This:

http://www.amazon.com/German-Art-War-Truppenfuhrung-Military/dp/0811735524/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249550561&sr=1-1

Looked amusing so I thumbed through it and decided to give it a read. Pretty interesting stuff, reading about how “the other side” thought.

I don’t fancy it myself. They should have left the series at Alien3, and not bum-raped it with the God-awful Alien Resurrection, or the AvP films….

But that’s just me! 😉

A:Res was by far the worst of the lot, but it did at least look very slick. Now, the expanded/altered version of Alien 3 that comes in the 9-disc boxset is a very fine film.

Me? I liked the two AvP movies. The first one had a lot of little homages to the franchise and was really not that bad a movie, it suffered primarily from not being what fans expected. The second one was FAR better. It reduced the humans to basically being extras and was full of all sorts of great extraterrestrial violence and mayhem. Wasn’t going to score high on the plot meter, but it didn’t need to. Rumor has it that a third film is in the works, as well as the aforememntioned Alien prequel (which will be a bridge between AVP and Alien-makes sense, else how did they know to have them land on Acheron in Alien and order Ian Holm to secure the alien life form?) and even a Robert Rodriguez directed “Predators” (not the same concept as his Predator 3 from long ago, but rather a simialr story as the first film).

1 aircraft carriers are big metal boxes filled with air that float on the surface.USN 4 big door (2 per side & a long open internal expanse)
2 put a hole in one, it becomes an big metal box filed with water & no longer floats.

Umm…no? You need to do more than simply “put a hole in one”. The internal structure is meant to have portions sealed off in case of just that scenario to allow the ship to stay afloat. A sensible solution is the Chinese ASBM with cluster munitions, to mangle the flight deck and score a mission kill. Or you can use a nuclear tipped Kh-22 or the like, that’d be a sensible option as well. But to state that simply holing one with what, a torpedo I assume, will sink it, is asinine. Multiple holes, or a nuke of some sort, that’ll sink it eventually. Surface or airburst nukes aren’t even going to sink it in a lot of cases, we proved that in testing already, and that was with much weaker WWII era vessels. They didn’t sink en masse until we figured out to blow up the bomb UNDER the water! You will irradiate the flight deck and likely make it non-operational for sure, but even a nuke blast above the surface isn’t going to guarantee an actual sinking.

I watched Alien and Aliens again. How is it that so many years later, they still can’t be topped?

Yeah, all the good stuff stays secret, and Google Earth doesn’t have any of Digital Globe’s imagery showing the entire test range. Terra Server has it though, and you can look around to a degree using their online viewer. Same with Sary Shagan. GE doesn’t have the current test sites, but there is imagery available, and Terra Server has it.

The testing isn’t made “as public”, not “isn’t made public”. We pass along a lot more info regarding the test programs and test shots for the reasons I explained above. Russia doesn’t have to care, as they’re basically performing either training intercepts or system verification trials to make sure the missiles are still reliable. Beyond that, no new systems apart from the 45T6 maybe, should even be out there to be trialled. Hence, less news about Russian ABM testing, which cannot be used as an excuse to claim that Russia isn’t operating or developing newer systems.