Right. The A-10's greatest assets are its low running costs, and the fact that (given a light enough mission) they can be used in lieu of more valuable and expensive fast movers, which can be assigned to missions that they (and only they) can do.

Most effective...at what? The USAF doesn’t just make a listicle of best-to-worst aircraft. They keep things very specific. Please try to do the same.

Right...were you going to post something relevant? Like ever?

See, that’s a stupid answer to a stupid question. F-35 is a tool. You’re asking the equivalent of whether or not I like a ratchet wrench. That is also a stupid question, because the answer is useless.

A-10 was basically meant to cover a strategic retreat and give time for NATO to regroup in central Europe. And the type of air defenses it was going to fly against are *not* the kind of systems vulnerable to SEAD/DEAD strikes.

That’s a really stupid question.

Not since the 70s, no. Sure, it’s outside of MANPAD range (which can now reach 15,000ft, where the A-10 typically operates), but anything bigger than that can reach 40, 50 thousand feet easily. Even 70s era soviet systems like the SA-6, which was one of the first mobile SAMs.

Strategic nuclear bomber role absolutely has *not* disappeared. Neither has the tactical nuclear strike role. Which is why the B-2A F-15E, F-16, F-35A and B-21 are all designed to be nuclear capable, or accommodate an upgrade to be nuclear capable. Which is not a trivial thing. Nuclear weapons require specific safety…

Except, not really. Neither the B-52 nor the A-10 can do the roles they were designed to do originally. Strategic penetration bombing for the former, and tank busting in defended airspace for the latter.

It was after he lost to Bush in 2000. It’s been a slightly unhinged, pseudo Tea Party robot ever since.

They’ve mentioned a couple of times in the show that the King’s Road is about a thousand miles. And that it takes a couple months to travel it, which makes sense given the distance. So that’s much bigger than Britain.

India was getting shitty engines no matter what, since it wasn’t building catapults into its carriers. Harrier has been out of production for years. Rafale, Hornet and even that nalavalized Typhoon proposed for the QE2 class require cats. India has not be cleared for F-35.

The QA system I mentioned earlier had a client front end (apparently Access can do that) acting as data entry for the main Access db. Both “apps” were developed by a man who has been using and iterating this setup for over a decade, taking it with him from job to job.

Well, the issue with Russian carrier jets is that there’s only so much you can fly off a ship without catapults (or resorting to STOVL). Su-33 cannot take off from Kuznetsov with anything close to full fuel, nor can it carry any more than A2A or modest A2G payloads.

I bet you also think the idea of giving a public drive, where *everyone* has write access, is a great collaborative tool.

Not sure how many, but at every company I’ve worked at, there was someone using a Access DB for something fairly important. Then again, I’ve mainly worked at/with small to medium sized businesses. I’ve seen entire demand forecasting and quality management systems built in Access.

IT people will remain employed because someone has to figure out that spreadsheet in every company that is 15MB (even while blank) from all the macros and conditional formatting. The guy that built it left 10 years ago and no one knows what it’s really doing, or even the password to access the locked and hidden cells.

I suggest combining this with automated scripting and machine learning that gets infinitely better at finding fundamentalist content and replacing it with increasing offensive (to said fundamentalist) porn.

Only if you’re already 50. Machine learning is having a renaissance, and that’s translating into huge advances for autonomous cars.