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Megamissen posted:gangs filling the vaccuum of a failing state and organizing themselves into political entities seems like a thing that could happen Crosspost from the haiteh thread: Bro Dad posted:bbq is a gang leader, which is just cutting out the middleman of haitian politicians hiring gang leaders to enforce their policies
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Mar 10, 2024 16:30
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easier to get western rubes mad about 'gangs' than revolutionaries against an installed regime
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Mar 10, 2024 16:30
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That seems to be Chris hedges opinion. He's interviewing a documentary team and listening to BBQ talk he makes all sorts of claims as to social change.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:33
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https://twitter.com/HueroProfe/status/1766699349562790365?t=HAQp7Bv8XmOMGtDptieIHA&s=19
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Mar 10, 2024 16:36
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Sancho Banana posted:What exactly are the tactical uses of this "tactical" jetpack Grift. Theoretically, jetpack infantry could do some incredibly sick moves in very vertical environments like mountain regions and cities provided they have light enough jetpacks that let them carry heavy weapons and other useful poo poo. So the SF brained DOD has been drooling and companies detected opportunity. That jetpack just makes human skeet.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:37
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jet packs own who cares if they actually are worth anything to the military. If they are gonna waste a bunch of money of stupid poo poo give me jet packs and flying cars and poo poo instead of murder robots.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:43
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Complications posted:Grift. Theoretically, jetpack infantry could do some incredibly sick moves in very vertical environments like mountain regions and cities provided they have light enough jetpacks that let them carry heavy weapons and other useful poo poo. So the SF brained DOD has been drooling and companies detected opportunity. That jetpack just makes human skeet. i can think of marginal cases where it would be useful but "big drone with a sling hanging under it" just seems like a better and more versitile solution
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Mar 10, 2024 16:44
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Megamissen posted:i can think of marginal cases where it would be useful but "big drone with a sling hanging under it" just seems like a better and more versitile solution They are field testing it for the eventual users, Amazon & Doordash.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:47
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Megamissen posted:i can think of marginal cases where it would be useful but "big drone with a sling hanging under it" just seems like a better and more versitile solution What is cooler to SF - kneeling in an corner with a laptop pushing buttons, or screaming onto a cliff top or rooftop and machine gunning and rocketing something personally?
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Mar 10, 2024 16:48
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Complications posted:What is cooler to SF - kneeling in an corner with a laptop pushing buttons, or screaming onto a cliff top or rooftop and machine gunning and rocketing something personally? get someone else to pilot the drone, while you lay waste to your enemies with one-handed machine gun fire
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Mar 10, 2024 16:52
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The jet packs are cool as gently caress, utility be damned, like that WW1/interwar Russian tank that had like 30 ft diameter big wheels or the US dirigible aircraft carrier, stuff straight out of pulp sci-fi
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Mar 10, 2024 16:59
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back in the 1950s and 1960s the US military experimented with personal flying machines to provide infantry with aerial reconnaissance capability, see if you can spot the problems with this particular design:  in addition to it being a giant blender with the death rotors right below the pilot, who is clinging onto the handlebars for dear life, it turns out that '20 minutes of instruction' was ridiculously optimistic, the thing was actually extremely complicated to control and required a great deal of skill to maneuver. expert test pilots had difficulty flying the thing even in the completely safe and controlled environment of a proving ground in the United States, the idea of actually using it in battlefield conditions is completely laughable. the counter-rotating rotors also had a tendency to wobble, which would cause them to intermesh with each other, destroying both rotors, kicking up shrapnel into the pilot's body, and then the entire ruined contraption would fall to the ground. anyway, 70 years later they're still trying to make personal flying machines happen
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Mar 10, 2024 17:02
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im honestly we suprised we havent seen big drones with extremely overprized "stealth blades" sold to american police departments for tacticool SWAT insertions to building rooftops and stuff offloading most gear to a secondary drone would help with the weight issues
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Mar 10, 2024 17:03
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A tilt rotor would be perfect for a personal flying machine.
