Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

El Reg is pure filth! Nobody below 50 should be allowed on here!

Beer... the ony way to enjoy cricket.

irongut,

You are fucking doing it wrong! We invented cricket for a reason! Cake. What other sport stops for lunch, tea and has three drinks breaks a day. If you go to Lords, the home of cricket, they will sell you a hamper for a reasonable price that contains snacks for all three drinks breaks, a very full lunch and an afternoon tea (for the tea interval). You are also allowed to bring in one bottle of wine per person, or 4 cans of beer, if you're some disgusting oik!

Cricket is for picnics! All day picnicking. Sometimes interesting things even happen on the pitch. If not, you can always have a nap, until it's time for the next meal.

I took Mum to Lords for afternoon tea one Mother's Day. It was superb. We got 7 different kinds of cake each, plus two scones and lots of sandwiches. I was even offered more, but by that point I was at Mr Creosote levels - and didn't even have room for a waffer thin mint.

Ah memories. Johnners, TMS, cake, lazy Summer afternoons, proper puddings with custard...

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: OK, but

* I did win a Sunday School book prize for 100% attendance in 1968.

Fucking commie bastard! Fire up the electric chair!

Re: I hope this hurts attendance for the World Cup

I thought fan attendance at the Saudi world cup was going to be bad. Would be funny if nobody wanted to go to the US one as well.

Facebook killed my account years ago, because I'd not logged in for a couple of months (only had the account to see family photos and rarely posted) - so logging in with the right password only got me to a screen demanding a copy of my passport. Nah.

Worse though, it means I can't close the account. At which point I can't even tell the US government that I don't have a social media account, because one may still exist. I'd have to create a new FB account to search FB for my old account and see if it's still there... Or I suppose I could talk to a person and ask one of the rellies to check. But speaking to people... Yuck! How very last century...

I did have a Myspace account, if that helps. But I can't even remember what email address I used to set it up, let alone what my password was.

That leaves me with El Reg, or I guess creating a Twitter account or something. I can't imagine getting in without something to show them.

My brother lives over there now, so I actually have reason to go. I could risk it, and rely on Colorado having a nicer quality of immigration official. I let my Mum go first on my last visit, and the immigration guy noticed we were together and invited me up to process us together. He even smiled at us both, and was pleasant. Not had that at immigration anywhere else. Maybe it's because Mum was getting assistance to go through the airport - so we got nicer treatment because we turned up on a golf cart? I definitely recommend travelling with an 85 year-old for the benefits of being taken to the front of every queue. But sadly she's decided the trip is too much now, so next time I'm on my own.

Re: Hey Trump

Such as fapping off over Donald Trump or Elon Musk

Do you mind?!?! Some of us have just eaten!

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: Noise!

So maybe a quiet and stealthy Vulcan bomber?

African or European?

Laden or unladen?

Or, for quiet but impressive, I suggest a Lancaster bomber with laryngitis (to quieten the Merlins down a tad).

Re: pheasants, crows, pigeons etc

Perhaps your leccy wagon could be fitted with shotgun sound effects

That shouldn't be allowed. Not until the car has first said, "Get orf my land!" Only then does it deploy the shotgun sound effect.

A recording of a Lancaster bomber at 500 feet, with all 4 Merlin engines going would be interesting. Perhaps a bit hard on nearby residences though.

Or how about a singsong voice chanting, "I'm coming to run you over! I'm coming to run you over!"

Maybe Tesla's could read a selection of the latest tweets from Elon and/or the most read tweets of the day?

Although I do quite like the idea of passing a law that the driver has to wind down the window and make their own vroom vroom noises.

With ICE engines getting so much quieter, at low speeds you tend to be relying more on tyre noise and wind noise than engine noise anyway. But the whining noises the Tesla driver in our office makes are quite good for getting your attention without being too loud or annoying. We've got a bunch of Prius taxis in my town, and they're all quite old - so don't have noisemakers. So can be a bit hard to avoid when they're just pulling out, before the motor kicks in and you can hear them.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

Re: Just a pie on the sky thought

Probably not, with the current 'USA first and only' attitude of the current US leadership.

To be fair, that's exactly the same traits that Putin and Xi display, so even if the US had a better administration in office, there's unlikely to be any cooperation with China or Russia soon.

All 3 seem to believe everything is a zero-sum game. So cooperation effectively means losing out to your partners, rather than winning everything on your own. With a side-order of nihilism specifically from Putin, of "if I can't have it then nobody else should either".

Re: So....

Umbracorn,

Channel 4 did a "reality show" called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(TV_series)">Space Cadets (link to Wiki), where three people were selected as astronauts and fooled into thinking they'd been sent into space for several days. Quite an interesting piece on it, I only remembered its existence, on how they carefully selected a group of reasonably intelligent, reasonably gullible conformists who liked practical jokes and weren't interested in space or sci-fi, and put them in with some actors. Apparently some people will believe anything...

Work bought me an advent calendar this year. 24 bottles of port, which I'm currently hoarding, because it doesn't seem like a good way to start the day... But once I've drunk this week's bottles tonight, I'm going to be thinking seriously about needing cheese - and a trip to the Moon might seem like quite a sensible idea...

