No, but I have purchased Early Access games on Steam.

The physics of a strategic atmospheric bomber hasn’t changed. The B52 is close to optimal in shape for the task.

I mean, the B-1 and the B-21 are also strategic bombers, came out later, are still in the US inventory, and they look pretty different. I don’t know if I’d agree with an argument that the natural convergence is towards the B-52.

I think that a better argument is that the B-52 still effectively fills a desired role better than other options in 2025, but I don’t know if I’d say that that encompasses all strategic bombing.

EDIT: I guess I should really use the B-2 rather than the B-21 for the flying wing example. The B-21 is flying, but not yet in USAF service. I was just kinda happy that I could find flying B-21 photographs.

They’re pretty large. I’m thinking butter-drenched hominy.

EDIT: Now I want hominy with butter.

EDIT2: https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/16952451-hominy-simmered-in-butter

No. Trump was not largely the factor involved in aid being held up – that was the Freedom Caucus, which was aiming to hold it (and a number of other things, including the budget earlier) hostage to get domestic policy gains that they wanted, given that the Republicans had a very narrow margin in the House and their support was required for a deal.

The Freedom Caucus didn’t actually care much about the fundamental issue of Ukraine aid, but they wanted to force spending reductions – they took the position that we could aid Ukraine, but if so it had to come from cutting government spending, reducing regular spending. It couldn’t be additional spending.

Trump’s faction has not been especially friendly with the Freedom Caucus, and supported the guy who just defeated its leader, Bob Good.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/republican-survive-trumps-wrath-bob-221830141.html

“I was concerned about the legal persecution, the abuse of power towards our president and how that would hurt him, potentially, in a general election,” Good told constituents in a town hall meeting. In another clip, recorded without Good’s awareness, he explained that DeSantis had a better record than Trump on guns (“Trump did red flag laws when he was president”) and abortion (“Trump is saying we’re gonna need to back off”).

McGuire’s allies stapled those quotes to Good’s forehead. It doesn’t matter if a critique of Trump is right; what matters is that the congressman was disloyal. “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” Trump campaign strategist Chris LaCivita said in January. The day after the Manhattan conviction, Trump’s campaign issued a cease-and-desist order to stop Good from displaying lawn signs that link the men together.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-endorses-primary-challenger-gop-rep-bob-good-virginia-rcna154285

Trump takes revenge on Rep. Bob Good after he endorsed Ron DeSantis

Former President Donald Trump endorsed the primary challenger taking on House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good, R-Va., saying the congressman “turned his back on our incredible movement.”

Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday morning that he is endorsing state Sen. John McGuire, who is challenging Good in a June 18 primary. Trump made a veiled reference to Good’s being one of the few members of Congress who endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary, writing that Good “was constantly attacking and fighting me until recently.”

Good endorsed Trump back in January, but the former president wrote that it was “too late.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4729084-bob-good-donald-trump-virginia-oklahoma-georgia-tom-cole/mlite/

Trump’s bid for revenge ends in a nail-biter

Good, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was seen by many as a dead man walking heading into his primary against Virginia state Sen. John McGuire on Tuesday night, especially because Good had run afoul of Trump.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4727667-bob-good-virginia-donald-trump-kevin-mccarthy-john-mcguire-freedom-caucus/

Bob Good ousted by Trump-backed rival in Virginia nail-biter

Good made a name for himself as a rabble-rouser within the House GOP caucus, bucking his own party at pivotal moments. Among the moves that rankled some in his party were his vote to oust former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from his Speakership; voting against the debt ceiling deal reached between President Biden and McCarthy last year; and voting down a foreign aid package that included aid to Ukraine and Israel.

You can find some people who are friendly with Trump who have opposed Ukraine aid. Vance is one possible running mate pick for Trump, and he has, in the past, pretty consistently advocated for not getting involved in Europe and Russia, and rather focusing on opposing China. On the other hand, Burgum, another possible running mate pick, has been a hawk on Russia. So depending upon how things play out you could wind up with people who do have a voice in advising Trump, will have access to him, and have taken policy positions against support for Ukraine. But I don’t anticipate Trump himself to be much of a factor on Ukraine, and I think that it’ll be recommendations from the Department of State and the like that will be the most influential in a potential second Trump administration.

US foreign policy usually isn’t a major factor in elections, and generally doesn’t swing back and forth around elections.

I don’t expect that Trump being in office will substantially change US policy on Ukraine. This is not a major election factor. I think that what you’re seeing is politicking, and that the major driver of US policy on Ukraine is the bureaucracy, not political leadership. That doesn’t change from administration to administration.