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Mar 10, 2024 17:06
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Votskomit posted:This thread makes me feel dumb and I had to skip past some bits, but I feel reassured knowing that Americans are using the wrong millimeter which is why they'll lose ww3? The selection process for weapon calibers is simply one aspect of why America will lose WW3. America will lose WW3 because war is fundamentally about productive capacity and logistics - “the furstest with the mostest”, “power to a point”, [insert favorite military aphorism here] In the past, the American empire had sufficient internal markets and raw resources to simply dominate in that fashion (see Tooze’s Wages of Destruction for more details as to how this shaped the 20th century). America could afford to be inefficient because it was so rich. America no longer has that advantage. America can no longer produce war material on a volume or cost basis that can match or exceed the powers it positions itself against. The glib answer to why this is the case is “capitalism!” but it is somewhat more than that, it is America’s particular brand of huckster neoliberalism that is the problem. America is full of scams. For ideological reasons it does nothing about them. Cartels, ponzis, MLM, bogus debts, advance fees, promissory notes, pyramid schemes, bucket shops, matrix schemes, affiliate schemes, bribery, board rigging, false products, price fixing, bid rigging, output control, monopolies, monopsonies, etc. Some are legal, some are not, some are illegal but not enforced, etc. And of course, every scam needs its way to get its payout, so accounting and tax evasion and fraud are rampant. Every “legitimate businessman” needs a way to hide their hoarded wealth, so loopholes and tricks are built that then the more common grifter and crook can also use to spirit away the surplus value of society. Any attempt to do anything in America happens against this background. This is all so massive and so pervasive, that you don’t notice it. The American Medical Association is a cartel that limits health care providers and each year writes the new billing rates for hospitals, which always choose the maximum rate possible for treatment even if that is not what is done, so insurance hikes their premiums on everyone, and tries to avoid paying out, creating bogus debt, which because there is “legal” bogus debt, then scammers create false bogus debt and feed that into the system, all of which squeezes you. And that is a tiny sliver of a single segment of the necessary economy. All these scams boost cost of living. PPP adjusted per capita, relative to China: You need health care, even though it costs 15x. You need an education, which costs 1.25x. You need housing, which costs 1.67x. Food costs 2.4x. That’s the basic necessities of what a worker needs just for cost of living, without even getting in to negotiating wages for specialized labor, or workers getting hammered by specific scams or regional inequity. All these costs add up throughout the entire supply chain. Everything costs more. And because everything costs more, everyone is on the hunt for their own angle so they can get by. So “consultants” insert themselves to get paid exorbitant sums. Local power players pile on regulations for thee but not for me to choke out competition, so experts in navigating those systems pop up. To protect scams, enforcement is torn down in favor of individual lawsuits, so you get a whole specialized legal apparatus booming. And all this induces and promotes precarity in the working class, so the bosses can squeeze them more. In this background you have something of a red queen’s race, where the increasing costs from scams, combine with the cycle of adoption to see to it that a given productive enterprise will steadily be less profitable even if it is an honest and fair business making a critical product. And given a choice between two companies, investors will pick the one with the better rate of return, leading to offshoring of productive capacity. But critically, because of all the scams and higher costs, even if there is a push to reindustrialize, it will still face the higher costs and limits on volume. This is why, for example, Spain can build a train station in a month, or the Dutch an underpass in a weekend, while in America it will take a decade and cost 300x. Other capitalist countries have varying degrees of enforcement on scams and central planning and control. In particular, central planning and control offers immense efficiencies in cost control and volume output; its weakness relative to market centered planning is information gathering and sorting, but when you know what you need (eg artillery shells), it can operate at scale with speed. That is why America will lose. We have let the capitalists, in particular the smaller ones, the American gentry level ones, run rampant, and facilitated an immense amount of economic crime and systemic economic failures even by the standards of market capitalism. Cleaning that up and getting core costs down to produce on a scale to match others, and to produce to match the necessary challenges instead of perpetuating the power of present players, would require such an immense change in America’s way of being that it would not make much sense to regard that America as the same as the present one, any more than we see the French First Republic and Fourth Republic as the same. Come World War 3, America will lose because it will either be defeated, or the changes made in the face of that challenge will make the present America cease to exist
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Mar 10, 2024 17:07
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(I had forgotten that the initial proposal was for the Aerocycle to also be amphibious so they could sell it to the Marines, god, imagine trying to take off or land with that thing in water if there is literally any wind whatsoever)
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Mar 10, 2024 17:08
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Rodney The Yam II posted:I never before appreciated the fine details of artillery physics and doctrine, nor the design history and material development of guns. Unironic thanks to all the posting gladiators itt It helps understand a bunch of things. For example, why didn’t the Romans make practical steam engines instead of toys, even though they understood the theory? The limits of material technology. The Romans could not make large pressure vessels, not by a long shot, because metalworking just wasn’t there yet. It’s also why steamships took so long to overtake sail - for the longest time they could only make rectangular boilers, even though they knew round ones would handle pressure better, and so boilers were very limited in power. Well, obviously the same thing happened with many elements of firearms design - there were breechloading muskets and cannon in the 1500s but metal could not be made strong enough and machined tightly enough the guarantee safety and a good seal, so a very thick tube only open on one end - muzzleloaders - was the correct choice given material constraints.
