Werthead

Their current king was on Star Trek: The Next Generation!

I think it's much more about the very, very real fear, distrust and outright hatred of Iran amongst a lot of Arab countries (especially in the Sunni-majority ones, which is just about all of them, bar Iraq and Azerbaijan). That fear and distrust has, in some cases, matched or far exceeded that of their concerns over Israel. Saudi Arabia bailing on the Arab cold war towards Iran seemed to take the heat out of that for a bit, despite it being more of a truce of convenience than any actual growing warmth between the countries (once both Iran and Saudi realised they'd gone as far as they each could in Yemen without basically launching full-scale invasions, so it was in their mutual interest to back down; the government forces and the Houthis have been less keen on peace), but it's been coming back into vogue more recently. It's quite startling how much that enmity is in play right now, even with Israel bombing Gaza, which the Arab street particularly utterly loathes. But even in the best of times, the Arab countries and Iran have only a very tenuous "enemy of my enemy is my friend," thing going on, and in fact I've seen some commentary that there is concern about Iran winning a war against Israel and being so energised that its ambitions grow from there. With Israel and US influence gone from the region, Iran has a clear path of influence and power extending right across the northern flank of the Arab sphere of influence (effectively an Iranian empire comprising its already massive, well-populated territories plus Iraq, Syria and Lebanon), which is something they very much do not want to deal with (and Türkiye would obviously have big problems with that as well). The three-way balance of power in the region between the Arab countries, Israel and Iran and its proxies is a finely-balanced thing, and one of the reasons why it's even vaguely plausible Iran did have something to do with 10/7 is because how that balance was shifting dramatically towards an Arab-Israeli détente, recognition and possibly even alliance, which would be vehemently against Iran's interests.

If they intended multiple waves of attacks, they would have launched a second wave of drones 1-2 hours after the first, still an hour or two before the first group reached Israel. They'd have to do that because of the timing imbalance between drones and faster-moving cruise missiles and much-faster-moving ballistic missiles. They fact they never launched that second wave would suggest they never planned a longer attack. In fact, the Iranian Mission tweeted this was a single strike long before the first drones even reached Israel and before many of the missile components to the attack had launched. The missiles were overflying Jordanian territory after they warned Iran not to do that. Iran could have routed all of its missiles north over Iraq and Syria, but tried to take a shortcut over Jordan and Jordan responded by shooting them down. Jordan gets underestimated a lot as probably the least significant power in the region (bar Lebanon and arguably war-torn Syria; even the microstates are usually richer than Jordan with more oil reserves) but they are well-equipped by the USA and exert considerable influence, especially on the Arab street for the sheer volume of Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi refugees they've taken in.

Fallout 4 is the most recent single-player game, the best-looking and is due to get a major update on 25 April. It's also the most accessible, although it's also been criticised for being the most dumbed-down, which I'm not too sure about. It's a solid game, very fun, the DLCs are pretty good (even if one of them is primarily aimed at evil players and doesn't have much content for good players), and it has a fair amount of quest reactivity. Fallout: New Vegas is probably the best game in the series but it's also janky and has the worst opening hour or so in the series. It also tries to be an open-world game but the optimal enjoyment of the game is held by playing it linear and following instructions on where to go next, which gives it a bit of a schizophrenic feeling in the early going. Once you're ~Level 15 or so, that ceases being a problem and you can do what you want. The story is pretty good, the characters fairly memorable, the faction interactions mostly good (in FO4 there's too many factions and they trip over one another a lot more). Obviously graphically a bit dated but hardly hideous. Fallout 3 was designed to introduce the franchise to new players, so it's probably the most traditional of the three "recent" SP games and has the most traditional Fallout opening (you start and spend a fair bit of time in a vault). It's pretty solid, but it has the stupidest ending of any video game in human history prior to Mass Effect 3, so you need to have the DLC installed (which fixes it). It's the oldest of the three so is looking a bit long in the tooth, but again perfectly playable. As you go back in time the decreasing QOL improvements from the later games may get more irritating (New Vegas has iron sights, survival mode and better crafting; Fallout 4 allows you to loot without having to open a separate screen and has the settlement building mode, which is pretty good, although I strongly recommend having the Vault-Tec and Automatron DLC before tackling that). I would recommend playing 3 and New Vegas on PC if possible to install some basic QOL mods and the fan-made bug fix packs, and also remove the "piss filters" which can be vaguely irritating on both games.

I took that as a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, personally.