And what moronic thing would you be doing that is that dangerous anyway?

The Company's bio-weapons division would like to invite you to study these new xenomorphs we've found. They're absolutely fascinating! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Once you've seen one, you'll remember it for the rest of your life!

Re: Current NASA situation

MachDiamond,

During the Moon landings, part of the procedure was to check the fuel state of the LEM by running up the thrust a bit, to settle the fuel in the tank, and give an accurate measure. Which was duplication, given none of the fuel should have been used since the tanks were filled on Earth.

This would give the option of getting underway in order to make the process a bit easier. Also, if spacecraft are capable of moving fuel around internally, isn't this at least a partially solved problem? Or is there no transfer between tanks, only a transfer from tank to engine / fuel cell?

OpenAI turns the screws on chatbots to get them to confess mischief

Re: Missing the point (again)

Jimmy Page,

To lie requires intent. A statement is not a lie just because it's wrong. It only becomes a lie when the person making it knows it to be wrong, but makes it anyway for some reason they have decided upon.

None of these LLMs are capable of lying, because they're not capable of decision.

Whether a true intelligence needs the ability to lie is an interesting question. Surely there's an argument either way. If you deliberately constructed an artificial intelligence, that intelligence might have rules imposed on it. Not something like the 3 laws of robotics, because that's not programmable, and Asimov spends enough time in his works showing that they come down to questions of semantics anyway.

But perhaps we might build an artificial intelligence (many decades / centuries in the future) which cannot tell an untruth. But that doesn't mean it has to blurt out the truth at inappropriate moments, or even that it can't deceive with the truth, in the way that a good lawyer or politician can. So maybe you can't be intelligent without the power to deceive, but I could imagine an intelligence without the power to actually lie.

An AI for an AI: Anthropic says AI agents require AI defense

Re: There was a tech company that swallowed AI…

I know a tech company that swallowed John Connor.

If it ain't careful it'll soon be a goner.

It swallowed John Connor to catch AI,

I don't know why it swallowed AI.

Perhaps it'll die.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Filippo,

The Soviets spent most of the Cold War flooding the world with lies. And we had to build institutions to try and deal with it. Something we'd let go after the Cold War ended, and our politicians have been slow to think about when Russia and China started using the same playbook again. It is easier, as you say, because the internet has made it much easier to get information to people direct - but I can remember Soviet propaganda from the 1980s, even as the Soviet Union was collapsing round their ears.

Of course, in countering propaganda, we have to be careful not to resort to it ourselves. Which is very difficult, if not impossible. Once you give a government the power to shape the news, they'll use it to protect themselves - and both the politicians and the bureaucrats will take advantage of this to protect their own narrow self-interests.

Also resilience against foreign propaganda requires more belief in your own government. A trusted system is less easy to subvert. Our governments are now way more open than they were in the Cold War, and in some ways a lot more honest and transparent. But also a lot less self-disciplined.

You have to be careful with everybody

Another thing that has fallen out of fashion, especially in the US, is respect for expertise.

This is true. Experts can be inconvenient and say things you want aren't possible - very annoying.

However "listen to the experts" can also be cover for "appeal to authority" instead of proper argument. You have a link talking about doctors recommending to ignore the new CDC site on vaccines - but I remember the British Medical Association during Covid saying that the government were wrong to delay 2nd dosing of patients with vaccines in order to get more people their first dose quicker.

In this case it was a bunch of doctors (via their union) having a go at a government they didn't like - although there were many with genuine fears about this policy. Even other governments publicly criticised the decision - although in the case of France I think that was sour grapes about us having more vaccines than them and Emanuel Macron who had his advisors briefing the press that he had read so much about the matter that he was basically an epidemiologist at this point (hence was personally making French policy).

It was a risk, and the people who decided on it knew it was a risk and said so at the time. But it was actually real experts in the JCVI - who were a mix of doctors and epidemiologists - whereas most of the BMA critics were ordinary doctors - who are therefore not much more expert in epidemiology than anyone else.

Expertise is vitally important. But can also lead to groupthink - as well as group self-interest. So you need to be almost as sceptical of them, although that's much harder to do, since they definitely know more than you do about what they're talking about.

I'd argue that our experts letting us down is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment. If they'd done a better job, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation. There are too many centrist politicians in this day and age who seem to be willing to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast - and promise they can do them and everything will be fine. Which makes them harder to distinguish from the Donald Trump's of this world, who'll just handwave difficult questions away and claim that he can easily do difficult things (despite having all the capacity for long-term thinking and planning of a hyperactive mayfly on speed). Give me the days of grumpy old centre right conservative types in suits, who tell you that you can't have jam today, because we can't afford it. But if we work hard, save hard and invest, we might have jam tomorrow. Rather than centrist politicians talking about how they can have all of the transport carbon neutral by 2035 (No! 2030! Don't you even care about the environment?!?!). Even you're going to be a centrist realist, then you need to actually be realistic.

Re: A case in point.

