China Deploys 30k-Ton Liaowang-1 "Floating Supercomputer" to Gulf of Oman | Hacker News Reader

China Deploys 30k-Ton Liaowang-1 "Floating Supercomputer" to Gulf of Oman

defencesecurityasia.com

43 pointsswed42020 comments

This is obviously not about helping Iran, as the article tries to suggest, but rather to observe US assets and strategies in a live war, especially when lots of stealth aircraft are flying around without Luneberg lenses to mask their true radar signature.

I wonder if they also intend to have a role in providing evidence about who blows up the next grade schools, hospitals, and desalination plants

Physical attacking such vessels is obviously not an option. But I wonder if directed targeted signal jamming and other electronic countermeasures could disrupt or at less severely affect such intelligence gathering. Intelligence gathering, specially signal intelligence is vital for future drone war, so I believe this question will become critical for everybody, regardless if they are pacifists or warmongers.

Why not use a few cans of hardware store metallic glitter spray paint on the radomes? Seems a bit cheaper than blowing it up.

> Physical attacking such vessels is obviously not an option.

Why not?

Ehm, geez, I don't know.. World war three ?

Israel is doing whatever it takes to start it, we must resist.

Because china has the means to reply. It's one thing to bully countries that can't defend themselves like Venezuela, Cuba or Iran, it's another one to do the same with the factory of the world

That is an direct act of war against near peer level opponent. They can't just roll over. But must respond in kind and cause at least similar or larger damage. Say sinking a aircraft carrier or a few.

It could backfire in a way that ends American actions like the one the Chinese have pulled there ballistic missled arm chair up to watch the action more closely. The recent embarasment of european tech by chinese tech in pakistan india scuffle, is a hint at what are otherwise unknown Chinese missle capabilities, ie the two OTHER ships in the flotilla, there will of course be many oilers , tenders, and whatnot joining up, complicating things further. Plus given that China got this hardware on site in 10 days, is a message all it's own.

Why is your first reaction to attack it?

I think they’re asking from the context of it being a military vessel being deployed to a relatively hot zone.

Is that a telescope in the middle of the ship? It looks like the covering I see at observatories.

Yeah, looks like an optical observatory. Probably not astronomical telescopes, the water isn't stable enough for observing space. Most likely they're low power optical telescopes for tracking aircraft.

This is a long article that could be a paragraph instead and lose nothing.

since when supercomputers are measured in kilotons?

PLAN Intelligence Ship Now Watching U.S.–Israel–Iran War From 6,000km Sensor Bubble

Waste of time and energy. People forget how much activity happened in that area over 20 years during the Iraq/Afghanistan fiasco that didnt achieve anything. Same story will repeat because the chimp troupe cant handle that level of complexity no matter what toys they have. So its like spending time collecting data on ants, that have learnt to speak and have declared they are going to control the weather. There are better things to waste a life and career on.

"Greatness cannot be planned" - K. Stanley

Technology, methods and people at the time are bound to have been different, even if only slightly so.

Throughout history, many things were thought of as wasteful and looked over, until some people serendipitously spent time and energy and found some diamond in the dirt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Stanley#:~:text=lead%2...

What would you say the %time that "research science managers" spend looking in/for the "dirt" should be? 100? 50? 20? 37?

It depends, but in general, it is expected be on the lower end.

The principal task of a "research science manager" is not to "do" the research, but foster an environment that will help other researcher that are actually focused into looking in / for the "dirt" (by dirt I assume you mean the nitty-gritty details of unraveling research problems). This would be setting high level direction, advising on approach to research problems, as well as the general "bureaucracy" and logistics required to make the team running. If time allows, a research science manager can still explore some research topics on his own as a research, but that becomes more of an side quest than actual main quest. Of course, they can still yield interesting result.

Finally, a research science manager should not just work in a top down fashion, but also incorporate bottom up feedback, i.e. adapt the overall research team's direction based on the "dirt" that is brought up to him by the dedicated researchers.

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