More to the point, I doubt it will turn out that Autopilot was even on. "Autopilot crashed me" is the best excuse bad drivers have ever been given. And people automatically take it at face values, until the logs get examined.
"Autopilot saves drunk drivers' life". Assuming he would have driven either way (drunks usually do), if he hadn't had autopilot on when he passed out, the car wouldn't have driven for a few minutes on its own, then pulled slowly to a stop and put the blinkers on. He would just have crashed. Possibly into another car.
If you're talking power to weight ratios, according to this, jet engines are typically ~5kW/kg, exceptionally to 10. A EMRAX 348 delivers about 4kW/kg continuous and about 8kW/kg peak. Very much in the same ballpark.
Now, the latter doesn't count the prop and the inverter. But then again, the former only includes the core engine, not the cowling / thrust reversers / etc associated hardware and fuel management hardware.
Now obviously, batteries are a lot heavier than aviation fuel (even accounting for higher motor efficiency, little wasted "fuel" on taxi, less parasitic losses, some regen on descent rather than inefficient running of turbines at low power, etc), limiting electric aircraft to only regional service for the time being. A jetliner full of fuel and passengers can go halfway around the world; with the lower energy density of batteries, you're limited to a couple hundred km max at present. But why not change out those flights that are under a couple hundred km? Not all air routes are long - three of the top ten busiest air routes in the world, for example, are only around 400km (Seoul-Jeju, Sao Paulo-Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo-Osaka) . And with a lower cost option being available for flight (electric), traffic would inherently shift toward shorter routes, both in terms of consumer behavior (airport choice) and airline behavior (hub/routing choice).
A common way to scrub dust and water-soluble gases in industry is known as a wet scrubber, where you either have gas bubbles moving through liquid or liquid droplets moving through the gas, transferring dust and soluble gases into the liquid.
With a subsea volcanic eruption, the ocean is basically a natural scrubber.
BTW, the main impact on the short-term climate from volcanoes is sulfur dioxide, not dust (I say "short term" because the longer-term impact is warming due to CO2 - but in the short term the SO2 greatly overpowers this effect).
Capsaicin seems like a much simpler solution... Almost all mammals (including rodents) find it painful. Doesn't work on birds, however, as they can't taste it.
It certainly steepens your descent profile, but the scenario in question was the plane running out of power while circling. And even a couple minutes worth of propulsion at landing makes a world of difference (2% of a 90 minute flight = nearly 2 minutes).
but if it's not enough to do a go-around, it's just not enough.
Seriously, you're demanding go-around capability on emergency, out-of-"fuel" landings?
The funny thing is, electric aircraft can regenerate on descent. If for some strange reason you "ran out of power" in the air, yes, you'd have to make an emergency landing, but it would be an emergency powered landing. Unlike the unpowered landing a combustion-powered aircraft landing has to make if it runs out of fuel.
EVs have a lower per-km rate of fires than gasoline cars (various figures suggest around 1/5th the rate). Why would it be any different with aircraft? Furthermore, it's much easier to make components redundant with EVs. Electric motors are light, batteries packs are easy to isolate from each other with no extra weight penalty, etc. In one design NASA has been working on there's a huge number of small props on the wing; they're only run at full power at takeoff, but beyond redundancy, they provide a huge amount of extra lift, greatly reducing takeoff distance. So far, though, they've only built a wing testbed;)
Quite to the contrary, I think it's absurdly pessimistic. People always underestimate S-curves. They did it with wind, they did it with solar, people are in various phases of realizing that they did it with EV passenger vehicles, and they're actively doing it with electric road transport, electric marine transport, and electric aircraft.
There's several companies close to offering electric puddle jumpers. Today. It's not going to take 22 years to transition.
I assume you're kidding. People have been flying electric light aircraft since 1997, when the Alisport Silent Club added an electric takeoff option. The fastest manned electric plane, the 330 LE, goes 340 kph. For the low-end consumer, you can get an Electraflyer-ULS for under $60k. While it has a 2 hour flight time, it's more like a powered glider, of course, with a very low cruising speed. For a bit more ($104k) you can get a 2-seater a Pipistrel Alpha Electro with a cruising speed of 200 kph and a range of 600km.
Since you wrote "serious question" - not at all. I just have an interest in EVs, and Tesla is the unambiguous leader in this front, so obviously they get most of my interest in this regard. And "spamming" is not a synonym for writing about a topic.