I've been trying the "do not show me this channel again" option you get in Youtube. Hoping this will have an effect on the algorithm, after watching a bit of one and realising it's crap. Having found some rather excellent history on their recently. Came across Drachinifel on Naval history and have been enjoying many hours of his top quality content - watched a few aviation things on there as well, and there's a hell of a lot of AI crap that's clearly an AI voice and the Wiki page, put to a few photos in order to get the advertising clicks.

I think the other clue is breadth of expertise and output. There are some channels producing too many videos to be possible with one person writing them. Plus you get a channel on aviation that has a side channel on ships, another on civil engineering and another on tanks - or opinions on Ukraine. Well I've got interests and opinions on all of those too, but I wouldn't be able to discuss all of them expertly enough to be worth an hour long video.

I think the other clue is when people express a lack of knowledge. A good expert will say that, "I think this, but can't know it because the sources disagree. Even when I went back to look at primary sources."

It's a wonderful resource, despite Google's best efforts to wreck it in order to juice those extra few pennies of revenue.

Remember that Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister for Propaganda and Enlightenment was around long before the internet - putting out industrial levels of bollocks. Along with his cohorts in the Soviet Union.

Not that it was anything new then. Everything from coins to royal portraits have been used, over millennia, in order to spread the message required by the ruler in question.

Take for example "King" Hatshepsut 1479 – 1458 BC - I believe she's too early to be Pharoah, so should still be titled King, but I ain't no Egyptologist. When her hubby :Thutmose II died, she was regent for her infant son. No problem, being a female regent. But then she co-reigns with him and not having a set-up for ruling women, she simply styled herself King and got herself a nice beard. You can say anything with statues...

As an example, have a look at Henry VIII's suit of armour that's definitely not writing a cheque that he can't cash.

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: It also took Zoom down

No, ITYM cried out in terror as the meeting was switched to Teams.

Our clients started using Zoom an awful lot, during the pandemic. But since 2021 they all seem to have moved to Teams. Which sometimes even deigns to allow you to join meetings on the first try...

UK SAP users say they're baffled by Business Suite reboot licensing maze

"The SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition package is not just a solution; it is a gateway to a future of limitless potential and unprecedented business agility,"

Share and enjoy!

The question is, does it have SAP's new GPP™ feature?

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Re: 400 million years in the future

Expect a cease and desist from the Lucas estate forthwith.

I'm safe! I'm safe! Lucas can't get me. He sold everything Star Wars to Disney. So they could squat in its decaying husk and endlessly violate its memory for smaller and smaller profits, until it was all destroyed.

Disney are that nice corporation. All about making the little 'uns happy. Nice cartoons and fairy tales. Mickey Mouse...

Uh oh! Mickey Mouse? Infinite lawsuits ahoy! We're doomed! Doomed!

400 million years in the future

A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far away: The Empire is about to run out of internet addresses. This is disrupting plans for the building of the 3,023rd Death Star. Grand Emperor Palpatine has somehow returned. In order to cut through the bureaucratic arguments he has decided to chair the 27,156,458th meeting of the Intergalactic Committee on Net Protocols to finally either totally migrate from IPv4 to IPv6 or to create IPvX and have done with both of them.

After 4 hours of painfully written dialogue the Emperor draws his lightsaber and kills everyone in the room. [Audience cheers.] Darth Jar Jar is put in charge of IPvX.

THE END

OpenAI money-go-round sees it invest in company that invested in OpenAI

Re: "Do we even have terms that describe this sort of financial make-believe?"

Jedit,

It's neither money laundering, nor tax evasion.

It could have the intention of deliberately inflating both companies' value, and therefore be fraud. But if they can claim they bought the stakes at "fair value" - then they get away with that.

It's also a way of tying businesses together, particularly if they're AI companies that don't make profits and so are cash poor. This way, you hand over cash, to be spent on making the losses even bigger, but for a stake in the massive, enormous, amazing future profits that are coming real-soon-now™! Which can then go on your books as an asset, rather than buying some shitty AI product that doesn't work and so lowers the value of your company. Hey presto! You're partners. And can lose money together into the future.

As my finance director (in a former life) used to joke in dull meetings, "our losses go to infinity and beyond!" We not being in some speculative industry actually sold real products for real profits. Although I did have a meeting with him once where I asked to write-off £800,000 - which is the most shareholder value I've managed to destroy in an afternoon's work. Makes me an amateur compared to VCs though.

Do we even have terms that describe this sort of financial make-believe?

Michael Hoffmann,

It's called re-cycling. How can you not approve of this thrifty, sound and ethical idea, to renew and reuse our Earth's scarce resources? In this case investment capital.

It is an interesting way of increasing the value of your investments, by buying a share of a company at an inflated value and then having that company buy yours at same. It's very 19th Century railway finance - and seems likely to end in the same way. I'm sure they can make it legal by having lots of paperwork to back up their "fair valuations" - and get their auditors to sign it all off.

The other thing it reminds me of is the Japanese 90s real estate crash. Where all the banks held stakes in each other, and everyone seemed to also buy shares in anyone they did regular business with. This led to a situation where no major company could be allowed to go bust, because of the horrible cascade effect it would have across the economy. Which meant that loads of companies were left holding vast assets that they could barely cope with, and nobody had any spare capital to invest - hence Japan got twenty years of economic stagnation.

