SchizophrenicMC

How does the Air Force remaining a branch of the Army make any sense at all? That's probably the worst argument I've heard in this whole stupid debate.

Soldiers of Do You Remember Love <3

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Space Battleship Yamato 2202: Soldiers of Sorrow

Or maybe

Encounters in Space Battleship Yamato 2202

I'm sorry, I can't keep having this argument after hearing the incredible news that a supersonic heavy bomber has a higher operational cost than a single-seat attacker. What's our next talking point, the fact that a single round costs less than a bomb?

Choppers can't always get their in time.

What, like the A-10 can? If you're too close to the bad guy for precision bombing, nobody's flying gun is saving your ass. Helo, A-10, or otherwise.

So, you gonna go do all the maintenance then? And pay for parts, gas, training, hangar/tiedown space, and all of the other, very many expensive things that a plane needs to stay in service?

It's not like the Air Force is axing the plane for marginal savings. Literally billions.

MANPADS are only a threat if you get close enough for them to be a threat. The longest-range systems have an effective range inside of 5 miles. There's this image we have of close air support involving an A-10 flying in, strafing the ground with its big old gun, and flying back out, but that's simply not the case. Precision guided munitions have been used to great effect for years and years, and CAS doctrine has relied upon them almost exclusively for 15 years. Even the A-10, a plane for which so many compromises were made to fit the GAU-8 inside its narrow nose, has made much more use of the precision ordnance they can strap to it, than the noisemaker under the tub. Arguably the most significant CAS aircraft of the last 15 years has been, wait for it: the B-1B Lancer.

Which really isn't something that gels with a lot of people's views. How can a high-altitude bomber be a "close" air support plane? Ask any Vietnam vet and they'll yell at you. But we're not rubbing sticks together here. Even the gruntiest grunt in the US armed forces is equipped with pound after pound of technological assets, and it's a lot easier to precision target a missile or bomb with all of the technological capacity we have today, than to put rounds on targets while strafing. Again, it's easy enough for an A-10 jockey to hit the broad side of a tank with the big gun, but using it against individual dudes on the ground is like bullseyeing womprats in your T-16 back in Beggar's Canyon back home: you have to be Luke Skywalker to do it.

And if you want to talk about loiter time, the whole reason we started deploying bombers as CAS planes is, they were the only things that could stay in the air long enough with a load of munitions to get to hell and back from the operating bases we had in 2001. An A-10 can carry over 10,000lbs of fuel. A B-1B can carry over 265,000lbs. Not to mention its external hardpoints alone can carry the maximum takeoff weight of an A-10. (Plus an additional 75,000lbs of ordnance in the belly) The Thunderbolt II has a ferry range smaller than the Lancer's combat radius. And none of this even touches on the Buff, which can use all the same fancy toys we've been strapping to A-10s and F-16s, and chucking into B-1 bellies since Enduring Freedom- it can just swallow up a whole lot more of them. And then fly for even longer.

All of which is to say, while I don't support the F-35 in a CAS role specifically, because it lacks pretty much everything you'd ask for in a CAS plane, the A-10 is coming onto a level of redundancy that doesn't justify itself. The current battlefield just doesn't justify the dedicated jet attacker built around a big gun. Maybe it will again in the future. (I really hope not) If you're that worried about it, wrap them up at Davis Monthan. They'll last longer out there. In the meantime, the tools we have available today make the A-10 obsolete for the role everyone wants it to fill. The Air Force doesn't want it, not because they're against providing CAS, but because it's a really expensive way to do it less effectively.

And they only have enough in the budget to do really expensive stuff ineffectively with one boondoggle of an aircraft.

People have this concept that CAS is carried out by a gun at 10 feet off the deck, while being plinked by small arms fire from the ski-mask-wearing bad guys on the ground. In actuality, target-seeking ordnance is typically more effective at this role, not least of all because it can be fired while outside of the range of enemy "anti-air" capabilities. (Which more and more often contain legitimate anti-air weapons like shoulder-hoisted missile launchers, which aircraft like the A-10 can't avoid and likely would not survive direct hits from)

While I'm still not convinced of the potential efficacy of the F-35 in any role, and I think it has no cost-effectiveness in a CAS role, I do have to say the A-10 is getting ancient and it is legitimately going up against technologies it was never designed to fight off. The A-10 was designed in a time when flak and bullets comprised the anti-air defense, and it was made to make tanks become scrap heaps, and it does all that handily. But it has a big radar and heat signature, and the enemies we do have for it don't have tanks, they have manpads. The people who do have tanks, enemies or not, have more advanced technology than even that. While aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 are arguably still competitive in their long-range missile bus role, the A-10 represents a pilot and a lot of money in danger when it flies CAS, and justifies itself a replacement.

