The US will lose WW3

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > The US will lose WW3

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

Nothing cynical about it, it’s basic pattern recognition. If you don’t recognize “Think of the poor women of X”, or “the people of Y cry out for freedom!” as the machinations of a capitalist class looking for resources or people to exploit by now, then I wonder if you wake up every day and put your hand on a hot stove.

Well you shouldn't just leave the stove on while you're sleeping. That's dangerous!

# ¿ Oct 11, 2022 19:59

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:09

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

indigi posted:

could you link up a bunch of bikes in tandem series to pull a heavy load like sled dogs

e: imagine one of those cycle-powered bars you see in cities but instead of kegs of beer it's carrying a howitzer

i knew some bike people who made a bike bus out of fixed gear bikes, but a howitzer weighs 15,760 lbs not counting ammo and it's 24 ft long. You'd probably need a bike setup with maybe 45 pedaling stations to move the gun and have a durable frame, and i think you would only be able to move it on paved surfaces. Maybe everyone can carry a bag lunch and a couple shells on their backs while they pedal.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2022 18:38

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Weka posted:

The svelte M777 is a mere 4.2 tons.

You could probably get away with 25 pedallers then. Hell, maybe you could rig up a way for the workers to pedal with their arms too and pare it down to 18 or so, but they'll get tired quicker

# ¿ Oct 19, 2022 14:37

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/LiaWong__/status/1577209925255561216

the uav can deploy the robodog

Why not just shoot it out of an artillery gun and have it parachute in? I doubt you're getting a lot of range on that drone and artillery shells can be as big as like 150 kg for ground based artillery. a robodog with a gun and parachute is probably less than 100 kg. Just have a massed robodog barrage, shooting a hundred of these little fuckers out.
I suppose you could just deploy these off of atvs though so you could get a presumably useless gun dog deep in enemy territory for cheap

# ¿ Oct 28, 2022 17:55

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

genericnick posted:

If you shoot it out of a gun the cargo has to withstand all the acceleration before it leaves the barrel.

You could secure it in the shell with a suspension along the shell, harden the robot, and pack it in gel. muzzle velocity on a 203mm is up to 600 m/s and they make shells that have rocket boosters in them, i think you could get a robodog in there

# ¿ Oct 28, 2022 18:05

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

A Bakers Cousin posted:

My gun dog shooting gun has problems that need to be addressed BUT is rad as gently caress

Exactly, i want it to rain robodogs

# ¿ Oct 28, 2022 18:06

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Hatebag posted:

You could secure it in the shell with a suspension along the shell, harden the robot, and pack it in gel. muzzle velocity on a 203mm is up to 600 m/s and they make shells that have rocket boosters in them, i think you could get a robodog in there

I just thought about this a little more and a robot dog covered in goo hosing you down with a 50 cal would be an extremely cool way to die. Sign me up

# ¿ Oct 29, 2022 01:28

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

indigi posted:

my main question about a Chinese invasion is how quickly could the US even hope to get there, it seems like China should be able to blockade and invade before the US could muster up more than a token response but maybe I’m overestimating mobilization and travel time

It probably would be an escalating situation over the course of months or years of usa provocation to get china to invade taiwan so I'd assume us forces would be gathering for a while beforehand

# ¿ Jan 12, 2023 00:21

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Frosted Flake posted:

The American public would lose their goddamn minds and demand nuclear war after the first carrier sunk imo

I don't think the american public cares about taiwan or china at all beyond having an enemy to hate and they also don't go crazy for wars where the enemy can fight back. They love cold wars, proxy wars, and committing genocide against what they perceive as defenseless countries but I don't think they're clamoring to get nuked. The media would be begging for armageddon, though

# ¿ Jan 12, 2023 14:00

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

genericnick posted:

Does the American public understand that other countries can nuke them back though?

