Gas for heating used to be the standard but is on its way out now. My house hasn't had a gas connection for 8 years, and many people qre switching to heat pumps and other cleaner methods of heating.
The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.
And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).
Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.
And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.
Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games.
All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.
France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet.
But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises.
I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.
If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.
But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ...
> but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier,
Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes.
High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers.
Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation.
If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?
Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
> Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers?
Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course.
> If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast
I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested.
> what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders
The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
> Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are
Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage.
> right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
> The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
> I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?
It's 2026, PRC has GEOsync ISR (optic+SAR) with persistent coverage of Pacific and beyond. Combined with 500+ other ISR sats, they basically have full coverage in relevant theatres, with hand offs for tracking/queuing/targeting. There's really nowhere for surface combatants to evade/hide anymore vs PRC tier adversary. US doesn't have ASAT capabilities to shootdown beyond LEO. Without ranting too much, highend C4ISR is basically massive enabler/coordination force multiplier, technically it's feasible to synergize highend C4ISR and upgraded COTs low end drones swarms to kill carrier groups, either via mathematically guaranteed saturation salvos or push A2D2 past max carrier standoff range, i.e. no viable sorties without entering no escape zone. Of course tier1 response is still hypersonics (including drones), but theoretically the techstack now exists for low end loitering swarms (well relative to PRC low end) to also do so for much less.
This is just nonsense. An unmanned platform that can stay on station for a significant time and strike at hundreds of miles and have enough payload to deal significant damage and be fast enough to arrive in meaningful time and somehow survive approaching a carrier group (those planes have guns, remember? it's not just SM-6 spam) cannot be cheap because of hard physical constraints like the energy required to stay in the air. There are no such "COTS" platforms, DJI quads don't cut it across multiple dimensions.
Clearly I'm not talking about hobbyist quads. We're talking shaheed tier loitering munitions, which is completely COTS (i.e. moped piston engines and for Iran sanctioned electronics stripped from washing machines). That's what PRC acquired 1M units of except with indigenous PRC supply chain which can also enhance Iran's D- execution, i.e. add resilient barrage EW proof mesh networking (all commoditized by now), more efficient hfe propulsion to extend ~2500km to ~4000km with some planform improvements. Synergize with high end orbital C4ISR = any carrier fleet within 3000km = swarm loitering no escape zone = as in carriers (must) bolt in opposite direction and drone will geometrically catchup. 3000km also basically max carrier sortie / stand off range with tanking, i.e. functionally A2D2 to push carriers to effectively 0 sortie range.
It's more or less simple VLS and CVW magazine math to figure out total carrier group saturation numbers. This also assuming prioritizing carrier survival... i.e. CVWs may not even be geometrically recoverable if carriers has to GTFO.
Napkin math hypothetical, if a stacked carrier group with 3DDGs quad packed antiair and CVWs where most tasking dedicated to shooting down drones... PRC needs to launch ~3000 enhanced shaheed136 tier moped munitions to fully deplete magazine and saturate. Considering PRC procurement likely getting them at fraction price of Iran (i.e. 10-20k, remember Iran has sanction tax), this probably actually cheaper than PRC hypersonic salvos. We're talking sub 100m swarms that effectively defeat carriers or at minimum draw billions in interceptors. VS 100m tier1 hypersonic ashm salvos that can do so in 1/20th time.
The TLDR is knowing where carriers are is theoretically a solved problem, and knowing where carriers are enables conemps/ops vs those who do not, i.e. if Iran can somehow launch 10000 drones, simply having shit C4ISR means they can't use same tactic.
You keep saying "loitering" and then use one way ranges. If "loitering", where does the time on station come from? Are the drones refuelled? Do they land or do they just crash when they run out of fuel? Or is "loitering" just as a buzzword devoid of meaning?
No, prop drones don't "geometrically catchup". Shahed's extreme range achieved by flying really slow, the top speed (which they don't sustain constantly to conserve fuel) is about 185kph, for the maximum flight time of about 13 hours. US carriers officially can sustain 60kph indefinitely, and in practice they can go faster. That means on a straight line a Shahed can only gain 1600km in the absolute best scenario. In reality it's much less, because launching takes time and the average speed is slower.
The capabilities that you're describing are a fantasy.
Loitering just means extended endurance, i.e. piston engine that can stay on station for 20+ hours / enhanced range of ~4500km, but can also function as attritable max range munitions. They're loitering because definitionally they can loiter, especially with datalink for midcourse corrections (again PRC specialty). It's basically value engineered TLAMs (which you know, loiters) on props instead of turbofan, where props trade speed advantage for range, but speed completely negated by massive A2D2 no escape zone because props still significantly faster than any surface fleet.
