, par maybe.

F15 is faster than either mig29 or Su27 (roughly Mig31 speed).
F16/F18, at altitude, are moderately slower, but a wash at sea level.

Why would they shoot and run?
We have awacs, we would know they are coming, so the only chance to shoot would be at max range. Max range shots are throw-away shots, they basically won't hit unless the target is unaware, which it won't be unaware because of the RWR. Just a slight turn and the missile can't follow after tens of miles of coasting and losing energy.


Chinese railgun is in sea trials, right now. Not some lab test. It wouldn't be on a ship without first having the gun proven, the mount proven, the fire control proven, stationary testing completed, etc.
2025 is the estimate for fleet wide usage.
Try finding a picture of a U.S. railgun aboard a U.S. ship.


Why would a laser rifle not work, when you can buy crap like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7baI2Nyi5rI
There's ones made in China, too : https://www.sanwulasers.com/customurl.aspx?type=Product&key=7wblue&shop=
That will light paper on fire ~instantly, and it's just a pitiful hand held laser pointer.
An actual weapon would be orders of magnitude stronger than a handheld toy.
It's an excellent covert operations weapon, silently blinding and starting fires form kilometers away.


Russia does not need to sink a U.S. carrier for no reason.
And the U.S. has no interest in giving Russia proper a need to defend from a U.S. carrier. For the very reasons you mentioned.


What Russia can do is proliferate such a missile, and effectively deprecate the U.S. carrier group as a military unit.

We need carriers to get our air force to wherever we need it to be.
If everyone had these missiles, we would have no way to deliver our air force by naval means.

Russia has land access to Europe, Asia, Africa. They can send planes to anywhere they need to go, from land bases. Russia doesn't /need/ a navy.

Most of the planet does not have a navy worth sinking. It's just us. This is the kind of weapon that disproportionately affects us.

-scheherazade

We have conventional missiles that hit hypersonic speeds for short periods. Aim54 fired at altitude checks that mark, and that's a 60's/70's tech missile.

The X15 did it manned, and that first flew in the late 1950's.

Why would Russia not be able to come up with something similar in the last half-century?


Re-entry from orbit is 4x hypersonic. Russia has plenty of experience with the effects.

The Russian p-270 was made in the 80's, and used a ramjet.
This new missile is an incremental improvement over tech they already posses. A higher speed ramjet missile. Hardly a stretch.

It's not like they are spamming the internet with updates just so you can see how they are doing.

-scheherazade

Why do you think it was secret?
Why do you think nobody noticed?
Do you think they just began on it since sanctions?

Every major power has had back-burner development of this stuff since the cold war.
The only "secret" was how much progress they made. That it existed, you can freely take for granted.

Just how you can take for granted that everyone is working on genetic weapons, everyone is working on directed energy weapons, everyone is working on infrastructure hacking weapons, everyone is working on automated robotic weapons, etc.

Do you think there is a better / more-cost-efficient place for Russia to spend defense dollars, than on a system which can trade the price of a missile for the price of an aircraft carrier?
I would be more surprised if they hadn't put their money into a program such as this.

Look at what progress China has made :
Which country is fielding a rail gun today? China.
Which country is fielding a man portable laser rifle? China
Which country has demonstrated quantum entanglement encrypted communication? China.

The world is moving on, while we stand around confidently patting ourselves on the back.

-scheherazade

When you have neither speed nor maneuverability, it's your own durability that is in question, not the opponents durability.

It took the capture of the Akutan zero, its repair, and U.S. flight testing, to work out countermeasures to the zero.

The countermeasures were basically :
- One surprise diving attack and run away with momentum, or just don't fight them.
- Else bait your pursuer into a head-on pass with an ally (Thatch weave) (which, is still a bad position, only it's bad for everyone.)

Zero had 20mm cannons. The F4F had .50's. The F4F did not out gun the zero. 20mms only need a couple rounds to down a plane.

Durability became a factor later in the war, after the U.S. brought in better planes, like the F4U, F6F, Mustang, etc... while the zero stagnated in near-original form, and Japan could not make planes like the N1K in meaningful quanitties, or even provide quality fuel for planes like the Ki84 to use full power.

History is history. We screwed up at the start of WW2. Hubris/pride/confidence made us dismiss technologies that came around to bite us in the ass hard, and cost a lot of lives.




Best rockets since the 1960's? Because it had the biggest rocket?
What about reliability, consistency, dependability.
If I had to put my own life on the line and go to space, and I had a choice, I would pick a Russian rocket.

-scheherazade

Hubris.

WW2 japan had fighters that flew faster, climbed quicker, had bigger guns, and turned quicker (a6m vs f4f). And we had intel reports that told us, but we ignored them because "we have the best stuff and nobody else can compete".

