@Just-Jeepin I haven't decided whether I should tell them I have it...

@Just-Jeepin One of the things put forward to me by the (now former) F-35 program guy I talk to from time to time in the wake of the Chinese balloon is that detecting something is not equivalent to knowing what that something is. And so one of the intercepts in the wake of that shootdown blew up someone's actual scientific balloon.

Unfortunately the part from The Hunt for Red October where the sound of the caterpillar drive is initially classified by the system as an underwater lava flow wasn't adapted to the movie, as that would have been my go to for explaining what happened.

@415s30 Yelp Wikipedia says:

Jeremiah O'Brien, SS John W. Brown, and SS Hellas Liberty are the only currently operational Liberty ships of the 2,710 built.

Hellas Liberty is the ex-Arthur M. Huddell, now living in Greece (apparently Greek merchants were operating over 600 Liberty Ships at one point, so they wanted one as a museum to remember that service)

@xsnowpig And depending on where you’re at in Colorado, you might have gotten a dose of plutonium as well.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant

@Just-Jeepin I know a guy on Kauai with a bunch of stuff but its rusty too, a lot of it was in WW2 movies. He has a Pacific Landing Craft which is worth a million dollars restored, but its a big job.

@facw said in Counterfeit hardware suspected in F-16 fatality:

@Just-Jeepin Note that F-35 deliveries are currently halted because a part supplied by Honeywell was discovered to contain a Chinese-made alloy. Lockheed put up this extremely gross statement:

“Honeywell was informed by their lube pump supplier for the turbomachine, that one of their suppliers has been using alloy sourced from China in their magnets. This supplier is a 3rd tier supplier to Lockheed Martin and the alloy provider is a 5th tier.”

That does not in any way exonerate Lockheed. If you don't have the capacity or competence to ensure your supply chain is complaint, don't outsource things.

In any event, Lockheed is now seeking an exemption to restart deliveries without fixing the issue.

IIRC the SR71 used Titanium parts from ore that was sourced from Russia. The CIA created various front companies to make this happen without the Russian's knowing.

Not that excuses Lockheed from the above.

@ash78 said in How the B-52 was born in a Dayton hotel room:

It was a hotel in Akron in 1949...or maybe it was Dayton. These memories all tend to run together after a while. The war was over and the the world -- especially America -- was riding high on a newfound exuberance that pervaded ever corner of every town in every little place in the whole great big US of A.

This hotel was nothing fancy. There might have been a television in the lounge, but the rooms just had radios, the kind where you'd put in a nickel and listen to Orson Welles or Howdy Doody through heavy static for about 15 minutes. The kind of place where a guy would just end up drinking his Jim Beam and staring at the paneled wood walls until sunrise.

When I came in , I saw her spread out on the bed like some kind of angel. I had seen her many times before, but not like this. Something was fresh and new in my eyes, a spirit of adventure. She had a look -- sort of a Germanic charm, even though she was born and bred right here in America. It was at that moment that I realized I just needed something new. I still loved her, but the spark was just gone. So I mustered up some courage, bent down, and folded her violently in half just as Chet said "Hey, Jim be careful with those B-47 plans, that's a master copy."

And that's how the B-52 was born. Or at least conceived.

I wish we had a comment of the year award, but I'll have to settle for a @cotd nomination

@415s30 Got to keep the trademark protected by demonstrating continuous use. Not the only artifact of a dead brand that Jeep keeps hanging onto - Overland, SC/Rambler, "X", etc

@BicycleBuck Yeah, I got nothing more than that. I do remember seeing a documentary about ekranoplans years ago and they showed them flying over low lying islands and landing on beaches and disgorging APCs. Of course my memory could be faulty, but it must have been the A-90 Orlyonok. The KM and Lun didn't have that capability and Spasatel has never been completed (not that it would have that capability either).

It's fair to say that they have their limitations, but it does make one wonder if the concept can be developed and improved. I agree with @phenotyp though, the lead image looks more dated than the Soviet equivalents. I guess we'll find out where this goes.

@Mark-Tucker those Tech Vests could be pretty complicated though

The wheels in the top picture are fantastic!

@baconsandwich I can't complain, that story is how I found the original Oppo.

@ttyymmnn @WasGTIthenGTOthenNOVAthenGTInowA4 I believe it’s common to leave them up while taxiing for better clearance

possibly forgot to lock in place

@just-jeepin I encourage reading Ernie Pyle's Brave Men.
which is a reprint of his articles from the front. Compelling stuff.

