Skipper torpedoes were from Wing Commander III (1994), IIRC it was mission 3 or 4 of the campaign you had do this escort mission (I hate escort missions) and you had to escort a transport which suddenly had a skipper torpedo fired at it, it uncloaked three times.

IIRC you could but it was a hold down this button rather than a toggle as in 1. Also the stealth mission required the cold gas thrusters upgrade which were limited.

Well it seems playing quake in the 1990s on a 36K modem and learning to lag shoot was useful after all!

It's not so much oil running out. It is the easy oil running out, i.e. oil which has a high energy return on energy input. As humans we like to pick the low hanging fruit first. Coal mining is a good example, we go for the stuff on the surface, then open cast, then dig shafts. Ghawar field in Saudi is an excellent example, it is 150 or so metres down on dry land. You can shift big machines on dry land. Deep water horizon gulf of Mexico is an excellent example too the oil was in deep water, which presents logistical challenges and deeper down meaning more work is required to get it to the surface. The Russian find is 300 or so metres down and thus it is easy oil.

Why? Exxon isn't the only oil big oil company. There is BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total SA. Who says those companies won't go into partnership with the Russians? The French recently sold a warship to the Russians.

I'm not so sure missiles would dictate battle range. On Earth we have dedicated weapon platforms to shoot down anti ship missiles. USN has the AEGIS cruisers, the Russians the Kirov battle cruisers. The horizon means the really really fast ones give about 10-20 seconds notice before you have a massive hole in the side of your ship. Weapons firms claim they can shoot down missiles (I'm not so sure about the claims). To extent the interception time they use airborne radar. However if space battles are fought at 10,000,0000km then you have quite a lot of notice of the missile coming as there is no horizon to hide behind and no sea to skim. If the missiles manoeuvre, you can see it and it is telegraphing its attack and movement direction with hours if not days and weeks.

I-war-2 was a bit more limiting as you couldn't really turn off the 2D space assist function. I-war-1 had bad enemy scripts. If you went into free flight mode with inertia and no computer correction to limit you to 2d space very few things could hit you. You could abuse it even more with LDS when a missile or anything was going to hit you hit LDS and instant 1000m/s

There is no real scarcity online. Which is why companies utilise artificial scarcity. Things such as some twitch tv live streams make you apply for a code to be able to watch it limiting the number of viewers when theoretically the sky is the limit.

Is it really paranoid? Consider Kraft and Unilever, they make pretty much everything under different brand names. They are hoovering up other brands and putting them under their labels.

It is in operation yes, in limited numbers. But they aren't making any more and as the costs escalate it seems they might as well make more F-22s than F35s. The the F-22 is tested and operational and mostly does what it was advertised to do. The F35 is still promises a lot of things, for the costs of the F35 you might have been able to replace on a 1:1 basis all the aging F-15s the USAF has.

The F35 is a government subsidy program for Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin were pretty much given a blank cheque to write for as much as they want. The irony is Lockheed Martin had a completed and viable aircraft the F-22 which could have been modified like the F-15 which grew over the years to become the F-15E

I remember going into Manchester University / MMU/ Salford. (MA courses) The course I was looking at had 2 out of 8 core modules the other 6(+2 if you wanted) were electives and depending on the combination that you chose your masters qualification would be named differently, it could change from MSc to MA or MEd.

Considering Iron Dome missiles were found on a cargo ship bound for China on the MS Thor Liberty in 2011, why is this news? China doesn't just have the schematics they have complete missile systems.

Sure, but similarly calling something capitalist doesn't mean it is capitalist either. The western world is not even remotely capitalist even though it pretends it is. I wouldn't call bail outs capitalist or subsidies like the F35 program capitalist.