Idk, they might think the chinese nukes are made of cardboard or that a bucket of cheesy broccoli will see them through the apocalypse. There's no telling with these fuckers

# ¿ Jan 12, 2023 14:07

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1465328265963261962

uhh what if one of the assumptions for the wargame is incredibly off

If the taiwan strait is about 160 km wide and a torpedo has a 40 km range, an ohio class sub (biggest sub which wouldn't be used in this scenario) has a draft of 10.8m. based on that map even a giant rear end sub would have plenty of room to operate. I doubt they could get the number of kills the exercise assumes but i don't think that's due to the topography

# ¿ Jan 13, 2023 04:57

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

atelier morgan posted:

if some moron put an ohio class in the taiwan strait they would be the dumbest motherfucker in all of naval history

Yeah i was assuming worst case scenario to think about maneuverability. I think any subs going in there would be hosed because that's gotta be a pretty easy place to monitor what's coming and going, so it would be easy enough to constrain the movement of any subs in there and kill them

# ¿ Jan 13, 2023 05:16

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Iron Crowned posted:

Why are we still funding the proxy war in Ukraine again? I forget

It's profitable for oil companies and weapons manufacturers

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 20:06

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

What about rods from god but it's dropping a couple pallettes of pennies instead of a tungsten utility pole?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 19:41

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Bar Ran Dun posted:

my quibble would be rail, that dates that analysis to that particular historical period. ships are more important logistically now, much more important. they got larger starting after WWII and cargo operations became significantly faster for all vessel categories (and those categories didn’t exist until the decades after the war).

Yeah but if you're trying to figure out how many guns and tanks a country can produce internally, rail is how the materials and products are getting moved around within a country. other than archipelago type countries i guess. Hell, even in the us, a country that is very racist against trains, you can see infantry fighting vehicles and tanks riding the rails like the hobos of yore

I guess hobos weren't covered in special tarps and lashed to the train cars with steel belts but whatever

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 21:16

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Bar Ran Dun posted:

no not really. it’s very much barges and ships in the US.

even far inland in the rust belt inland. it’s ships on the Great Lakes and barges down the Mississippi and out the seaway. steel manufacturing is almost always port based and where it concentrated to in the United States over the last 70 years is definitely port based I don’t think any primarily rail based centers of production here survived. outside out boutique arc furnace stuff.

Aren't all the m1 tanks manufactured in lima, oh? That's pretty far from navigable waterways and just happens to be right along a freight rail line. If you're saying they take the tanks to lake erie and then to the Atlantic on barges I'll buy it but they still have to get them to lake erie and that's going to be on a train. Plus they have to get raw materials to the factory.
I'm not an expert on where weapons are manufactured but it looks like general dynamics makes artillery guns and from what i can see their factories are all in the baltimore-dc area along a bunch of rail lines and not waterways, so if they have to bring materials to the factories they're going to need rail, and likewise for shipping em out.
Maybe it would be more accurate to consider the entirety of the logistics chain because plenty of war stuff is going out on planes too but i think the point was to simplify the analysis

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 21:50

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Bar Ran Dun posted:

Ohio is on the Great Lakes and has navigable inland rivers with quite a lot of barge traffic my dude.

Baltimore is a major port. where is the steel plant in Baltimore? where are the steel and aluminum plants in Ohio?

look a good example is Chicago. where are the steel facilities (right on the lake or on the calumet) where is the Ford assembly plant, right on the calumet. they both have rail too. but how does the majority of the bulk ore get to US steel? how does the majority of the steel coils get from US steel to the Ford assembly plant?

I’m not saying rail isn’t important and a part of all this. Just that it’s a secondary part and it became the secondary part after WWII and the rather huge changes that occurred in marine shipping.

Boats can get steel to the port or tanks from the port but you need rail for moving stuff to/from the factory. Trust me, I've played a lot of civilization, i know how this stuff works

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 22:39

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

atelier morgan posted:

trucks deliver consumer goods to every neighborhood in the country, whereas military production is heavily centralized and most of it has an engine or goes on something with an engine to drive itself around, so you'd expect different transport ratios

pipelines for POL ofc

I love the idea of a caravan of 10,000 apcs tearing rear end across america but i think it might be a little impractical

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 22:48

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Bar Ran Dun posted:

depends on the factory. often the drayage is… trucks.

differentiate in your head between the drayage and which mode does the primary move intermodally.

there is a reason ocean waybills are referred to “master” and truck and freight forwarder waybills are often referred to as “house”.