It's not as interesting as what I though it was going to be about. I'd like to see a series of a dozen or two small, high-temperature-capable reaction vessels (some glass, some platinum-coated steel), each with its own temperature and pressure regulation hardware, and self-reconfiguring plumbing fixtures attached to it (gas/liquid multiplexers). Some vessels would come with common catalyst packs in them (platinum, vanadium oxide, iron, etc), some capable of maintaining a temperature gradient for distillation, some for gas-liquid exchange, some with stirring hardware or an auger to remove precipitates, one with electrodes for electrolysis, etc. A couple heat exchangers also would be nice (potentially the same hardware as the MUXes), as well as a the obligate pump(s) and compressor(s). And of course you need hoppers for solid feedstocks, feed lines for liquids and gases, etc. A nice touch would be if one or more XYZ-axis arms could move between different feedstocks and/or containers for finished products.
Something like that, where the vessels remain constant but the lines between them reconfigure based on software inputs, would be amazing. Doesn't need to be large - even a desk-sized unit would be very useful. And such a thing would be invaluable for space applications, too; it's one thing to set up offworld production of certain largescale feedstocks, but a whole different thing to try to set up production of every chemical we use as a society, and in particular those needed to keep your industrial processes going. Small-scale batch synthesis is an option, but that requires human labour, and humans leave a massive trail of required consumables in their wake. Automated lab synthesis, however...
It's not just about appearances. It's about cost, drag, and power consumption. Lidar is a pain on all three of those (in addition to looks). You simply can't sell cars with big $10k domes bulging out of the top upping your drag coefficient by 10-20% and consuming a couple kilowatts of power. That would be a disaster to your range, and make your vehicle totally uncompetitive.
"More than one year after launching V2, Autopilot still lacks some of the functionality of the original, and there are many anecdotal reports from owners of unpredictable behavior."
Funny how you don't get anecdotal reports concerning the others, given that most of them don't have owners to make said anecdotal reports. And of most of the competitors' systems, they're comically bad. And they have the gall to actually market the car as currently "self-driving" (unlike Tesla which markets self-driving as an additional package which you can buy but won't be active for years).
Some of my favorite quotes from the test drive comparison:
One never really decides to engage Drive Pilot. You press two buttons on the left side of the dash, one for Distronic Cruise Control, the other for Automatic Steering, then press a button on the left side of the steering wheel, then, — when Drive Pilot decides conditions are suitable — it engages.
Is there an audible sound? None that I heard. Like Autopilot, a green steering wheel icon illuminates on the bottom center of the display, and is duplicated in the Heads-Up Display.
Engagement is made clear by the car’s instant and unsafe wandering in all but perfect conditions, and often in perfect conditions.
Unlike with Autopilot, placing your hands on the wheel and steering doesn’t instantly disengage Drive Pilot. I suppose this is intended as a method of allowing the user to guide Drive Pilot by making course corrections, but instead it resulted in an unwanted and stressful upper arm workout, without which I’d have been killed.
I got the Drive Pilot to “drive” itself for as long as sixty seconds, which is as along as Mercedes-Benz deems it safe. Trust me, you don’t want to take your hands off the wheel that long unless your car’s on fire and you’re reaching for a fire extinguisher, and even then.
Drive Pilot had a nasty habit of disengaging in good conditions before sixty seconds were up, with no obvious warning except the green steering icon going out, and lane drift. After the third time, I actually felt fear.
This is actually a dangerous product. The car will steer itself into oncoming traffic. It oscillates between lane markings like a drunk driver. No setting or speed is sufficient to compensate for the utter failure of this functionality.
Did anyone in Stuttgart drive a Tesla on Autopilot? Even once?
People need to be fired. Think I’m being harsh? Here’s another direct comparison between Drive Pilot and Autopilot, from Norway’s Autofil. Scroll down to the pictures comparing the two cars' lane keeping. Need more convincing? Here's Wired's take. Still don't believe me? Video is coming soon, via Drive on NBC Sports.
The only good thing about Drive Pilot is that your Mercedes will protect you from it. Did I trust it? Only at a crawl. Did I understand it? I don’t understand how Mercedes-Benz could release this to the public. I hated literally everything about it. It drove like a drunk ten year old, fighting for the wheel with a drunk fourteen year old.
Look at the price of even a small nuclear power plant. Now look at the price on a Maersk Triple E. There's your answer.
