OTOH current day Russia doesn't have the yoke of communism around their neck. Is the level of corruption worse than the economic inefficiency of communism? I don't know, possibly?
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
> battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes.
The main reason really is range. A battleship can obliterate a target within about 25 km (yes, I know the guns can shoot longer than that, but practical accuracy against a moving target such as another ship..) whereas an aircraft carrier can launch strikes from hundreds of km away. Further, the carrier can launch reconnaissance aircraft (nowadays with radar obviously, but thinking of the WWII era when battleships were obsoleted) so it's aware of what's happening around it. So it can, say, stay away out of range of enemy battleships, as well as detect enemy targets at long range to launch strikes against. Yes, mistakes can still happen, see the battle of Samar. And yes, the battleship likely has floatplanes, but compared to a carrier, few of them, shorter range, and needs relatively calm seas to recover them.
All this being said, yes it took a lot of planes launched from a lot of carriers to sink the Yamato. But due to the range issue explained in the previous paragraph, the carriers could safely do this well out of range of the massive guns of the Yamato, whereas the Yamato could do nothing more than sit there impotently taking hit after hit until it finally succumbed.
> When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
In principle, yes. But to do that the battleship needs to get awfully close to whatever it's going to shoot at, running the risk of hitting mines, or being targeted by shore-based anti-ship missiles etc. And if you already have the overwhelming superiority to get rid of all such enemy systems before bringing the battleship in, why not use those same assets to hit the same targets the battleship would hit in the first place?
You are mostly correct, except for one key point: the battleship was armored so that it could get close to the action and have somewhat reasonable chances of surviving. Most ships today could not take near the hits the Yamato did. (the Yamato shows why it is pointless to try)
Indeed! It blew my mind when I read that factoid in the Glasgow transportation museum(?) back when I visited about 10 years ago.
FWIW, a similar percentage of the world's steam locomotives were also made in the area in the same timeframe. Mind-boggling concentration of the worldwide heavy industry at the time!
Glasgow transportation museum(?) back when I visited about 10 years ago.
Looks like that would have been the new Riverside Museum (very distinctive Zaha Hadid building in an open area) rather than the old Transport Museum?
For anyone reading this thread, I highly recommend visiting the Riverside if you get a chance, as well as the Tall Ship moored next to it, which has been developed into an excellent historical museum in its own right in the last few years.
> Looks like that would have been the new Riverside Museum (very distinctive Zaha Hadid building in an open area) rather than the old Transport Museum?
Ah yes, that must be it, looking it up online I recognize the building. It appeared very shiny and new when I visited, which seems to match the timeline (per wikipedia, it opened in June 2011, and I was there in spring 2012).
I believe most use cases where really shallow draft is required has been taken over by waterjets. Less efficient than propellers, particularly at slow speed, but more efficient than paddle wheels, AFAIU.
Then there's other things like channels having been dredged over the years, roads have been massively improved, ships have echo sounders etc., so maybe there's less need nowadays for traversing really shallow waters with big boats.
Over here there's a paddle wheel tourist ship (no steam though, just plain diesel). But the cheeky thing is that it's actually powered by propellers, the paddle wheel is just turned around by a small electric (hydraulic?) motor for show.
As an aside, the GNU Fortran compiler (gfortran) also provides a quad precision floating point type, similar to this one. If the target supports native quad precision it uses that, otherwise it falls back to software emulation.
Math functions are provided via libquadmath. Newer glibc also provides quad precision functions with slightly different names, IIRC using a f128 suffix rather than "q" like libquadmath.
One thing I liked about a Vernor Vinge sci-fi novel I read once was the concept of "computer archeologist". Spool the evolution of software forwards a few centuries, and we'll have layers upon layers of software where instead of solving problems with existing tooling, we just plaster on yet another NIH layer. Rinse and repeat, and soon enough we'll need a separate profession of people who are capable of digging down into those old layers and figure out how they work.
There was a big project to re-architect the low level storage system to something that isn't dependent on vacuuming, called zheap. Unfortunately it seems to have stalled and nobody seems to be working on it anymore? I keep scanning the release notes for each new pgsql version, but no dice.
I think OrioleDB is picking up from where zheap left things, and seems quite active in upstreaming their work, you might be interested to check it out.
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
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