Great, but if you want to supply enough factories and steel mills to do a war, trucks ain't cuttin it because they can't move as much volume as rail and they cost a lot more. Which is why robustness of railroads is a good metric for determining the war capacity of country
It's pretty irrelevant though because in a full scale war the us is getting out the nukes in the first minute

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 23:08

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Bar Ran Dun posted:

right and what I’m trying to communicate to you is: that rail ain’t cutting it because they can't move as much volume as ships and they cost a lot more.

four 150 hopper car trains is one Panamax loading to 13 m. a single Afromax might be ten trains.

it’s worse on the container side the Ever Ace is basically equivalent to 40 double stacked 150 40’ car trains.

Yeah, neither rail nor boats are cutting it on their own, but because of where the factories are located both are necessary to get things to where they can kill people. I think in the case of america, the choke point is the railways because america has a dogshit rail system.
Unless they need to kill a bunch of people in lima, oh or Baltimore with tanks or artillery, respectively

# ¿ Feb 18, 2023 02:11

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Relevant Tangent posted:

if nobody thinks they'll win then world war three seems unlikely to happen

There are definitely crazies who think ww3 is survivable for them personally. Missile defense is probably fake other than launching small yield counter-nukes to defend a city which may well be the plan but i bet there's some freaks who think the us could do a sneak nuke sub attack on say china's ground based nukes and they're willing to roll the dice on their own personal survival from the response. Probably more and more of them as the us continues to decline. Hell, why do you think the us has hardened bunkers if they don't think they can win?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2023 18:57

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Frosted Flake posted:

The recruitment thing is a perfect example of what Slavvy is talking about.

What actually drives recruitment and retention? Primarily, salary, benefits, conditions of service. Secondarily, housing, education, benefits for spouse and dependants, social prestige (which is directly related to the above and particularly how it pays compared to civilian jobs).

This is a loving joke.

So what did they do? Made an ad hoping that a desire to "be all you can be" (but not materially!) will somehow get people to agree to get shot at for peanuts.

Neoliberalism offers dick all, on like an ideological level, and they don't realize when that fucks up their attempts to wage war.

Lol median income per capita is like $38k. So destroying your soul by directly participating in an engine of genocide is worth upwards of $10k/year.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2023 00:50

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Orbis Tertius posted:

the idea of neoliberal states powering up to rational technocratic economic governance in the face of total war or whatever duress is extremely funny.

Obviously in a time of unprecedented crisis, the us could magically create functional railroads, hundreds of factories for components not produced here, heavy industry, hire competent people, and restructure itself to serve functions other than giving money to rich perverts all in a timely manner.
Though I guess with the possibility of immediate nuclear holocaust there's not any reason to have an adaptable government or economy because it's moot if they shoot but it is funny that the west has kneecapped itself from being able to have a cold war because that's the most likely scenario for the immediate future.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 14:55

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Frosted Flake posted:

Also getting people to die for rich perverts.

I don't know because I'm obviously in a bubble, but I'm curious how military history is taught that the social element is totally invisible. I mean, the best military histories these days are often social histories.

You can read about the MAS rifle all day long, TOE, OOB, tactics and doctrine, but the defeat of the French Army in 1940, for example, was that the will of the army and nation to continue resisting collapsed. There were still strong French forces in the field, but when the military situation became extremely difficult, and the sacrifices required would have been extreme, French society was not willing to fight on, for reasons that go way back to 1870. You can look at Léon Blum and the Popular Front, the Matignon Agreements as offering a France worth fighting for, which the liberals betrayed. In fact, many of these people would become leaders of the French Resistance. They continued to fight not just for their country, but a vision of their country.

When the Popular Front was betrayed, the Radical government crushed the Communists and fired over 800,000 workers. Albert Lebrun and the Democratic Alliance, elected in 1939, threatened to undo the victories for the French people gained under the FP. They could not really articulate, other than defence against the Boche, what was being fought for. They undercut the social contracts at the heart of the Third Republic immediately before calling on the population to fight a war for it. They realized that moving the capital to southern France or Algeria was futile because the support wasn't there. Not only did they sign the armistice, but these same liberals and conservatives "pragmatically" formed the Vichy government and collaborated.