It's just not economically justifiable. So far only one country (Russia) has even found it economically justifiable for icebreakers, which are about the most energy intensive task at sea you can get. As a general rule, reactors only go on ships when they must (when you need them to be deployed for long periods at a time - aka carriers, missile subs, etc)
That would be great if the industry could react that fast, but it takes a lot longer than just a few years to convert a large portion of the world's total petroleum consumption from high sulfur sources to low sulfur sources. They're working on it, but there will be a supply-demand imbalance, and it will have financial consequences.
BTW, the IMO regulations come into effect at the start of 2020, not the end. Not much time left. The rule change was only announced this fall
It can also be dealt with, mind you, by installing scrubbers on ships - then they can still burn high sulfur fuel. But about 80% of shipping is expected to switch to lower sulfur crude, as the capital costs for ships to add scrubbers are quite high. There's another problem, in that the most affordable way to scrub sulfur from ship exhaust ends up dumping it into the sea... but then they're exposing themselves to a liability that years from now that might be banned and they'd have to undergo yet another retrofit.
But it's important to know that in 2020 a new low sulfur standard on bunker fuel is going to come into play. That's going to put shipping in direct competition with diesel for refinery output, and will likely create a significant crunch in that regard. The right time to have killed off biodiesel's subsidies is either "several years ago" or "after the market adjusts to the new low sulfur standards", not during the crunch / adaptation timeperiods.
I mean, you can make the diesel crunch worse if you want if you're willing to drive up commodities prices further in order to accelerate the transition to electric shipping. There's a logic there. But as far as timing goes, diesel is going to be in a tight spot as it is without taking a lot of alternative fuel off the market.
There were over 1000 recorded attempts to shoot them down. None came particularly close. Among other problems, most antiaircraft missiles (particularly air-to-air) rely on flight surfaces designed for maneuvering in the denser air at lower altitudes and become poor at tracking at SR-71 flight altitudes. Most missiles couldn't win in a tail chase either. And they weren't designed to deal with the high net velocity of closing head-on (more similar to those for ABM defenses). The low radar cross section made it even more challenging, reducing the amount of time they had to prepare.
The Soviets and/or other anti-US powers would surely eventually have gotten the job done with advancing tech and enough tries, but at the time of its retirement, it still flew in a pretty safe envelope. Not perfectly safe. but pretty safe.
The programme was killed because they were a pain to maintain. Advancing needs meant that they would have on top of that had to spend money on a tech upgrade (such as adding a realtime data link). Meanwhile, there were programmes hungry for its budget, including stealth aircraft (B2) and drones (Global Hawk).
That said, in today's threat environment, I'm sure mach 5 would be appreciated;)
Lol, you realize that we were occupied by the UK and subsequently US, don't you? Then had a NATO base here for half a century? That Icelanders are among the best non-native English speakers in Europe? That there's more English TV stations broadcasting here than Icelandic?
Worked here. TV = sjónvarp = vision-caster. And speaking of that, "radio" is "útvarp", out-caster. Again, I don't see why France gets so much credit for linguistic preservation. Their linguistic preservation efforts seem lackluster at best, and their adoption rates of official terms even more lackluster.
I don't know why France gets so much credit for linguistic preservation. Seriously, it's 2018 and they're just now getting around to formalizing a French word for smartphone? And like usual, I imagine few people will use the new word.
When telephones came out, Icelandic quickly adopted the word "sími", resurrecting an old word for "thread". Cell phones came out, and they became "farsímar". Smartphones came out, and they quickly became "snjallsímar". I mean, it doesn't happen immediately. People were calling tablets "tablets" at first, but when it came out that the proper word was "spjaldtölva", people switched over pretty quickly. Tölva (computer), by the way, comes from "tala" (number) plus "völva" (prophetess).:)
A fun experiment is to go to Wikipedia and enter a bunch of random science terms in different science fields - preferably ones not named after a person or whatnot (which tends to carry over between *any* language) - and for each one, look at the in-other-languages sidebar to see what the word is in other languages. Because as a general rule, in almost every language the terms very strongly resemble the English.... except Icelandic. You know, you look up photon, and it's a bunch of entries like "photon", "foton", "fotona", "futun", etc, etc.... then you get to Icelandic, and it's "ljóseind".;) It's "tyrannosaurus", "tiranozaurus", "turanosaurus", etc, etc.... then Icelandic, "grameðla". But it's actually quite useful. For example, in some members of my family there's a condition called ankylosing spondylitis. Unless you're a doctor who's familiar with the field, or someone in your family has it, odds are you have no clue what that is. But in Icelandic, it's "hryggigt" - that's "hryggur" (spine) + "gigt" (arthritis). Anyone can see that term and immediately have a rough idea of what the primary symptoms are like (the spine slowly fuses, among other things).