>geometrically catchup
A carrier at 3000km and GTFO sprint opposite direction at max speed, i.e. 30knots / 60km, will have prop drones closing speed/gap at 120km per hour. AKA intercept time distance around ~24 hours at 4500km. Hence why I said ENHANCED shaheeds, i.e. swap propulsion with 30% more efficient heavy fuel engines, increase aspect ratio and improved shaheed basically makes carriers operating within 3000kms unable to reach ~4500km endurance no escape zone. This within the platforms SWAP potential, technically can also just swap payload for fuel but HFE and planform improvements simply more efficient.
3000km also VASTLY optimistic scenario for carriers and limits of prop planform/SWAP potential, it's functionally carrier at 0 sortie scrap metal range. Realistically carriers max effective standoff is ~2200km, at which point effective sorties down to 20% (rest tanking/support). So no, mathematically, carriers cannot fastandfurious straight line out of this, and definitely not surface fleet escorts. The capabilities I'm describing is pedestrian for PRC. Unless one thinks PRC cannot build a better shaheed than Iran who literally built them in caves with box of scraps.
That's how I understood it. If you add a new thing (constant, route, feature flag, property, DB table) and it immediately needs to be added in 4 different places (4 seems to be the standard in my current project) before you can use it, that's not DRY.
> If you add a new thing (constant, route, feature flag, property, DB table) and it immediately needs to be added in 4 different places (4 seems to be the standard in my current project) before you can use it, that's not DRY.
The tricky part is that sometimes "a new thing" is really "four new things" disguised as one. A database table is a great example because it's a failure mode I've seen many times. A developer has to do it once and they have to add what they perceive as the same thing four times: the database table itself, the internal DB->code translation e.g. ORM mapping, the API definition, and maybe a CRUD UI widget. The developer thinks, "oh, this isn't DRY" and looks to tools like Alembic and PostGREST or Postgraphile to handle this end-to-end; now you only need to write to one place when adding a database table, great!
It works great at first, then more complex requirements come down: the database gets some virtual generated columns which shouldn't be exposed in code, the API shouldn't return certain fields, the UI needs to work off denormalized views. Suddenly what appeared to be the same thing four times is now four different things, except there's a framework in place which treats these four things as one, and the challenge is now decoupling them.
Thankfully most good modern frameworks have escape valves for when your requirements get more complicated, but a lot of older ones[0] really locked you in and it became a nightmare to deal with.
[0] really old versions of Entity Framework being the best/worst example.
I believe that was the point of Ruby on Rails: that you really had to just create the class, and the framework would create the table and handle the ORM. Or maybe you still had to write the migration; it's been as while. That was pretty spectacular in its dedication to DRY, but also pretty extreme.
But the code I'm talking about is really adding the same thing in 4 different places: the constant itself, adding it to a type, adding it to a list, and there was something else. It made it very easy to forget one step.
95 is high for Finnish saunas in Finland at least. Public saunas are very rarely so hot here, and few like it that hot.
Edit: to put it into some numbers, per one study[1] Finnish sauna sessions were on average at 75.9°C with SD 9.9°C. If we assume normal distribution, that means that more than 97 % of sauna sessions are at < 95°C.
I actually like them that hot. I look for 90+ saunas, and once was in one that claimed to be over 100. Although I have no idea how accurate that is. They're very bearable to me. But if they're not bearable, of course you should look for a sauna that's not quite as hot. Or at least stay low; the higher you sit, the hotter it is.
You can have over 100°C. The amount of steam is a crucial factor. Even over 100°C doesn't feel that hot if it's dry, but at higher temperatures the "löyly profile" often becomes quite harsh.
In my case 95°C was without any steam; it caused me burning skin sensation and I almost collapsed after just 5 minutes, whereas pre-covid I could do 3-4 rounds of steam with towels pushing steam at me at the topmost place and last up to 20 minutes before I needed to leave.
This is mostly about game logic, where I can understand the reliance on floating point numbers. I've also seen these epsilon comparisons in code that had nothing to do with game engines or positions in continuous space, and it has always hurt my eyes.
I think if you want to work with values that might be exactly equal to other values, floating point is simply not the right choice. For money, use BigDecimal or something like that. For lots of purposes, int might be more appropriate. If you do need floating point, maybe compare whether the value is larger than the other value.
The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.
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