Battlecruiser Alignment Chart
If he loves Russia so much, we should deport him there, and nationalize all his assets since SpaceX is a critical security apparatus and he's clearly the foreign agent of a hostile power.
iyaerP
1 Post – 61 Comments
Joined 12 months ago
the Original God of War Kratos had all the depth of a puddle.
nuKratos is by far the superior character.
I'd have more sympathy for the people of Afghanistan if they had actually fought back against the Taliban.
People say that America lost in Afghanistan, but we were basically the only thing propping up democracy. The people themselves made no effort.
Always is. Same with the "BLM" arsonists being off duty cops.
That's not Paul, that's his son who turns into the worm.
Isreal and being genocidal conquerors. Name a more ironically iconic duo.
Not where he should be: prison.
Is it ethnic cleansing?
Oh boy!
It's disgusting that it required someone killing themselves to motivate the cops to even pretend to care.
Because the algorithm caters to nazis.
Just arrest all these fuckers, starting with the Texas Governor.
The cruelty is the point.
Their end goal is a population of moronic wage-slaves who are living a barely subsistence lifestyle that will believe anything told of them rather than challenging the wealth, power, and right to rule of the ruling class.
They aren't just conservative, they're regressive. They long for the days of Feudal lordship with themselves cast as the lords.
Sounds like Twitter needs some obstruction of justice charges and for some people to get arrested.
It's clearly a bad faith argument. The real logic is that if they make cancelling easy, frustrated people will do it. If cancelling is annoying or difficult enough, some people will give up and keep paying.
On this issue yes, on other issues, no. See: Republicans wanting to cut all support to Ukraine so that Daddy Vladdy can win his war.
Don't forget that the 2016 DNC hack was accompanied by an equal hack of the RNC, it's just that the Republican info was saved as kompromat where the Democratic info was released in the short term to damage them and help Trump win the election so Putin could have his puppet in the White House.
That's it?
THAT'S FUCKING NOTHING.
Yeah, the IDF deliberately targets journalists. We all know this.
The Republican party is an existential threat to the continued existence of the human species.
They must be stopped at any and all costs.
It'd be laughable if it wasn't as tragically predictable.
I watched the hearings yesterday, and I was mostly left with the impression that we need more investigations, and to kick some asses in the aviation world so that encounters with UAPs can be safely reported without sacrificing the career of the pilot in question by even talking about it.
Mostly it's stuff we already know about, the tictac and a couple other similar events. The most interesting thing by far to me is the report of a UAP that "split" a flight of F-18s. That means that it physically passed between two jets. Hard to say that it was a balloon or sensor defect in that event. I bring up balloons because lot of the UFO craze is caused by people just not knowing what they're seeing or now having the knowledge to contextualize a relatively static object appearing to move via parallax against a static background due to the movement of the observer source. It certainly wasn't helped by the fact that back in the day, the Air Force was doing MIB psyops to the locals who reported to the air force base when stealth fighters were first being developed and tested. Civilians then started mass reporting about "triangle UFOs" which were just F-117s before anyone even knew that those existed, and you got the pile of of fraudsters and people who just wanted their moment in the limelight.
What we're getting in the Congressional hearing isn't that. These are our most trained and experienced fighter pilots operating multiple sensor systems, all of which are showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible, and compounded by confirmation from the Mk 1 Eyeball. Fooling the human eye is pretty easy, but trained observers like fighter pilots are harder to fool, but still possible. Fooling trained human observers and multiple different sensor systesm (FLIR, RADAR, and optical cameras) all at once is still possible, but harder. But the more sensor systems in play, the harder it is to fool all of them, and the incidents in question had the full sensor suite of multiple AEGIS mounting surface warships, multiple fighter pilots and weapons officers and the sensor systems of those planes from multiple different angles all in general agreement about the impossible behaviors of the UAPs.
At the tail end of last year, we just got the reveal of the latest and greatest in US secret weapons development with the B-21 and that was pretty much an iteration on known physics and known systems. B-21 is miles better than B-2, but it isn't a tictac, and when we look at the development of these kind of systems in the past, they generally take about a decade to go from conceptualization to prototype, and about another decade to go from prototype to public reveal. In that timeframe, B-21s would have been around during the right era for the tictac event and the one off Virginia Beach, but again, B-21s aren't magical supertech vehicles that can ignore all known physics. B-21s could probably have spoofed some of the sensors on the ships and F-18s that intercepted the Tictacs, but they still are a visible plane, no MCU style invisibility/colorshifting panels to make it look like a grey cube inside a transparent sphere, or just the smooth countourless description of the tictac.