Yeah, it might.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/chinas-balancing-act-between-us-and-russia

The United States’ efforts to limit China’s shipments of dual-use goods to Russia seem to be having an impact. Russia is finding it harder to obtain the semiconductors and machine tools needed to sustain its war effort. Additionally, Putin’s plan to boost his failing gas revenues by building a second pipeline to China remains stalled.

Yet China is a winner in a situation created by Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine. China has expanded its market presence in Russia and secured affordable Russian hydrocarbons, but only to a degree that maintains its diversified portfolio of energy sources.

Aborted Trade Growth

Chinese-Russian trade has seen explosive growth since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With bilateral trade surging from $145 billion in 2021 to $240 billion in 2023, China has solidified its position as Russia’s main trading partner.

The primary areas of cooperation include energy, agriculture, technology, infrastructure construction, and transportation, Putin pointed out during his visit to Beijing. What this really means is that China is Russia’s top source for the types of goods that the United States identifies as “high-priority” items. These goods—including semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, and machine tools—can be used in both civilian and military sectors.

In December 2023, monthly exports of these dual-use products from China to Russia reached over $600 million but have since fallen to over $300 million per month. Despite this decrease, China’s support for Russia’s war effort through these supplies has been substantial. Russia’s dependence on China for these products has surged from 32 percent in 2021 to 89 percent in 2023.

But China also has no reason to do that, and some good reason not to. I bet that they won’t.

China may not have a direct interest in the outcome of the war itself.

However, it does gain from Russia being dependent on China.

The reason that Putin has been willing to have that dependence is because China isn’t actively aiming to oppose the invasion. All China has to do to gain here is, well, nothing.

For China, that’s a pretty low-cost way to gain a bunch of influence in Asia. My guess is that China’s goals probably look something like this:

• Make sure that this doesn’t turn nuclear (which would potentially affect China).

• Don’t have China become involved in the conflict.

• Make use of the period of time where Russia is cut off from the West to extend short-run Russian dependence (like, obtaining substitute parts from China) to long-run dependence (tying Russia to Chinese systems and services) insofar as possible.

If China decides to act in concert with the West, then it gains nothing – China probably doesn’t care much what happens in Ukraine – and loses this new influence in Russia, which Beijing probably does very much want.

Unexploded remotely-triggerable ordinance with a camera on it.

Ruling in the case Ukraine v. Russia (re Crimea), the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found June 25 that Russia is guilty of a pattern of human rights violations since 2014 in Crimea, as codified under the European Convention on Human Rights a

Russia withdrew from the ECHR. Presumably whatever specific incidents they’re talking about were before that, but I’m not sure how much Russia is going to care about that.

Russia also terminated ECHR jurisdiction in 2022.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-parliament-votes-exit-european-court-human-rights-2022-06-07/

LONDON, June 7 (Reuters) - Russia’s parliament on Tuesday passed a pair of bills ending the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction in the country, a rupture provoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

I’m not sure whether that ended authority over cases on issues prior to that time or not, in each of the eyes of Russia and the ECHR. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia’s position is that it did, as there wouldn’t be much point to also terminating jurisdiction after leaving if it didn’t.

I wonder if we’re going to see the return of machine gunner ball turrets with this new era

The reason for those was that the bombers were vulnerable to fighters approaching from below. I don’t think that this’ll be applicable for a number of reasons:

• No reason to use a large aircraft like that. All they need is a plane that can get altitude and hold two people.

• My guess is that one issue for the B-17 in WW2 was that they needed to fly in formation, couldn’t maneuver much, to achieve the “interlocked fields of fire” that was their defensive doctrine of the time. So becomes harder to deal with a blind spot by maneuvering, so there’s a need for exotic things like the ball turret.

• The drones that they’re shooting down are defenseless. If Russia does start sending out drones with some kind of air-to-air capability, my guess is that a ball turret won’t be a good counter.

• I’m pretty sure that those ball turrets used .50 cal machine guns. They probably don’t need that. My understanding is that the round caliber in WW2 that a fighter carried depended on what they expected to run into. It was a the reason that the US only used .50 cal machine guns, not 20mm autocannons, in its fighters – the 20mm was only considered necessary to bring down a bomber, where the thing was a big structure, big struts, could potentially absorb a lot of damage. The US wasn’t fighting anyone who was going to be using much by way of heavy bombers against them. I suspect that the lightest of bullets will probably mess those little drones up badly. Honestly, they’d probably do best with a shotgun or automatic shotgun at the very short ranges that I’ve seen footage of them engaging at; that’s more likely to expend kinetic energy inside the drone, hit a lot of stuff in there. Also reduces collateral damage to whatever is off in the distance behind the drone.