What's my point here? Military history is not separate from social and political history. A soldier comes from a society, fights for a society. That's directly related to their belief in the economic system offering them direct material benefits, and the ability of the state to respond to their will, politics. A society as comically dysfunctional as America's is right now, should it call upon people to defend it, while ideologically unable to offer them anything better, will find people evading conscription, conscripts that won't fight, forces that rout on contact with the enemy.

I mean, how many times have we seen this with America's own puppet governments? Who was going to fight for the RVN of 1975? Even more obviously, the Afghan government? It didn't matter how much material they had, soldiers either believed the enemy offered a better vision of society, or, at least that the society that had conscripted them was not worth fighting for. Particularly when the North Vietnamese and Taliban offered an amnesty for common soldiers to lay down their arms, only the rich perverts and the hard core of people who had committed war crimes on their behalf remained, and they promptly fled the country.

Liberalism works by denying the existence of social contracts, but this is where they hit a wall. People will die for God, Queen and Country, or The Republic, or whatever, but they aren't going to die for... what? Who in the Rust Belt thinks that their decaying cities with an apathetic government and deep social and economic crisis is worth protecting, particularly if their homes aren't directly threatened? If the PLA invaded Ohio, sure. But if the war is in Taiwan and over Taiwan? No. Why would they fight and die, by the millions in all likelihood, on the other side of the world, if nothing will change at home? You're going to die for a President that didn't even loving visit your down after one of the largest environmental disasters in history, and a government that has not cleaned it up? One that has not provided for you during it, not compensated you for your suffering, not brought the people responsible to justice?

The other thing is that when you give people weapons, you are giving them a direct say in the social, economic and political changes they want. This is why neoliberal states shrunk down to tiny professional forces. Neoliberalism is public management, technocracy. It shuns mass politics, mass anything really. A mass military is a political force, the Grand Army of the Republic was the dominant force in American politics for decades after the Civil War, because once you give poor Germans and Irishmen guns and organize them, you can't shut them out of the political process afterwards.

lol I mean that's kind of a benefit, in a roundabout way. Because neoliberals have ideological blinders to the point where they can't contemplate corporate taxes or any of those war economy measures, they probably also won't think "what if these people we arm by the millions use their guns against us?". That's more or less what triggered the Athenian Revolution.

Hell, i don't even think americans would volunteer to be soldiers if there was a land invasion of the continental us. The us is essentially transitioning to a feudal society, they'd have to forcibly conscript an army and have them provide their own ar-15s like a bunch of peasants in the middle ages. Even for the dumbest americans it's plain to see that all american society is a churning evil monstrosity dedicated solely to enriching rich perverts, though some have misidentified the rich perverts as minority groups.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 17:09

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

KomradeX posted:

I mean at best tbe political leadership of the West has bought into its own bullshit hook, line, and sinker and think war with China will be like our colonial wars because America is invincible. At worst they know they'll be lauching nukes minutes after the first shot and they'll probably be fine so why not

That's exactly it. They don't care about nuclear war, plagues, climate change, or any existential threat to humanity because they assume they'll be fine and they can probably make 2% more money if they min-max the country to the brink of annihilation.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 17:12

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Danann posted:

It's the same report lol. One of the major assumption of this wargame is having submarines inside the strait not dying lmao.

Lol all the us subs have an effective 11 m cross section diameter and they'd be operating in as little as 50 m of crystal clear water. They would probably be able to see the subs from the surface!!!

# ¿ Mar 21, 2023 00:14

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

You could blow up a $2.8B sub for 20 kg of c4, a waterproof box, a cellphone, and a hunk of scrap metal lol

# ¿ Mar 21, 2023 00:24

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

mycomancy posted:

What would doing the bold accomplish?

