ijuin

Given that the Netherlands lacks the domestic industry necessary for building current-generation tanks, it makes sense for them to be buying them from its neighbors in Germany/France/Britain. For a force of less than a hundred tanks, it is more cost-effective than building a factory and training the personnel to manufacture their own.

And you don’t think that Catalina may have taken one step too far and stepped upon that area?

Oh the land will be there, and many of the people, but the political entity known as the Russian Socialist Federal Republic will have ceased to exist, at best being replaced by a government constructed by the occupying forces, as the German Federal Republic was created to replace the Third Reich.

The lanes are supposed to be waxed, so yes.

Yes. 20 thousand tons is as big as the WWII USS Enterprise CV-06 and other “fleet carriers” of the time. Anything that large ought to be called a Cruiser rather than a Destroyer.

Bad for them, yes, but using them on civilian centers will mean that there will no longer be a Russia when the rest of the world is through with them.

It’s not that they don’t have nukes—it’s that they know damn well that if they use them on cities, the rest of the nuclear powers will decide that they are too dangerous to be allowed to continue living, and will annihilate the Russian government.

Helicopter gunships tend not to carry torpedoes, nor do they have the range or speed of fixed-wing aircraft, so a helicopter carrier better fits the “defense, but no expeditionary force” doctrine. Anyway, their two helicopter-only carriers plus two STOVL light carriers still puts them as a secondary blue-water navy as opposed to USA, UK, China, or Russia.

Unfortunately, the Putin administration has cried “wolf” so much that we can no longer tell when they are serious.

Well, the SDF was the way that it was so that Japan would not build up a force of battlecruisers and fleet aircraft carriers after WWII, but would still be able to repel attacks from say, North Korea and the like. Now that all of the leaders from WWII have died of old age, that fear has mostly abated.

I don’t think we have seen a cat Edward as of yet, either.

Bah! One simply needs a lower propellant charge!

Yeah the Y 16/32 part seemed especially incoherent.

No, that would be Mar-a-Lago.

I would lean toward stupid-proofing it, myself.

I think that those spikes are meant to be exaggerated eyelashes, as one gets with mascara.

Yes, but due to the USA being surrounded by ocean to the east and west and a large friendly nation to the north, any incoming air assault via airplane would be visible for at least two hours before arrival, meaning that there is plenty of time to scramble the piloted interceptors. 9/11 (the most recent large air strike on United States home territory) was unique in that it subverted our own commercial aircraft to use the airplanes as suicide missiles, as opposed to every other hijacking before then which had used the lives of the passengers as bargaining chips or as targets unto themselves—the passengers in the 9/11 attacks were basically irrelevant to the hijacker’s plans, while our responses were all based around the assumption of trying to get the hijackers to let the passengers live. And as for ICBM/SLBM-based attacks, well, reliable defenses against those have yet to be invented—current ABM systems are not seriously thought to be capable of intercepting a large missile strike even if we deployed a trillion dollars’ worth of them—and it’s nearly certain that Russia would, if it chose to nuke us, attempt to circumvent MAD via a massive first strike aimed at making us unable to make a counter-strike, as opposed to just a handful of missiles.

Said the creature who sleeps eighteen hours out of every twenty-four.

Borrow one of mine—I have six cats, two of whom like to eat any prey that they catch.

I presume he was under anesthesia at the time. Informing him would require stopping the surgery, waking him up, and then starting over again afterward.

Two and a half centuries—Space Battleship Yamato was set in AD 2199/2200

I have always understood that a Warship is any ship designed for combat (possibly excluding vessels that are considered to be too small to qualify as “ships”, such as patrol boats and torpedo boats). A Battleship is a category of Warship characterized by carrying the heaviest armor and anti-ship weapons that are considered practical at the time (usually artillery, but also torpedoes and, post-WWII, missiles). A subcategory of Battleships, known as Dreadnoughts, after the first of their type, are known for foregoing a secondary battery of medium-sized artillery in favor of carrying as many of the largest size of artillery as possible (often 8-12 guns of 12 inch caliber or more), and most Battleships from WWI onward are of the Dreadnought type. Battleships are considered obsolete for two reasons. First, missiles and Carrier-based aircraft have much greater range than artillery, which means that most nations have given up on using naval artillery larger than 155 mm/6 inch caliber. Second, torpedoes and missiles have become destructive enough that no currently available armor can protect against them without being so heavy as to greatly impair mobility, which has led to the abandonment of armor above that needed to resist the aforementioned 155 mm artillery. Thus, ships that can avoid being hit via countermeasures, anti-aircraft/antimissile/anti-torpedo defenses, or mobility, are favored instead, which is why the US Navy fields the Ticonderoga class missile cruisers instead of battleships.

That explains Florida Man all by itself—you would have to be crazy to live there in the first place.

For the same reason that she was trying to act “cute” earlier—she is afraid that it would intimidate her companions.

Tea, Earl Gray, hot.