Now, all that being said, I don't think that it was "little green men" either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all, and what evidence we have is some combination of sparse, classified, and disorganized. I think that right now we have unexplained behaviors from unexplained objects and our best approach going forwards is going to be to try and collate data and coordinate the study of it to try and figure out what causes these events.
At the same time, I don't think that these events are the result of foreign actors either. If China had that kind of tech, we wouldn't have seen the pathetic excuse for balloons this year, and they probably would have made a play for Taiwan by now. If Russia had that kind of tech, they wouldn't be rolling out T-55 rustbuckets to fight in Ukraine. Clearly the answer is South Korea and the pro-Starcraft scene is there to train the pilots in microing such a highly versatile and responsive craft. I for one welcome our new Korean overlords. :p
The thing that stands out to me there is that it's multiple ships and planes tracking this and producing this data. If it was like a glitch in the AN/SPY radar on an AEGIS equipped ship like the Princeton, then that same glitch wouldn't also have shown up on the FLIR and optical cameras of an F-18 as well as the radar of the E2 and the non-AEGIS equipped ship like the Nimitz. Repeat down the list for possible sensors. There exists commonality, like all the F-18s would have had the same kind of radar, but that doesn't extend to the E2 nor the ships.
But as mentioned in the hearing, the only publicly available release of that data is the FLIR camera. What's shown on the video I've seen several different "debunkings" of, all of which with various explanations, although the most common is basically thermal lens flare, but that still doesn't explain the eyeball reports nor the radar tracks, but unfortunately we have none of that data available publicly. And this is all of course predicated on the idea of these eyewitnesses being credible. If the follow-up hearings happen and the DoD under congressional pressure releases the radar data from the Princeton and Nimitz that day and it doesn't track with what the people in the hearing today were saying, then that blows a giant hole in the story.
And that's assuming that it's not another misunderstanding that winds up easily explained. Like when we started doing manned space missions, the pilots reported "foo fighters" as dancing lights outside the Mercury spacecraft. Well, it turned out that the Mercury had an issue with condensation on the interior of the windows and that the light from the sun when coming in not diffused from the atmosphere would create an optical illusion of dancing lights. Similar thing with "flying dutchman" ships floating above the horizon where it is merely an optical illusion created by certain atmospheric conditions that create a false horizon. But it'd have to be one hell of a phenomena to show up on multiple sensor systems like that.
At the end of the day, I still don't know. The rational skeptic in me says it probably isn't aliens, but at the same time, unless these fighter pilots are lying under oath, (and Grusch was very clear to couch everything in terms of "this is the hearsay that others have told me, and everything else goes under SCIF") I don't have the imagination to postulate as to what it could be.
The "there is no good evidence" problem is why I want the radar tracks for Nimitz and Princeton released. They'd either confirm the tictac story, or just blow it away entirely, because a large part of what makes that one so compelling is that it was ostensibly tracked from so many different angles from so many different types and models of military radars. If David Fravor was lying about those radar tracks showing the impossible events he describes, then we can dismiss his claims entirely. If the radar tracks show a mostly consistent behavior, then it lends credence to the UAP, and we can discuss it in good faith without having to try and justify it constantly to skeptics. It's one thing when we just have the one FLIR clip. It's another if we have the radar returns from an E2 Sentry, the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and the squadron of F-18s.
Besides, at this point, it's not like these are bleeding edge capabilities. These are all systems that have been around longer than I've been alive. The newer shit is all far and away superior, and so releasing a bit of the information for fighter and naval sensors developed in the fucking EIGHTIES isn't exactly going to be giving up the game to China.
They're committing treason now.
They committed it in the past too, but they're also doing it now in real time.
It's funny because the Sgt York was actually exceptional, as one of the pilots who had to test against it discussed at length.
In 1982 I participated in both cooperative and non-cooperative tests at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, flying an Air Force CH-3E helicopter against a Sergeant York. I would have been dead many times over had it been shooting live rounds at us instead of just video.
