The now-dirty soap dispenser.

You can turn on most facets with your elbows, but pumping soap with dirty hands while trying not to get the soap dispenser wet is more of a challenge. Best used in kitchens where you are more likely to have gunk on your hands.

The reconnaissance plane then has to fly back to the UK, have the film unloaded from the rather bulky cameras, develop the film, turn it over to analysts, have the analysts create maps, get those maps across the English Channel by plane or boat, and get that map to the front lines. By which time the unit that wanted the map has already taken that bit of ground and moved on.

Kirby’s maps would be used within a day of their creation. If you want maps that fast of a particular tactical area, you use some guy on the ground, not aircraft. Photo-reconnaissance aircraft were used for grander strategic reconnaissance duties, including tracking German ships and factory outputs.

An important element behind the Battle of Los Angeles was the submarine I-17. The night before the Battle this Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery just up the coast, causing little damage but stirring invasion fears. It is critical background for why some anti-aircraft gunners were unusually jumpy the next night.

I-17 had previously been part of an armada of Japanese submarines stationed around Pearl Harbor and then ordered to the West Coast, where she sank the tanker Emidio, the first ship sunk in that operation. She later served on several cargo runs to Guadalcanal, using her pressurized aircraft hangar to transport some of the cargo. She rescued 151 Japanese soldiers and sailors who survived the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, and during the rescue was unsuccessfully attacked by two US PT-boats. She later sank the freighter Stanvac Manila and two of the PT-boats carried aboard as cargo: four other PT-boats floated off the sinking ship and survived. In August 1943 she was ordered to scout US bases in the South Pacific, and after a successful reconnaissance flight by her floatplane on 10 August, she was sunk on 19 August by a New Zealand minesweeper and a group of US floatplanes. HMNZS Tui rescued six survivors, with the remaining 97 crewmen going to the bottom.

The Medal of Honor was not for this action. If was for the Namkwan Attack:

> For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as commanding officer of the U.S.S. Barb during her 11th war patrol along the east coast of China from 19 December 1944 to 15 February 1945. After sinking a large enemy ammunition ship and damaging additional tonnage during a running 2-hour night battle on 8 January, Comdr. Fluckey, in an exceptional feat of brilliant deduction and bold tracking on 25 January, located a concentration of more than 30 enemy ships in the lower reaches of Nankuan Chiang (Mamkwan Harbor). Fully aware that a safe retirement would necessitate an hour's run at full speed through the uncharted, mined, and rock-obstructed waters, he bravely ordered, "Battle station — torpedoes!" In a daring penetration of the heavy enemy screen, and riding in 5 fathoms [9 m] of water, he launched the Barb's last forward torpedoes at 3,000 yard [2.7 km] range. Quickly bringing the ship's stern tubes to bear, he turned loose 4 more torpedoes into the enemy, obtaining 8 direct hits on 6 of the main targets to explode a large ammunition ship and cause inestimable damage by the resultant flying shells and other pyrotechnics. Clearing the treacherous area at high speed, he brought the Barb through to safety and 4 days later sank a large Japanese freighter to complete a record of heroic combat achievement, reflecting the highest credit upon Comdr. Fluckey, his gallant officers and men, and the U.S. Naval Service.

The question was about moving the train itself, not the cargo said train may be carrying. For my part in this discussion, the train could be empty or loaded to the brim. In my head I was thinking the engine/cars were cargo on a ship and unloading them via a crane in some port like Rio for use on the Brazilian rail system.

>Did you downvote me?

I generally don't downvote anyone except in extremely rare circumstances. Not considering maintenance or why universal solutions are not needed in all cases are commonplace and not worth my downvote. I use these as teaching points, encouraging you to think about something in a different way.

Even if it does, that’s only viable if the train regularly has to go from one gauge to another. If you sent a train from the US to Brazil, its better to completely change out the bogies than to have a system you don’t need that could fail and cause a crash and thus must be maintained.

It was the last one of Fermat’s theorems left unproven, and was downgraded to a conjecture after some time.