There was recent news about at least one, which I assume this is referencing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/06/10/another-world-war-i-style-dogfight-raged-over-ukraine-as-a-ukrainian-yak-52-with-a-rear-gunner-engaged-a-russian-drone/

Honestly, I wish that NCD posts would include a “context” link, since a lot of times they reference things that have happened within very recent periods of time. I get that some people are totally up on the news, but some people – even if they generally follow military issues – aren’t going to know about the most-recent happenings.

Links:

• Portal

• Portal 2

• Enderal and Steam Store

• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

• Secret World Legends (no dedicated Wikipedia page; apparently this is a remake of the earlier The Secret World)

Yeah, I’ve have a few games that I’ve really enjoyed the bands from.

This is kind of diverging from the topic, but…one of my annoyances in video games is that that there are a number of video games that I play to the point of getting tired of the music, but don’t have the option to buy more music tracks for. There are mods for Stellaris to add more music tracks – people clearly want more music – but even though Paradox is a game publisher that specializes in putting out games with huge amounts of DLC, they don’t sell additional audio for the game, which just seems bizarre to me. I really wish that Fallout: New Vegas had commercial DLC radio packs in the same genre, but nope – though there are people who have made enormous free “radio” mods for the Fallout series, like Old World Radio and Old World Radio 2 for Fallout 4, so there are clearly a considerable number of players who’d like more music to be available.

This doesn’t work for games that you play through once and are done with, but I kind of wish that when a band creates audio for a game that one spends a lot of time playing, that the game developer would at least provide the option to buy more audio from the band for it, as long as it fits. The amount of developer time required to incorporate additional audio tracks seems very limited, and if the band is still producing audio in the same style, it seems like it’d be a sensible fit.

What’s even odder is that it’s become extremely common for game publishers on Steam to go the opposite direction and sell access to the game’s soundtrack to play independently of the game. So they’re basically acting as a music vendor already. That’s also very low developer-effort. But they very rarely have DLC to add more audio from the band back into the game.

Cities: Skylines is the only game that I can think of off the top of my head where the game publisher sold additional DLC music.

I don’t understand why either game publishers or music labels wouldn’t love that kind of relationship. If you’re a music label, have a bunch of IP, I’d think that getting royalties from your audio getting wider play is almost always worthwhile, and if it’s in a game, it’s not competing with non-game use; if anything, it probably promotes it. From a game publisher’s standpoint, the cost to incorporate more music in many games is minimal, so the risk is very low. From a player’s standpoint, it makes the game more-playable; the music doesn’t wear on you.

Project Zomboid is very similar thematically to Cataclysm (zombie apocalypse, loot world for supplies to stay alive), but is far simpler in every respect, is real-time rather than turn-based, plays on handcrafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, has its zombie infections be incurable, and has combat that I really don’t like (though Project Zomboid also has a much gentler learning curve and a loveable raccoon mascot). I’m not sure if one could reasonably put it into the same genre. Maybe.

Maybe SimEarth.

This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.

1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.

I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.

I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.

EDIT: Liquid War. This is open-source and part of the GNU project. One has a map with some areas closed off and some open space that liquid can flow through. There are two or more “blobs” of liquid of different color; each is attempting to destroy the other. Your blob is attracted to your mouse cursor. “Moving into” a pixel of the other color eventually converts it to your own. If two liquids meet in a bottleneck, they tend to stalemate. One wins by getting liquid on multiple sides of the opponent’s liquid, so that one can move one’s own liquid from multiple directions into it. Maybe a bit closer to a tech demo than a full-on game. I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but it is free and as far as I know unique, and I had fun with it.

Terraria

I’d probably put Starbound in the same genre, but yeah, those are the only games in the genre that I’m aware of. It’s pretty unusual.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a post on Telegram, said Russia had used more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets in the past week. He issued a fresh plea in his nightly video address for better weapons systems. “The sooner the world helps us deal with the Russian combat aircraft launching these bombs, the sooner we can strike – justifiably strike – Russian military infrastructure … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.