The recovery from the dot-com bust was relatively rapid, because companies went bust or got bought out on the cheap, if they had useful tech. Or in the case of the fibre companies, who'd laid way more than they could sell (even despite their fraudulent cross-selling agreements between themselves) - that fibre came in useful later on. Much of the useful stuff continued, but with less of the bonkers stuff.

Whereas the banking crash in 2007 was harder to recover from because the banks couldn't afford to lend for investment and we'd bailed-out lots of companies who had to sit there doing very little but keep their heads above water.

I suspect the coming AI crash will be somewhere in between. There's lots of big players, like Amazon, MS and Google that will take big, but not company threatening losses. But it might make them less willing to take risks and invest. And then lots of AI companies with no business model will disappear. I worry that the sheer amount invested is going to cause problems for the finance industry - which hopefully still remembers some of the lessons from 2007. But probably not...

UK gov blames budget leak on misconfigured WordPress plugin, server

Re: Illegal

It's very unlikely to be illegal to have. But it might be illegal to use?

If you're a journalist, you're doing journalist things - then happy days. You just got a scoop.

If you're a trader - then you might be considered to be using insider information. However I'd suspect your lawyers will argue that the data was published online (by the government no less), and so you used publicly available information - so not insider dealing. Unless there's some conspiracy where an insider deliberately messes up security to give someone else plausible deniability - bloody hard to prove - I can't see anything coming of this.

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

First Law: An agent may not randomly wipe out a drive letter or, through inaction, allow a drive letter to avoid the recycle bin on the way to the rubbish."

Second law: Unless it's a printer. In which case a printer may not take an action, or through inaction, that causes any good to happen to a human.

Re: What the Fark did you expect?

If you expected anything better from this, you're a freaking moron and deserve having all your hard drives formatted.

This is the problem with the IT industry. It's still not a mature industry - insert the old joke about technology being the name we give for stuff that doesn't work yet.

If you buy a car, you expect it to work. To drive you from A to B. You require training to operate it. But you don't know how it works (at least most people don't). So you pay a professional to fix it. Ford don't issue cars that randomly accelerate to 100mph and squish random pedestrians. Or at least they fact fines and severe criticism if they do.

Cut to Google issuing software that doesn't work as advertised and may just randomly deletes all your data. Blame user for what happened, rather than Google. Even where user accepts he should have done better and is partially responsible - call user moron.

Consider you may be part of the problem with the IT industry, not part of the solution?

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

Re: Trifold?

You missed something. It can also be unfolded into a small sheep containment and protection device - should your miniature sheep be menaced by wolves - or in fact large insects.

I really don't know why El Reg missed that vital bit of the press release...

PostHog admits Shai-Hulud 2.0 was its biggest ever security bungle

Re: Totally misunderstood that

ecarlseen,

Hoo boy! That website is an abomination!

It's like something perpetrated in the late 90s, on Geocities. But somehow more upsetting, because it's tidy and organised. Which means someone inflicted it on you deliberately! Rather than just being the product of enthusiasm and incompetence, this is the result of a diseased mind!

Picked a product page at random (LLM Analytics) and it's got an upsettingly fluorescent purple title that makes your eyes bleed, and so unable to read the pale grey text beneath.

What is the obsession of modern UI designers with fucking zero contrast pale grey text, on a white background? These guys have even less excuse with their use of high contrast purple.

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: Redefinition of airliners

Airbus is rubbish though! I mean, their flying buses aren't even nuclear powered!

UK Digital Services Tax raises £800M from global tech giants

Re: How about 20% tax?

so I'm not expecting them to try, but the results could be better.

doublelayer,

What you're asking for here is a wholesale re-arrangement of international corporate taxation, that's going to require agreement from the governments of the EU (both as individual countries and probably at Commission level too), the USA (under Trump no less), Canada, China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, India, Australia and a bunch of other countries with decent sized economies. Good luck with that! Seeing as hell is likely to require gritting and snowploughs first, I think a temporary measure is the most likely solution.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

I'll have the Death Star of beef with the Tie-Fighter prawns please!

Very well sir. But only a Sith deals in surf'n'turf.

Re: The "3D printed chicken"

jpennycook,

I've had tripe, and it was mostly tasteless. Like snails. The taste comes from what you cook them in. The texture of both is pretty awful though, they were just a cheap source of protein, that have now gone "posh" in some restaurants. The same path that oysters have taken in UK food culture.

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

Like a badger,

I don't think I've made any accusations of corruption.

Sorry, didn't accuse you, and didn't mean you to get the impression that I had. I just get frustrated with the comments you do see on this thread, and I've seen on others reading about this story of, "oh this is easy. Just do this thing." Which in most cases is buy Korean/Japanese/Italian ship without ordering it, which would be illegal, because Congress have mandated all sorts of standards and have a buy American act etc.

