- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
A lot of people think of the really cheap and awful 3.5" floppies you'd see a bunch around the turn of the millennium, where the standards of manufacture were made as low as possible so the obsolete format could be pushed at a real cheap price. Those are horribly unreliable, but a lot of people forget or aren't aware of that high quality diskettes were also made, and if you look back at stuff like the 8.5" diskettes (which are soft and literally floppy), those were available at a very high level of quality if you were willing to pay for that, and they are actually surprisingly hardy even in substandard storage conditions.
I have a lot of confidence that the old floppy setups they used in those silos were still working absolutely perfectly the day they were replaced.
This is also another thing where quality and type is a critical aspect, looking at cheap as fuck 8-track tapes, those wear easily, but there's other forms of tape media which is not just surprisingly hardy, but there's modern forms of tape media which can hold hundreds of gigabytes easily. I don't know what format they use for F-15s, but it's probably more than adequate if it has worked this far.
Right? Israeli carry was a smart idea for the circumstances at the time. It's a ragtag army with little money and they gotta buy all kinds of different surplus to arm themselves, so sidearms are a wild mix. Safeties off, chambers empty, magazines full: this works consistently and safely with any service pistols I can think of, which is great for making sure various people who may not have the best training don't go and have an accident with an unfamiliar pistol.
I always thought that was a great approach for this exact context. Naturally, the IDF continues to do this even though they are well past the point of actually needing it, they have standardized pistols and far better training today.
However, if you're in a force with standardized sidearms, or you're otherwise familiar with your pistol, there's very little good reason to carry it that way. Unless you're a poorfag who only has some little Ring Of Fire pistol, I see no reason to carry with the chamber empty.