Well, I don’t know what kind of counter he’s aiming for. There are basically two that I can think of:

Long-range SAMs with sufficient range (and maybe mobility) to strike an aircraft launching glide bombs without being placed at risk. Ukraine’s has had some old long-range Warsaw Pact SAMs, but I don’t think that we’ve got more stores or production capacity. There are Patriots, but those are the only anti-ballistic-missile counter Ukraine presently has; using them as a counter for aircraft will cut into that. I suggested earlier that the SAMP/T systems that France sent, firing Aster missiles – which theoretically have an ABM capability, but at least earlier in the conflict, apparently weren’t intercepting them – might work, if the range is long enough.

Aircraft armed with long-range air-to-air missiles.

Russia’s newest glide bombs, according to this article, probably reach about 90 km.

To use it to directly support the front, that’s about how close they’re going to have to get. Maybe closer if they want to strike behind the front.

The US has the AIM-120. The latest version reaches 160–180 km according to WP. We have other long-range air-to-air missiles in development, but not in production today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Range_Engagement_Weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-260_JATM

Europe has the Meteor:

Maximum range: 200 km (110 nmi)+[4] No Escape Zone: 60 km (32 nmi)+[5]

A Ukrainian aircraft firing those will need to do so at high altitude to leverage high range, use the aircraft’s fuel rather than the missile’s. That height will make it visible to Russian air defense, and the aircraft has to avoid getting hit by Russian SAMs.

The longest-range SAM that I’m aware of that Russia has is an S-400 variant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system

That can reach out 400 km with the right missile according to WP.

Now, there are a number of ways one might measure range (from what height? Are these “minimum maximum” ranges or the actual limit? Is this a no-escape range or the furthest the missile can travel? What altitude can it reach at that point?) So I can’t say “this is the range that Ukraine’s going to need” exactly. But if Russia can legitimately reach out about twice as far as any air-to-air missile, it seems to me that that’s going to be a problem for air-to-air missile use unless countermeasures or stealth or similar can prevent Russia from making use of SAMs.

Ukraine has been hitting S-400s with ATACMS, so those are, in turn, under threat.

I think that the problem is that the entire article, other than that sentence, consists of a list of bullet points. It’s conventional for articles to sometimes include a list of bullet points with an “executive summary” at the top, and then have the real article below, but this just omits that latter text.

deleted by creator

Ah, gotcha. It also looks like it was considered to be very difficult (though any game from that era is gonna generally be a lot harder than present-day games).

I also remember a one-bit, not even polygon, but wireframe Star Wars third person rail shooter. It was on the early Mac, but I think it was a port from DOS or something.

kagis

Oh, wow. Apparently, it was actually a color arcade game, Star Wars, from 1983, and I’d just only seen the black-and-white Mac port until today. I wonder if those are true vector-display graphics, like Tempest.

kagis

Apparently yes. For the younger crowd, there was a point in time with CRTs where some video games actually plotted graphics on specialized CRTs by controlling the electron beam and plotting out the graphics with the point of the beam, kind of the way an old analog oscilloscope works. I bet that there have been antialiased remakes or clones of probably most of those vector-display games by now.

EDIT: Oh, I lied. It was first-person, not third person. You did have to dodge obstacles, but you weren’t looking at your ship from behind.

Rise to Ruins is maybe the most-similar game in terms of gameplay that I can think of. You initiate construction of buildings. You have automated characters build them (kind of like Majesty and Settlers). You can upgrade them, and they can provide equipment to characters. It has the same ramping difficulty of attackers. It doesn’t start with a map populated with monster generators the way Majesty does – instead, they show up over time. It has spells. You can build “defensive buildings”. It starts with the map covered with a fog of war. Your colony’s NPCs level up over time. You can put beefy, non-critical structures to act as something like a tank to absorb attacks while your characters make their way over to deal with a threat, kind of like Majesty.

It’s got some major gameplay differences, though:

• It’s one of the “unwinnable” games – absent some ways to kinda cheese the game and win, you’re just expected to survive for as long as possible. There’s a – I forget the term, but “corruption” – that spreads around the map, making terrain more-and-more hostile, and eventually overwhelming you. Majesty is about surviving the most-unpleasant bit, but if you can overcome that, you’ll win a round.

• No gold economy or NPC incentives. Well, IIRC one can create a “golem attractor” that will tend to make a that particular type of NPCs show up in an area, and you can create structures that NPCs will frequent to tend to make them hang out in a given area.

• A strategic map (which some may like).

• Survival aspects, like needing water and food.

• Path efficiency and building roads and such matters.

• The NPCs do get more-durable, but not to the extreme level that they do in Majesty, and they don’t quite work together in the same sorts of ways.

• It’s got more of a maze-building tower-defense aspect.