It certainly isn't the cold war anymore. For better and for worse.

I've driven more Miatas than I care to count, and I've never bought one for a variety of reasons. They're either too expensive or too poorly maintained around here. One time I drove an NA that was being sold by a Chevy dealer who wanted $5,000 for it, and it had leaked so badly not only was the interior completely drenched, but the rocker panels had filled with gallons of water, which sloshed whenever the car came to a stop. It was pretty humorous. It also highlighted the problem I have with the NA in north Texas: you have to wait for it. Throttle response is immediate, but acceleration takes time. That's fine if you're at low speed tossing it about, but this is a flat land.

Which sucks because I do like Miatas. I've been nothing but impressed by the good-condition Miatas I've driven- and I've had seat time in all 4 generations. But it's really hard to justify one where I live. As a second car for sure, but I have 4 cars at the moment, and if I have to pare down to only two cars, a Miata is sadly not on the list.

In other news, I can't decide whether 4th-gen Legacy guys are dull and uncreative, or if the creative Legacy guys just stay away from the forums. All this talk about how [insert swap] can't be done. Still doing a bit of research, but I'm presently tempted to buy a wrecked Legacy GT 5MT and swap its guts into my Outback. Getting a bit tired of the lame duck 4EAT and 175hp just isn't enough for my big old wagon, especially not fed through that dumpy automatic. Also I have good reason to believe the 4EAT's front diff is on its way out and that's not gonna be fun. But I need to figure out whether it will be more practical to try and run the engine on a Haltech and pay the $2k to make that happen, or to just go ahead and pull the dashboards out of both cars when I have the swap going, because apparently the whole dash harness needs to be replaced when you swap engines, because while Subaru used mechanical commonality across the models and decades, they used different wiring harnesses for every revision of a given model.

Knowing Nissan, they'll move the GT-R to the Maxima platform, same as everything else, grow it 5" in every direction, and stuff a CVT into it. I've come to the conclusion that Nissan can't be saved.

My grandpa flew on a Connie throughout the 60s and early 70s, working radar and I believe sonobuoy detection. (Though the latter may have actually been on P-3s; I'd have to ask) When he retired in the late 90s, he took up restoring them and moved to Camarillo, California. He's been involved in the restoration of at least 5 of the 9 near-airworthy Connies left in the world. There's been a big uptick in investor interest in these planes in the last couple years though, and Columbine II and Bataan both got bought last year, with intent to restore and fly on the airshow circuit.

Still, it would have been nice to see Columbine II while she was on her way to finishing school as it were.

I feel like the Miata is the one car that doesn't work as a targa. It's already a roadster. The roof comes all the way off, pillars, glass, and all. Having a targa top is great if the car is a Corvette or a 911 or a Supra, and you're trying as hard as you can to not sacrifice the structure when you take the roof out. But this is a car that never had a roof to begin with, and now we're stuck with flying buttresses, rear glass, and blind spots? Come ooooooooon Mazda, you had the PRHT so right on the NC. It was a work of art. And now this?

Could be worse. Could be 10 years of bloated GT-Rs. Ever seen one of those things in person? They are literally bigger than my Outback in every dimension, and don't even have Subaru wagon interior capacity. I mean sure, the Skylines were big too, but not this big, and they don't feel this fat.

So I'm really burned up. Yesterday, Columbine II, the original Air Force One, and the only flying Lockheed Constellation in the country, took off from an airport a couple hours away from my house. I would have gone to see it (my grandpa's a big Connie nut, from his time in the Navy) but I had to take my dad (who also would have loved to see it) to have surgery.

Saw this at the local dealership last month. One of the few gems that won't hit Stateside.

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Curse the Levorg. It is exactly the car I have now, with modern Impreza styling. I need it in my life. But Subaru will not make it so.

