Lord Ratner

U-2, as far as I know. I only flew it three times, but holy shit, it's... different. On the KC it was the combination of low engines, fast approach speeds, and the cable driven ailerons and elevators delaying all the inputs. Then you had a huge hydraulic rudder that would throw the plane around much faster than the cable driven surfaces. It had so much inertia that if you didn't pull the power at the right point, you couldn't slow down. If I remember correctly we went to idle at 200-300 feet for the flaps 30 (engine out) approach when heavy. I also can't compare it to the fighters that were around in your day, because they only keep the planes, not the pilots in the museums 😂🤣. I suspect some of those rocket ships with stubby little wings were an absolute monster to fly, but everything we have now is so much more advanced. The difference between the U2 and the kc-135 was not close, I don't want to make it sound like the kc-135 was unmanageable. After all, many of the world pilot training students flew it just fine. But when I talked to pilots who had flown both fighter aircraft and the kc-135, the raw stick and rudder of the kc-135 was more to manage. It was just really sloppy. You made up for it with probably the easiest combat mission in the AF. I taught many many KC135 pilots that were barely able to fly the plane, much less handle a more complicated mission. Honestly the biggest argument I have in support of the kc-135 being harder to land than a fighter is that the fighters weren't doing touch and gos when I was in. That blew my mind. There's no way you could get proficient at flying the kc-135 without doing pattern only flights. But you also have the better pilot factor to deal with, for whatever that equalizes.

That's what makes the most sense to me. We need a higher standard than what the T-1 offered, but we don't need refueling pilots (like I was) proficient in 4ship. Dump that stuff into IFF. I was a KC-135 instructor for a bit and the irony of that plane was that it was probably the second hardest plane in the AF to fly (stick and rudder, not mission execution obviously), yet it got mostly bottom-half UPT graduates because it was old and had bad CONUS bases. And it flies a lot of formation. Not fingertip at 90° of bank, but the same principals made you a good platform for the receivers. A student with solid formation work and more high-speed non-autopilot flying would absolutely benefit even the most herbivorific planes. And the weak swimmers can't hide behind their flying partner like they could in the T-1.

Yeah, absolutely. I did the IFT replacement at the Air Force academy when they had gotten rid of IFT (or whatever the program was pre-2006). It was like half of a PPL course, taught by civilians, and had basically no standards. I learned practically nothing. Then it was over 2 years before I started upt, so I had long since brain dumped everything from that course. The T-6 is perfectly suitable to be the first airplane and Air Force pilot touches. Edit: agreed with the above however, 45 hours would be wholly insufficient. 100 hours is probably The Sweet spot before going to an intermediate or advanced trainer. If we're going to transition back to everybody flies the T-38 (replacement) then we probably need more like 150 hours in something like the T-6. At least back when I was a FAIP, The limited t38 slots meant that only your best students were going to it, so you could get away with much less training.

Too much effort is spent justifying upholding the law. Just call them criminals and keep arresting them. The people who don't want us to follow the laws are never going to be convinced no matter how many high-level whatevers you catch, and the people who are already supporters are just going to be turned off if you're caught in a lie. There's never going to be an administration in the history of the country that loses an election for upholding immigration laws. Plenty have lost elections for over-promising and under-delivering.

Doesn't look extreme to me. Mmayyybeee definitely severe though. That wasn't the type of turbulence that turns flight attendants and beverage carts into missiles. Or, conversely, the inescapable gravitational pull between the Earth and that crew's gigantic nuts was keeping them from being affected by the turbulence as much.

Loyalty is everything to him, and he seems to be addicted to trolling. Trump is also hypersensitive to any suggestion of political witch hunts now. Couldn't even make it a year. Pity.

We got a good example of "Bad Trump" recently. Really I'd say 90% of his actions towards Canada have been bad, but throwing a tariff on them because you don't like an ad run by a provincial government is particularly stupid. One tragedy of Trump v2 is going to be that we finally have a president who uses tariffs, which are a phenomenal tool, but he's using them like a distracted child, and he's going to end up discrediting them for another few decades.

