MachineGenes

It's 'Hope'.

The British introduced khaki camouflage during the Boer War, and had already deployed it at the beginning of WWI. The French Army initially had a tradition of their uniforms always being composed of blue, white and red, which became a handicap.

Think of an F-35 pilot as a fox hunter on a horse, riding with hounds (the drones). As hounds in a fox hunt, drones do most of the fighting, but the F-35 provides C2 oversight for complex combat, using a human pilot teamed with AI. Not obsolete, merely retasked.

In the era of machine-intelligent EW, the era of the ‘tethered’ drone (remotely piloted) will soon end. The answer is not fully-autonomous drones (for a number of reasons) but partially-autonomous drones flying into combat with a human handler nearby for when EW gets hard.

Manned combat aircraft will have a different role in the future. Consider the much-maligned F-35. Rather than a combat aircraft, consider it a supersonic command-and-control (C2) node. It’s also an extraordinary sensor platform, soaking up battle space data.

As someone who works in hypersonics and AI, I’m afraid I disagree with you there, @elonmusk . Future wars are about a convergence of a lot of very different technologies. Yes, hypersonics and drones are two components; another two are AI and electronic warfare (EW).

In English, please? The website’s dual language mode doesn’t seem to work, and this article is too important for my schoolboy-era German…

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It’s worth noting that Champollion’s breakthrough was itself dependent on an insight of the British physicist Thomas Young, who first realised that the cartouche in hieroglyphics contained names of pharaohs and other relevant people. Champollion never gave Young credit for this.

The obvious omission was the Duke of Marlborough, who along with Frederick the Great were peer- comparable to Napoleon himself. Another obvious one is Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army.

English Interregnum (Commonwealth of England + Protectorate) had a national flag before 1660. Predates Union Jack+ Netherlands.

I’m afraid this is false. The flags of the Interregnum of England (the English republic) included red, white and blue national flags (denoting England + Scotland). Some variants also included Ireland. These were formal national flags and they ended at the Restoration in 1660.

Actually HMAS Sydney, like the Australian Imperial Force, did regard itself as ‘British’ in WWII. The modern use of the word ‘British’— being restricted to the United Kingdom— is technically an anachronism when applied to WWI and WWII forces.

Because Churchill’s claim to fame rests on far more than his fondness for turreted fighters. Agreed Chamberlain deserved far more credit than he got re rearmament— a point Churchill made at Chamberlain’s death. But Churchill on the back benches was the gadfly pushing rearmament.

Or simply JAUKCUS? Rhymes with caucus…

Bottom line: actually try wielding a foil or sabre on a spiral staircase, either by itself or with a shield. And you'll see for yourself the difference imposed by the spiral. Given that knifework is closely related to rapierwork, this remains true even for tight spirals!

For example, once projectile weapons (crossbows and then muskets) became widely available and had improved sufficiently, most people might be expected to widen the staircases to enable them to be brought to bear, even if this reduces the effectiveness of the spiral for swordsmen.

The variation of width of staircase would exist for a multitude of reasons, including budget, structural constraints (including available materials) and the changes in engineering sophistication across the centuries. They would also have changed based on the changes in weapons.

The fact not all castles adopt this approach is also irrelevant. Leonardo da Vinci-- for example-- had many excellent defensive ideas, most of which were ignored by most people. But clever people like Cesare Borgia paid attention. The same is true for other innovations.

Your counter-arguments re the different functions of castles and the various ways castles fall to siege are, with respect, irrelevant. One might expect provisions to be made in designing castles even for relatively unlikely military events.