"Favourable optics"

Hmmm....

Having seen my share of Russian dashcam videos, I think it would be fairly easy to identify the potential runway 'cos that would be the only stretch of road without car-eating potholes.

I did this. It made it at least twenty times more awesome.

That thing looks mean.

Really? Spiderman threads here now?

Somehow, I'd always assumed the prototype ended up in China,

The link is tenuous at best but there's a storyline about using drones to deliver food from a repurposed aircraft carrier (the USS Flagg).

Precision.

As an aside, this has been the ongoing storyline in the Least I Could Do webcomic for the last couple of months.

Broken Arrow close enough?

How are those ankles?

I wonder where they get their tobacco from? Bit of a luxury item for hard cash sales you'd think.

Mind you, so would be a room full of cognac.

Thank you both, gentlemen (?). I figured there must have been some practical on-the-ground kind of use but I just could not pick it.

This may well be filed under "Missing the Point" but what's the significance of the bottles taped to the antenna?

What's NSFW about that?

And of course the US would see it that way and shall continue to see it that way until a foreign warship of a less than friendly power starts going up and down the US coast.

I read 1, 2 and 3 over the course of a month so I can't really separate them in my mind. There wasn't a lot of action that I can recall but there were some nifty little sections, particularly in regards to the technologies involved, spooky gunships out of DC-3s, Australian soldiers with AK-47s and the aforementioned…

Something vaguely similar with an obsolete aircraft carrier in World War 2.3 by John Birmingham. The Japanese stack out the flight deck with vertical launch Ohka kamikaze missiles. Just goes to show that it wouldn't take too much if you had the right suicidal resources.