JcDent

Notable for shooting down U-2s (plane, not band) and keeping USAF away from Hanoi.

Two days later President Johnson gave the order to attack known SA-75 positions outside the 30-mile exclusion zone. On the morning of July 27, 48 F-105s participated in the strike, Operation Spring High. The Vietnamese knew U.S. aircraft were coming, and set up many 23mm and 37mm anti-aircraft guns at the two SAM sites. These anti-aircraft guns were lethal at close range. The Vietnamese shot down six aircraft and more than half of the remaining U.S. aircraft suffered damage from ground fire. However, the Vietnamese had replaced the SAMs with white-painted bundles of bamboo. Operation Spring High had destroyed two decoy targets for the loss of six aircraft and five pilots.

You can see here how a weapon system doesn't have to be destroying targets to impact the warzone. When SA-2s began deployment, they were able to reach out and blap targets at 20km height. Bombers started flying under 3km height where SA-2s can't engage them... but that puts them within AAA gun range. Granted, AAA gun accuracy is rofl lol, but with enough lead in the air...

I'm getting lasers shot at my face because I will not suffer keratosis growths.

Wrinkles, sure, that's inevitable when becoming an old.

But anything vaguely growth-like I can (afford to) scour from face, i will scour.

Reactor refueling was always a slow process, something for the engineers to do, but the mech pilot needs to be in the cockpit anyway. Rarely does anything go wrong, so it's easy to zone out, check out the food cassettes, and select a meal.

Meals for pilots are always tube food, but its not as finely ground as baby food. They leave just enough texture that you can chew. Exo-atmospheric missions require you to wear a helmet and use the food port for the straw, but at the railhead, you don't need the helmet.

Select "Food Cassette" on the UI which rotates into place, then set the exterior viewscreen to relax-mode, natural scene, deep forest, cracking fire at night, adjusts birdsong and animal noises to be just infrequent and distant enough not to block radio transmission.

Now to the food, in the hot cassettes are the starters and mains. There was mashed potatoes with gravy, creamed spinach, sage stuffing with chorizo, egg fried rice with sausage, pumpkin soup, onion and cheese galette, hmmm the stuffing sounded good. Lets heat that.

Fingers flash on the controllers and after a short delay, a nice hot tube drops. The glove has just enough insulation to make it easy to pick up. Use the straw and the tube hisses slightly. One squeeze later and a synthetically powerful sage flavor fills the mouth.

As you eat/drink the stuffing paste, savoring the spicy sausage bits between the soft bready texture, the eye tracks the mains options: turkey in gravy, beef pot pie, chicken pot pie, fish cakes in aioli, ham with collard greens, General Tso's in broken rice, that's new.

Turkey would be too obvious considering the time of year, but the General Tso's sounds interesting. Another few clicks, the empty stuffing tube discarded, a sweet, savory flavor fills your mouth. The tiny chunks of meat that come through are somehow crispy.

Better not to think too hard about how they managed that food magic in a thermostabilized metal tube. You decide to check the cold cassettes for dessert to not think. Everything's caffeinated, puddings, fruit, apple tart, oooh, another new option: German chocolate chestnuts.

You've never tasted real German chocolate, but it caught your eye, and soon a cold tube drops. The chocolate flavor is a bit weak, the caffeine's bitterness obvious, but the chestnut pieces have a nice lightly sweet flavor and a bit of texture. The best new dessert tube.

The radio crackles to life, the groundside engineers confirm the reactor is refueled and nominal. You hit screen reset and drop your foot to open the trash hatch as the mech releases spent tubes to a ground station. "Didn't save any for me?" the engineer jokes. No time for that.

Though I'm sure the guy doing MRE reviews on YouTube would disagree, but seeing how he's chowing down on WW2-vintage British rations as well as 2020 Russian prisoner rations with no less gusto then when trying the latest and greatest NATO food packs, his opinions are to be taken with a grain of salt.

I hope there's a future and people of that future view venture capitalists with disdain usually reserved for conquistadors, cigarette ads featuring doctors, and old-timey parenting books that recommend caning.