Even the more logical, "just build the Canadian River Class (their Type 26)", would still mean lots of work and delays. Almost certainly more delay than finishing the Constitution class. What they've basically had to do is a design, not quite from scratch, to make the quart (of all the stuff they want and the pork barrel politics they practise) fit into the pint pot of the FREMM design.

but leaves us not that much further forward in terms of (for the most part) bloody expensive weapons, delivered late, often with fundamental flaws or capability gaps and with little commonality with likely co-combatants

I heard an interview with a defence journalist who got a visit to a Chinese Type 54 (I think) frigate. He said that he walked in from the helicopter pad, through the hangar, through a watertight door (into the lower level of the superstructure) and walked all the way to the prow of the ship with not a single watertight door in evidence after that. Also after the hangar there was a boat bay, where they'd got a fuel tank for the boats and an ASW torpedo launcher (with reloads) and not a single firefighting device in the compartment. Plus storing your boat fuel with your torpedoes. There's not been a lot of naval combat since WWII, and I think a lot of navies have forgotten some vital lessons about the importance of this sort of stuff.

Similarly the Russian army still operate the T72. Designed to be cheap, and accept the fact that it was a deathtrap, with limited crew survivability if it took a hit. Fine for a two week victory over NATO in the 1970s, when you had an army of 3 million and the result was probably a nuclear holocaust anyway. Not so useful to a modern Russian army of only about 400,000 that was about to invade Ukraine and fight a 3 year (and counting) war.

Sometimes you have to spend money to keep your guys alive. Possibly the Chinese see those whole ship's crews as expendable - although even with their vast population, demographics are turning against them, and they'd do well to care about their people. Morale also has an effect on combat - giving your crews a bit more hope of survival can be a good thing.

I do share your frustration with defence procurement. But I also think some of these problems are inevitable. If you want to counteract an enemy that have little care for human life (even that of their own soldiers) and outnumber you, then your best bet is to have technically superior weapons. But to do that, you're demanding technological development, to order. And that rarely happens without delays and cost over-runs.

Also, standardising on weapons is very difficult in a democracy. We've been allies with the US for ages. They'll happily sell us weapons, but they'll move heaven and earth, and pay three times the amount, to buy only US stuff - rather than buy from us. And I don't see how we fix that, because it's a fundamental flaw of democracy. France and Germany are the same, and our ministers get in trouble when they buy foreign. Short of NATO becoming a country, that's hard to fix. Norway have just done it with Type 26, though the paperwork ain't signed yet - and there's still a chance for our politicians (or theirs) to fuck it up. They're literally just buying our ships, buying our weapons and not changing anything - so we can fight, upgrade and train together. But then look at Eurofighter, where Italy, Germany and Spain refused to go for the cool new radar that we wanted. So we had to wait an extra 5-10 years for the upgraded AESA radar (being out of date lost a few foreign sales too), and now we've got two. Because Germany and Spain have decided on a cheaper option than Britain, and Italy only signed on a couple of years ago, after we'd done the R&D.

The Gulf War and Ukraine show that even the previous two generations of weapons mostly worked as advertised though. And things like F-35 keep winning acquisition competitions, which suggest that they are as good as advertised, even if vastly over-budget.

Re: This sounds like a job...

If Perun had to do a separate video on every military procurement disaster he'd have to quit his job and become a full-time Youtuber. Plus he'd also have to clone himself several times, in order to keep up with demand.

Plus, have you no care for the poor guy's mental health?

Re: I changed it ...

You have to specify everything. You need fireproof mattresses and duvets, for example.

I spent 6 months arguing with London Underground about some 24 litre £10 plastic water tanks once. This is because they were going in a piece of kit in an underground station and they have a limit of how many grammes of plastic they're allowed per m³ of area under ground. Read about the deaths from smoke in the King's Cross fire and you'll understand where those rules come from. The answer was to either get rid of some plastic bits from other plant or spend a few thousand quid custom making the plastic tanks out of steel, or finding an off-the-shelf steel tank and re-designing our product to fit it.

Fire kills ships. And crews. Navies, or at least good ones, really care about this.

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

Like a badger,

Problem, it's horses for courses. You complain about design changes leading to more expense. But if you buy my frigate with my preferred choice of diesel engines then you now have to retrain all your engineers to maintain both my diesels and your current diesels. And now need two supply chains. So it's probably cheaper to standardise on yours, and change the design. Same with radars, torpedoes, missiles, decoys, deck guns, combat systems and a host of other stuff.

At this point, pause in sympathy with the poor Ukrainian engineers - who have a nightmare of everyone else's hand-me-down equipment, plus a bunch of old Soviet stuff to maintain.

This is one of the big problems for Australia. They destroyed their submarine program with France (Attack class) because they've standardised on US systems. Plus they wanted a nuclear hull with an AIP propulsion system from a different French sub. Plus the French promised them lots of workshare and then kept reducing that, until Australia was going to only get 30% of the build. That's program killing technical risk, and I doubt the French were ever being honest about the risks. But now they're taking a UK design with some parts being common between US, UK and them. So are the Royal Navy going to have to change to US combat systems to suit the Aussies (which then won't match with our other boats) or will the Aussies have a separate set-up on a class with only 5 Aussie and 8-12 UK boats? Making it fire both Spearfish and Mk48 torpedoes should be relatively easy - it's likely to use UK sonar. Difficult.