As for the Miata, I have mixed feelings. The NC PRHT was great. The top took up no space, it retracted quickly, and it weighed less than 100lbs fully involved. While I'm sure the ND RF has pulled off similar feats, the PRHT was a full retracting top. This is just a Targa Miata. And the Miata is probably the only sporty car I don't like as a targa. It's already a roadster, why make it less top-off? And while I do like the fastback styling, they've only gone halfway with it. Those are flying buttresses back there, where I feel they should at least carry a raked rear window with them. If you're going to go for fastback styling, make it a fastback. They've kind of missed the mark for me.

In similar news, the Fiat 124 Elaborazione Abarth also makes a bit of a miss, using the same engine as the regular 124. You're really telling me you couldn't put the 1.7 from the 4C in there somehow? You had to stick to the 1.4 multiair?

Amazing to see Alonso walk away from that. There was absolutely no car left to walk out of.

In other news,

Miata RF

and

2017 Impreza

Yes, this will go quite well with my Strike RM. When I eventually get around to building my Strike RM.

Gigabyte or MSI, can't go wrong.

So I visited the Peterson Air & Space Museum, Peterson AFB, Colorado this past weekend. Took some pictures:

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Thanks for all the advice, Schizo. I wound up buying it. It was in good mechanical shape, needs a bit of cosmetic repair (headliner fabric rests in my head) and a damn good interior cleaning.

I'll grab a pic or two later on. I looked and looked, but couldn't see that 0331 stamp. Perhaps it's smaller than I thought, or maybe it doesn't have one. It is a 4X4, but does not have the full-time 4WD position. It was pretty fully equipped, being a Cherokee Classic.

If you have the time and inclination, Schizo, a quick treatise on what to watch out for l, and a Cherokee's typical quirks, would be welcome. For instance, I kinda have to hit the brakes pretty hard to get them to bite, and the feel isn't what you call progressive. Still, stopping happens with a good amount of authority. Is that a quirk of Cherokees?

Stuff to do: scrub interior, replace headliner, install Weathertech matting, put on seat covers, and eventually replace some black paint. Not bothering with making it more off-road capable since that's not its mission. It'll be a utility vehicle, on-road, with bad weather capabilities.

Thanks for the advice!

This era of Jeep is known for having weak brakes. The TJ and XJ especially, since they have rear drum brakes. It is possible to switch to rear disc brakes from a ZJ Grand Cherokee, which does improve pedal feel and overall performance, especially in the XJ, which is the lightest of the bunch. (Hardly over 3200lbs) It is notable that the ZJ uses the same tiny front brakes as the XJ though so no need to mess with that. For an immediate improvement, I would look into more aggressive pads and rotors for the front brakes, and make sure the rears are properly adjusted. You'll never get fantastic pedal feel- these Jeeps just really need overboosted brakes to begin with- but you can get a lot better stopping power out of them without spending a lot of money.

Watch out for the electronics. As previously stated, there are a few electrical gremlins that can mess with the engine's stable operation, and you can get funny issues with lights sometimes. I don't think I've ever seen a late 90s Jeep where the power windows didn't work, but door locks are common failure points. Headliners are a 100% failure rate item for this era of Jeep, and I actually have 2 Grand Cherokees at the moment that need work done to their headliners. Keep an eye on your cooling system. 4.0s aren't very sensitive to cooling faults, but it's a very long block that can be difficult to work on around where the cooling stuff happens. Don't get too concerned if the engine makes a lot of tapping or even knocking noises at startup; 4.0s have a nasty tendency of developing benign wrist pin slop that sounds like rod knock but has no effect on sustained operation. They also sometimes get a bit of lifter noise. If something is really wrong, you'll know. That stamp in the head, by the way, is pretty small, but all 4.0 heads have a stamping there that denotes the casting revision. It may not say 0331- if it doesn't, you win. My advice: get a flashlight and a rag. The valve cover is sealed to a flat surface, so leaks are common and cause a lot of grease buildup around where the casting number is.

I can't think of anything else right now, but basically, treat an old Jeep like the Millennium Falcon and you'll be fine. They're quirky, some areas won't inspire confidence, but keep it patched up and know where to hit it and you'll be fine for the most part.

In other news, I just got back from a weekend trip to Colorado Springs. So. Many. Subarus.

