jrs100000

joined 1 year ago
[–] jrs100000 4 points 1 year ago

Well Bones didn't appear in the pilot or first episode of TOS, so I dont think well get more than a cameo if he shows up at all.

[–] jrs100000 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your right, it is just as plausible. Theres no theoretical physics department in the Pentagon. If they were developing, proving and exploiting new laws of nature the minds responsible would be coming from the top levels of academia. Half the faculty at MIT must be in on it, teaching students, publishing and reviewing papers, developing new technologies, all based on old physics theyve known was incorrect for, what, decades? What a joke it all must be.

[–] jrs100000 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It was vaguely implied several times throughout the series that the ships computer, or at least the holodecks, were more alive than anyone knew/acknowledged. Lots of strange stuff happened in there. I always assumed it had something to do with the modifications made by the Binars.

[–] jrs100000 16 points 1 year ago

Well she was obviously making an excuse to be there and everyone in the room knew it. Id guess the security clearance was something like manually verifying his identity and registering him with the computer as part of the command staff. This would normally be the sort of boring paperwork the computer or a lower level security person does off screen, but she wanted an excuse to be there and the clearance was technically something she was responsible for.

[–] jrs100000 1 points 1 year ago

Which crimes are those?

[–] jrs100000 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It sounds like the issue was that the two primary female characters in TNG were the doctor and the counselor. Whenever the two of them talked professionally it was probably going to be about a patient, and there was a good chance the patient would be male. For VOY, when the captain and chief engineer communicate professionally it would usually be about a piece of machinery, which would of course not be male.

[–] jrs100000 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Targeting civilians is a war crime, but targeting infrastructure and killing civilians in the process is not.

[–] jrs100000 2 points 1 year ago

At around 55 and 70 seconds it looks like the tanks are firing, the first shell hitting the hillside and the other landing off camera. They might have been panicking or they might have also been taking direct fire.

[–] jrs100000 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

North Korea is quite poor. They ave a GDP per capita of around 1700 USD, and that has likely been shrinking steadily year over year since the Soviet Union collapsed. They have an extremely militarized economy, devoting perhapse 1/5 to 1/4 of their entire GDP to the military (for reference, the US is at about 3% and Russia is at about 5% right now in the middle of a punishing war). To come up with hard currency for their missile and nuclear programs they have focused on illicit programs including counterfeiting, drug production and trafficking their own population.

Their military is also massive for their population, with roughly 1 million active duty troops and perhaps 3 million more in reserve. This military has two primary missions: to keep the current leader in power and to reunify the Korean peninsula under north Korean rule by force. To accomplish this they maintain a strategic stockpile of supplies sufficient to support their active duty military for at least six months of high intensity combat. These supplies are kept in an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers that have been constructed throughout the country. North Korean doctrine imagines an extremely high intensity conflict that is likely more intense than anything we have seen Russia perform in Ukraine, outside of perhaps a Wagner suicide charge. The amount of food, weapons, supplies, fuel and munitions required to support a force this large for six months in an intensive offensive is enormous. When you consider the poor state of their economy and the poverty that most north Koreans live in its absolutely staggering.

Now during the 90s north Korea suffered from two catastrophic disasters. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union, cutting off most of the foreign aid that had propped up their economy and supplied their military. This led to a collapse of their industrial base and starting the trend of year over year GDP decline that continues to this day. The second disaster was the North Korean Famine. This famine lasted throughout the mid and late 90s and resulted in the deaths of a significant percentage of their population. Exactly how bad things were is a closely held state secret. We know that people were trying to eat grass and tree bark. There were rumors that people were digging up freshly buried corpses and children and old people were going missing, but I couldnt say if that was common or even if it was true at all. The famine was finally ended with a steady supply of international food aid. This solution was a thin cover for the fact that their agricultural capacity has still not recovered to this day.

North Korea does manufacture arms and munitions for export. However, the quantity these weapons are available in would be on a scale suitable to arm your standard warlord on a tight budget, but not nearly enough to backstop a full scale mechanized conflict. If they are supplying at a significant level it means they are taking weapons and munitions from front line units (which they would never do), or they are dipping into their reserves. Now, north Korea does genuinely support Russia and it is very much in their interest that Russia not collapse again. However, considering the extreme hardships they have endured without touching those strategic reserves, I find it implausible that they are doing so now. I believe that this is actually an equipment swap, where they dig out crates of old supplies from their bunkers and swap them out with brand new supplies from China. I dont have any evidence to back that part up, its just a hunch.

[–] jrs100000 2 points 1 year ago

Necessity is the mother of invention.

[–] jrs100000 4 points 1 year ago

I would need to see sources for that. As far as I am aware the Roman legions primarily manufactured their own weapons and numerous weapons making factory sites have been unearthed in Italy. And the M17 is made by Sig Sauer, Inc, a US spin off company headquartered New Hampshire and manufacturing in the US

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