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Gremlin swarms thwart aircraft carrier vulnerability + Caligula's Garden of Delights

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Gremlin swarms to mitigate aircraft carrier vulnerability (engineering)
https://www.economist.com/science-and-te...to-the-air

EXCERPT: Aircraft carriers are juicy targets. They are also increasingly vulnerable ones [...] technological advance threatens to make them redundant.

American naval planners are particularly worried about China’s DF-26. This weapon ... is a so-called manoeuvring ballistic missile (meaning it can vary its final approach path, rather than being subject solely to the laws of gravity) that has been dubbed a “carrier killer”. The DF-26 can be launched from a lorry, and can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead.

This threat is fearsome enough to keep American carriers at least 1,600km from China’s coast, reckons Bryan Clark, a naval strategist at the Hudson Institute, a think-tank. That is much farther than the range of a carrier’s warplanes unless they can be refuelled in-flight. America’s Department of Defence is therefore looking for a workaround. One back-to-the-future idea being tested (it dates, originally, from 1917) is to turn a suitable plane into an aerial aircraft-carrier capable of launching and recovering uncrewed drones in flight. This would allow seaborne carriers to be kept well out of harm’s way.

To that end DARPA, the defence department’s advanced research projects agency, is running a programme called Gremlins, a name that also applies to the individual drones themselves. A Gremlin drone weighs 680kg and has a wingspan of nearly 3.5 metres. Once it has been dropped, deployed its wings and fired up its turbofan engine, it can fly to an area up to 500km away and in the words of Scott Wierzbanowski, the Gremlin programme’s head, “go in and create havoc”. That done, it would then return to its aerial mothership.

Gremlins would operate in fleets, under ultimate human control. In this, they are similar to the “loyal wingman” idea of drone squadrons accompanying a crewed fighter aircraft into battle. Loyal wingmen, however, would take off from and land on terra firma, or possibly a conventional, naval, aircraft-carrier. Operational Gremlins need never touch the ground.

Gremlins’ principal jobs would be intercepting communications, jamming signals and hunting for things to be destroyed, thus softening up the defences in contested airspace to make it safer for crewed aircraft. Such drones could also be armed with small missiles or explosives for a kamikaze attack. And they would both share data and co-operate among themselves, and pass reconnaissance and targeting information back to warships and aircraft able to fire bigger missiles than they could carry.... (MORE - details)


Caligula’s Garden of Delights, unearthed & restored (architecture, design)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/scien...miani.html

EXCERPTS: During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.

[...] Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.

[...] The objects and structural remnants on display in the museum paint a vivid picture of wealth, power and opulence. Among the stunning examples of ancient Roman artistry are elaborate mosaics and frescoes, a marble staircase, capitals of colored marble and limestone, and an imperial guard’s bronze brooch inset with gold and mother-of-pearl. “All the most refined objects and art produced in the Imperial Age turned up,” Dr. Serlorenzi said.

[...] Evidence suggests that after Caligula’s violent death — he was hacked to bits by his bodyguards — the house and garden survived at least until the Severan dynasty, which ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. By the fourth century, the gardens had apparently fallen into desuetude, and statuary in the abandoned pavilions was broken into pieces to build the foundations of a series of spas. The statues were not discovered until 1874 ... the Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani nosed around freshly excavated construction sites and uncovered an immense gallery with an alabaster floor and fluted columns of giallo antico, considered the finest of the yellow marbles.

He later stumbled upon a rich deposit of classical sculptures that, at some point in the horti’s history, had been deliberately hidden to protect them. The treasures included the Lancellotti Discobolus, now housed at the National Museum of Rome; the Esquiline Venus and a bust of Commodus depicted as Hercules, now at the Capitoline Museums. In short time, the sculptures were carted off, the foundation of an apartment building was laid, and the ancient ruins were reburied.

[...] What all of this does for Caligula’s seemingly irredeemable reputation is an open question. He emerges from Suetonius’s “The Twelve Caesars,” written 80 years after the emperor was bumped off, as utterly depraved: having incestuous relationships with his sisters, sleeping with anyone he liked the look of, using criminals as food for his wild beasts when beef became too pricey and insisting that a loyal subject who had vowed to give his own life if the emperor survived an illness should carry through on his promise and die.

Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, posited that while Caligula might have been assassinated because he was a monster, it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated. In “SPQR,” her rich history of ancient Rome, she argues that “it is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, willful misinterpretation and outright invention — largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius.”

Whether Caligula got a raw deal from history is a subject of hot and unyielding debate... (MORE - details, images)
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