If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information:
“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.”
What in the actual fuck.
“…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.”
Wat.
“ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.”
After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work.
* This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago.
* One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash.
* The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early.
> “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.”
> WAT.
It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.
> the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works
The operations team didn't have a flight tracker. The Flight Explorer website is a free consumer tool [1]. The actual flight tracking software is native [2].
Malaysia Airlines' flightops was essentially using Google Flights to track their planes. That's the WTF.
> actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account
I've never flown a 777. But modern GA flight computers, e.g. G1000, are pretty advanced about projecting fuel consumption. (Of course, this wasn't always the case [2].)
You could of course blame the individuals for not knowing where which information comes from, but that wouldn't help in avoiding such problems in the future.
I think it's a UX failure in some sense. It's important information to know which number comes from what source.
So it should be clearly visible if a trajectory is prediction without up to date positional data.
It should be clearly visible which values are from the aircraft and which are from the ground.
It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors.
I hope that the 5Y process or whatever they used came to this conclusion as well, and not human error.
Human error is constant, design issues can be fixed.
Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
> Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers.
Human Factors is very much part of every airplane's design. From the ground up, and it involves all roles and every subsystems.
> Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these designs did much more than read a single book.
> It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors.
Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it. (Also clearly you are misunderstanding even the problem. The problem was that the range estimate was NOT derived from fuel sensors.)
>I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these designs did much more than read a single book.
I don't work in that sector which is why I went by the posted examples. Showing a predicted trajectory exactly the same as a measured trajectory seems like no care at all was taken.
>Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it.
I'd have to see an actual implementation. But e.g. the air traffic controller gets their trajectory shown the same? Make it a dashed differently colored line from the point you haven't gotten a sensor reading.
But by the way you're attacking people over small oversights in a comment I can't assume good faith from you.
Would writing the equation, data sources, and output format for each of those buttons on the button be good UX?
No, I agree with you, this is not a UX problem it's a training one - a test question along the lines of "How does fuel prediction work on a B790" etc ...
Not knowing your altimeter is connected to your transponder, and that you provide the altitude along with your squawk to the atc screens is a pretty glaring wtf.
You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared.
More generally, sticking with an approach that "works" by some shallow criterion, even though on deeper analysis it doesn't work, because the alternatives are not as good by the shallow criterion.
The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
That top one really gets me. That employees in flight operations wouldn't understand the concept of dead reckoning is used in a flight tracker. Well not that some would have been confused... But that nobody in the room would have raised that over a several hours span.
Even on a pure UI level, any software used in such a role really ought to warn the user somehow for "this aircraft has been X hours out of contact" in a world where this isn't supposed to happen anymore.
You also figure it out pretty quickly when you watch a few plans make physically impossible jumps between their dead reckoning location and their actual location.
What what? Do you want to pay for the search? How much do you want to pay for it? Every human endeavour is constrained by resources. The art of doing anything is figuring out how to best employ the available resources to achieve goals.
> What in the actual fuck.
Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
> Every human endeavour is constrained by resources
There is a difference between constraining activities based on resources at hand and adopting a hypothesis because it favours your resource constraints. (Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not.)
> Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. (FlightExplorer has a professional edition, but it runs natively. If flightops were looking at a website, they were essentially using Google Flights to track their planes.)
> Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not.
Yes. And there is nothing to indicate that they concluded that the keys must be under the lights. In fact there is every reason to assume that they choose this assumption to fit their resource constraints. Because the other option would have been to not even start searching.
But turns out if you assume people are stupid, then they will appear stupid.
> An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology.
Everything about aviation is complicated technology. The fact that there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do, but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated.
Also this is the problem with vacuous statements. The statement, I quote "What in the actual fuck." does not let us know what the commenter found curious about the situation. I thought it was that an operator misread the display. You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows. We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue and letting them figure out with their professional tools and training. Or maybe they are just surprised that airplanes sometimes fly and sometimes not. Who knows.
> there is nothing to indicate that they concluded that the keys must be under the lights
"ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close" based on their resource constraints. The resources are the light. They ruled out--according to this source--a hypothesis based on where the light was.
> the other option would have been to not even start searching
Why?! Even when ATSB chose their hypothesis the entire area wasn't searched.
> there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do
Not for flightops! (And not this one.)
> but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated
Have you flown a plane? This isn't an edge case issue, it means MA flightops was always blind on takeoff and approach for its entire fleet. That they thought this website was appropriate for the task represents a massive lack of training and protocol, let alone tooling or oversight.
