Korolev Cross Werner Van Braun

I used to nerdgasm over the Soyuz spacecraft and rocket (and Buran, but how can you not??). And I was in the National Space Centre in the UK, and there would be a Soyuz right there in the main entrance, and the Russian national anthem would be blaring out of the speakers. It's all still there of course.My mom was one of the engineers tasked with designing Buran. Amazing thing that when it was assembled it did not fit the doors of the hanger in Moscow. So, they had to disassemble some of the wall as well. The thing was heavy, so they wanted to transport it across Moscow river to an airport where Mriya would pick it up. The asphalt road was not strong enough, so major "fixing" was undertaken, where cement blocks were put under near the road and rolled over with asphalt. Buran was then transported in tbe middle of the night on a huge platform with BTRs and tanks surrounding it. Good memories.

I made a mistake previously, Buran was not transported by Mriya the first time around, VM-T Atlant was used. She was and still is proud to have participated in it's creation. She was extremely sad when everything fell through and had to abandon the project. Buran had two ways for crew rescue: ejection and separation of actual Buran from the carrier (then landing by itself). It had an autopilot and was able to land by itself, which she was particularly proud of. Fun fact, the autopilot program was around 100 megabytes, that's a lot of space during that era and if I am to believe her and she wasn't messing with me the data was uploaded with the help of old school tapes and deck recorder (ala Commodore).

On a related note, the B52 is still a young whippersnapper compared to how long some ships used to stay in naval service. Part of the reason the Greek philosophers used a ship in their thought experiment is that wooden hulls can be (and usually are) continually renewed by maintenance crews, almost like a living creature replacing its cells. Because ships were so expensive, it was common to keep existing vessels in serviceable condition for generations. A shipwright could encounter a ship that his grandfather had worked on 60 years prior, and it wasn't that unusual.

Its also quite often that construction is more expensive than maintenance and upgrade. The only real reason to get a new one is if you need the new capability. Most older ships would be slowly relegated to less important services that probably wouldn't get a purpose built ship anyway.John Moses Browning was a mastermind of guns. Created the .30 cal, the .50 cal, the BAR, the Trench gun and also worked for Winchester. His guns have probably been sold in the tens of millions around the world, but unlike Kalashnikov, his guns are accurate, powerful and most of all, very suitable for their roles. The US military needed a bigger gun than the .30 cal, cause it wasn't cutting it. So Browning made the much bigger .50 cal, a gun capable of taking down tanks and planes while being used as a highly accurate gun as well.