That's based on the nato vs serbia war f117 shootdown. nato ran the same attacks day after day so the serbs knew where the attacks were coming from and they lost a stealth jet.
A very smart serb sam commander set his radar to the lowest frequency it could go, meaning that it had increased perceptive capabilities in close range but a smaller range and could detect stealth jets in the reduced area. But nato had countermeasures so if they detected a bunch of radar bursts they'd fire missiles at the sam sites, so zoltan the sam commander would only do 2 20 second radar bursts before packing up his site and moving. BUT on the night in question zoltan knew from spies that the nato cruise missile planes weren't operational, so when they detected the f117s they hosed the fuckers down with radar, got a lock, and shot his rear end down.
It's a very neat david vs goliath story

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 03:49

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

bedpan posted:

then, years later, he baked a f117-shaped cake for the pilot

He seems cool

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 03:52

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

If an artillery barrel can only shoot about 100 rounds before it has to be replaced, an adjustable barrel seems like a non-starter from a practical standpoint because it would cost more for very little reason. And i suppose if you're replacing the barrel you'd need a workshop to get it precisely in place.
Therefore the best solution is a multi-barrelled gun. It could have one firing platform and some kind of revolving mechanism to switch the active barrel in the field. The platforms are probably more profitable than the barrels anyway

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 15:44

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Real hurthling! posted:

why do mortars make a cool fwump sound when they launch in movies instead of a boom?

Mortars have a muzzle velocity around 90 m/s, howitzers fire at 830 m/s. It's similar to how a silencer for a pistol reduces muzzle velocity below the speed of sound, so you could think of a mortar as a tiny silenced howitzer
Speed of sound is around 350 m/s

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 20:09

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

BitcoinRockefeller posted:

Suppressors don't slow down the bullet down, rather they give the muzzle gasses a controlled place to expand and depressurize. Basically instead of having a poo poo load of gas squeezed into the barrel and letting it fly off everywhere at extreme pressure (and volume) after the bullet leaves the barrel you have the same amount of gas and let it expand ~20x more before letting it out in the wild, with a corresponding drop in pressure. You need subsonic ammunition or there will still be a supersonic crack from the bullet.

Interesting. Older rubber gasket suppressors do reduce muzzle velocity but modern ones have a series of baffles where the bullet does not have to pass through any additional material. So I guess you could create a suppressor for a mortar tube by drilling out a cylinder with baffles and have a silenced mortar and it wouldn't change how it fired. I wonder if anyone has made silenced artillery

# ¿ Mar 30, 2023 14:23

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Griz posted:

https://freerangeamerican.us/silencer-for-howitzers/

I grew up in central NJ and the army base would post notices in the newspaper when they were gonna do night artillery training to reduce the number of 911 calls about explosions because you can hear that poo poo 20 miles away if the weather is right.

Heh, it looks like a dick n balls.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2023 15:15

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

The US Army's special Milk Troops

# ¿ Apr 12, 2023 15:02

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

The j-31 is funny because if they did rip off the design they got rid of the absolutely brain dead single engine design

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 03:52

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Filthy Hans posted:

are there any VTOL jets that have twin engines

Yak-38

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 04:40

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

BitcoinRockefeller posted:

I'm thinking he meant traditional twin engines, not 1+2 vertical ones.

He said twins, there's twin engines! What more do you want, you madman?

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 04:48

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

How about instead of VTOL they just fire the jets straight up using a rocket sled or rail gun and then the jets land in the water and they pick em up with a crane? Seems like that would allow you to make the jets a lot cheaper plus the idea of shooting out jets like they were munitions is funny.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 13:48

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

mlmp08 posted:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-length_launch

These could land again fine, but the whole idea was abandoned as complicated and outpaced by offensive weapons.

Mat testing was much more dangerous landing, due to the forces involved in landing a plane on high friction mats.

Uh it doesn't seem like they landed fine

quote:

ZELMAL (ZEro-length Launch MAt Landing)

The ZELMAL program investigated the possibility of a zero-length landing. The program was conducted 1953 and 1954. It involved a Republic F-84 aircraft and an inflatable rubber mat. The aircraft would perform a zero-length landing by catching an arrester cable with a tailhook, similar to an aircraft carrier landing. The aircraft would then drop onto a rubber mat. A number of unmanned test were performed before a humans piloted two ZELMAL tests in 1954. In both cases the pilots suffered back and/or neck injuries. The program was not continued after that.

They just slammed the nuclear strike jet into a rubber mat like it was at fuckin WrestleMania and snapped a couple dudes' spines

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 14:07

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 11, 2024 08:09

Hatebag: Jun 17, 2008

Why does a tomahawk need black powder? Aren't the warheads c4? That's made outta RDX

# ¿ Apr 26, 2023 16:44

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > The US will lose WW3

«‹›9 »