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Brrrmph posted:pinball owns. there’s a place nearby that is pinball and billiards. it had probably 20 machines. no bar, no food - just the games. somehow they make it on that. big fan of balls over here
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May 20, 2024 03:50
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 17:25 |
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Manzoon posted:Lordy I had no idea they were throwing these things up at military bases. I thought you meant government subsidized housing when you said "uncle sam". This all started with the "tent cities" of wars like WW2, Korea, Vietnam, and finally Desert Storm. In each of those wars, tents were viable because they were quick and small to ship, and easy to setup, tear down, and relocate as necessary depending on how the shape of the battlefield lines changed. What changed the most in Afghanistan and Iraq2 is the need for longevity. In the first Gulf War we were in and out of there in nine months so Shelter-System tents were a totally workable solution: roll in, set up your base, grid out your living, sanitary, eating, and working areas, throw up your tents, power the grids with generators, plumb your drinking and waste, and you're good to go. Each "Alaska" style shelter-system tent could house about 8-10 troops comfortably, and 16-20 for very short-terms.  Tent city at Da Nang Airbase during the Vietnam war using USGI style tents  Tent city at Ali Al-Salem Airfield during Operation Desert Shield using USGI style tents, note the HVAC unit on each tent  Tent city at Basrah Airport during Operation Iraqi Freedom using "Alaska" style insulated tents We tried to do the same thing with Afghanistan and then Iraq, and what we learned is that the tent system works great. For about 18 months. That's about the hard-use limit of those tents, no matter what the manufacturers state, they just wear out too quickly. The government scratched it's head and tried to come up with some solutions. The first of these were "B-Huts" or "Barracks Huts", ~16' wide by 40' long, dating all the way back to the 1800's, and constructed out of 2x4's and plywood, a crew of CE troops can put one up in about 8-12 hours. They each can house up to 36 troops, but the typical use case was 12-16. They made entire cities of these to house thousands of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. They aren't without their own problems though; they are poorly insulated, flammable, you can hear ANYTHING that's happening inside or out of them from snoring to farting to people having fun with themselves, and they are prone to pests, snakes, and dust/dirt ingress. One of the good things about them though is the customizability of them. As they are built, they are left as one big room inside, and one of the first things the residents do is build walls to separate them into cubicle-style rooms, that way the overhead cooling is still efficient but you have some modicum of privacy. Each cubicle "room" would have an outlet, and later ethernet, and eventually wifi as the need for personal communication grew. In the early days you could only get email/internet at the designated morale tents, but later you could personally purchase access, and eventually by 2010 or so, uncle sam started offering free internet, though it was slow, locked down, and prone to blackouts. Typically you would have 14-20 B-Huts each with 1 or 2 blue porta-johns next to them (mostly so lazy GI's didn't piss on the sides of buildings at night), surrounding a "town square" in the center with either a generator or a dedicated power hookup, a "Water Buffalo" tanker trailer or a dedicated water hookup, a group of emergency bunkers for shelling/bombing, and a "Cadillac" shower trailer with 10-20 showers and 10-20 toilets. Roughly 10 of these "towns" would constitute a "city", and if you were trying to give someone directions, you could tell someone where they needed to go all the way down to the individual B-Hut.   B-Huts in Bagram Airbase Afghanistan  Shower trailer similar to the "Cadillac" trailers used by the DoD in the B-Hut villages  Interior view of shower trailer similar to those in use in Afghanistan/Iraq during OEF/OIF The "B-Hut" system works great as well. For about 6 years. That's about the hard-use limit of the huts and the Cadillac poo poo and shower trailers. When you've had hundreds or possibly even thousands of troops cycle in and out of a single town, things just wear out. The government scratched their heads again, "we were only supposed to be doing this for a couple years right?" and again tried to come up with a solution. They realized they needed something with the modularity of tents where they could ship them in en-masse, with the longevity of B-Huts, and to add to all of it, they wanted something that had more efficiency for heating cooling and electrical consumption. The also wanted something not as vulnerable to small arms and indirect attacks as the soft tents, and nearly-as-soft