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Aviation biofuel is mostly a distraction. Any serious effort to decarbonize the transportation industry would focus on a scalable system, presumably high-speed rail.
(And whoever is thinking about being a smartass, don’t you dare come at me with bullshit about trans-ocean flights, they obviously can’t be take by train, but biofuel is still utterly incapable of supplying even only ocean flights. It’s not ever going to be a viable product. We’d be better off trying to scale up carbon capture than try to use all our arable land to grow crops for fuel.)
Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.
Beelink and Minisforum are legit
I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.
1·6 months agoI think US military operations moved away from counter-insurgency to preparedness with conflicts with mechanized military forces that have actual air power, so a low-and-slow airframe wasn’t considered as necessary. That, and drones are filling a lot of the air coverage and surveillance gap (though no one on the ground will tell you there could ever be a complete replacement for the BRRRRRRRR of an A-10.)
As I understand it, the Armed Overwatch pick that would at least sometimes replace the A-10 for close air support is the OA-1K Sky Warden, which has 10 hard points, and a 7,257kg gross weight. I don’t know how to accurately calculate the Sky Warden’s weight budget, but it’s a little more than half of the gross weight of the A-10, so I’d guess it’s roughly half, or 3,500kg or so. Which is definitely a step down in terms of weight and ability, but I guess the hope is that it will be cheaper to fly and maintain, particularly since it’s based off the long-running Air Tractor AT-802 airframe. I think the other two planes in consideration, the EMB-314 Super Tucano and the AT-6B Wolverine, have fewer hard points (5 each) and lower maximum take-off weights (5,400kg and 2,948kg, respectively).
And if I read the literature correctly, the craft actually selected was the OA-1K Sky Warden, the airframe based on the agricultural aircraft designs of Air Tractor AT-802.
It looks like the Scorpion was not selected by the USAF for the light-strike or patrolling craft role, in favor of pursuing turboprop options (Beechcraft AT-6 Wolverine and Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucano).
Roku Jellyfin app has been pretty good lately, few complaints now!