The Sergeant York was the front-runner in a program intended to provide the Army with a sorely needed “division air defense” (DIVAD) weapon system. It was based on a novel concept: re-purposing M48 Patton tank chassis’ with a new turret incorporating twin Swedish Bofors 40mm cannons and two radar systems — one for area surveillance (the rectangular antenna) and one for targeting (the conical antenna, an off-the-shelf application of the F-16′s radar). (Compare the picture below with that of the Sergeant York to see how this adaptation worked.)
A firing control system integrated the two radars, with on-board software prioritizing targets based on the threat they were assessed to pose to the system itself. (For the late ’70s /early ’80s, this was cosmic.) If the operator elected to allow the system to engage targets hands-off, it would slew the turret around at a nauseatingly rapid rate, taking on each in turn automatically.
On the next-to-last day of the test, my aircraft was joined by an Army AH-1 Cobra and OH-58 Kiowa and two Air Force A-10s. My H-3 was part of the test profile because its radar signature was essentially the same as that of an Mi-24 HIND assault helicopter of the day, which was heavily armed with both anti-tank missiles and rockets. We all converged on it simultaneously from about 6000 meters. My aircraft was the first to die, followed by the two A-10s, then the Cobra, and finally the Kiowa. It took less than 15 seconds to put plenty of hypothetical rounds into each of us.
I spent a depressing amount of that week watching myself get tracked and killed on video. Trying to “mask” behind anything other than rising terrain simply didn’t work; the DIVAD radar got a nice Doppler return off my rotor system if any part of it was within its line of sight, and it burned right through trees just fine. I couldn’t outrun or out-maneuver it laterally; when I moved, it tracked me. I left feeling pretty convinced that it was the Next Big Thing, especially since I’d come into the test pretty cocky thanks to having had a lot of (successful) exercise experience against current Army air defense systems.
So, what happened to the program itself? I think it was a combination of factors. First, the off-the-shelf concept was cool as far as it went, but the Patton design already was a quarter-century old; the DIVAD was awfully slow compared with the M1 Abrams tanks it was supposed to protect. It would have had a lot of trouble keeping up with the pack.
Second, The Atlantic Monthly published a really nasty article (bordering on a hatchet job) purporting to show the program was a complete failure and a ruinous waste of money. One of its most impressive bits of propaganda was an anecdote about a test where the system — on full automatic — took aim at a nearby trailer full of monitoring equipment. Paraphrasing, “It tracked and killed an exhaust fan,” chortled the author. (See The Gun That Shoots Fans for a recounting of this.)
Yeah, it did. It was designed to look for things that rotate (like helicopter main rotor systems) and prioritize them for prompt destruction. If any bad guys were on the battlefield in vehicles with unshrouded exhaust fans, they might have been blown away rather comprehensively. (My understanding at the time was that said fan was part of a rest room in one of the support vehicles and not a “latrine,” but why mess up a good narrative, right?)
To my knowledge, neither ventilated latrines nor RVs full of recording devices are part of a typical Army unit’s table of allowance, so I really doubt there was much of a fratricide threat there. However, the bottom line was that this particular piece of partisan reporting beat the crap out of a program that I believe the Army needed, but already was facing a few developmental issues, and helped hasten its cancellation.
(The New York Times opinion piece linked to above was equally laden with innuendo and assumptions. It made a fair point about possible anti-radiation attacks it might have invited… but there are radars on every battlefield, and there are means of controlling emissions. It compared a late-Fifties era Soviet system — the ZSU-23–4 — with one fully twenty years newer in design. It asserted that it couldn’t hit fixed-wing aircraft, which to my mind and personal observation was arrant nonsense. The only issue it raised that I agree with was possible NATO compatibility problems with the unique 40mm caliber shells the Sergeant York’s guns fired. Funny — the Times pontificated that it wouldn’t be cancelled, too. Oops.)
Third, the hydraulics that were used in the prototype were a 3000 psi system that really couldn’t handle the weight of the turret in its Awesome Hosing Things mode. One of the only times I actually got a score on the system was when I cheated; I deliberately exploited that vulnerability. I flew straight toward the system (which would have blown us out of the sky about twenty times over had I tried to do so for real) until directly over it, then tried to defeat the system from above.
If memory serves, the system specifications called for the guns to elevate to more than 85 degrees if something was coming up and over; it then would lower them quickly, slew the turret 180 degrees around, and raise the guns again to re-engage. It was supposed to be able to do that in perhaps ten seconds (but I’m here to tell you it did it a lot faster than that). So, I had my flight engineer tell me the moment the guns dropped, at which point I did a course reversal maneuver to try to catch it pointed the wrong way. What the video later showed was:
Helicopter flies over.