Yeah, I don't think it was that it could never be used again, it was more like "the WMG can be fired 6 times in close succession, and then it has to recharge all dramatic-like, which isn't great for combat"

I work with servers. Effectively any capacity to do anything with servers is handled via expansion. Drive controllers- specifically RAID controllers- are very common and have incredible cooling demands. Our higher-end cards run at 55C despite having their own airflow channels through the chassis, as well as sizable onboard heatsinks. Though, mind you, these are 16-drive SAS3 controllers with dedicated (off-board) supercapacitor backups and 1GB of cache memory, and they cost more than some gamers' whole builds. That said, even those will occasionally log thermal faults in our datacenter environment.

Actually, my craziest expansion card scenario deals with a particular 4u server motherboard/chassis combo that supports up to 3TB of RAM, which is all installed via 8 expansion cards. These particular chassis, as well as their internal fans, run a set of very high output rear-mount fans, which move so much air, I'm not exaggerating when I say you can feel it strongly from the workstation 10 feet away. It's even more than you get from servers running twin GPUs. (GRID and TESLA GPUs, too. Fancy stuff) We also use IPMI and TPM, both of which are handled via expansion components, and all of our >1Gbps NICs are expansion cards. (You better believe the 10G cards get HOT) All of this fun stuff means when something breaks, we don't have to fail out the whole chassis, and we can get our customers back online a lot faster. It's great. Also, when implemented properly, it's just as fast as onboard. Sometimes faster, especially in the case of hard drives with dedicated controllers.

Oh and, yes, I did get boned on expansion capacity on this mobo:

Literally only 1 x16 slot. By the by, this is a full tower case, that GPU just makes everything look small. (Don't mind my cable management too closely. It's functional, not pretty. Again: I work with servers. Serviceability is key)

Meh, expansion cards can get you that sweet 3.1 lovin'.

I mean, my best system's socket 775(weep for me!(or not, I got an upgrade planned)), but I still got USB3 ports through the magic of PCIe. Added more SATA ports that way, too.

Use the slots, they make life complete.

I tried to use expansion cards, but it turned out my workstation-based rig wasn't really made to handle double-width GPUs. Since I have a gaming GPU, I don't have enough room to install PCIe peripherals like wireless cards, USB3 cards, or even SATA III controllers. Not to mention I don't have enough available PCIe lanes to have the number of sockets I'd need to do everything I want with expansion capability. Manufacturers are putting more stuff onboard, which is fine I guess. I'd rather all the neat features be expansion features on a board with tons and tons of open PCIe lanes, so I can get all that fancy stuff without having to shell out for that Skylake proc I don't strictly want. But manufacturers aren't going that route.

Plus you get all these cooling issues, which gets noisy if you're used to a quiet rig. Rather get some Z170 loving.

I'll agree with that evaluation. The problem isn't so much with Ivy Bridge itself, but rather the chipsets that support it. Even those aren't really problematic, per se, but they don't offer the featureset I'm looking for today, personally. And, in my opinion, it's that 170-series chipset and all its fun new features that make a scratchbuild worth it. Of course, like technoblue said, if you don't care for the new features, IvyBridge will probably tide you over for awhile yet. Probably until Kaby Lake or whatever they're calling it is out and depreciating. Tick-tock, my friends.

All that said, Bloomfield is about 8 years old now and it is getting to be its own problem. (As well as having a weird triple channel IMC that doesn't support anything faster than 1333MHz stably, and absolutely no support for the speed my SSD can make happen) Oh if I'd only gotten fed up with it in November. I could have had beautiful transitional Devil's Canyon fun. Now I'm stuck eyeing Skylake, and it's not quite the amount of money I was hoping to spend. Still, native support for USB 3.1, SATA III, and Skylake's versatile onboard IMC are all attractive features. If Intel would just stick to a socket for more than one generation, I wouldn't feel so bad about dropping the cash on a Skylake build right now. I can afford a $300 incremental upgrade to a new proc down the line, but it's tough to justify $500 for a proc and mobo- more if they change the socket style enough to necessitate changing coolers. Curse my habit for only playing CPU-bound games.

Envy, not jealousy.

Envy would still be mislabeling it. Though I guess there isn't a single word for when your eyes roll so hard the angular momentum of Earth is measurably affected.

I think it's AgentONE who has the Alfa 4C.

By the way, I've got my eye on a 99 Jeep Cherokee with 204K miles on it. One owner, who really took care of it. Anything I should look out for when I look it over?

