The Biggest Aircraft Ever Made Exists Now

Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: A billionaire has managed to build the largest plane ever made, living in the Bay Area is really tough if you aren't insanely rich and one game designer thinks he can improve the guns in "Doom" (2016).

Mutli-Billionaire Overcomes All Odds To Build Giant Plane That Will Bring A Smaller Plane To Space

I'm sorry. I'm in a poopy mood this week. Any other week and I'd be on here gushing praise for Steve Levy's exclusive look at Stratolaunch in Wired. How cool is it, I might ask, that humanity has managed to assemble a plane that is not only 385 from wingtip-to-wingtip, but that it's only the plane that will bring another plane (or rocket) to space.

But as cool as the largest plane ever made might sound, I do not think it is that great.  As much as we love to romanticize extending our grasp into the heavens, Stratolaunch, whether it flies or not come this fall, will have zero impact on you. You will never be able to fly in it. It's not going boldly where no man has gone before. It is merely a way to get satellites into orbit that's cheaper than SpaceX. 

What once seemed like a cool thing a few years ago — tech billionaires using their fortunes to make rockets and spaceships — now just seems like a misguided allocation of wealth. 

[Wired]

It's Extremely Difficult To Live In The Bay Area Unless You're Rich

Speaking of misguided allocations of wealth, this week Vice's Rick Paulas spoke with Bay Area residents who are not fabulously rich about how they manage to live in a place that is notoriously, and at times comically, expensive.

The folks Paulas talks with range from median incomes (between $58,000 to $88,000) to minimum wage ($13.23 to $15 an hour). And in either case the places that they can somewhat afford to live are either being actively gentrified, have minimal public transit options or both. Their entertainment options are limited or nonexistent, eating out is either a rare luxury or a pipe dream and if they suddenly lost their job they'd most likely have to pack up and find a life somewhere else in this country.

It is an extremely distressing and vexing situation. And maybe our only hope is that once the rich have priced out everyone but themselves from the cities, they'll finally realize the error of their ways. (Probably not).

[Vice]

Turns Out You Can Improve The Near-Perfect Guns From 'Doom' 2016

One of the few bright points of 2016 is that there was a "Doom" remake and it is astoundingly good. It might have been a hell year, but at least you could unwind by taking on the minions of hell on Mars. 

It's hard to imagine how one might improve something that was about as close to perfect as you could ask for in a thing created by humans, but game designer Nathan Fouts — who, most famously, designed the absolutely insane weapons in "Resistance: Fall of Man" — believes that the guns in "Doom" could be even better.

His critique of the weapons reads a little like an excited kid just making up crazy-ass weapons in his sketchbook while simultaneously uttering explosions and plasma bursts as he draws just A Really Big And Cool Gun, but is otherwise spot on. The alt-fire functionality of most of the guns are side-grades at best, Fouts argues, and instead should just give you the option to expend more ammo to kill demons harder and faster.

I will say that the only thing I personally disagree with is his opinion of the super shotgun. He thinks it's superfluous, but I, meanwhile, found it to be the most enjoyable weapon in the entire game. Perhaps I do not have the imagination of Fouts, but I suppose I enjoyed the notion that in a research base on Mars housing all kinds of technology up to and including the ability to literally open a rift to hell and exploit it to create a near-infinite energy source, that the best solution to rectifying this situation was the brutish and primitive double-barrel shotgun. Video games!

[Kotaku] ​