An aileron roll is a negative-G maneuver, and I'm not so sure the plane was capable of such. The video that I saw showed only positive-G maneuvers.

Nonsense - why should I trust you to say it exists?

The giphy isn't even of the same setup - it has three vertical panels, the ars technica shows them as horizontal.

No, the chicken came first. The egg was only faking it.

'Latest', dammit, not 'last' - I'm not holding a short position!

Doesn't that more or less describe the planning and investment that went into their last assembly line?

The four ounce chunk of metal doesn't matter - the entire gun will show up on the x-ray. This article specifically shows the infamous "invisible" Glock 7 in a conventional x-ray; this page shows how to detect metal, plastic, and organic (e.g., explosives) items in a color coded airport x-ray device.

[Other sources do indicate that it is possible to crank the power up and/or modify the sensitivity enough to ignore plastics, but did not supply comparison images. Also, the minimal detection law specifically requires that airport type scanners be used.]

EDIT: The Liberator can't quite be entirely made of plastic; it needs a nail for a firing pin. But the nail is too small to make the gun legally detectable.

The gun needs to be detectable, not made of metal. A fully functional Liberator can be made entirely from plastic, but to keep it legal an utterly non-functional metal plate is epoxied into a slot on the frame. The metal has enough mass to trigger the metal detector.

To you there may be no logic in the flat-earth theory, but to a believer, there is.

But I wasn't arguing logic, I was arguing logistics. And where is there 'logic' in suggesting that a person "just" do something that is well beyond the means of the average person?

Why is this a problem (for the vast majority of their users), and how is it "pretentiously ignorant"? As you pointed out, the decision to go with the spherical projection was made to simplify coding - not because they weren't aware of the sphere/ellipsoid distinction.

Even if they did go through the non-trivial process of getting a pilot's license, how would flying in a straight line for a few hours prove anything? You would see nothing but virtually flat, featureless ocean until you ran out of fuel and had to turn back.

[And you'd spend the rest of your life sitting back in the armchair at your club, sipping your brandy, and claiming that you were only minutes away from seeing the edge.]

No, you'd want to go with a rocket, not a plane - which flat earther/rocketeer Mike Hughes is bound and determined to do.

Agreed.

Interesting indeed, and I don't recall them talking about that during the tour, which seemed to focus more on the power generating aspects. Or maybe that's just what caught my interest. Anyway, thanks for the link.

Let's slow down a step. Yes, you can legally (under Federal law) build your own gun, but building it as full auto is just as illegal as using that same 'simple part' to convert a commercial version.

It might, if you're trying to reboot your crashed laptop while you drive.