AMAZON

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@exage03040 Also there some indication that Ryan Sawyer Mays might have intentionally sabotaged some equipment on his way to/from setting the fire, obviously, he couldn't have gone around and disabled everything on the whole damn ship, but doing something like cutting the hoses and stealing the fire extinguishers closest to where the blaze started would certainly cause some early delay. I don't know what actually went on, other than the Navy stating that there appeared to be a degree of sabotage involved with some firefighting equipment

@silentbutnotreallydeadly said in Warthogs: an endangered species:

@just-jeepin
Have you considered the prospect that it's an Oppo favourite because it's old, impractical, inefficient, possibly unsafe and hard to transport to where it's actually most useful but, if it does get to party, is hilarious fun to drive and has an outrageous cannon?

All of this, plus it has braaaaaaaaaaps.

@nauraushaun definitely not good for the Jeep’s drivetrain. Nor the passengers’.

@just-jeepin very interesting!

@facw Just depends on how far SpaceX can really drive down the price. Elon says $2 million per launch (but then, Elon says a lot of things...), but we're probably still 3-5 years off an operational Starship mission, so the exact cost of a full stack is still fluid.

@just-jeepin

"Yamamoto determined to strike U.S. ....."

@just-jeepin said in How Iceland changed the world:

@benjrblant From the snow depth I’m guessing…June?

January.

@vondon302 Legend says he's still there today, still trying to get it together. The driver, on the other hand went on to have a wonderful life as a career politician and balloon and ice cream salesman.

@smallbear TankBoat is a bit of a misleading name for what this is. It's a boat with a tank-like turret, not an amphibious tank.

@mr-ontop said in Join the Royal Navy, be Iron Man:

@distraxi Since you read the book you are aware that the only thing it had in common with the movie was the title.

Ummm, books plural and TV series not movie. But aside from that, it's still not an assessment I agree with - I thought they did a decent job of staying true to both the spirit and the general plotlines, given the constraints of not having a book's effectively unlimited special effects budget and needing to condense each volume down to 13 hours or so of TV. There were some characters who weren't a great match (e.g. Draper, Avasarala, and IMO Holden) and some who came out of the TV series a lot stronger than the books (e.g. Drummer), the plot got a bit mixed up in places and some things left hanging, and there's some stuff they left out that I would have liked to see left in (or vice versa), but overall I was impressed with the match. Better than the latter part of GoT, for sure...

@just-jeepin There are other clues that the billiards article is written by somebody who isn't an expert. Near the end of the article, they claim that the F-86 was "far superior" to the MiG-15. The two were much more closely matched than that. The American pilots just had much better training, and they were taught how to use their plane's strengths against the MiG's weaknesses while avoiding situations where the MiG performed better.

@facw That was here in town...that suuuuuucked.

@nowhere Yes, that sub was the one in New West. It was pretty scruffy, but it was neat to walk through it. I’d like to see the Onondaga one day as well.

@just-jeepin The quality of these hand drawn illustrations is really remarkable. Especially the cut throughs of the bomb sight that show how it's operated. There's a high degree of technical skill at play there.

Also, one ad reminds me Autocar still exists. I see like one a year around these parts.

alt text

Recently saw one of these but a dump truck and was kind of confused. Mack has huge market share in dump trucks and you'll see the occasional Western Star. But Autocar? Why even bother in this segment?

They're significant for offering a cabover (of which I've never even seen one) that doesn't appear to based on the Club of Four Cabs design used by Peterbilt and others I guess.

https://www.autocartruck.com/trucks/

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@skyfire77

That looks familiar.

“Obliterate your co-workers with the NERF coronavirus bomb launcher.”

Updated for you.

@just-jeepin That was a good read, thanks for posting it.

@just-jeepin

Well look at the bright side... we're one step closer to more realistic sex-bots!

@aremmes that, and the powertrain's all still intact. It should be pointed out that the tiny surviving portion of the Queen Mary's powertrain (basically, just one engine room and the propeller shafts) is the single most popular attraction on board - and unlike the Queen Mary's mostly destroyed interiors, the ones on the United States could all be recreated pretty cheaply and easily - no exotic woodwork or other expensive materials.

@just-jeepin That's amazing!

@pip-bip I'd imagine it's a little warm downstairs.

The Falcon's passing game isn't what it used to be.