Reminds me of this Mountain goats pastiche this person did:

www.youtube.com/shorts/pUZdh...

I love Winch, but the site is a little old since he's been less able to maintain it, and there's been some recent discussion if the assumptions that reduce to that are quite as airtight in practice, but that's definitely where a lot of people point to for originating "no stealth in space".

Engine drive flares are particularly likely to be "hot" and without one, your course is predictable. However, getting sufficient resolution IR view angles on everything and the revist rates to sort out what's moving is an assumption, & maybe not as justified as the "no stealth in space" asserts.

Basically, if you can point a lot of IR sensors many directions, updating them frequently, it's hard for a "stealth" ship to be anything like as cold as your background, and also they might get in front of stars, so you can do math that says you'll definitely see the ship
trying to stealth.

It's been something of an article of faith on science fiction websites back to the 90s or so (see Atomic Rockets) for reasons hard to fit well into a tweet length & somewhat assumption dependent. It reduces to a snappy saying that isn't 100% true.

Fixed wing Wildcat (F4F-3 I think) compared to folding wing (F4F-4 or similar). You can kind of "tetris" two fixed wing aircraft together, but you can see how it let you fit two or three times as many planes aboard.

Most carrier aircraft did and do where possible, it makes packing on the deck and in the hangar significantly better. The folding wing Wildcat let you fit about 2-3 times as many planes as the early fixed wing models.

I'd like to read a good modern biography of him, anyone have one to recommend? I've read Horne's "History of the Army of the Cumberland....written at the request of Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas chiefly from his private military journal & official & other documents furnished by him" but that's old.

A truly terrible launch vehicle with over-rated economics, radically oversized payload, and really terrible payload handling plans (or lack thereof). I would and could recommend others?

They've done that since the freaking V2:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

This was figured out for rockets for 80 years now, and it works fine for everything from Saturn V to N1 to Shuttle to SLS. But SpaceX wanted to be different, and it turns out it was dumb. Who knew!

People have known how to do this right since the 40s. You use a flame deflector to turn the flow from straight down to along the trench, directing the energy out the side without ever stopping it and turning the velocity back to pressure, avoiding the stupid hard stop on a flat surface SpaceX built.

A static fire involves filling the tanks of the vehicle at least partially (testing ground connections & ability to hold pressure and cycle valves) and then ignites the engines for a short duration while held down, testing plumbing from engines to tanks and all valves and igniters and stuff is OK.

That might be a better summary of my article than the actual article. Thanks for recommending it!

Thanks!