B-huts. Add to all of this, they realized they had a very easy time of things with regards to room to stretch their legs in the initial days of OEF and OIF; they had been able to go in and fence off thousands of acres and just say "this is now a coalition base". They realized most likely in future conflicts they would not be able to continue this practice, and would be limited in the area they could use, and would have to house people more efficiently. This base "sprawl" was not only extremely inefficient in regards to heating, cooling, water and energy use, it was also inefficient for feeding, cleaning, and working in. I knew guys that would drop to showering every 2-3 days if the cadillac trailer in their square was busted and they didn't feel like hiking to the next square every morning. I personally would skip breakfast pretty much every day in favor of protein/breakfast bars because the nearest dining facility was a 10 minute walk away. The big brains finally came up with the modular shipping container housing I posted earlier. Called CHU's or CLU's (Containerized Housing/Living Units), they could not only be built at home, sealed up, and lay ready to be used as needed, they could also be stacked by the thousands onto a container ship or rail system and transported nearly anywhere. Once they arrived at their destination, no longer was the housing area bound by how many acres you had available, now they could stack them as high as they felt comfortable. You could place semi-permanent sanitary/shower/laundry facilities in front of each block and remove the need for cadillac trailers altogether. Some now even contain their own bathrooms, albeit without showers. Most of the ones I've seen have been 20-40 foot units set up in two to three story blocks, with each unit entered from the outside, but they are even experimenting now with 10-foot single-occupancy containers that have a hallway between two rows, set three units high. Most bases now have internet of some form or another, the free options being locked down and extremely slow due to the infrastructure being crap and the pipes being overcrowded, and the pay options being significantly better but costing from $ to $$$. In 2008 a group of 4 us went in on a 1mb connection for $100/mo, the group previous to us had had it wired in somehow. In 2012 I managed to get a 2mb 20GB capped connection from the Brits that used microwave(?) towers scattered around Camp Bastion/Leatherneck and you rented a receiver for $120/mo. This beat the hell out of trying to use the "free" internet which was a mess because the base designed for 8000 troops had 18-20,000 troops on it at any given time due it being the last port of call for anyone leaving the country due to the drawdown. When I was at Ali Al-Salem in 2016 there was decent free internet provided, but due to it being an ostensibly islamic-country-owned base, it was highly censored with regards to indecency of any kind. While there I bought a pocket battery operated wifi router with a SIM slot for $50, and got a 4GLTE SIM data-only plan for $20 a month for the first 50GB and then $5/10GB over that. All in all, CLU's/CHU's suck to live in, are cramped and mildly uncomfortable, but they are LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than any of the previous alternatives.  A large block of CLU's at Camp Lemmonier Djibouti  New single occupancy unit block design Sorry if this ran a little long, I just got to writing about my experiences in government supplied housing in austere locations, and here we are. spookykid fucked around with this message at 08:15 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 04:13
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thanks for breaking all that down for us spookykid
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May 20, 2024 04:26
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spookykid posted:Sorry if this ran a little long, I just got to writing about my experiences in government supplied housing in austere locations, and here we are. Nah, it makes sense in that context. If you plan on moving them or have limited to no local construction, a container housing set-up like that makes a lot more sense. The cost analysis doesn't really fly if they are supposed to be permanent housing. The stuff that I've designed is only holding oil-water separators and wash equipment with pump skids. We have a few at some mining operations North of the Arctic Circle and in tropical areas, the heating and ventilation considerations are wildly different and I wouldn't want to live in one that's for sure.
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May 20, 2024 04:29
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Kenny Logins posted:thanks for breaking all that down for us spookykid I just thought it would be a fun look into a slice of life that most people have no idea how it works, but you talk to any military member about "tent cities"/B-huts/"cadillacs"/CLU's/chowhalls/etc and they know exactly what you're talking about.