You see the same stuff today with China. China makes all of our microchips, all of our microelectronics, most of which are designed over there anyways (companies here just ask for a widget that does X and Y, and Chinese companies design+make it), yet we act like as if they are some technologically retarded place that only knows how to steal ip.

Russia has been at the forefront of rocketry since ww2. Nobody has systems that compare to their consistency and reliability. Not even the U.S.. The idea that Russia can't make a hyper sonic missile before the U.S., because it's Russia, is a non sequitur.

Also, Russia broke up as a country because guaranteed government jobs for all citizens, where you can't be fired and performance is not important, is going to destroy any economy. No one will produce, shelves will be empty, and money will be no more than paper. Combine that with making private business illegal (preventing people from economically helping themselves), and you have a recipe for economic disaster and social discontent.

This missile exists to swat down carrier groups on the cheap.
We're gonna need some powerful lasers, or our own hyper sonic interceptors, or else proliferation would instantly leave us isolated in the Americas (vis-a-vis power projection via conventional weaponry). Our only option for projecting power would be reduced to nuclear or nothing.

-scheherazade

What sort of evidence?

- Accusation/testimonial evidence?

- Or Physical evidence that is an invariant indicator of rape, that you can hold, see, measure, etc?



Anyone can accuse. That's effortless. Takes barely more energy than breathing.

(It's also effortless for a group of sour girls to gang up on a dude that upset them. Because "f that guy'. (That attitude isn't even rare.))



Physical evidence? People are convicted day in and day out of all sorts of things without physical evidence.

(Court is after all a popularity contest.)




My scary moment was when a cop detained me and told me he was going to charge me with : reckless driving, driving without a seat belt, and with threatening his life.

Why? Because I pulled up to a road block and asked him if I could drive past his road block to go home (which was a short way past the road block)... and he was having some emotional stability/triggering issues at the time, and he instantly turned red and went full on tirade mode.

Fortunately for me, after detaining me a few hours, some switch flipped in his head again and he just went to his car, got in, and drove off. Surreal.

So I asked myself :
If I had been charged, what would be the difference in court, vis-a-vis evidence, between it being a lie, and it being the truth?
Answer : No difference.

All he threatened me with was provable only by his word, and no evidence was required. I likely would have gone to jail, and had my life turned upside down... all on some person's grimace.

My view on evidence changed that day.
I will _NEVER_ convict anyone of anything, without physical tangible evidence that I can hold in my hand and see with my eyes, or at least run forensic tests on.
Testimony doesn't mean _shit_. It's absolutely, patently _worthless_.

(I also now run a dash cam everywhere I drive to protect myself from false accusations)




Basically, unless you have physical proof, I don't care.
Whatever you have to say, prove it.
No proof, no cares.

That goes for all accusations of anything ever. Across the board. Absolute.

It's the standard I want people to have for me, and it's the standard I have for others.

-scheherazade





(Aside, unrelated : I know a dude that was raped by a girl (he was nearly paralyzed drunk at his own house party). Wasn't even a secret. People at the party knew it happened. Nobody cared. When he complained, all anyone said was "Oh whatever. Shut up get over it". It wasn't even a question of 'did it happen?', it was a matter of "so what?".)

Looks like the water neat the boat was hit, and the boat was showered with spray and pebbles.

-scheherazade

I believe only the ascent is slow mo (around 5 min mark).

The rest just looks slow because it's under water and she's freediving (only slow movement to save air). The reflections give away the timing.

-scheherazade

Eisenhower by today's standards is some enlightened being sent from above.

-scheherazade

It's a glock. It has no external safety.

You can always pull the trigger on a charged glock and it will send the striker.

This is why I call B.S. on the idea that glocks have a safety.
Trigger dingle-berries as a primary 'safety' is a retarded concept.
If you can pull the trigger and fires, it isn't safe.

-scheherazade

Since half the defenders were also Mexican, I wouldn't draw that conclusion, conclusively, I conclude.

-scheherazade

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

Hmm, I partly agree.

Surely, what goes around comes around. Kids are people, too.

You do some shit to poke your kids in the feels, you'll have to live with the consequences.

However, I don't see the debt (owe).
People are free to make their own choices regarding their own affairs, and their personal part of any relationship with others.
People are free to dislike other people's choices.

Happiness/contentment is not a requirement, and no one else has to go out of their way to make whoever else happy.

-scheherazade

I race on my own dime.

Everything my parents thought was dangerous when I was a kid, I had to fund for myself after I was an adult.

My parents spent their money as they pleased.
I spend my money as I please.

Not angry about it. It's not like they owed me anything.

-scheherazade

Ouch. XA. ::cringe::

My condolences.

On the bright side, at least it's not a yaris?

-scheherazade