Norway have 4 frigates. Which they're planning to replace, not being happy after one of them sank. I'm not sure if this was design or operator error, but it's controversial. So perhaps they're less concerned about supply chains and interoperability, seeing as they're getting rid of the old. Though they have other missile boats and subs. But also they live next door to the UK. So they've bought Type 26 in its entirety and plan to actually join our program. So I think they're signing up for the same training, upgrade and maintenance program as us. That's what they've said they want anyway, nothing's signed yet. Maybe this is a model for Australia, who are getting rid of the Collins class subs - but equally they want to buy 3 used US subs at which point having one CMS (combat management system) makes more sense.

In the end, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

But there's plenty of stuff to buy. Italy or France just keep building cheap-ish frigates, and will sell you one of their own Navy's cheaper ships and just take the replacement from the yards - a pure off-the-shelf deal. You can always upgrade them later. Upgradeability is why ships keep getting bigger. Steel and air are cheap, so make it bigger, you can fit more in later. French FDI or Italian upgradeable patrol frigate for cheaps, FREMM variants for better.

Britain has the Type 26 - £750m a ship but absolutely top ASW (anti-sub) combatant that's got decent AAW (anti-air) capabilities. Or the general purpose Type 31 (£150m each - but that's a lie as the MOD are providing many of the combat systems directly), plus it's immediately going to require upgrades once built - but they wanted them built quick and worry about the rest later. Poland are buying a high-end air defence variant of this, the Miecznik class. Denmark and Sweden are looking at it.

Spain have a mix of frigates that are decent options to buy. And you can buy from Germany. Spain and Germany use lots of US systems and weapons. Italy and France are standardised on Aster surface-to-air missiles and more European weapons. Britain the same, and us and Italy are starting to converge on things like CAMM (Sea Ceptor) SAMs.

However it is complicated. And generating outrage by calling people stupid and/or corrupt for making perfectly sensible, but expensive, decisions is far too easy and gets far too many likes. Plus up-front cost is often a poor guide for systems that are going to be in service for 20-40 years - and the supply-chains and training pipelines that are required to support them.

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

thames,

I think the other reason for building a frigate is that many US yards can't build something as big as a Burke. Let alone a 14,000 tonne replacement. So they need something smaller, to get more hulls in the water.

They also need more ASW. I think you suggested that Type 31 would suit the US in an earlier post. But they want an ASW ship. Which makes sense, as our threat is mostly Russia plus everything else - unless we expand our area of operations to seriously confront China. But for the US they've got to deal with both Russia, and the much bigger threat of China - both of which have large submarine fleets - plus everything else. The sub threat in most of the world is much lower, unless you're fighting NATO or India.

That leaves the US with very few options. LCS is too noisy for ASW, and not really for blue water work. They can't build many more Arleigh Burke than they already are. Buying anything else "off-the-shelf" would be a sick joke. It's illegal to buy foreign ships, and Congress doesn't strike me as likely to get together in a spirit of cooperation to pass laws to change this, plus they'd also have to change the buy American laws, the damage control laws etc.

Constellation is the only chance to get ships into the water in numbers, in any reasonable time. So I guess the administration will just do some hand-waving, say something about missiles and B21, then wander off whistling quietly to themselves and leave it to the next administration to pick up the pieces.

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

mcswell,

The US went further than anyone else in high pressure steam, from the 1920s and kept it up into the 60s at least. Very successfully in general. I guess they pushed too far with the Adams class? The Royal Navy didn't, because the big gain is more efficiency (the higher the pressure the higher the temperature) the downside is complication. Efficiency means better fuel economy for a US Navy expecting to cross the Pacific and fight a war with Japan. Into the Cold War, all their operational areas were thousands of miles from their home ports. Whereas the Royal Navy had bases everywhere - so went for easier/cheaper maintenance and having to make more fuel stops in friendly ports.

The Germans in WWII also went for high pressure steam, but couldn't get it to work. And ended up with a fleet of unreliable, top-heavy destroyers that were at permanent risk of capsizing in bad weather and couldn't use half their weaponry when the sea was rough. "Fortunately", they lost a third of those destroyers in the Battle of Norway and were forced to build cheaper 1,500 tonne torpedo boats that were actually rather decent, normal sized, destroyers.

Nowadays, as thames says, it's marine diesels and gas turbines, with the brave people having those but using them to run electric drives. The RN had some problems with this on Type 45 (now fixed). But Type 31 is diesel-only for cheapness. Constellation will have diesel electric combined with direct drive from the gas turbine - this is because the electric propulsion is much quieter at slow speeds, ideal for anti-submarine work. Arleigh Burke have all the sensors for good ASW performance, but aren't very quiet (I don't think they have rafted machinery) and they don't have quiet electric motors for slow speed cruising. LCS have water jets, which are apparently very noisy - and make them unsuitable for ASW work. Noise puts you in danger of detection, plus your own noise could mask the submarine's noise.

Finally, on aluminium superstructures - these melt at lower temperature than steel. USS Belknap collided with USS John F. Kennedy and caught fire. The superstructure collapsed: There's a picture early in this wiki article. Hence the USN changed its rules.