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May 20, 2024 04:31
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that’s a cool as hell post thank you i enjoy that the mobile showers are the EXACT same showers that they deploy at music festivals now
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May 20, 2024 04:32
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fucken great post hell yeah
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May 20, 2024 04:33
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big fan of b-huts over here
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May 20, 2024 04:35
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PIZZA.BAT posted:that’s a cool as hell post thank you
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May 20, 2024 04:37
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many years ago they recruited in my class at the academy for the firms that were bidding on designing those. they had groups of us design container housing for “disaster relief” What you see in your second to last photos is remarkably similar to the reefer racks used more modern us terminals.  Above is the reefer stacks at Garden City Terminal in GPA. In general converted containers are a pain in the rear end. Once one modifies the can the CSC plate is invalid, then it ceases to be a container and becomes cargo that has to go on a flat rack. Unless they go through the process of getting the design approved by a classification society but that never happens for smaller projects like containers turned into labs. But the military doesn’t have to worry about that. I hadn’t realized they’d turned it into a full on modular system.
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May 20, 2024 04:52
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PokeJoe posted:big fan of b-huts over here They had their advantages, despite being shacks built out of sticks in the middle of the desert. One of the biggest ones was that once they were built, as long as they weren't catching fire, housing a colony of mutant rats, or being an active bordello, (all of these things are things that happened including the whoring) the higher-ups basically washed their hands of them. That meant that all you had to do was go down to the "self help" materials yard, get a pile of lumber and borrow tools, and you could customize it as much as you wanted. Most that I saw had 6.5-7' walls cubicle-style with wood or curtain doors and open ceilings, but I saw ones done up into individual rooms, each with their own light switch, window, vent for AC, etc. In ours in 2008, we took the wiring for the ethernet drop that the previous occupants had, and we snagged a spool of CAT5, a patch panel, and all the wall panels from the COM guys, and a router+switch from newegg, and wired ethernet drops to all the "rooms".
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May 20, 2024 04:58
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PokeJoe posted:big fan of b-huts over here so you’re a b-hut head
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May 20, 2024 05:05
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Jonny 290 posted:fucken great post hell yeah
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May 20, 2024 05:34
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PIZZA.BAT posted:that’s a cool as hell post thank you
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May 20, 2024 06:53
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Kenny Logins posted:bsky isn’t great for videos and gifs currently oh right I thought it was like...a bad thing
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May 20, 2024 08:44
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May 20, 2024 10:04
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May 20, 2024 10:06
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"well well well" said Mytar, "who's mocking who now?"
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May 20, 2024 10:11
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The Buttpocalypse 
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May 20, 2024 10:23
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PokeJoe posted:big fan of balls over here text me
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May 20, 2024 10:34
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I wonder how many well-known companies there are in the world where people who don't understand the language of wherever they're from don't know the name and/or brand just means the thing. Like Konecranes is a former brand or subsidiary of Kone, which means "machine". Abloy is/was short for Ltd. Lock Ltd. I think Alko is pretty self-explanatory tho.
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May 20, 2024 10:43
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Abloy is/was short for Ltd. Lock Ltd. This sounded weird enough that I had to go look it up. Wikipedia posted:The name Abloy comes from a contraction of the Swedish Finnish bilingual name Ab Låsfabriken Lukkotehdas Oy, meaning literally Corp. Lock Factory Lock Factory Corp. What a silly name.
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May 20, 2024 12:00
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May 20, 2024 13:19
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Unfortunately I think this is fake. I'd love a Hotdog Stand -theme coffee machine:
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May 20, 2024 13:31
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the red is a standard color, they probably just painted or 3d printed the yellow plastic parts
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May 20, 2024 13:43
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PokeJoe posted:big fan of b-huts over here
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May 20, 2024 14:02
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May 20, 2024 16:13
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May 20, 2024 16:57
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a wheezy steampunk av draws near…!
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May 20, 2024 17:05
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the crying liberty paperbagging it feels like a new level for kelly
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May 20, 2024 17:06
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lol @ lady lib around the corner
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May 20, 2024 17:07
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May 20, 2024 17:16
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May 20, 2024 17:29
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i like everything about that!
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May 20, 2024 17:31
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this place sounds cool as hell
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May 20, 2024 17:33
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I love food museum shark
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May 20, 2024 17:43
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haveblue posted:I love food museum shark everyone loves food museum shark
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May 20, 2024 18:01
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rotor posted:everyone loves food museum shark we regret to inform you that food museum shark is racist
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May 20, 2024 18:12
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May 20, 2024 20:35
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 17:25 |
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i hate that bartender, at all the bars ive met him at
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May 20, 2024 20:40
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