My understanding is that they were removed mostly due to maintenance issues, and the aerodynamic impact is minimal on the F-15. I don’t know why NASA keeps the turkey feathers on theirs - of course, with only 1, the maintenance load is less, and it could be that they have characterized the F-15 with them on and don’t…

Here’s a good nerd moment. Operational f15’s don’t have the Turkey feathers on the nozzles because of airflow dynamics issues that I can’t remember the explaination for but aren’t present on the f16. I’m curious how those conditions were changed in the quiet spike 

I also see a lot of Regulus 2 in the comic aircraft:

Looks familiar...

There’s also the F-15 Quiet Spike, another NAS experiment on changing aircraft structure to reduce sonic boom.

I have heard some truly harrowing stories along those lines — people removing blown airbags and filling the space with crumpled newspaper so the steering wheel looked factory, that kind of thing.

I know someone that bought totaled card at auction, gave them cosmetic repairs and simply sold them across the border at a discount. It’s a huge market. Oh, so you crashed and your car didn’t have an airbag? Who cares!

Yup, completely blew my mind when just for gits and shiggles I ran the Carfax on my beloved 2019 yellow Jeep Renegade (honest i loved that thing) It died heroically keeping me safe while I launched it 8 feet in the air, hit a tree, and landed on the passenger side on an icy road. The whole Jeep was demolished and was…

Oh man I listened to this the other day and wanted to talk about it so bad.

Excuse me, that’s Sir David Stellantis.

Seriously, as if it wasn’t bad enough when it was just FCA, now they are pulling in the goddam french. Although I wouldn’t mind Chrysler just being rebadged Peugeots + the Pacifica.

True, but I suppose the issue is with the expected buying public for these Wagoneers are probably cross shopping with things like the Escalade or the Denali, not necessarily German Luxo-barges, so they’re probably less attuned the German vagaries.

That being said, I’d probably assume that “Grand” meant “bigger” instead…

The problem is because it’s a Jeep and not a Dodge or Ram.

Every other automaker has clear brand hierarchy for just this sort of problem. For every Sequoia and 4Runner there’s a Lexus GX and LX. For every Excursion there’s a Navigator. GM even has three tiers, with the Tahoe/Suburban —> Yukon/YukonXL —> Escalade. This…

The think is, NASA needs something that actually exists. So far the only thing Starship has done successfully is blow up. Like most things from the not so smartest guy in the world, it is just a fantasy at this point.

First off, Fuck Starship.

Compared to your mom!

I prefer a space escalator. Then you don’t have to wait for the car to stop at every floor along the way.

Yeah.... Sarcasm aside I think a lot of people see rockets as sort of taking a step back. But the Shuttle was not a safe design, too fragile and prone to damage at takeoff. The thing was really akin to a flying piece of china.

And you know... CGI has really improved too. [/joke]

I love this kind of stuff. I’ve been recently watching some moon race docs and it wasn’t until some of the last missions that we got any sort of high definition images and video of the moon. There were a lot of issues with some of the cameras. On one trip one of the astronauts aimed the color video camera at a…