International Ultramarine Corps

The International Ultramarine Corps, formerly the Ultramarine Corps, is a fictional team of superheroes published by DC Comics. They first appeared in DC One Million #2 (November 1998), and were created by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter.

History

The Corps was created by the U.S. as a government-sponsored group of superhumans to rival the more independent Justice League. Led by General Wade Eiling, the original members of the team were Flow, 4-D, Pulse 8 and Warmaker One. During a fight with the JLA, the UMC realised that Eiling was dangerously insane and that they were on the wrong side; they then sided with the League against their leader.

Having developed a mistrust of governments, the Corps subsequently declared themselves independent of any and all nations and built a free-floating city in which to dwell, which they named Superbia and set in the air above the ruins of Montevideo. They put out a call to other disaffected superheroes to join them in their city, and received a number of responses from around the globe, although the total population and demographics of Superbia are unknown.

Traffic flow (computer networking)

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection."RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection." Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval."

Conceptual description

A flow can be uniquely identified by the following parameters within a certain time period:

Rapping

Rapping (or emceeing,MCing,spitting bars,or rhyming) is "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The components of rapping include "content", "flow" (rhythm and rhyme), and "delivery". Rapping is distinct from spoken-word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat. Rapping is often associated with and a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, but the origins of the phenomenon can be said to predate hip-hop culture by centuries. It can also be found in alternative rock such as that of Cake, gorrilaz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rapping is also used in Kwaito music, a genre that originated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is composed of hip-hop elements.

Rapping can be delivered over a beat or without accompaniment. Stylistically, rap occupies a gray area between speech, prose, poetry, and singing. The word (meaning originally "to hit") as used to describe quick speech or repartee predates the musical form. The word had been used in British English since the 16th century. It was part of the African-American dialect of English in the 1960s meaning "to converse", and very soon after that in its present usage as a term denoting the musical style. Today, the terms "rap" and "rapping" are so closely associated with hip-hop music that many use the terms interchangeably.

BMD-3

The BMD-3 (Boyevaya Mashina Desanta, Russian "Боевая Машина Десанта", literally "Combat Vehicle of the Airborne") is an infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) originating from the former Soviet Union. This armored fighting vehicle is one of the lightest in its class and is intended to be a fire support platform for use by airborne and air assault units. The primary armament is a 30 mm 2A42 autocannon capable of firing different types of ammunition which include high-explosive and armor-piecing. The BMD-3 possesses multiple secondary weapons such as the 9M113 Konkurs missile and the AGS-17 grenade launcher to defeat a wide range of targets from enemy infantry to other armored fighting vehicles.

Designed in the 1980s, the vehicle was manufactured by the Volgograd tractor factory under the industrial index Object 950. The BMD-3 entered service with the VDV in 1990 with only 137 vehicles being produced due to the economic depression. The operators of the BMD-3 are Angola and Russia. As of 2013, 123 BMD-3s and 60 BMD-4s are in service with the Russian Airborne Troops.

BMD-2

The BMD-2 is a Soviet airborne infantry fighting vehicle, introduced in 1985. It is a variant of BMD-1 with a new turret and some changes done to the hull. BMD stands for Boyevaya Mashina Desanta (Боевая Машина Десанта, literally "Airborne Combat Vehicle"). It was developed as a replacement of BMD-1 but it failed to replace it completely because of a downfall of Soviet economy in 1980s. NATO gave it the designation BMD M1981/1.

Development

When the Soviet war in Afghanistan broke out the Soviet forces operated BMP-1 IFVs and BMD-1 airborne IFVs. They were both armed with 73 mm 2A28 "Grom" low pressure smoothbore short-recoil semi-automatic gun, 9S428 ATGM launcher capable of firing 9M14 "Malyutka" (NATO: AT-3A Sagger A), 9M14M "Malyutka-M" (NATO: AT-3B Sagger B) and 9M14P "Malyutka-P" (NATO: AT-3C Sagger C) ATGMs and 7.62 mm PKT coaxial tank machine gun. Although their armament made for strong anti-tank firepower, it didn't provide sufficient firepower against enemy unarmored vehicles, infantry, firing points and light fortified positions, especially during mountain battles because of low elevation angle of the main gun.