Nah dude, this is legit, I lived through the tail end of the satanic panic years, those FBI raids were no joke. We used to scatter a layer of d4s along the stairs leading the basement, right before the tripwire that releases a full paint can on a string. Every player was issued a smoke bomb before the start of the game so we could make a clean getaway while the officers were distracted.

D4 with a top face:

This is an idea that’s been toyed with, but simply doesn’t give the same kind of situational awareness that a human pilot directly in the situation has, not to mention the issues with communication links, which not only present the problem of jamming as you said, but also make stealth much more difficult. With a human pilot, the craft can shut off all radio comms for a much lower signature.

What we’re seeing instead as the expected path forward is a hybrid approach; wingman drones.

You build a top of the line stealth fighter, and then you give it two drone buddies, which can be remotely fed instructions by the human operated craft. You retain situational awareness, and from a flying platform you can fall back to laser communication; unjammable and undetectable. Pilot safety is significantly enhanced because they can hang back and let the drones engage, and each pilot (a very expensive asset) can now command significantly more firepower.

Saab are working on this for their upcoming sixth gen fighter, which I’d very much like to see us collaborate on developing.

Imagine you and twenty of your friends have ganged up on someone in a fight. Would feel exactly as confident if they were armed with a knife as you would if they were armed with nothing?

It’s not always about being able to win the fight. Sometimes it’s just about making the fight costly enough that the other party decides its not worth it.

This, by the way, is exactly why our military is still pushing for the F-35, despite the very high political costs and risks that it now comes with. When you get down to the brass tacks of what an air war between Canada and Russia would look like, the unavoidable factor is that Russia simply does not have any 5th gen fighters. Even on paper their only claimed 5th gen simply isn’t. The specs they’ve announced for the Su-57 it barely qualify as stealthy. And it’s well known that Russia overstates their specs (whereas NATO tends to understate ours). We also know from what’s been happening Ukraine that Russian radar is dogshit.

Everything in Russia’s current air fleet, including their grand total of 6 “5th gen” fighters, would get stomped into the ground by an F-35. Stealth is a huge force multiplier. When you can kill the enemy without them even seeing you, it’s not even a fight, it’s just a turkey shoot. Even a small fleet of F-35s would inflict unimaginable damage on the Russian air force. They’d be limited only by their ability to maintain locations to launch from, and their available supply of fuel, parts and munitions.

Something like that dramatically alters the calculations when it comes to considering any kind of attack.

Canada’s geography isn’t exactly conducive to relying on anti-air systems alone. It’s the same reason Trump’s golden dome is a fantasy; he’s trying to recreate Iron Dome, but Iron Dome only works because Isreal is tiny. Canada isn’t.

There’s also a huge cost to air defense systems. Just for some rough perspective, a single Patriot missile system costs as much as 10 F-35s. A Patriot covers a radius of about 160km, an F-35, without midair refueling, covers a radius of about 1800km.

You simply cannot create the same kind of air defence network with ground batteries only as you can with aerial interceptors, and when you need to cover a country as large as ours that makes a huge difference. Far from being a fraction of the cost, your proposal would actually be orders magnitude more expensive.

Even when you throw drones into the picture they’re simply not going to adjust that calculation in any meaningful way. A drone capable of intercepting enemy aircraft or missiles as effectively as a fighter plane is going to cost as much as a fighter plane. There’s really no avoiding that.

They didn’t, either time. But reality got in the way of the meme so OP ignored it.

The first Iraq war was an unqualified success. There’s really no way around that. Should they have gone the whole way and removed Saddam from power? Maybe. But the goal of the war was to protect Kuwait and that goal was accomplished.

The second Iraq war was stupid, unnecessary, messy, pointless, badly mismanaged, and came at a staggeringly high cost. But it was successful. They achieved the regime change they wanted and ultimately created a puppet state in the Middle East. They’re using Iraqi bases right now in their attacks on Iran, something that would not possible if that war had been a failure.

Doesn’t make it a good idea. Getting what you want isn’t great if you massively overpay for it.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, absolutely counts as a loss. The US got nothing that they wanted - it didn’t even lead to the death of Bin Laden since he was hiding out in Pakistan - and wasted a tonne of lives and resources to ultimately just put the country back in the hands of the Taliban and give them a whole bunch of military hardware.

