Romulans are very sneaky.
This was the event I was thinking of:
The article is silent on whether Fitzgerald was running blacked out. It appears, between the lines, that the other ship was on autopilot with no one on the bridge, so any running lights on Fitzgerald would have been immaterial to the accident.
Yes, totally wrong.
Although…sort of related to that: I did hear a possibly apocryphal sea story about a submarine transiting on the surface that looked like a much smaller vessel visually and on radar because only the sail (aka conning tower) was visible in moderate seas. Anyway the sub had the right-of-way but some large merchant vessel supposedly asked them to give way over the ship-to-ship radio. It took some back and forth to get the merchant to realize they were dealing with a much larger vessel than was apparent that was equally constrained in its maneuvering.
The British Crown must be relieved that the U.S. covers any damages caused by warships of the Royal Navy. 
“Geologists claim it’s because the earlier Cenozoic used to be called the Tertiary, but that’s just a ruse to hide the secret third geologic period, between the Neogene and the Quaternary, that they won’t tell us about.”
I still think no one’s topped the Geologic chart from “Science Made Stupid”. For example, back in the “Pestiferous Era” the predominant life form was “Nasty Crawly Things”.
Not true where I am or anywhere I’ve practiced. Not having appropriate navigation lights on is usually an offence. The Colregs themselves don’t create offences but everywhere I know there are local laws that result in a failure to comply with them being an offence.
Amazing.
“Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. ‘It’s the first time that method has ever actually worked,’ said a spokesperson.”
Okay, that actually made me laugh out loud.
Sort of a lot of fishing line. Earth is 40,000 km around at the equator, but there’s no jet stream there, so let’s assume 45 deg latitude. So 28,000 km, or 92 million feet. Some preliminary research suggests that high quality (Spectra) fishing line costs about 2 cents a foot, so maybe in bulk that 's 1 cent/foot. Which means about a million bucks in fishing line to go all the way around the Earth.
I feel like the tensile strength of the line is going to be a problem, but maybe you could arrange kites in a way so that there isn’t much net tension on the line.
I’m thinking the multiple kites on the string would help, kind of like DPUs on railroads.
The greatest benefit of distributed power—and the reason for development of the original concept—is the reduction of draw-gear draft forces, permitting a wholesale increase in the size of trains without exceeding draw-gear strength, through the use of mid- or end-of-train locomotives.
And the mouse-over comment made me LOL as well, @Zakalwe
Staging kites has been used to set altitude records for kite flying. Google AI claims
The world altitude record for a kite train is 9,740 meters (31,955 feet), achieved on August 1, 1919, by the Prussian Meteorological Institute (Germany) over Lindenberg.
And if you deliberately made your kite reflective to radar with say a thin layer of foil, I don’t doubt you could create an air traffic hazard that would get the authorities p.o.'d with you.
But wouldn’t it be an air traffic hazard whether or not you made it more visible to radar? At least when you make it show up better on radar, they’ll know it’s there.
A kite would be harmless to a plane, I think, but a radar-visible unidentifiable object in a flight path would have to be avoided, because it might be dangerous
Pretty much any solid object that enters a jet engine is going to do some serious damage. Planes have crashed from hitting relatively small birds.
Do I see a way here to protect Kyiv from those pesky Russian drones?
Probably not. You’d need a ludicrous number of kites before there was a significant chance of any given drone hitting a kite and/or string, and the paradigm of drones is that they’re cheap enough that you don’t care if a significant fraction of them are destroyed.
It worked with blimps during the London raids, and kites are even cheaper than blimps or drones. Could you make a square array with silk netting in between the lines to catch the drones and entangle them?
Before the invention of radar people had presumed that defense against aerial attack was effectively impossible. Too much boundary to cover, not to mention that unlike a land perimeter the sky is three dimensional.