The suggestion this represented the full attack capability of Iran might be correct, but it feels optimistic. As a very simple demonstration, Hezbollah is known to be capable of launching masses of smaller munitions at Israel from Lebanon. They did not do so in concert with this attack. The Houthis may have also been able to fire more weapons, but apparently the US hit a number of launch sites in Yemen with missiles on platforms before they could launch. Also, contrary to Houthi claims, previous US and UK air strikes on Yemen had destroyed significant launch infrastructure as well as storage facilities, limiting their ability to join the attack. More exist and some replacements have come in from Iran, but it is more logistically challenging than it was. Iran also chose to lead the attack with very slow-moving drones. If they had not done so, they could have fired a larger number of ballistic missiles with far shorter flight-times from Iran and had a more significant chance of penetrating the air defence net. Israel's AA systems were also given a relatively lighter ride because the majority of the weapons were intercepted by Israeli, Jordanian, UK and US aircraft outside of Israel's borders, which had plenty to time to scramble and get into range to intercept (the UK and Israel even had time to launch tankers). Even if we accept that Iran did not have enough launchers to launch more drones and missiles at once (a highly optimistic statement), they could have reloaded and fired again and again, and kept up a sustained, pressurised attack on Israel unfolding over many more hours. In fact, Israel and the US both warned that was the most likely format for the attack and seemed bemused when it stopped relatively quickly. The one area where I think Iran did fail, and was taken by surprise, was the effectiveness of Israel's anti-ballistic weapons. Whilst I think the attacks over Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were not designed to cause real damage, Iran I think did really want to hit that airbase hard as that's where they focused their ballistic strikes. The missiles either veering off and hitting open desert or being intercepted (in at least one case, extra-atmospherically) before impact seems to have been unexpected. As it stands, the airbase took negligible damage. The US has said it also assesses that around 40% of Iran's ballistic missiles failed on takeoff or still inside Iranian or Iraqi airspace, which the Iranians will likely be furious about.

It's an alt history. The Fallout universe's history diverged from our own after World War II, as the transistor was never invented. Instead they kept using valve technology, giving everything this 1950s-ish vibe even up to 2077. The real reason is that Fallout 1 was supposed to be a sequel to an earlier game called Wasteland, published in 1988 by Electronic Arts. The same team founded a new company, Interplay, and nine years later started making a Wasteland sequel, but EA wouldn't sell them back the rights. So they had to make a "spiritual sequel." EA was apparently quite arsey about it and insisted they make sure their new game was legally distinct from the original. So they did that by making Fallout 1 with a single character (rather than Wasteland's party) and using the retrofuturistic thing to distinguish Fallout 1's setting from Wasteland. Ironically, Interplay collapsed in 2004 and sold the Fallout IP rights to Bethesda, who then made Fallout 3, 4 and 76. Some of the old Interplay team, now at Obsidian, made Fallout: New Vegas after Bethesda contracted them to make a new game, and the rest of the old Interplay team, now at inXile, finally succeeded in buying back the Wasteland IP from EA and made Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2020).

Serbia in general seems to be doing a thing of saying whatever Russia is doing is fine but then the government does things which seem to indicate they don't think what Russia is doing is fine, but they can't say so without pissing off too much street opinion. Bit weird, but I suppose better than the alternatives. Serbia has been doing this for a while, they were in talks with Russia about buying S300 and S400 AA systems, but eventually realised that they were a bit antiquated at this point and bought a bunch of Chinese AA systems instead.

Serbia has dropped all plans to buy Russian fighter jets, citing the sanctions regime making it impossible. They had been urged by Moscow to "wait out" the sanctions but the Serbian government has decided they can't afford to wait. Instead, they have ordered twelve Rafale fighters from France.

The UK has confirmed aircraft operating over Syria engaged several Iranian targets. A Iranian Emad missile fell short of Israel, instead landing west of the Jordanian city of Karek, close to the Dead Sea, failing to cause damage. The US Navy has confirmed that the USS Carney and USS Arleigh Burke engaged and destroyed four Iranian medium range ballistic missiles. Apparently this was the first combat deployment of the new SM-3 antiballistic missile. USAF F-15E Strike Eagles from the 494th and 335th fighter squadrons downed 70 Iranian drones between them, mostly over Syrian and Iraqi territory but some intercepts over Jordanian territory. An Israeli Sa-ar 6-class corvette engaged Iranian targets over Eilat Bay using C-dome interceptors. Unclear if these were Iranian drones or Houthi ones flying north from Yemen. The damage at Nevatim Airbase appears to be risibly tiny:

Judge of Worlds will be released on 24 April 2025, apparently.

This is something Ukraine has been working on with cheap air defences for defeating drones. Given that Ukraine has been full-throttled in its support for Israel - rather more than can be said in reverse at times - I wouldn't be surprised if there was some exchange of ideas going on there behind the scenes. Ukraine will likely be hustling to get the Shahed factories onto a list of possible targets Israel is considering for retaliatory strikes. The UK's DragonFire laser interception system seems to have been unexpectedly successful, rather more than I think was expected, and possibly superior to the laser-Arrow and laser-Patriot variants both Israel and the US have been working on, both of which seem to be some time away from launching at scale. If the UK system is much closer to mass production (as hinted by the idea of field-testing it this year in Ukraine), that could be very promising.

That's actually a pretty big reasoning why the US and European countries are trying to restrain Israel. They know there's a huge civil opposition to the Iranian government and the Iranian government, although extremely resilient, could fall given time and momentum. Israel bombing Iran hard could pull large numbers of people behind the government and make that less likely. The Israeli position might be that this has been "on the cards" for a decade straight and hasn't happened, and may never happen, so shouldn't be a factor. I've also seen the argument that if Israeli hits the government and military structures hard and manages to avoid civilian casualties, that may strengthen the opposition hand. Actual Iranian opposition figures have supported both ideas, so who knows, but I think most analysts think an Israeli attack on Iran would not have a helpful impact on those hoping for the fall of the regime.

Not quite correct. Moldaver isn't from the games, she's a new character.

Saudi Arabia did not take part in last night's actions. Jordan was the only Arab country which directly engaged Iranian missiles and drones overflying its territory.