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Mar 10, 2024 17:25
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I saw a wheel lock musket up close last week and it definitely made me appreciate how difficult and finicky (and dangerous) it must have been to develop and employ these controlled explosive technologies given the artisanal methods and materials of the time. And then when i see the footage of underground Hamas rifle manufacturing it's very easy to see how the simplest design in today's world is far simpler and more straightforward than a wheel musket could be, simply because we can make metal tubes that fit into each other better (hyberbole ofc but you get what i mean)
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Mar 10, 2024 18:08
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China and Russia have a bunch of 203mm guns and the Pion has made plenty of appearances of both sides of the Ukraine war. They still have a place even if there other long-range systems. Also, a 203mm is just going to be more simple to produce than some comparable systems to 55km+. Personally, I think it makes sense to keep them around and if push comes to shove, there eventually made be a return to even larger guns even if there are drones, rockets, and missiles also be thrown around. I don’t think the Excalibur shells showed they were worth the cost coupled with their lower payload except in edge cases.
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Mar 10, 2024 18:57
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Rodney The Yam II posted:I saw a wheel lock musket up close last week and it definitely made me appreciate how difficult and finicky (and dangerous) it must have been to develop and employ these controlled explosive technologies given the artisanal methods and materials of the time. And then when i see the footage of underground Hamas rifle manufacturing it's very easy to see how the simplest design in today's world is far simpler and more straightforward than a wheel musket could be, simply because we can make metal tubes that fit into each other better (hyberbole ofc but you get what i mean) That's a great example. Wheel locks are incredibly complicated, with all sorts of moving parts, cams, springs, whatever. However, they were necessary given the kind of parts that could be made and how strong and large each part could be. In artillery construction too, a limitation has always been the size of castings, and strong castings. When you can only reliably make small, somewhat soft parts, you need a lot of complexity and you have to limit forces dramatically. For something more contemporary, if you look at a cutaway of the Maxim gun, That's obscene complexity compared to modern gas operated machine guns. However, all of the small parts and delicate timings were required because they couldn't make small, strong, parts like a gas system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVpa1dC3VQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s951EH4EH4c I think probably someone like Ardennes could speak to this better, but people have an idea that modern technology makes things more complex. I would say that's not actually true in many military applications. The material limitations of what was available to achieve a certain task made many things in the past much more mechanically complex, with stronger materials and larger parts eventually allowing for reduced complexity. If you've ever taken apart an old pistol, or the bolt assembly of an old rifle, compared to contemporary ones, there are far more parts, timing, head spacing etc. For cannon construction, guns had to be built up and/or wire wound, they could not make long, strong, one piece cannon barrels. This obviously added to weight, so that a gun howitzer would be insanely heavy. You could not make a 33 calibre long 6 inch gun for land use. You could chop that barrel down to a few calibres for a howitzer, however. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 19:08 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 19:02
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cheesy alternate history novel series 1632, in which an entire early-2000s small West Virginia town is sent back in time to Germany during the Thirty Years War, spends a lot of time talking about how most modern technology can't be replicated even if they teach people exactly how to do it, because they have neither the materials nor the tools to make them, and often don't even have the tools to make the tools you'd need they also can't really issue modern firearms to 1600s soldiers, even trained arquebusiers, because they haven't been trained in individual marksmanship at all and don't really use them effectively. they end up issuing pump-action shotguns with slugs to a bunch of guys and just having them use them as though they are extremely rapid-firing arquebuses, but eventually even abandon those and deliberately switch to simpler, lower-technology breechloading rifles for logistical reasons there's a bit in one of the early books where they demonstrate a micrometer and the Swedes are completely flabbergasted by the idea of making anything to such exacting precision
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Mar 10, 2024 19:10
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:
Excellent explanations, and this is also where the American slang for Gat came from, this specific gun.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:33
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Mister Bates posted:cheesy alternate history novel series 1632, in which an entire early-2000s small West Virginia town is sent back in time to Germany during the Thirty Years War, spends a lot of time talking about how most modern technology can't be replicated even if they teach people exactly how to do it, because they have neither the materials nor the tools to make them, and often don't even have the tools to make the tools you'd need To be fair, swedes are flabbergasted by a lot of things
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Mar 10, 2024 20:45
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Mister Bates posted:back in the 1950s and 1960s the US military experimented with personal flying machines to provide infantry with aerial reconnaissance capability, see if you can spot the problems with this particular design: I like how you're just standing on the Jesus nut right above the blades in that one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut
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Mar 10, 2024 20:53
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HouseofSuren posted:I like how you're just standing on the Jesus nut right above the blades in that one it's simplicity of engineering the weight of the pilot helps keep the nut securely threaded. 
