True, but now you’ve just invented the Concorde problem again. How are you going to fill enough seats on a daily/weekly basis to justify a route? That’s if you even manage to make this economical.

Concorde was killed by the internet as major businesses could simply have a video call or email conference instead of needing to send physical delegates to major financial capitals. That took away their core repeat customer base, and they weren’t able to recover past that point. Who will be the main customer base for this?

I think you misunderstood what I meant by the word modern, I should have worded myself better, but what I meant is that even if prices were reduced significantly to 5-10 thousand dollars per ticket as compared to a current day valuation of the approximately 60,000 dollars that a 20,000 dollar concorde ticket would have cost in 1985… who is able to afford that price?

It doesn’t matter what technology comes into play, bringing the price of a suborbital liner to modern day airfare prices would be impossible. 5-10 thousand dollars from 60 thousand is already an astronomical drop. What customers have 5-10 thousand dollars lying around for a single flight?

There is no economy of scale for a niche luxury product with more economical alternatives. You have an incredibly small subset of customers, and dropping the price from 10 thousand to 8 thousand isn’t going to drive up business at all. Especially when a one way flight from New York to Beijing is 400-1,500 dollars, and as has been shown through endless industry studies, the primary concern for airline customers is by far price.

I know all this. Nothing you mentioned prevents Chinese companies from making bad or speculative investments. Regulatory authorities are not going to step in just because one company invested into a bunk project that went nowhere. Hundreds of companies go bankrupt in China every week, and hundreds more are formed, as it would be a bureaucratic nightmare for the central economic office to micromanage the investments of individual firms. Speculative venture capital is also not “gaming the system” as insider trading and short selling are, and the entire point is that there is a high risk to those investments.

I don’t see how you describing China’s mixed command economy is at all relevant to a small startup firm taking a risk on a single aircraft frame. A bird in a cage can still choke itself on a poor investment and die.

What worries me is that those profit calculations don’t mean that Chinese firms aren’t just as susceptible as western firms to speculative investing and venture capital interests.

Hopefully this goes somewhere, but even with a modern price of 5,000 dollars. I’m still confused as to who this plane is meant to serve. It is outclassed by trains for regional travel, and is entirely uneconomical for long distance flights since while it can save fuel while cruising, it will chew through a massive quantity of fuel while accelerating and climbing.

Also the Blackbird sacrifices a LOT to be as light and aerodynamic as it is, as is evident by the pilot requiring an entire spacesuit. That’s not really conducive to commercial travel.

Didn’t the internet essentially make the Concord obsolete? Its main purpose was flying businessmen from New York to London/Paris so they could finish major transactions before the markets closed.

Tickets were also 20,000 dollars in 1985 money, so even if China makes a plane with a modern ticket price of 10,000-15,000… who exactly is the customer base for this?

Positions of power are held predominately by psychopaths.

A group more likely to be pedophiles because they feel absolutely no remorse over their actions or empathy towards the children they harm.

Plus it’s the ultimate compromat material.

Does it really count as the WW2 era? It was produced to late to see combat and active service on any front, and was relegated to a second line role since the Soviets abandoned the heavy tank concept relatively soon after.

That’s at least… interesting. There are still other options you could have taken. Why not a painting or drawing of Vostok?

A generic ai filter cat? Booooo

AI profile pic detected. Opinion discarded.

China and Vietnam still has a VAT tax system based off of the Soviet system as well

I don’t think Lysenko is a great representation of the Soviet Union. An unstable, charlatan fraud who held the Soviet Union behind by decades in the realm of biology, and was known to target those who opposed his ideas while having breakdowns when other Soviet biologists dared to conduct experiments into genetics and not his ludicrous Medieval alchemy esque ideas.

It’s not real. This has been online since 2021, and despite multiple news agencies trying to track down where this image was taken or the advertising agency who ran it, Musk never tweeting about the billboard, and the overall bizarre nature of the ad, it’s most likely not real.

Oh, I agree, and I wasn’t disputing that Google is a scummy IDF supporting company.

I was just saying that the research wasn’t Tel Aviv University’s. He was just a contributor to the project.

This research didn’t come from there. Arar is a traveling PhD student who contributed to the research team while studying in the United States, the research is entirely google’s.

Still leaves a bad taste in your my though.

Their source is Mike Benz… on the Tucker Carlson podcast?

Really pulling out the irrefutable sources I see.

That sleeping style is known as the Da Vinci method, as he was the one who purportedly popularized it. The schedule has been thoroughly studied, and the conclusion is that a human being could not sustain such a sleeping method since mental, physical, emotional, and mental degradation and damage begins to wreck havoc incredibly quickly, and will cause lasting harm that negates any of the purported benefits.

True, but that’s not displayed as inherent to the Soviets or even unreasonable to a degree. The German brutality is talked about and displayed frequently, and the actions of the Soviets are displayed as a righteous anger in response to an invasion and suffering at the hands of an incredibly evil enemy. War is hell, and I feel that the game demonstrated the brutality of the conflict well. The US and Japan also shown engaging in that same brutality in the Pacific Campaign, so its not something unique to the Soviet missions.

Even then, moments like the one you talk about are rare, and preceded by a lot of context. For example, the scene where the group of SS soldiers attempt to surrender and you have the option to burn or shoot them, comes directly after an entire mission of that SS unit fighting savagely and repeatedly killing captured or surrendered Soviet troops, and then only surrendering because they attempted to escape into the metro system but were cut off and surrounded.

Or even the scene at the beginning of “Their land, their blood”, where Rheznov gives you the option of shooting the Germans bleeding out on the floor, comes after those same Germans beat you, a captured soldier, senseless, and were preparing to execute you. Which they were only prevented in doing because of the Red Army’s arrival.

To answer your question, Call of Duty 2 is alright. You’ll run into some tropes here or there, but nothing egregious. Mainly stuff along the lines of your officer giving you potatoes to use for throwing practice instead of training grenades. The game is a simple, fun, arcade shooter.

Call of Duty 1 is much much worse and I would stay away from it, mainly because its very unpolished and not fun.

The USSR did not actually kill retreating men in the field. Blocking detachments were mainly made up of the worst soldiers in a unit and were primarily used to round up malingerers and send them back to the front. There were also roughly 100-250 men in each blocking detachment, and each group was expected to enforce no-retreat orders on a regiment of roughly 40,000-50,000 men. The primary politcal goal of blocking detachments was to persuade officers from ordering panicked retreats in order to prevent the front line from collapsing. If individual units needed to fall back, they would be allowed to.

If a solider was suspected of serious desertion, they would be arrested and tried under court martial, not shot on the spot.

The only caveat to this is that Penal troops were followed by armed NKVD officers which would kill them on the spot for attempting to either surrender to the Germans, or escape from captivity.