That's not like Icelandic is "pure" or anything. "Hæ" is essentially embedded in the language, for example. "Basically" is pretty much becoming that way. Etc,. But at least in general, people try. And for most - not all, but most - new science/tech terms, the Icelandic terms stick.
Russian officials have suggested the U.S. or its allies may have had a role in the drone attacks on the bases. Mr. Putin said drones captured in the course of the attacks revealed highly sophisticated technological elements that were acquired and passed to the rebels from abroad.
The Pentagon has said it played no role in the drone attacks.
A person close to Russia’s Defense Ministry said the accusations have largely served to deflect attention away from Russia’s own failure to protect its main Syrian base at Hmeimim.
The base was hit by a number of drones on New Year’s Eve, killing two service people, injuring 10 and damaging at least six planes, the person said. The attack was allegedly the first to penetrate the base’s formidable defenses including Pantsir and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.
Oh, and another thing: this article says that there was no claim of responsibility. Nonsense. FSA Free Alawite Movement claimed responsibility for it, and promised more attacks.
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More to the point, I doubt it will turn out that Autopilot was even on. "Autopilot crashed me" is the best excuse bad drivers have ever been given. And people automatically take it at face values, until the logs get examined.
"Autopilot saves drunk drivers' life". Assuming he would have driven either way (drunks usually do), if he hadn't had autopilot on when he passed out, the car wouldn't have driven for a few minutes on its own, then pulled slowly to a stop and put the blinkers on. He would just have crashed. Possibly into another car.
If you're talking power to weight ratios, according to this, jet engines are typically ~5kW/kg, exceptionally to 10. A EMRAX 348 delivers about 4kW/kg continuous and about 8kW/kg peak. Very much in the same ballpark.
Now, the latter doesn't count the prop and the inverter. But then again, the former only includes the core engine, not the cowling / thrust reversers / etc associated hardware and fuel management hardware.
Now obviously, batteries are a lot heavier than aviation fuel (even accounting for higher motor efficiency, little wasted "fuel" on taxi, less parasitic losses, some regen on descent rather than inefficient running of turbines at low power, etc), limiting electric aircraft to only regional service for the time being. A jetliner full of fuel and passengers can go halfway around the world; with the lower energy density of batteries, you're limited to a couple hundred km max at present. But why not change out those flights that are under a couple hundred km? Not all air routes are long - three of the top ten busiest air routes in the world, for example, are only around 400km (Seoul-Jeju, Sao Paulo-Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo-Osaka) . And with a lower cost option being available for flight (electric), traffic would inherently shift toward shorter routes, both in terms of consumer behavior (airport choice) and airline behavior (hub/routing choice).
A common way to scrub dust and water-soluble gases in industry is known as a wet scrubber, where you either have gas bubbles moving through liquid or liquid droplets moving through the gas, transferring dust and soluble gases into the liquid.
With a subsea volcanic eruption, the ocean is basically a natural scrubber.
BTW, the main impact on the short-term climate from volcanoes is sulfur dioxide, not dust (I say "short term" because the longer-term impact is warming due to CO2 - but in the short term the SO2 greatly overpowers this effect).
Capsaicin seems like a much simpler solution... Almost all mammals (including rodents) find it painful. Doesn't work on birds, however, as they can't taste it.
It certainly steepens your descent profile, but the scenario in question was the plane running out of power while circling. And even a couple minutes worth of propulsion at landing makes a world of difference (2% of a 90 minute flight = nearly 2 minutes).
Seriously, you're demanding go-around capability on emergency, out-of-"fuel" landings?
The funny thing is, electric aircraft can regenerate on descent. If for some strange reason you "ran out of power" in the air, yes, you'd have to make an emergency landing, but it would be an emergency powered landing. Unlike the unpowered landing a combustion-powered aircraft landing has to make if it runs out of fuel.
Yes, I prefer my airplanes to be filled with nice safe hydrocarbons. They never burn.
EVs have a lower per-km rate of fires than gasoline cars (various figures suggest around 1/5th the rate). Why would it be any different with aircraft? Furthermore, it's much easier to make components redundant with EVs. Electric motors are light, batteries packs are easy to isolate from each other with no extra weight penalty, etc. In one design NASA has been working on there's a huge number of small props on the wing; they're only run at full power at takeoff, but beyond redundancy, they provide a huge amount of extra lift, greatly reducing takeoff distance. So far, though, they've only built a wing testbed ;)
Quite to the contrary, I think it's absurdly pessimistic. People always underestimate S-curves. They did it with wind, they did it with solar, people are in various phases of realizing that they did it with EV passenger vehicles, and they're actively doing it with electric road transport, electric marine transport, and electric aircraft.
