There are what? About a dozen different plastic types Lego uses? There might be a batch of plastic that was used that is slowly shrinking over time from off-gassing. (Typical bricks are ABS which don’t have that particular problem.)

There might be a defect that someone else is aware of, but you might need to replace the connectors or glue them. Heck, you just need to fix the friction fit so creative use of PTFE thread tape might work.

(Not a Lego expert, but I do my research into plastics and such for other reasons. I want to guess that it might be the PMO (Delrin) that is causing the issue which is absolutely not approved for use in spacecraft.)

Edit: Clarification on the PTFE thread tape use. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s not sticky and does not have any glue on it. If anything, it’s going to be a bit more slippery than other plastics. If you had two bricks and put a layer of PTFE tape between them, it’s would be thin enough to act as a wedge between the bricks to fix a friction fit but you should still be able to pull the bricks apart easily. You would need to experiment though.

Don’t confuse me with facts.

AI can’t recognize a pattern it’s wasn’t trained on? Imagine that…

Please tell me it’s healthcare. They could probably afford top notch medical services at super affordable prices and still make a hell of a profit.

We don’t talk about that.

But they launched a website.

Experts say that is not possible.

Fucking troll accounts.

This is the way.

(I’ll just note that oil with bubbles in it does not look like an actual milkshake. If it looks like a milkshake, then bad things are happening.)

I feel better knowing that Chinese military partners get to feel the joy as well. (Curbs can be a bitch sometimes…)

Regardless of the side, if the convicts have proper training, supplies and aren’t used as pure cannon fodder I don’t have any issues with it personally.

Honestly, I am surprised that Ukraine wasn’t doing it sooner. Unfortunately, the front has been somewhat slow for the last year or so (with an exception or two) and that means both sides are dug in fairly deep.

If Ukraine decides to push back harder and start retaking large portions of land, their losses are going to skyrocket. Regardless is you agree or not, using convicts to push the lines makes sense and doesn’t risk better trained troops.

That is just how wars of this type work and the offensive side will need to absorb more damage.

Personally, if I had the option of fighting or rotting in prison, I would fight and would probably volunteer for some of the hardest work. The thing is, it would need to be my choice and I hope that any convicts, Russian or Ukrainian, get a choice in that.

Ukrainian convicts are probably going to get decent training first. It’s also likely they are going to go into some of the worst spots. Ukraine is outnumbered and they can’t afford to lose anyone, criminal or not, but it doesn’t mean they are going to have it easy.

Russia/Wagner hardly gave their convicts any training, maybe gave them guns and supplies and sent them to the front blind to find artillery locations. They were cannon fodder, pure and simple. Bakhmut was a slaughter.

There are some major differences here.

I was teaching people how to download porn years before that kid showed up. That should have made me at least a cardinal or something and I ain’t even catholic.

I am not sure where y’all evolved, but you skipped a few thousand years and a whole bunch of sharpened sticks.

I don’t buy it in this particular case, but “directed energy” can do some funky things: https://youtu.be/J-SH18dtBlY?si=40dOJbu4O9ZWWCsZ

(No, it’s not a conspiracy theory video or any of that crap. Benn Jordan is a musician that likes all kinds of funky sound things.)

I have heard a few things, TBH. Everything in the range from simply vaporized and hot to the vaporized metal being in a near plasma state. Shrug.

Wikipedia gives a few numbers ranging from 660K to almost 1200K (copper melt temp is 1358K) from testing it quotes. It seems to be dependent on the cone alloy and the explosive type.

In practice, it’s probably is all over the place in regards to temperature. If you can round up a few RPGs, I would totally be down for some testing…

you’ll be doing the QA and will in fact be working on the parts / product to get it to where you need it to be.

Absolutely. Unless a person wants to spend thousands of dollars on push button solutions that cover every imaginable use case, customization is the way to go.

For solid machines, the customer should already have an idea about what parts need to be modified. If a machine was advertised to mill a widget at +/-20% tolerance, cool. If you want to spend $500 more on a custom pully to get withing 5%, awesome. Precision is expensive and customization is niche.

For cheap machines, everything is generally ravaged by bean counters at every level of design and manufacturing. As long as people understand this and can make repairs, that is sometimes OK.

While I feel OPs pain of finding a 2¢ part that was 0.3mm off center, I can only just shrug it off. A pseudo-premium 5¢ part or building a jig for a worker to test each gear would have been quite expensive and it would probably tack on $2-$5 to the end product price. ($2-$5 actually matters on sites like Amazon or Temu and could potentially cost thousands in lost sales due to product placement.)

I am going to need your 50 point summary of those obvious points in the longest form possible by this afternoon so I can be completely convinced that I have already made up my mind in the correct way. Thanks.