Jeeps from that period, especially the 4.0l models, have electronic gremlins that can cause random stalls, regardless of how well-cared-for the vehicle is. Also, 1999-2001 4.0l engines used head casting revision 0331, which is prone to randomly cracking and becoming useless. Unfortunately, the issue isn't related to mileage, so the 0331 castings haven't all cycled out yet. Some people have been lucky. Definitely ask about that. You can also find the casting number next to the valve cover mating surface:

Also watch out for the 42RE transmission. XJs are really light, so they shouldn't have too many issues, but they can cause trouble in the heavier ZJ and WJ Grand Cherokees and I wouldn't rule out the possibility. Make note of the transfer case, if the vehicle is a 4x4. Look for the presence of a 4 Full Time position- this designates the NP242J transfer case which was optional on some Limited models. Most XJs had NP231J however, which does not have a full time AWD position.

Leaks are ubiquitous and will likely emanate from everything that contains fluid. If you find something that isn't leaking, ask about it. On a Jeep, if something isn't leaking, it's best to assume you've run it completely dry and are about to have a really bad day. There's really only a couple of design flaws that cause this- the real cause is just the number of miles people were willing to put on these suckers every year without regard to the maintenance costs. They were cheap to buy, but there's only so much you can do to reduce the time it takes to do a rear main seal, you know?

Anyway, I'm probably getting out of the Jeep game by next year myself. There's a couple things I still want to check off the bucket list with my 5.9 Limited, but after that I'm kinda done fiddling with Daimler-Chrysler, and I just don't have the budget for a new Jeep. I'd like to say my Jeeps have been good to me, but then, I've owned 5 Grand Cherokees and that probably speaks for itself. They're probably fine as second or third vehicles, but I've always made the mistake of trying to daily drive them. And at this point I'd rather spend my money and time working on a project sports car than a project fast SUV. (And project wheelers never really worked out too much in my area of Texas anyway)

There isn't an inherent minimum interleaving requirement with any kind of DDR RAM, the numbers just specify the standard revisions to Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic RAM. DDR was introduced ages ago, DDR2 replaced it and was used until around 8 or 10 years ago, when DDR3 took over as the mainstream, and now new stuff uses DDR4 RAM. Notably, none of it is cross-compatible.

When I refer to channel count, I'm talking about a technique used to increase effective data transfer rate by interleaving RAM in such a way that multiple modules (sticks) communicate across separate channels, taking advantage of processing capacity while one module is refreshing. (Something that has to be done every few cycles to keep bits in volatile memory, which takes up a clock cycle and slows down any RAM) Most modern machines are designed to use dual-channel memory, whereby RAM is dedicated to two separate channels for interleaving purposes. You may notice your DIMM Slots are two different colors. That designates the channels. Intel's Bloomfield architecture used triple-channel memory access, which was neat in theory, but in practice I've found much the same thing that other manufacturers did: it's not really worth it. Which is why you don't see too many 6-slot boards anymore. Some high-end machines use quad-channel now, which is also fine. It acts like dual channel memory if you only install two sticks, which was something triple-channel always gave me trouble with. (I solved that by cramming a stick into all 6 slots) Though honestly, you can run most anything on one stick and it'll do stuff, though it'll be slower than having the same amount of RAM spread across two sticks because of that whole interleaving thing.

On the topic of your proc, I might consider moving from Ivy Bridge. It's just a die shrink of Sandy Bridge, which has been in production for about 5 years now. I'm not saying go full i7, but the real benefits to the newer Core-series procs come with their respective chipsets and support for all kinds of fun modern computing tricks. That's why I'm considering going from an 8 year old i7 to a new i5. Even as nice as a hyperthreading 4 core CPU is, being limited to 24GB of RAM, and only supporting SATA II and USB2.0 sucks. Having a bunch of SATA-III channels would be great, and some USB3.0 support would be nice too. (Especially if I had room on top of my desk for my desktop) Plus M.2 support and so on. There was an awesome Black Friday deal I missed for a 4790k with a late-model transitional MSi board that had a lot of the features of the newer chipsets, for $350. I'm still burned up about that.

Finally, on the ASUS note, they were good to me and my friends for years, and then a bunch of us bought various new ASUS boards and they all proved one thing: ASUS has gone to hell in a hamster bowl. Reliability? Performance? No, no. Name value.