> You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows
The article said MA flightops "were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website" (top comment). I pointed out that FE doesn't have a web-based professional app (comment you responded to). This isn't a "who knows" situation.
> We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue
Read the article at the top of this thread. Dempsey/Cloudberg goes into this in detail.
The repeated references to "riddles" feels a bit strange (in regards to the captain's home flight simulator tracks). I'm not sure if it's a strange translation or ESL thing, but it just feels like a strange word choice, like this is the start of a Dan Brown book or something
I'm ESL myself but I feel such poetic language is at least somewhat appropriate for MH370, probably one of the greatest real-world mysteries of the 21st century, no?
And yet, I'd say it's warranted; an entertaining read means more eyes on your paper. Second, the sciences have a reputation for being boring and dry, and efforts to reduce that are good (as long as the core is solid)
The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/
> Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide
D P Phillips. Science. 1978.
> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
There have been other murder/suicides of this kind (assuming that the theory is correct). Particularly SilkAir 185 and Germanwings 9525 (I think there is at least another one, but at the moment it is escaping me). In fact, my impression has been, for a long time, that MH370 is itself a copycat of SilkAir 185 where the suicide corrected the mistakes that led to the discovery that the accident was in fact caused by the captain.
I'm not particularly concerned about this, after the germanwings incident in europe and US (and possibly everywhere else as well) flight decks are required to always have at least two people: if one of the pilots wants or needs to leave one of the flight attendants must take his place.
Wikipedia says this was walked back, unfortunately.
> Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new recommendations from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that required two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times but, by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule.
That's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side the families of the victims have a right to know, and having free press is a good thing. On the other, reporting on these things may lead to copycats.
What happened to that other research team who used amateur radio network packet metadata that had been saved, to track airplanes including MH370 and showed tracks that also matched the satellite pings? Can't remember the name of that group though...
Wasn't the conlusion they were finding data that match their conclusion, i.e. they said "it could be here in the ocean" and then they found signals to confirm their guess, but it could be any point in the ocean and they'd be able to find such signals.
In any case I googled the keywords, it's called WSPR, and also found a critique:
Publishing a peer reviewed paper would equate to handing their IP over for free. Maybe the right thing to do in the face of such a tragedy is to do that.
Or perhaps they genuinely have some cool technology, and it could be sold into aero, military industries and they want to monetize it.
In that case the right thing to do would be to hand over their projected track data, which it sounds like they did.
In context of the paper, "high-speed gravitationally accelerated dive following fuel starvation", it bears mentioning the L/D ratio of a 777 is around 20. Which means if you lose power at 35,000 feet, you can have at most 132 miles of glide to the surface if well piloted.
What are the assumptions for the “132 miles” figure? At the very least wind is going to affect that- if you’re in a headwind you could probably make it closer to 150 miles (albeit not a huge gain).
It was most probably a mass and self suicide attempt by the pilot. The known plane trajectory is compatible and as a mental health professional I confirm there is an unconscious depression state that can be hidden from anyone while leading to such crazy behaviour.
There is a very good book by the french journalist Florence de Changy about MH370, which "solves" all the issues with most of the theories out there and proposes what really happened.
So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.
US shooting down a civilian passenger liner because of hypothesized secret cargo headed for China, and successfully covering it up for 10 years doesn't sound like something that passes Occam's Razor at all -- sounds like the very opposite, in fact.
One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.
I obviously don't believe anything but deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot.
But just know that these things did happen.
There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction.
A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight.
The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit.
"In 2023, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said that France downed the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet in an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Amato said that Italy tipped off Libya about the planned assassination and consequently Gaddafi did not board the Libyan military jet"
To be honest, this theory of mistaken identity sounds much more plausible than anybody shooting down (or bombing) a random passenger plane flying an Italian domestic flight on purpose. Whether the presumably Libyan plane they actually targeted was transporting nuclear material or Gaddafi, I have no idea. Shame on them anyway for covering it up.
That is an old theory that has been largely debunked by the book I suggested and the evidence that has surfaced recently. Not only that, but Israel was the only country in the planet that successfully showed to be able to traverse the mediterranean while avoiding completely radar detection flying thousands of miles at extremely low altitudes in Operation Wooden Leg[1] and some others.
Also Amato's words are quite meaningless as he never had an idea, and he was not prime minister at the time.
