Believe it or not, those hollow tubes have a limited service life. When I served in Tonkin Gulf back in '72, we had to go into the yard at Sasebo to replace the barrel on our 5"/54 naval rifle because it was worn out after 3000 rounds. Bigger tubes wear faster. The 16"/50s on the battleships actually needed replaceable liners because they needed to be changed after a few 100 rounds. Just because the projectiles are powered by magnets not chemical explosives doesn't mean they barrels won't wear out, and when they do, you won't be able to replace them at sea any more than the current tubes can. Rail guns may be the way of the future, but they're not going to get rid of all the maintenance issues we have now.

In the military, projects like this always have names, as do operations. Some of them are very apt, even in wartime, such as Overlord and Mincemeat and some of them are designed to mislead, such as Operation Citadel. In this case, there's one name that stands out so far that it's hard to see why any other name would even be considered: Project Baskerville.

You don't even need separate input streams for this. You can do what ancient, obsolete line editors such as vi did: you start out in command mode, so that the program treats everything as commands; then, if you need to, you switch to data mode so that anything you input is considered as data until you enter something special that takes you back to command mode. And, when you're in data mode, nothing you enter except that special signal is, or can be taken as a command by the program.

I should boycott that company and make sure I don't know how / refuse to use the industry standard tool they release... that will show them!

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one interesting idea for delta emulator is to move the break in the triangle to the center of the base. which would make it look more like a delta symbol.

My thought is simply to make their new logo a mirror image of the old one with the gap on the other side.

Then there is the matter of amtrack having what feels like a million stops that makes any trip take seemingly forever.

That's a problem with a well-known solution. You just make the HSR routes express, meaning that they only stop in major cities, and ignore the small towns in between. If you need to get to one of those smaller places, you go to the nearest city the express stops at and transfer to a local line.

That means a crash landing autogyro is "super safe" as the landing actually helps keeping the rotor running. A crash landing is basically no big difference to a normal landing. The only critical point is: oops something is wrong: I have to land NOW. It is in both crafts a a problem if you miss that point of decision.

And this is what I was trying to say, but in more technical terms. You know the subject, and I have little knowledge of the subject except for what's in the Wikipedia article.

I'd think that the lower noise would be a plus in urban environments would be a plus, as well as their ability to land safely after an engine failure, especially if their carrying casualties to the nearest ER.

Hi, I'm an FAA certificated commercial helicopter pilot.

Good! You may be able to tell me if an idea of mine is any good. Earlier in this discussion, I suggested using an autogyro instead of a helicopter because it doesn't have to trade airspeed for lift and still has enough lift to land if there's an engine failure. What do you think of the idea? Does it seem practical or am I all wet?

Actually, if you don't need 3D movement or hovering, you don't need to design anything new. You can use something that's been around now for just over a century: an autogyro. Very short take off and landing, quiet and if the engine fails in flight, the rotor still has enough lift to let you land smoothly and safely. Why aren't they being used for this now? Probably because it's old technology and most of the designers today don't even know about it.

We had one of the coldest and wettest summers in memory.

The corporate culture and team building exercises don't work for everybody. Clearly, they don't for you, and I doubt they'd work for me, but I'd give it a try and if it didn't work for me, I'd at least keep it to myself. However, it does seem to work for the Japanese. I've seen stuff on TV about Japanese companies that start the work day with calisthenics and other group exercises followed by having everybody sing the corporation's theme song, and all the workers just take it for granted. Of course, it may help that the managers, execs and even the C level admins are out there, not just watching but taking part with everybody else.

These people definitely buy into the astroturfing of how essential offices are etc. etc.

Up until quite recently, that was conventional wisdom for the simple reason that it was true. Until the Internet became ubiquitous most office work required you to be in the office to work because if you weren't you didn't have access to the information you needed to get your job done. Now, time have changed, and it's going to take some time for managers and investors to wrap their little minds around the new way of working.

Just look at the egyptian hieroglypics, they are not 10000 years old and still we have trouble understanding them.

Really? If you take a moment to look into the facts you'll find that hieroglyphics were first translated roughly 200 years ago.

If the company's top priority is warming chairs and justifying poorly-thought-out commercial real-estate purchases, then it must be a pretty terrible place to work.