I agree with that specific question, but that doesn't actually matter to anybody. What matters are the favorability ratings of the various players, in particular Trump, which will play into the midterms. Not to mention six points isn't enough to get anybody excited. And since we just happen to have a president who presided over another shutdown during his first term, where his favorability ratings did drop, it's a pretty apples apples to comparison... It was either yesterday or the day before I saw on MSNBC them talking about Trump gaining a point in favorability. That doesn't indicate any real consequences from the shutdown. The other dirty little secret is that no one really gives a shit about this anymore. There are so many carve outs for what government activity continues despite a shutdown that the average American isn't being impacted.

So let me get this straight, 20 million illegal immigrants coming into the country is better than a small number of constitutional violations that are being resolved in the courts? That's the math. I don't work in the Congress, so I don't get to pick a made-up third option where the border is closed and there are no violations of constitutional rights. I have a choice between a candidate that made everything worse, dramatically, and a candidate who single-handedly reduced illegal immigration to near zero, while fucking up in some edge cases. That's pretty easy math to me. No one is denying the constitutional violations, though I suspect you would view far more of the deportation activity as a violation than I would. But even if I agreed with you on every single case, the alternative was a slow rolling catastrophe for my country and the country my children will inherit. Caveats are part of living in the real world. I will be very black and white in this point. If this is a literal statement, then you are a hack. And while I could put together a rather extensive list of individual things he has done that are quite easy for me or any other conservative-minded person to support, and I can even make a smaller list of things that any fair-minded liberal would support, if you can't do that on your own, then you are simply beyond any position that is worth engaging with. In that case, TDS is a fair label.

The nuance matters, but absent additional nuance I'm still inclined to agree with bonsai on this one. The Republicans in the house and the Senate are working in lockstep, so they should be pulling by the same rules as far as what is and isn't shut down business. Philosophically it's a bit hard to argue that you can't swear in a representative during a shutdown, as Congress is the mechanism for resolving the shutdown, and representatives and senators make up the Congress. What if 140 Republican congressman died in a plane crash during the shutdown? Should they be replaced by Republican governors and maintain the majority, or should Democrats be given the majority because the fatalities happened to coincide with the government shut down? Not that it matters. The Democrats overplayed their hand by demanding the reversal of fairly-passed legislation in exchange for opening the government. The polls support this pretty convincingly.

From what I'd gathered, for the moment at least, the ATF has given up on forced reset triggers on rifles. In their settlement agreement with rare breed, they had two interesting conditions. The first was that it would not be adapted to conventional pistols (conventional in the sense that it doesn't include all of the pistol AR and pistol rifle type guns), and the second was that he would agree to enforce his patent against others. I suspect the restriction on pistols was directly related to their ongoing attempts to get rid of the Glock switch.

Got a link? If true, then we agree, that's a bunch of ridiculous bullshit. But then you won't have to search very hard to find my criticisms of the Republican party.

One of the most iconic voices ever.

They don't read or listen. This is just where they take out their frustrations on the amorphous "Republican voter" as depicted by their favorite news outlet. Every time one of them breaks out the "why aren't you criticizing Trump like you do the liberals" routine, someone points out that nearly every conservative here regularly criticizes Trump, and then suddenly their keyboard goes quiet. It's boring.

I'm not at all against buying the Argentinian pesos. America is going to have to accept that we are not at war with free market enemies. Would it be better or worse for us to have stable allies in our hemisphere? After 30 years of funding the buildup of China, we are now in the unfortunate position of competing with the monster we created. That monster is going to dump money on every country that it can to weaken our sphere of influence. That doesn't mean we give everyone money and bankrupt ourselves like the Soviet Union did, but it does mean we have to be realistic about what it takes to cultivate and retain allies. Argentina is in the very rare position of having elected a leader on the message of hard choices to fix things. Unsurprisingly, those hard choices are making it hard for him to retain control. No one here should be surprised, Americans have become entitled and lazy as well. But of all the countries in South America to support, and hopefully turn into an example, the one with a historically humongous economy and fiercely pro-american leader is probably the best bet. I wish we could go back in time and divert trillions of dollars in manufacturing build up to the people much closer to us that share a much more similar history and moral philosophy. But we didn't, so now we have to do it the harder way.

