jrs100000

Ok I was being circuitous. Distilleries do have the capacity to produce numerous chemicals. The issue is not that Russia might run out of disinfectants or antifreeze. The concern is that that breweries and distilleries are dual use facilities. They can be used to produce common consumer goods, like alcohol, but can also be converted to produce chemical and biological agents. If Ukraine is spending valuable strategic drones to blow up distilleries it could be that they just dont have any better targets, or it might be that they are desperate and trying to do anything to make a fireball, or it might be that the CIA has warned them that Russia is getting desperate and is prepping their next war crime.

I am curious what the goal is. The first is pretty, but stills are notoriously easy to replace and bulk grain alcohol is cheap. Are they producing something other than vodka here?

This applies to the US and western Europe. There are places in the world where hitmen can be hired by normal people, but they are closer to homeless drug addicts than the sort of professional you are probably envisioning.

Is nobody going to ask why Ted Cruz is wearing a yellow wig?

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Oh thank God. I thought they were bragging about using Twitter.

No, the first course of action would be to stop the fire.

Link just doesnt realize he is the girlfriend now.

Well it looks like one of the SU-57s is already down, so the odds are looking better for Cessna!

Should have let that one live.

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.

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.

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.

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.

North Korea has been painstakingly hoarding military supplies for generations. While their people starve and freeze they stuff tunnels and caves full of food and clothing. While their industry crumbles they pry up train tracks to melt down into artillery shells. They have their own soldiers train in cheap tennis shoes so boots can be saved for war. What would make them dip into these precious stockpiles that are so important to their security that everything else can be sacrificed to preserve them? My guess is its pretty simple. Russia sends oil to China, China sends new munitions and uniforms to NK, NK sends old stockpiles to Russia. Russia gets their supplies and China keeps their hands clean.

NK doesnt have a significant textile industry. They get their uniforms from China, like everyone else.

Well obviously it didnt work and Spock was not optimistic about his odds. Also, Spock is the guy who evenually cracks the riddle of time travel, so he may have been working off some early half formed theories of temporal physics.

Ok, so here’s an alternate theory: Horonium is actually tritanium (or maybe duranium) that has been saturated with temporal radiation. As for why they mentioned the NX class being built with it, perhaps the Enterprise’s temporal adventures were classified. Starfleet told everyone that all the ships were made with honorarium to cover up the truth.

For one, the Temporal Cold War was supposed to be over by that point, and time travel would not become a common thing until Spock discovers time warp. We know there was a brief conflict with the Romulans at some point around this time. However, the interesting development in that war was supposed to be cloaking devices, not temporal weapons. Besides, Starfleet should have been upgrading to proper shields by then, not retrofitting hull plating. And I’m pretty sure the shade of grey comment was a joke. We know that even by the TNG era, they don’t pay much attention to color-matching hull plates.

I like where you are going with this, except for a few problems. The fact that nobody believed in time travel until well after the Enterprise was built was a huge plot point, so it definitely was not intentional. On top of that, the Enterprise traveled through time several times, through both anomalies and deliberate transport, so the material certainly did not protect from that sort of temporal effect. Also, at one point, they pick up a time ship with a temporal radiation leak that was readily detected through the hull, meaning it’s not even an effective shield.