This reportage[2], albeit in Italian, aired by Italian state tv last year, starts by interviewing the person you quote Giuliano Amato, and he clearly points out that the government has never had a clear idea on who shoot it down. It goes into huge detail on all the elements behind the Israeli thesis and it's the only credible one for which he have substantial proofs, from the fact that France used civilian airplanes to transport uranium, to the fact that special cargo was indeed used on the very same flight (but in a different date), interviews with Israeli and French officials and Italian civilians that had seen fighter jets above the cost of Calabria and all pointed to Israeli fighters (albeit, not the F15s used in Operation Wooden Leg).
"Perfect Hiding Place": Australian Scientist Claims He's Found Where Missing MH370 Plane Is
The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur Airport in southern Malaysia en route to Beijing, China, on March 8, 2014.
Years after its disappearance, an Australian scientist has claimed that he has found the "perfect hiding place" for the missing MH370 plane.
The Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 people on board, vanished from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur in 2014. Its disappearance sparked the biggest search in aviation history with the whereabouts of the jet still unknown to this day.
Now, Tasmanian researcher Vincent Lyne has said that he believes he has figured out where the plane is. In a LinkedIn post, Mr Lyne claimed that the plane was deliberately ploughed deep into the Broken Ridge - a 20,000-foot-deep hole in the Indian Ocean.
"This work changes the narrative of MH370's disappearance from one of no-blame, fuel-starvation at the 7th arc, high-speed dive, to a mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible perfect-disappearance in the Southern Indian Ocean," the researcher wrote.
I'm in Australia, tangentially connected to the Fugro vessel ocean floor search that followed and almost from the outset heard very little other than "pilot appears to have evaded radar, swung plane about low, and gone waaaaay off course delibrately".
Various 'causes' have been hypoxia, hijacking, suicidal pilot | other flight crew - sans any real knowledge of happenings in the cockpit it's a standing mystery.
If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now?
Which theory could explain the absolute silence?
Even if all passengers were alive at the time of a water landing, getting out of a plane is tricky in the best of conditions. Getting out of a damaged, rapidly sinking plane is very hard or maybe impossible.
Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm.
And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
When you get a sailing license, you learn that if a man goes overboard, it's best to be (at east) three. One goes overboard, one orders the other never to let the overboard man out of sight and to point with his arm outstretched in his direction, and the boatman uses the outstretched arm to the man overboard. It is impressive how quickly you lose sight of someone even in light waves.
This is absolutely correct, but is in part due to the complicated nature of getting a sailing vessel to a fixed location in the sea behind the current location of the boat and in such a manner that allows for the boat to be put directly into the wind at the right time to kill forward motion.
Only very small motor boats are agile enough that you can turn on a dime and not loose sight of a man-over-board. And even then, it strongly depends on wind, current and boat speed. Also, orientation on the seas, sense of direction and getting to a remembered position again is very very hard to impossible. Especially when agitated. You might try using compass and GPS, but those are imprecise, overwhelming and useless when there is any kind of waves or current.
It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks.
Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.
What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.
If some part of that system was on fire or an engine was damaged and it was pumping smoke into the cabin. Basically every system can be switched off, sometimes it’s necessary to be able to switch them off completely (normally for pressurisation they would already be on the way to a breathable altitude), or to be able to power cycle something to try and fix an issue.
At the end of the day, there are so many other ways for the pilots to down an airliner and kill everyone, they are ultimately the only people you can’t practically have the system distrust. The only thing you can do is the rule to always have two people in the cockpit but it doesn’t always help.
It's more that they have the ability to control the pressurisation manually in case the automatic system fails.
Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.
Also even if you (try to) take capabilities away they are by definition quite smart people and could probably figure a way round if they really wanted to.
Pilots have access to virtually all critical systems on board; if they wanted to kill everyone on board, they could simply fly the plane into a mountain. Pressurization is mostly automatically managed, but if it fails, the pilots must be able to manually depressurize before landing.
Because if you have control of the aircraft you already can kill everyone if you wanted. Manual control of cabin pressure could be useful if the pressurization system malfunctioned and needed to be manually overridden.
All vehicles that can be steered have that possibility, even cars: If there is a steering wheel, it is possible to deliberately crash the vehicle. If it is possible to shut down engines, it can also be used for malicious purposes. In other words, there is always the possibility of using everything for malicious purposes.
On the other hand, the ability to shut down a system that has failed can save everyone on board.
There are approximately 40,000,000 flights each year. Almost all occur without incident. In the entire 120-year history of aviation, only a few accidents have resulted from the pilot intentionally crashing the plane.
Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure. That’s why airplanes are usually pressurized.
If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.
> Most people can’t breathe at high altitudes due to insufficient air pressure.
Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough. There are some individual variability in how high is too high. That is of interest if you go mountaineering, but not really in a situation where an aircraft rapidly decompresses at the altitude MH370 was speculated to be flying at.
> Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough.
Read generously, they're talking about with supplemental oxygen. At 35k feet, even with pure oxygen, many people will not be able to breathe and most will not be able to comfortably. (Above 40k feet, supplemental oxygen no longer works--everybody needs pressurised oxygen.)
(Obviously nobody can breathe above the Armstrong limit, but that isn't relevant with a commercial airliner.)
I think I saw a YouTube video of a guy in a chamber simulating what happens. Basically you have less than 30s before you enter a state of delirium in which it doesn't seem important to put your mask on, so then you die.
That's why they tell you in safety briefings to always put your own mask on before helping others.
fwiw, it’s a really good YT channel. Nice equilibrium between an accessible discourse and going into every important detail. And nice illustrations with what I guess is from flight simulator.
You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore:
I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Maybe because of the pre-safety instructions where it sort of implies (maybe it's just me) that if a plane were to land on water, I could just put on a life vest, get the raft and get off. Looking at that footage and the death toll, feels like a miracle even that many people survived.
That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.
> I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible.
Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible.
On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible.
Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing
I didn't say that water landings in general are not possible (though they are difficult even under ideal conditions). I said that landing in the open ocean is not really something that has been done successfully in a modern airliner.
The closest example I could find in the list you link was the following. But it ditched a few miles from the coast and had much smaller engines than a typical modern passenger airliner. Also, it was a cargo flight with only the pilots on board, and the captain was seriously injured.
Well that would be exactly right. I think people are confused because of some of the language you're using. Ditching is extremely dangerous and usually results in fatalities, but it's not impossible. There's a checklist for it.
You are correct about the difficulty of ditching in the ocean. See Admiral Cloudberg's description of ditching a DC-9 in the Caribbean during bad weather. There were many survivors.
Very interesting article. Worth noting that the position and size of the engines on the DC-9 would likely be more favorable for ditching than that of most modern airliners. The low and very large underwing engines generate a huge yaw force as soon as they contact the water, and it's very difficult to get both to contact at exactly the same time in a rough sea.
The video there seems to indicate that the hijackers flew that plane into the ocean (unless the commentary is inaccurate) so that is probably not as good a ditching as it could have been if the pilots had been flying… But yes it’s going to be a lot worse than the ditching on the Hudson in any case.
No, the pilot can depressurize the aircraft at high altitude.
In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes.
After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes.
No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the plane crash.
Pilot can also re-pressurize the aircraft after 30 minutes, and breathe fine. Pilot oxygen masks are meant to last for at least an hour.
It's more insidious. At high altitude the drop masks don't provide enough pressure to maintain consciousness for their full rated duration. It's expected that pilots will descend very quickly after a depressurization event to at least 14000 or below. If he stayed at high altitude the passengers probably went unconscious quickly.
Yes, for those interested in this scenario, check Helios Airways Flight 522. I think that's what happened with MH370, except that the depressurization was deliberate. Most likely a single pilot stayed alive and functioning in the cockpit, eventually repressurizing the aircraft.
Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make sense, although it kind of failed considering the debris which eventually reached Africa.
We only have a clue where it might be because Zaharie likely powered “the AC bus back up…Unbeknownst to him, the satellite communication unit starts to acknowledge the satellite again. This is his one mistake — but it’s a forgivable one, as hardly any airline pilots knew about this system feature before the disappearance of MH370” [1].
Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably.
If the pilot tried to kill all the passengers to cover his tracks and then killed himself, as many here have commented (which TBH is extremely cruel and insidious), why did he bother trying to land the plane at all? Why not just cut the engine and dump it in the sea? People who commit suicide are the most depressed. They don't care what other people think!
Why of all the possibilities, you choose the most vile one and present it as if you know the facts?
I'm not making any assumptions about the pilot's motives or the final circumstances. I just wondered about the implications of a controlled glide, as the paper suggested. Is there any uncertainty, any margin for error? There certainly is.
No doubt, the question is whether it was a catastrophic crash, a glide down, or an attempted controlled landing; there's no way to land on water without some parts coming off. The brunt of the wreckage has never been found.
* video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk
* great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...