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This might be interesting: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/23490/chapter/6

Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.


Is there a curve for how much an efficiency gain translate in max distance?

From https://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes...

All other things equal, range varies proportionately with efficiency. Ie, if you have 500km range at 50% overall efficiency, then at 65% overall efficiency, you have 650km range.


Great resource, thanks.

This is a phys.org "article". They're usually just rehashed press releases, and this one is particularly bad - it's literally just the NASA press release with the last 2 paragraphs chopped off. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/nisar/us-indian-space-mission-...

Uhhh... editor/author/LLM was asleep here. There are 4 sentinel-1 sats in orbit, but one of them has been decommissioned because of system failure... as the article itself states.

You are right. It should be something like “Replacement Sentinel-1 Satellite is Live, Ensuring the Future of ESA‘s Copernicus Program”

There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".

UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.


> CTF-151 via UN

And Operation Atalanta by the EU.


As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/)

These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.

And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.

So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.


There are two broad reasons why the US has troops in Germany (and in Europe overall).

1. Because the Europeans wanted them there. NATO was a big security blanket, and certainly since the end of the cold war, up to say... 2014, America -wanted- a compliant Europe.

2. Because Europe is an amazing springboard into the middle east, and America just can't help but get itself involved in dropping bombs on the middle east.

1 ties into 2. A compliant Europe is less likely to raise objections to being used as a forward base for bombing Iraqis and Iranians. It's only in the last 10-15 years that the US realized that perhaps it was/had squandered it's lead to China, and dropped the ball (Europe at fault too) on properly containing (or addressing) Russia, and it would sure be nice if it could focus on the Pacific.


And number 3:

To ensure that Germany and Russia never team up to be a world super power that would rival the USA.

That's the main reason they are there.


OP is probably from the US and only see "America" as the good guy.

The articles mention withdrawing a BCT (which is ~4000 people) form Germany.

The US currently has 2 BCTs "fully" in Germany. The 2nd Cav Regiment (a Stryker unit.. so infantry mounted on 8x8 APCs) and an Armoured BCT on 9 month rotation (so tanks and IFVs).

There have been a bunch of studies indicating that the rotational ABCT costs more than even a truly forward deployed ABCT. My bet is that it's the ABCT that is going to get withdrawn. It's both the flashier unit, and likely has the highest impact on freeing up money. This also lines up with the withdrawal timelines... since the unit is rotational, they just need to wait for the end of rotation, and just... not send another. Much less disruption.

While the timing was obviously conjunction with current events, this draw down was likely to happen at some point in this term, even in absence of Iran things. Trump literally tried to do this at the end of his last term.


The total energy supply figure is a primary energy mix - for the fossil fuels it represents the thermal energy of the fuel. You can look at the final energy consumption section a bit lower to get a different picture taking into account conversion losses.

Some crude averages from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

~50% gasoline, ~25-30% diesel.


Ukraine has concretely demonstrated their ability to perform deep missile/drone strikes (on the order of ~1500km) onto Russian strategic and economic assets.

Ukrainian drone capabilities in the near battlefield (up to ~20-30km deep) are also not contested. Russian milbloggers will openly talk about the difficulty of massing and movement in that area due to the saturation of drone coverage (and btw, this challenge is more or less symmetric).

So the article is not likely exaggerating any of their capabilities. However, it is exaggerating via omission.

In terms of deep strikes, the question is what the success rate of these missions are, what cadence can they sustain, what's the constellation of Russian lapses that have to line up for a successful strike, etc.

Another known area of weakness (that the Ukrianians are working hard on) is the middle range. How to strike quickly at targets of opportunity in the 50-500km range field. This was/is a capability that things like GMLRS and ATACMS provided, but I imagine the Ukraine is forced to ration those munitions carefully.


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