There's several companies close to offering electric puddle jumpers. Today. It's not going to take 22 years to transition.
I assume you're kidding. People have been flying electric light aircraft since 1997, when the Alisport Silent Club added an electric takeoff option. The fastest manned electric plane, the 330 LE, goes 340 kph. For the low-end consumer, you can get an Electraflyer-ULS for under $60k. While it has a 2 hour flight time, it's more like a powered glider, of course, with a very low cruising speed. For a bit more ($104k) you can get a 2-seater a Pipistrel Alpha Electro with a cruising speed of 200 kph and a range of 600km.
Since you wrote "serious question" - not at all. I just have an interest in EVs, and Tesla is the unambiguous leader in this front, so obviously they get most of my interest in this regard. And "spamming" is not a synonym for writing about a topic.
It's not as interesting as what I though it was going to be about. I'd like to see a series of a dozen or two small, high-temperature-capable reaction vessels (some glass, some platinum-coated steel), each with its own temperature and pressure regulation hardware, and self-reconfiguring plumbing fixtures attached to it (gas/liquid multiplexers). Some vessels would come with common catalyst packs in them (platinum, vanadium oxide, iron, etc), some capable of maintaining a temperature gradient for distillation, some for gas-liquid exchange, some with stirring hardware or an auger to remove precipitates, one with electrodes for electrolysis, etc. A couple heat exchangers also would be nice (potentially the same hardware as the MUXes), as well as a the obligate pump(s) and compressor(s). And of course you need hoppers for solid feedstocks, feed lines for liquids and gases, etc. A nice touch would be if one or more XYZ-axis arms could move between different feedstocks and/or containers for finished products.
Something like that, where the vessels remain constant but the lines between them reconfigure based on software inputs, would be amazing. Doesn't need to be large - even a desk-sized unit would be very useful. And such a thing would be invaluable for space applications, too; it's one thing to set up offworld production of certain largescale feedstocks, but a whole different thing to try to set up production of every chemical we use as a society, and in particular those needed to keep your industrial processes going. Small-scale batch synthesis is an option, but that requires human labour, and humans leave a massive trail of required consumables in their wake. Automated lab synthesis, however...
But as for this? I don't see the point of the 3d printer. They're just printing a bunch of simply interconnected vessels and then manually doing a series of reactions in them.
It's not just about appearances. It's about cost, drag, and power consumption. Lidar is a pain on all three of those (in addition to looks). You simply can't sell cars with big $10k domes bulging out of the top upping your drag coefficient by 10-20% and consuming a couple kilowatts of power. That would be a disaster to your range, and make your vehicle totally uncompetitive.
Funny how you don't get anecdotal reports concerning the others, given that most of them don't have owners to make said anecdotal reports. And of most of the competitors' systems, they're comically bad. And they have the gall to actually market the car as currently "self-driving" (unlike Tesla which markets self-driving as an additional package which you can buy but won't be active for years).
Some of my favorite quotes from the test drive comparison:
Also, it's dark where I am. Therefore, it's dark everywhere.
Look at the price of even a small nuclear power plant. Now look at the price on a Maersk Triple E. There's your answer.
It's just not economically justifiable. So far only one country (Russia) has even found it economically justifiable for icebreakers, which are about the most energy intensive task at sea you can get. As a general rule, reactors only go on ships when they must (when you need them to be deployed for long periods at a time - aka carriers, missile subs, etc)
That would be great if the industry could react that fast, but it takes a lot longer than just a few years to convert a large portion of the world's total petroleum consumption from high sulfur sources to low sulfur sources. They're working on it, but there will be a supply-demand imbalance, and it will have financial consequences.
BTW, the IMO regulations come into effect at the start of 2020, not the end. Not much time left. The rule change was only announced this fall
It can also be dealt with, mind you, by installing scrubbers on ships - then they can still burn high sulfur fuel. But about 80% of shipping is expected to switch to lower sulfur crude, as the capital costs for ships to add scrubbers are quite high. There's another problem, in that the most affordable way to scrub sulfur from ship exhaust ends up dumping it into the sea... but then they're exposing themselves to a liability that years from now that might be banned and they'd have to undergo yet another retrofit.