HMS Sheffield suffered some extra casualties, because in order to save weight they'd used aluminium ladders. Some people were unable to escape to the deck because these ladders melted in the fire, after it was hit by an Exocet in 1982.

Re: Destroyers for bases in reverse?

We scrapped the last Type 23 that went into Life-Extension, after inspecting it and finding that the cost was up around £100m! Type 23 were excellent ships, but the idea at the time was to build them relatively cheaply, for a hull life of only twenty years, because that way we could just keep producing them to keep the industrial base in working order, until we got a new design, then start building that. Rather than just not buying any new ASW ships for twenty years, and then wondering why we were running out of ships!

This generation of British politicians (from both major parties) have actually understood that mistake and made some quite good decisions to fix it, in the last ten years. Not sure if the next generation will manage to live up to the same standard though. People are actually quite good at learning lessons, but also sadly very good at forgetting them again.

This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

Whatever this decision is actually for, it's not about speeding up deliveries of greatly needed ships to the fleet. If that were the case, they'd have an alternative ready and would be able to say exactly what that alternative is, and at least roughly what the timeline would be.

They've fucked this program up, but that doesn't mean that it's unfixably fucked up, just that it's over time and over budget. So the question is not, what should we have done to get this right 6 years ago when we agreed this process. The question is, what should we do now? First ship is due by 2030. Can they get anything built faster, by any other means? That seems incredibly unlikely - to actually impossible. Therefore the only viable choice was to go with what they've got, and finish it off.

It is amazing on how many levels everyone has fucked up though.

Fincantieri appear to have promised that they could meet US damage control and ship-survivability requirements with relative ease. That was clearly something between wishful thinking and a massive lie. And it does make you wonder exactly how safe Italian designs are? The Italian Navy aren't losing ships every day, but there's been incredibly little serious naval conflict since WWII - and so very few people have got actual experience. The Royal Navy learnt some painful lessons in the Falklands - and so have much tougher rules for ship design nowadays. We bought the Iver Huitfeld design off the Danes, in order to turn it into Type 31, and apparently much of the work was bringing the design up to acceptable safety standards for the RN (although it was also an experimental modular ship design that turned out to be too ambitious and was removed). After the failure of the Iver Huitfeld in combat in the Red Sea - the Danes are now looking at downgrading them to long-range patrol frigates, and buying the Type 31 design back off us - although those failure were the combat management system, weapons and sensor integration - rather than the ship itself. I'm still rather confused as to why they seem to be saying they can't fix it. In the Red Sea they found that trying to fire the weapons took the radar off-line - thus meaning they had to resort to shooting down a missile with the canons, in electro-optical targetting mode, and worse, were using post expiration-date ammunition, much of which exploded as soon as it left the gun barrel.

I've read suggestions from several different sources that the US Navy wanted to go with Type 26 because it mostly met US safety standards, and so "all" they'd have to do is change every single weapons system and sensor on the ship. With FREMM, they've had to change every single weapons system, every sensor and re-design the internal bulkheads and sub-division and lengthen the ship in order to fit all the extra VLS cells that they want (although that last bit was at least well-understood beforehand).

The other reason for all the changes is that the Navy told porkies to Congress, or at least told them what they wanted to hear, because no off-the-shelf design actually existed. Or in fact, could exist. But they needed new ships that were cheaper than Arleigh Burkes, and also required smaller crews. And who manages the budget?

Thus we get to Congress. Oh dear God! Congress! They forced the Navy to not take Type 26, because it wasn't finished yet. As opposed to using an off-the-shelf design that didn't exist either... They made them build it in a shipyard that doesn't have a deep enough channel to get to the sea. So the ship is having to be built without a bow sonar, even though it's supposed to be a specialist ASW ship. It's got the best towed sonar available, but nonetheless...

There's a law against buying ships from abroad. So that's out. The law mandates that all ships comply with their damage standards. So buying a foreign off-the-shelf design is also out. They're also mandated to use mostly US weapons. So again, off-the-shelf is much harder. Congress also made them re-design Constellation again, ships from 3 onwards have to be able to carry Tomahawk and SM6, which means more strike length Mk41 VLS, rather than the shorter ones used for the ESSM SAMs they were planning to use.

I'd say Congress are the worst problem here, not the Navy. But it could be they're both as bad as each other? And the contractors shouldn't get off lightly either.

NASA pares back Boeing's Starliner deal after 2024 calamity

Re: Capsule might only manage three crewed missions to the ISS....

Technically, if they can get the damn things to the ISS, all of them can come back. Eventually.

Ah yes. In the same sense that every ship can be a minesweeper. Once.

The Fighter Pilot podcast's Vincent Aiello has two questions he always asks his interviewees. One is, "does your number of take-offs equal your number of landings?" Ideally this should be true...

The second is: "how did you get your call-sign and what stupid thing did you do to earn it?"