Bought some toys to make range day a lot more fun: https://ar500targetsolutions.com/product/12x20-ar550-reactive-hostage-target-system-1-2/ And this fancy bit of kit: https://shootingtargets7.com/products/dueling-tree-target I'll report back in a couple weeks with the review

If she's kept from the House when the government reopens, I'm with you 100%. Until then it's just mock outrage. The Constitution did not contemplate a government shutdown.

That's not really the issue though. I agree with you that they will do us they're told (and right now they are just being told to make money). The issue is that what they produce is fundamentally unhelpful in a great war. China will be in a better position to manufacture the precision components required to mass-produce F-35s. That's a result of companies like Apple funding both the industrial capabilities and the intellectual capabilities required. They can convert their existing infrastructure towards wartime production. We can too, just not for the types of weaponry that we currently procure. One of the more fascinating things lucky pointed out was how China mandated all of the civilian Maritime assets be designed to military spec. So a ferry that is used to shuttle cars and semi trucks from Port to Port still has the ability to handle tanks. That type of foresight simply does not exist in America.

This is the Crux of it. You either have to believe all of them are stupid, which is true for the majority but not the entirety of our executive and general officer class, or they just don't care. The ugly reality is that the F22 is a completely useless airframe in a great conflict, purely by merit of its scarcity. And the F32 is most likely not far behind based on how difficult it would be to ramp up production. And just like all the bankers during the great financial crisis, these "leaders" will skitter away into the shadows like the cockroaches they are, never to be held accountable, while dudes like Luckey end up being the secret ingredient to winning the next war.

Palmer Luckey on Rogan is pretty good. Hearing a defense contractor talk about designing weaponry that can be manufactured in an auto factory is refreshing. At the end of the next war I don't think the current defense giants will be on top anymore. How many F-22/35s are we going to crank out in the next global conflict?

My favorite part of a government shutdown are the news mashups showing every politician from both sides taking the exact opposite position during the previous shutdown when it was the other team leading it.

Right now the only obvious enemy is China. Not only do they have enough people, they have a huge imbalance in the male:female ratio. Excess unmarried men are a societal risk. Additionally, the population hasn't fully appreciated that their life savings have been squandered building ghost cities that will never be occupied. That won't go over well as their boomers attempt to retire. Even without that, their demographics are terrible because their Baby Boomer generation was huge and the one-child policy created a much larger generational imbalance between the boomers and millennials than exists in the rest of the world. Last I saw the revised population estimates were 200-300 million fewer Chinese than we thought 10 years ago. Shrinking population = shrinking economy = social unrest. You know of a better way for a dictatorship to quell social unrest (with a bunch of excess males) than war? We're already in the early phases with the trade war. Think of it from their perspective, not ours. The US is forcing a reindustrialization in the West, which is a direct attack on China's wealth generation. And the primary pressure points against America (rare earths production being a huge one) are being identified and, at least rhetorically, mitigated in future plans. If we allow China to take over their half of the planet, particularly all the east Asian countries, then maybe there's no war. But we won't, so eventually everything will spill over into another global conflict. Honestly I'm amazed at how many people just operate on the assumption that humanity has evolved out of wars.

War.

Is that a gondola pole? When I flew with Huggy he may have tried to hand-start the prop, but he still knew about powered flight 😂😂

At least now we know what the bargain was to get the qataris to abandon Hamas and force the ceasefire. This might be another bit of 4d chess on behalf of the Trump administration. Giving the qataris a no shit facility in the United States is going to tie them to us in a much more concrete way than simply having a base in their country. My suspicion is that the Trump administration has decided that we are going to buy the qataris away from the Chinese and the Iranians. And we're going to lock them in with a deeply integrated military, similar to how we have locked in the Saudis. Obviously the 4D chess bit is tongue in cheek, but it's just another example of the Trump administration making a decision and buying into it 100%. In an era where the dreams of a cosmopolitan worldwide alliance have fallen apart, if the Republicans commit themselves to the concept of a Balkanized world again, we can start making moves to make sure that our sphere of influence is the more powerful one. The real problem of course will be the the pseudo-utopians on the far right and the far left that have turned into New age isolationists. They'll bitch and moan about the duplicitous nature of the Qatari regime as though that's not an inescapable facet of international relations. It's got to be a rough time to be a libertarian.