Herodotus, the Father of Lies, claimed to have heard all his stories from other people. Just because someone said “I heard it from reliable sources” doesn’t mean it’s accurate, especially since the Plato descriptions are part of a philosophical discussion about the perfect society with Atlantis playing the part of the opposite of the ideal Athens and it’s a very safe bet that Plato’s account is fiction.

>You assume that as a plane is crashing, the datastream fails. Why?

1. Connection issues are common problems for normal operations and should be expected for any such system.

2. To communicate the volume of data an FDR captures with satellites you need a high-gain antenna with significant power requirements. To reduce said power requirements a directional antenna is best, such as for Starlink. These will naturally loose connection if a plane is no longer pointed up, such as diving towards the ground and especially diving while inverted. This isn’t GPS where the data transmitted is minimal, there is a massive amount of data in an FDR.

> Given such, any data are better than none.

And the cases of no data are practically unheard of. If you can get to the wreck, you can get to the flight data recorders.

>Last point regarding rarity of use: How often do flight data recorders get read?

Every single time they are recovered, with dozens per year as legal requirements push them to smaller aircraft with lower safer standards compared to airlines. You may not read an FDR in case of a bird strike where the aircraft lands safely, but even then removing them is common.

Name another crash in the last decade besides MH 370 where the black boxes were not recovered.

>The title of this thread marvelled at the technology of the hardware devices. I'm sure a fraction of that technology could make online flight recorders happen.

It is far easier to make anything wired function reliably at high bit rates compared to something wireless. Landlines came a century before wireless phones (satellite or cellular). Wired Internet long predates wireless, and most of the global internet passes along undersea cables rather than satellites. A couple months ago T Mobile and SpaceX announced they were going to used Starlink satellites to end dead zones: these require large version 2 satellites too large to fit on a Falcon 9 and will initially only offer text message support rather than real-time voice calls.

You’re asking for something far more ambitious: real-time communication with thousands of airliners in the air every second with high data output from each. Thus would require massive allocation of radio frequencies (which are already limited) and require thousands of new satellites to function (with cheap launches at about $1 million per satellite using Starlink as an approximation, which is far cheaper than most). All to solve a problem that is so rare it has only been an issue for a handful of crashes over the past several decades (we haven’t even discussed how most crashes are within a few miles of an airport).

This could be solved far more easily by a far simpler solution: every five minutes in the air the aircraft transmits its current GPS coordinates. If it goes down, the search area is now small enough that you can easily find the black boxes.

Your naïvety on such problems shows how little you actually know about the subject and engineering in general. A complicated solution for a niche problem almost never sees the light of day.

You’re ignoring any connection issues: if the aircraft cannot transmit the data to a satellite for whatever reason, such as it’s actively crashing, then it doesn’t matter how you are handling the data once it’s at the satellite. Even if you have 90% of coverage during normal operations, when planes start failing and the data is most critical the successful connection rate is going to plummet.

This is especially true once you start recognizing the types of crashes. The types of crashes where you are most likely to have connection all the way to the ground generally have few or no fatalities and the aircraft is recovered largely intact, such as the Miracle on the Hudson. In these cases you easily recover the flight recorder and can compare the data to survivor interviews and the recovered wreckage.

The crashes where you want a satellite connection are those where you cannot recover the flight recorder or the extremely rare cases where it is unreadable. These crashes almost by definition have no survivors and no significant debris recovered. For the crashes where you have to heavily rely on FDR data, the aircraft almost always becomes uncontrollable and any high-gain antenna necessary to transmit the dozens to hundreds of data channels (and many are reaching 1,000) would lose connection with a satellite network. When you need the data most, you don’t have it.

About the only time this would have been useful is MH 370. In this case, however, you don’t need to send all of the flight recorder data to a satellite network, just accurate position data at regular intervals. The problem with MH 370 is the search area was so fast we couldn’t find the recorders before their pinger batteries died, but with position data you would drastically narrow the search area and find the recorders and more importantly wreckage quickly. At that point you can use a low-gain omnidirectional antenna, much more likely to function in case of major maneuvers, and even if you lose that data the search area has shrunk dramatically.