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Mar 10, 2024 20:56
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Complications posted:Grift. Theoretically, jetpack infantry could do some incredibly sick moves in very vertical environments like mountain regions and cities provided they have light enough jetpacks that let them carry heavy weapons and other useful poo poo. So the SF brained DOD has been drooling and companies detected opportunity. That jetpack just makes human skeet. And any fuckup on approach is broken legs, blown knees, and bulged disks
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Mar 10, 2024 21:00
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the russians just made gasoline powered rocket boots instead https://youtu.be/w7s-tnzPZ3c?t=76
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Mar 10, 2024 21:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/DocStrangelove2/status/1766163221092913200?t=g0ucpiegVpWGG2fNWxnm-A&s=19 can't even fly and fire like the 1950s version could 
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Mar 10, 2024 21:25
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Complications posted:Grift. Theoretically, jetpack infantry could do some incredibly sick moves in very vertical environments like mountain regions and cities provided they have light enough jetpacks that let them carry heavy weapons and other useful poo poo. So the SF brained DOD has been drooling and companies detected opportunity. That jetpack just makes human skeet. Two things about jetpacks: 1) in high altitude or high wind conditions, any kind of small aircraft gets a lot less controllable, and the design of a man portable jetpack type of deal means its balance and trim are kind of inherently hosed. You get a gust of wind and get blown sideways in that thing and your ability to recover is probably somewhere just north of zero, even if you don't go into a building or cliff face. this is particularly true in places where there are large objects creating crosswinds and up or down-drafts (like, say, cliffs or buildings). Drones deal with this by using sensors and a location fix and just adjusting trim constantly to maintain a set point. It's not clear a jetpack even could work like that even if it was fully computer controlled because a big chunk of the overall drag surface and position of control surfaces is determine by the dude wearing the machine rather than the machine itself. EG how big do the computer-controlled control surfaces need to be in order to counteract a panicking 250 lb special forces baby squirming around and throwing the center of mass and lift vector all over the place? BrotherJayne posted:And any fuckup on approach is broken legs, blown knees, and bulged disks 2) we've seen from the way the US has employed artillery in the last few years that the MIC genuinely doesn't give half a gently caress about what happens to the machine operators, so I don't know if a super high injury rate would dissuade the US from buying these things
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Mar 10, 2024 21:39
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We break enough guys parachuting, fast roping and repelling. Let's figure those out first. If we can go one calendar year without a soldier being hospitalized for an injury caused by training in the Tyrolean traverse and Swiss seat, sure, give jet packs a shot.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:44
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:We break enough guys parachuting, fast roping and repelling. Let's figure those out first. Sorry but those don't have enough margin, put on this solid fuel rocket shoe
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Mar 10, 2024 22:01
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Personally I'm waiting for anti gravity belts. So I can flip the on switch and immediately get flung off the Earth and end up in the void of space because its orbiting the sun at some unimaginable speed and gravity no longer binds me to this mortal realm.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:04
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That opening fight scene in Dune 2 ruled, agreed
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Mar 10, 2024 22:10
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the newest man personal flying device tested by the us army is a couple tabs of lsd
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Mar 10, 2024 22:15
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quote:The jets and powerpack are affixed to the wearer with metal frames; it uses five micro-gas turbines - two on each arm and one on the back. Their power is 1,050 bhp (780 kW), with the turbines running at 120,000 rpm. The unit weighs 27 kilograms (60 lb) and has a maximum flight time of 10 minutes, with a current speed record of 85 mph (137 km/h; 74 kn).[11] The flight pack can reach altitudes of 2,000 feet (610 m). Though its envisaged that in normal use, it would be flown at only three or four metres above the ground.[12] This isn't going on a battlefield any time soon. It seems like it's only good for tactical missions against opposing forces that don't have dense defenses (but if that's the case, they probably don't have air defense either, so why not just use a helicopter?). Maybe they'll sell some to the Saudi special forces or something.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:34
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you just KNOW seal team 7 or something is going to buy a dozen of them and bust them out for parties or whatever
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Mar 10, 2024 22:46
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Iirc it's a solution looking for a problem, the guy that made it built it "just because" and "it is cool" (likely a convergence of technology making it feasible since you can buy those little hobby turbojets commercially now) but, as it turns out, there's not a huge market for expensive artisanal jetpacks and there is a learning curve to using them (you need to take like a weeklong course at their facility), so they pivoted to soliciting defense customers to keep the company/product afloat
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Mar 10, 2024 22:47
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the us is so woefully behind adversaries on this tech
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Mar 10, 2024 22:48
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but seriously, "ropes" and "ladders" are technologies that allow soldiers to traverse distances and elevations, and both result in many, many, injuries annually. I don't know why rope training has to be so dangerous when teenage counsellors at summer camps can run preteens through a ropes course without incident.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:05
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Owlbear Camus posted:the us is so woefully behind adversaries on this tech lol this brought back memories of me just casually playing war with children’s toys
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Mar 10, 2024 23:18
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