But it's important to know that in 2020 a new low sulfur standard on bunker fuel is going to come into play. That's going to put shipping in direct competition with diesel for refinery output, and will likely create a significant crunch in that regard. The right time to have killed off biodiesel's subsidies is either "several years ago" or "after the market adjusts to the new low sulfur standards", not during the crunch / adaptation timeperiods.
I mean, you can make the diesel crunch worse if you want if you're willing to drive up commodities prices further in order to accelerate the transition to electric shipping. There's a logic there. But as far as timing goes, diesel is going to be in a tight spot as it is without taking a lot of alternative fuel off the market.
There were over 1000 recorded attempts to shoot them down. None came particularly close. Among other problems, most antiaircraft missiles (particularly air-to-air) rely on flight surfaces designed for maneuvering in the denser air at lower altitudes and become poor at tracking at SR-71 flight altitudes. Most missiles couldn't win in a tail chase either. And they weren't designed to deal with the high net velocity of closing head-on (more similar to those for ABM defenses). The low radar cross section made it even more challenging, reducing the amount of time they had to prepare.
The Soviets and/or other anti-US powers would surely eventually have gotten the job done with advancing tech and enough tries, but at the time of its retirement, it still flew in a pretty safe envelope. Not perfectly safe. but pretty safe.
The programme was killed because they were a pain to maintain. Advancing needs meant that they would have on top of that had to spend money on a tech upgrade (such as adding a realtime data link). Meanwhile, there were programmes hungry for its budget, including stealth aircraft (B2) and drones (Global Hawk).
That said, in today's threat environment, I'm sure mach 5 would be appreciated ;)
Lol, you realize that we were occupied by the UK and subsequently US, don't you? Then had a NATO base here for half a century? That Icelanders are among the best non-native English speakers in Europe? That there's more English TV stations broadcasting here than Icelandic?
Worked here. TV = sjónvarp = vision-caster. And speaking of that, "radio" is "útvarp", out-caster. Again, I don't see why France gets so much credit for linguistic preservation. Their linguistic preservation efforts seem lackluster at best, and their adoption rates of official terms even more lackluster.
I don't know why France gets so much credit for linguistic preservation. Seriously, it's 2018 and they're just now getting around to formalizing a French word for smartphone? And like usual, I imagine few people will use the new word.
When telephones came out, Icelandic quickly adopted the word "sími", resurrecting an old word for "thread". Cell phones came out, and they became "farsímar". Smartphones came out, and they quickly became "snjallsímar". I mean, it doesn't happen immediately. People were calling tablets "tablets" at first, but when it came out that the proper word was "spjaldtölva", people switched over pretty quickly. Tölva (computer), by the way, comes from "tala" (number) plus "völva" (prophetess). :)
A fun experiment is to go to Wikipedia and enter a bunch of random science terms in different science fields - preferably ones not named after a person or whatnot (which tends to carry over between *any* language) - and for each one, look at the in-other-languages sidebar to see what the word is in other languages. Because as a general rule, in almost every language the terms very strongly resemble the English.... except Icelandic. You know, you look up photon, and it's a bunch of entries like "photon", "foton", "fotona", "futun", etc, etc.... then you get to Icelandic, and it's "ljóseind". ;) It's "tyrannosaurus", "tiranozaurus", "turanosaurus", etc, etc.... then Icelandic, "grameðla". But it's actually quite useful. For example, in some members of my family there's a condition called ankylosing spondylitis. Unless you're a doctor who's familiar with the field, or someone in your family has it, odds are you have no clue what that is. But in Icelandic, it's "hryggigt" - that's "hryggur" (spine) + "gigt" (arthritis). Anyone can see that term and immediately have a rough idea of what the primary symptoms are like (the spine slowly fuses, among other things).
That's not like Icelandic is "pure" or anything. "Hæ" is essentially embedded in the language, for example. "Basically" is pretty much becoming that way. Etc,. But at least in general, people try. And for most - not all, but most - new science/tech terms, the Icelandic terms stick.
Mortar attack on December 31 - oh really?
In the real world, antiaircraft missiles are a couple million dollars each.
I seriously doubt it costs a tenth as much to build these. More like 1/100th, if that much. Possibly as little as 1/1000th.
Oh, and another thing: this article says that there was no claim of responsibility. Nonsense. FSA Free Alawite Movement claimed responsibility for it, and promised more attacks.