On the second he was talking about a young Academy trainee. Not even graduated and gone into pilot training yet. Who'd gone to the fleet in the Summer for a bit of "work experience", I'm sure there'll be a much more military term for it. Guy is in the backseat of an F-18 with an instructor who's doing practice dogfighting with trainee pilots. When the trainees manages to crash into them, forcing them to eject. Before the ambulance has even arrived to pick them up, this new guy has now been assigned a call-sign by this officer, for if he makes the fleet. O'Tool. Which stands for one take-off, zero landings.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Re: More missiles

thames,

If the drone is 30 miles away, then all it needs to do is to stay low and it will be below the horizon.

My point was just that short range, cheaper defence weapons only work to defend you. Long range stuff is more expensive - but being longer range you can cover a larger area. Hence you sometimes shoot down cheap stuff with expensive missiles, because it's the only weapon you can bring to bear.

Also, remember that a drone hiding below your radar horizon, also can't see you. This is where you get to conversations about kill chains. To destroy a thing, you first have to find it. So something has to be flying at sufficient altitude to do the reconnaissance, and you can shoot that something down.

I'm not sure why laser weapons are preferred to just adding more 40mm canon. Which have similar ranges.

I also think that Phalanx has its uses. For example, when the Danish frigate Iver Huidtfelt had a radar failure while in combat in the Red Sea last year, that could have ended rather badly. I believe the problem has been tracked to the ship's combat system, the radar was actually working fine. But they weren't able to run it, and the weapons at the same time. Thus they had to shoot down the missile with cannon, but had to do it with optical guidance, not radar. Which worked, though defective ammo made this even more stressful, and showered the ship with fragments as half the ammo exploded as soon as it left the barrel. This was apparently because the ammo was time-expired (past its sell-by date)!

At which point a system like Phalanx, that has its own independent radar might save you, because it's independent of your CMS and still works if the ship's radar has taken a hit. So I'd like to keep it, as the old belt-and-braces, extra layers in the Swiss cheese defence.

Re: whhhiiiizzzzz ?

Zolko,

I believe it causes a build-up of heat, which overheats or melts the control wiring and processors. Dazzling or blinding sensors can be done as well - although that kind of tech has been deployed for literally decades - and doesn't need that kind of power.

It's probably a less good area defence weapon, but in order to hit you, it has to fly towards you, making it considerably easier to hit. You still have to worry about the tracking speed of the mount, as it can manoeuvre around to throw you off target - but that's still easier than hitting a moving target going across you at speed.

Also, the harder you make the drone problem, the more expensive and complex the drones have to be. Thus evening out the costs. You don't want to be wasting a million dollar missile on a $500 drone. But if you have cheaper systems to deal with them, then you don't mind using a million dollar missile on a million dollar drone. Or using your cheaper point defence missiles (or even cheaper guns) on $100,000 drones.

EvilDrSmith,

Thanks. I remember reading something about that, back in the 90s in a discussion about the ethics of laser dazzlers that were being deployed. I'd never seen it confirmed before.

Re: How fast can it kill drones?

breakfast,

Everyone seems to be making sub-aquatic drones...

Ukraine have used several of them to sink Russian ships. They've got a drone that looks a bit like a small speedboat, but with a fibreglass cover over the top. And the idea is that it can loiter just underwater, which just a few sensors peeping above the surface, until the target comes within range. Then the engines come on, and I think it operates above the water. They've fitted them with missiles of all sorts, or just filled them with explosives and rammed them into ships. They've even shot down helicopters with a version with old heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on.

This is just a development of what's already been done with speedboats (either with suicide crews or drones) - but with the extra stealth of being able to hide underwater. Ukraine have tried lots of other drone-related tricks, to attack Russian ships or the Kerch bridge.

Russia have many different ones. Including the Poseidon that they call a nuclear powered torpedo. Well a torpedo is already a one-way attack drone, but this thing (if it works) has an effectively unlimited range, and is a nuclear weapon carrying drone. They've also got a large sub called Belgorod, which is specifically designed for special operations - including operating underwater uncrewed vehicles. As well as carrying the Losharik, which is a nuclear powered crewed deep submergence vehicle - which requires a mothership for support (the Belgorod or a surface ship).

There's also XULVs, which are small unmanned drone-submarines with lots of stuff in them. Some are supposed to have month-long endurance, as long as they're only doing a few knots, while listening with sonar - the idea being that a ship could launch a few of them to cover an important area - or they could be used for sneaky recce close to an enemy's coast.

Of course there's also loads of civilian unmanned

Re: Coherent Beam Combining?!?

It's got funnels. Not sure how large they are in comparison to a womp rat though.

After typing that, I then had to look it up, as there were a few ships in WWII that took bombs down the funnel - which ended up being catastrophic. As that meant going straight into the engine room, and doing much more serious damage - plus without power damage control becomes a lot more difficult.

I had a vague memory that USS Arizona took a bomb down the funnel at Pearl Harbour. But that's apparently not true, though it was thought so at the time. Instead it took a direct hit to a magazine and exploded. However the destroyers HMS Keith and the unfortunately named HMS Grenade both did take hits down the funnel that led to their sinking. Plus the troopship Lancastria.

Of RN ships to be on that were worse than HMS Grenade, I can only think of HMS Decoy. Fortunately there wasn't an HMS Meatshield...

Rhyme is the key to set AIs free when verse outsmarts security

Prompt:

There once was a man from Nantucket...