If they go that far, then yes, the only reasonable response would be to stop any purchases of US equipment altogether.

I doubt they will, for that exact reason. It’s the kind of hardball move I’m sure Trump would very much like to pull, but I’m also sure that his handlers / diaper changers recognize how damaging it would be, not just to any future sales to Canada, but future sales across the world. Nobody wants to buy from a store that constantly changes or refuses to honour their own terms of service. There are already concerns that the US might stop offering firmware updates to buyers of the F-35, but those concern are at least hypothetical, currently. If they pull this “red card” it very much stops being hypothetical. Maybe you sell a few more units to buyers who are currently locked in (that might even include Canada), but you lose basically any future business from everyone who has better options.

As in, list from memory? List games that you actually played? Or just games you think are good?

Why would you use an image as a meme format if you didn’t know where it came from? That’s an incredibly bad way to communicate. You’re basically saying “Yes your Honor, but you see I was deliberately being an idiot.” Like, that doesn’t make it better.

It’s a ridiculously good performance and I think it really shocked a lot of people who only knew him from Doctor Who.

I’ve always said that it takes a genuinely good person to play a truly repugnant villain, and by all accounts that’s Tennant through and through.

It’s from Jessica Jones, a very, very good show. David Tennant plays a man with mind control powers who uses them in all of the worst ways you can possibly imagine. It’s technically a Marvel comics thing, but the creators were given total carte blanche and went deep into the absolute nightmarishness of the subject matter. It’s basically a mix of detective noir and horror. Tennant and Ritter both deliver incredible performances and the show really plays with the abject terror of living in a world with superhumans in it. It’s like a version of Invincible that refuses to ever undermine the horror by cracking a joke.

I think you can have combat focused stories as long as your combat mechanics are lightweight and fast.

When I switched out my Shadowrun game to The Sprawl, and then eventually a homebrew, I actually got less afraid of letting combat happen because I knew it wouldn’t eat up ninety percent of the session. By volume of time spent, combat became much less of each session, and yet conversely combat could happen at any time and every scene could feel like a fight might break out because there was no sigh “Roll for initiative…”

With fast, lightweight combat mechanics (especially ones that do not have an initiative system) you get to weave violence into the substance of your story constantly, without the system taking place of the storytelling.

That’s not to say that less combat focused games are a bad thing. The other big change I found was that it was also much easier to run sessions where no fighting occurred, because I didn’t have to figure out how to fill the several hours that should have been taken up by a fight, and the players never felt like there was a difference between fighting and talking and everything else. It all just became part of the broader texture of the story, so a session with no fighting didn’t feel weird or out of place.

I am utterly perplexed as to why people keep posting this image with text that implies that we’re supposed to sympathise with the mass murdering serial rapist.

Yes, isn’t it curious how three F-15s were shot down, all of them in combat at the time, and every single time it was those damn Kuwaitis.

It’s almost like the US might have maybe decided that was less embarrassing than admitting that Iran hit three of their planes.

It’s not endless. They just don’t know when it’s going to end. But don’t worry, Trump has assured everyone that they have enough munitions stockpiled to fight forever. Not that they’re going to. Because it’s not an endless war. It’s just… open-ended.

What fucking idiocy is this? It’s not enough that half our economy is tied to a fossil fuel that’s rapidly being replaced by renewables, now we have to double down?

Jesus wept, I didn’t think reading comprehension had gotten that bad.

Yes, this clarification is correct. I meant that the increase amounts to an extra five dollars when you renew your passport once every ten years.

God damn, you’d think people could put that together from context.

By 2.7%. That’s the really rather important detail that they decided not to include in the headline.

It’s about $5 every 10 years. If you can afford to travel abroad in the first place, you’ll be fine.

Found 'em

Trump doesn’t spend time thinking about the practicalities of something like this, because when he says “51st state” what he means is “The latest expansion of my kingly domain.”

He has zero intention of letting newly subjugated Canadians vote. He doesn’t even want to let Americans vote. These are the fantasies of an autocrat, not carefully thought out plans.