Traverse/re-acquire movement starts.
Helicopter initiated hammerhead turn (gorgeous, if I say so myself).
Guns started to elevate to re-engage.
Clunk. Guns fall helplessly down; DIVAD crew uses bad language.
The hydraulics hadn’t been able to support the multiple close-on, consecutive demands of movement in multiple axes and failed. Like I said, I cheated. The Army and the contractors already knew about this problem and were going to fit out production models with a 5000 psi system. That might have had some survivability issues of its own, but the Army was perfectly happy that we’d done what we did — it proved the test wasn’t rigged and underscored the need for the production change.
Finally, the Army itself honestly appraised the system based on its progress (and lack of progress) versus their requirements. Wikipedia provides a passage that encapsulates this end-game well: “The M247 OT&E Director, Jack Krings, stated the tests showed, ‘...the SGT YORK was not operationally effective in adequately protecting friendly forces during simulated combat, even though its inherent capabilities provided improvement over the current [General Electric] Vulcan gun system. The SGT YORK was not operationally suitable because of its low availability during the tests.’ ”
I guess I’m forced to conclude that the Sergeant York was a really good concept with some definite developmental flaws — some recognized and being dealt with, perhaps one or two that would have made it less than fully effective in its intended role — that was expensive enough for bad PR to help bring it down before it fully matured. The Army was under a lot of political pressure to get it fielded, but to their credit they decided not to potentially throw good money after bad.
On balance, a lot of the contemporaneous criticisms mounted against the M247 really don’t hold up very well over time. Short-range air defense currently is provided by the latest generation of the AN/MPQ-64F1 Improved Sentinel system. Radar emitting on the battlefield? Check. Target prioritization capabilities? Check. Towed (which equals “slow”) versus self-propelled? Check.
I’m glad we never wound up in the position of needing it but not having it. My personal judgment was and is that it probably could have wound up a heck of a lot more capable and useful than its developmental history might suggest, but its cancellation probably was justified given other acquisition priorities at the time.
Bottom line: I repeatedly flew a helicopter against it over the course of many hours of testing, including coming at it as unpredictably as I knew how, and it cleaned my clock pretty much every time.
And given how murderously effective the Gepard has proven in Ukraine, I'm inclined to agree with his assessment
We have well-regulated militias.
They're called the National fucking Guard.
Every Tom, Dick, and wife-beating Harry doesn't need to walk around with enough firepower to massacre a neighborhood.
The Constitution is a framework of government, not a goddamn suicide pact. Society and technology have changed since it was written, and we aren't worried about needing the family musket to form a citizen militia to repel the Brits invading from Canada. And even by the end of the Revolutionary War, the myth of farmer militias gave way to the reality of a professional army.
They're a gang.
Full stop.
Ban corporate landownership.
Full stop.
This is my surprised face.
:|
Pitbulls shouldn't exist as a breed.
What's that, the company infamous for being restrictive as hell in regards to usability, interoperability, repair, and even infamously went to court to defend their right to throttle their consumer's hardware capabilities to force them to upgrade isn't supporting their legacy hardware?
What.
A.
Fucking.
Surprise.
It's almost like he made a bunch of promises and then the democrats deliberate self-sabotaged so that they wouldn't have to actually fufil them.
What's that, we can't fix the senate because the parliamentarian said so? I guess the filibuster is insurmountable then. It certainly isn't like we can just ignore or replace said parlimentarian.
What's that, rather than using the clear and unambiguous means of forgiving student debt, we're going to use a method that the Republicans can easily block with a lawsuit that goes to their bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court? Guess you're stuck in debtor's hell forever.
Campaign on worker and union rights but then pass laws to force the railroad workers back to work without striking and without any rights.
Republicans are traitors and Democrats are nigh-on useless, and they wonder why voter turnout looks grim.
I feel like at this point we just go full Spanish Inquisition and burn these motherfuckers at the stake.
I will die before I use Windows 11.
"Upgrading" from 7 to 10 was already painful enough.
Israel is a genocidal colonial ethnostate.
We never should have given them a fucking penny or a single bullet.
Lemmy's very nature killed it for me.
It's way too much work to try and cultivate the setup I built with ease on reddit.
