Okay counter point, I can live minimum wage comfortably ish in France. You don’t need 200k to live here.

Also, I don’t think comparing the top 1% crack engineers is a good representation of salaries compared to cost of living.

Desperate immigrants, impoverished eastern Europeans, or Roma. I see it a lot where I live. They get paid minimum wage for backbreaking labor during harvest season, and they live in a poorer country the rest of the year.

The thing is. SLS is ludicrously more expensive then Space X rocket because congress basically strong armed NASA into re-using shuttle hardware to keep jobs. And SLS can put about 100t, twice as much payload to orbit compared to Falcon Heavy.

Shuttle was supposed to be a lot more reusable, with a reusable 1st stage, as well as the shuttle we know. But, post Apolo budget cut (and quite frankly technological limitations of 1970s), killed the design. NASA had to compromise further to keep the program going, by offering to allow the air force to use a shuttle for satellite capture (which it never did). And skipping technical details, it made the shuttle even less reusable, and also gave it it’s iconic look with the wing in the rears.

I forgot my point so take the info dump for free

And that justifies the students getting jailed?

They can also be flying with extra munitions under the wings. At which point they stop being stealthy.

Also stealth aircraft are notoriously difficult and sensitive on maintenance. So might be a case of stealth degrading after a few weeks of intense operation.

And the theory I see floating around on forums is that it was a QAEM-118 missile. Since it has IR and optical guidance that could ignore sheath at shorter ranges/low speed. And some US missions might be flying at low altitude to make use of terrain masking.

Phalanx is self defense only. The weapons used to protect nearby ships are ESSM and SM-2 missiles. Which should to work fine to intercept cheap drone, artillery and ballistic missiles. (Tho very expressive to intercept artillery with missiles)

The navy has used those systems recently to defend ships during the Houti crisis in the red sea.

Ah yes. This surely will have no long term consequences.

Yeah except right now the biggest issue the Bundeswehr faces is equipment and troop readiness. A report came around 2022 and made noise. After a short exercise 18 modern Puma IVF had been out of action for lack of spare parts on relatively minor issues. And that was on the 10th Panzer division which was earmarked for deployment in Lithuania, not a low priority unit.

More bodies are nice for an army. But those come after the infrastructure has been fixed for what already exist

If you have an article or maybe remember more details about that story?

The closest I could find is this.

Ukraine doesn’t really operate western helicopter in general so the story may have been about something else. We have reports of the Russian using captured American armor vehicles. So no kill switch in those.

Well then they are fucked. Maybe France’s Snecma is an option and the Japanese also have engines. Pretty much everything else is Licensed copy of American engine or Chinese/Russian which are obvious no.

I think turkey was looking into making their own jet engines. But Erdogan Turkey is about as good of an option as trump USA.

Okay so just to clarify what the software lockdown on F-35 means is that other country except the USA aren’t allowed to create update to the software. Exception for Israel and maybe the UK (don’t quote me) are allowed to modify the software themselves.

It doesn’t mean a instant kill switch. But it does mean that if the USA decides to block someone from update it’s much harder for a country to make their own update.

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No. But they aren’t refusing to sell it. They just don’t have it. And are under various sanctions by the US, EU and most south American countries over human rights abuse so they probably couldn’t sell oil anyway.

Actually it’s kinda ironic that Venezuela is under sanctions for human rights abuse but not the Gulf states.

Oh and I wasn’t actually trying to go anywhere with my comment but I do realize how it sounds now. But I am not in favor of invading anyone

I mean to be fair they just don’t have the infrastructure to extract it anymore. Economic sanctions since the Obama years have mean that the equipment to extract crude has become hard to maintain.

South African authorities said 23 of the Palestinians had traveled onwards to other countries, without naming those countries, but 130 remained and were allowed in after intervention from South Africa’s Ministry of Home Affairs and an offer by an NGO called Gift of the Givers to accommodate them.

“Even though they do not have the necessary documents and papers, these are people from a strife-torn, a war-torn country, and out of compassion, out of empathy, we must receive them and be able to deal with the situation that they are facing,” Ramaphosa said.