I'm still here, but the site iddn't make it easy.
Remember, the cruelty is the point.
We need to start a remote workers union.
I mean, I'm no conspiracy nut or UFO true believer or anything, but the simple fact is that aerial photography is nowhere near that simple or easy.
I live directly under the flight path for the local airbase, and about twice a week I have F-35s fly overhead. I basically know the schedule, and I usually try to take a picture of them, but despite it being a routine occurrence that I know to prepare for, I've only managed to get a handful of pictures, and of those pictures, they're almost all small and blurry squintovision. They're better than bigfoot photos but not by much. With my naked eye, I'm close enough to pick out individual features on the airframe and see if the the gear is up or down, and if they have anything on wing pylons, etc. But my actual pictures? Usually come out something like this. Now imagine you're trying to do that for a target 5 miles distant rather than just a few hundred feet overhead, and it only gets worse.
And the thing is that yes, the military does have a lot of eyes on the sky, but as they pointed out in the hearings, there exists no mechanism for making reports of UAP, collating and collecting the relevant radar and sensor data, and then trying to figure out what it was. If you talk about UAPs, you're going to get laughed out of the room if not sidelined into a career dead end.
Like even ignoring the possibility of aliens, and assuming that this is just some unknown atmospheric effect (that shows up on multiple different radar systems, FLIR, and optics), it's still worth gathering that data so we can find out what's going on. Investigating odd phenomena is great for our scientific understanding of the world around us. Right now we don't have a mechanism for Pilot A to say "Hey, that blip on radar did strange behaviors X, Y, and Z" and then the relevant sensor data is collected into a format for use by meteorologists or whomever.
99.9 repeating % of the time, it's just going to be something innocuous like what all the civilian UFO reports are of "in these specific atmospheric conditions, we get an optical illusion of a cubical cloud" Locals in LA think that the borg are invading, but from other angles, the cloud just looks slightly funny rather than a cube. Or they mistake a drone formation for some impossible alien craft. But when we have trained military observers who are all saying the same thing and we're seeing data from our most advanced military sensors, it's a different matter entirely.
That's why I'm so mono-focussed on the tictac report, because in that example we have radar tracks from 4 seperate system types (AN/SPY on the USS Princeton, AN/SPS and AN/SPQ on the USS Nimitz, either APS-125 or APS-139 for an E-2 Hawkeye, and the AN/APG-73 on the F-18s) These were all cited as having been there and tracking the tictac, and reported that it descended from 80,000 feet to sea level in a matter of moments, and when the F-18s are sent out, that's when we get the encounter that David Fravor describes. Alex Dietrich, the pilot in the wingplane of Fravor's flight also described the same encounter, complete with "I don't consider myself a whistle blower ... I don't identify as a UFO person," but despite that disclaimer, she still ends up collaborating his story for how the tictac behaved.
So there we have no fewer than 6 separate radar sets, of which at least 4 sources are different models so we can pretty safely rule out operator error or code glitch, the eyes of 2 seperate F18s pilots, one at high elevation, one that moved to intercept and they all describe the behavior of the tictac as moving impossibly to how we understand physics. Later on in a followup flight, they stick the FLIR pod on one of the F18s and we get the video that doesn't show very much, and we know for a fact that what's shown on that video isn't the full duration of it.
Now let's throw UFOs out of the equation entirely. Assume that it's only some kind of atmospheric anomaly like ball lightning or something. Isn't that still something that's incredibly cool and worth investigation? If something can act like that, let's figure out what it is and how it does it. And if it is aliens, then congratulations, we have the most important discovery in the history of mankind on our hands. And if it isn't aliens, then we've merely done a lot of cool science and made both commercial and military aviation safer by explaining what these are and if/how they are a danger. And that's what this congressional meeting was about. Setting up official channels so that when pilots run into things like this they can report it and we can start to aggregate the data and figure out what's going on. And on the other side of the equation is investigating DoD black projects that may or may not be pretending to be aliens (we know they did this with the original stealth programs, complete with MIB suits visiting the local skywatchers and telling them very specifically that it WASN'T UFOs, and thus distracting attention away from the stealth planes.) and letting the American government know what the fuck is actually going on in our military that ostensibly works for us.
IDF and killing aid workers. Name a more iconic du.
I wish someone had trained me how to use a buttplug. Could have saved myself a huge pain in the ass.