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aphid_licker posted:Kinda lol that that corps sized formation has a single shorad bn to its name This always perplexed me about the US army order of battle compared to for example Russia, what happens if our air force is a little too busy fighting the enemy air force to come drop a bomb on some shack you see across the valley? What happens if our air force is so tied up the enemy has opportunities to deploy theirs in ground-attack roles safely? Are you really going to rely on Strykers with a pod of 4 stingers to fend off an air attack? What if they use stand-off weapons that outrange stinger? Russia's got a cavalcade of air defense (Tor, Shilka, Tunguska, Osa, etc on top of MANPADS obviously) we got ???? dudes with MANPADS or MANPADS bolted to IFVs? I guess there's Patriot... but good luck in a high-mobility environment. The US used to have more/heavier tracked/road mobile air defense stuff but after the Cold War we just kinda assumed the AF would do all the heavy lifting and never filled that hole. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 19:54 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 19:44
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skooma512 posted:The US really doesn't have much ground based AA capabilities huh. Patriot's really it, anything larger is geared towards ICBM interception and isn't mobile (or at least isn't meant to shoot and move quick enough to support a maneuver brigade) afaik. Pretty sure Patriot also cannot be fired on the move and has a long setup time. You get a pod of 4 stingers and a 25mm/30mm cannon and that's it! Good luck, commander! Maybe the navy will invent dirtbreaker technology and steam in some destroyers overland. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 20:19 on Jan 18, 2022 |
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Jan 18, 2022 20:16
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GrunkleStalin posted:I thought all the issues with the M16/M4 in Vietnam were related to the ammunition primer and soldiers believing it never had to be cleaned. This is the case, the M16/M4 platform is perfectly fine now. I wouldn't say it requires any more or less maintanence than any other service rifle. The new rifle trials will be interesting to watch, they want to move more towards a high-pressure battle rifle-esque cartridge yet mitigate the recoil and muzzle blast associated with them. I think one or two proposals involve giving every single rifle an integral suppressor even. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 18:02 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 17:58
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WW3 will bring an end to carriers as a crown jewel of militaries just like WW2 ended the reign of the battleship You could probably sink a 10 billion dollar carrier with much less than 10 billion dollars' worth of ballistic missiles
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Jan 21, 2022 01:44
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Top Gun Reference posted:Anti-torpedo torpedoes were in development for the USN and could have been a game changer if the program wasn't cancelled in 2018 lol. Supercavitating torpedoes would probably zoom right past those countermeasures anyway. Ah, you mean the hydrosonic missiles 
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Jan 21, 2022 01:47
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The MATV/JLTV has built-in night vision cameras with a flip-down screen and a halon system that suffocates the crew if it goes off and like no cargo space and the cab is as high off the ground as a big rig, it is supposed to fill the role of a jeep, lmao it owns Iirc the doors have hydraulics since they're so heavy due to the armor, like basically an apc ramp but the designers wanted it to open like a car door Imagine a ww2 movie where the commander comes tooting down the road in a jeep but instead its a big rear end loving over-the-road tractor trailor sized armored car being driven by an 18 year old with "40 hours" (some E6 rubberstamped their license) of driver training who is sitting like ten feet off the ground white-knuckling the steering wheel trying not to take out oncoming traffic or street signs Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 22:20 on Feb 20, 2022 |
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Feb 20, 2022 22:16
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I wonder if the failures of the VDV will make the US rethink keeping the 82nd jump qualified, we've only ever used the 75th for airborne raids in the past several decades anyway. I've always thought divisional airborne units were obsolete and this seems to demonstrate that.
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Mar 4, 2022 22:06
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i say swears online posted:lol no way, the airborne themselves would parachute into the pentagon to stop any cuts Didn't stop the 101st from being stripped of their jump status, and the Army even disbanded all the LRS companies recently so it's not like they're adverse to getting rid of "elite" heritage units.
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Mar 4, 2022 22:14
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i say swears online posted:well that's egg on my face, i didn't even know. i was wondering why you didn't mention them as well in your previous post The 101st haven't been an airborne unit since the 70's, they're an air assault division now. There's also the 173rd (itself a brigade) and a brigade of the 25th ID who are still jump qualified "regular" units, but pretty much every nation that still has paratroopers has brigade-sized units only. Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 22:32 on Mar 4, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 22:29
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i say swears online posted:maybe they should change their loving name if it's been over fifty years Supposedly they're waiting for the last surviving jump qualified 101st veteran that served during their time as an airborne unit to die, but that could be BS for all I know.
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Mar 4, 2022 22:58
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:How are Russia and China near-parity when we spend $800 billion bucks on the military in every budget? They may have "parity" in technology but not quantity. The Russian and Chinese navy are tiny compared to the US for example, and the US Navy is actually one of the largest air forces in the world on top of that. Whether or not hypersonic cruise missiles can negate that disadvantage though is another question.
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Mar 6, 2022 02:41
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this isn't true anymore, it's all T-11 all the time now The T11 is such a wonky rear end parachute but it's necessary because when the T10 was designed nobody was wearing body armor (and gym culture wasn't making dudes 200 lbs of muscle) plummeting like a meteor
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Jun 27, 2022 16:57
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I was part of a detail testing sense through the wall technology ten years ago, its a gimmick. It uses doppler pulses to find moving objects and is defeated by metal, so like a big appliance or ducting will make it not work. Even then, the only info you get is "there is something moving beyond this wall", which could be a curtain blowing in the wind, a dog, or a toddler rolling around on the floor with the mom laying on the couch. Afaik the project never went anywhere since, if anything, it was actually detrimental due to such high false positives. Imagine telling an 18 year old private "yo dude there is something in this room!!!!!" and have him kick the door in immediately doming an old lady because the dang radar said there were dudes definitely moving around in there
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Sep 11, 2022 16:12
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Trabisnikof posted:during Star Wars they were researching using space based particle accelerators as weapons but they had no idea how to really make it work, but it sounded cool. The name escapes me but there was an (air force I think?) project that used a massive capacitor bank and a cylindrical railgun (one rod electrode coaxial with a cylinder electrode) that fired superheated plasma apparently with enough velocity to be a viable weapon, it was quietly classified after demonstrating that it worked and I always wonder what became of it afterwards The (conductive) plasma was basically the armature of a railgun, and the plasma being so light in mass and the capacitor bank being loving gigantic with a huge surface area since the barrel was a donut instead of two rails, you get the idea
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Oct 9, 2022 00:37
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Lolling at the thought of an alternate history where the US never has a revolution, but develops otherwise identical to how it is now, so we have units like "the second royal battalion of Iowa (duke fistingtonshire's own) guard grenadiers" and units stationed in las vegas pining on about their rich highlander heritage
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Nov 7, 2023 21:12
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Frosted Flake posted:lol loving GPS and comms are jammed in Ukraine but everybody thinks this poo poo is going to work in a real war. It's deluded. Not only will gps be jammed, the satellites will straight up be shot down. China's developing essentially TELs that can launch satellites, all they have to do is destroy Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg and we'd be absolutely hosed
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Nov 15, 2023 02:35
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cat botherer posted:What does TEL stand for? As mentioned, transporter erector launcher. Those bigass ICBM trucks that can toot out to a random launch site, erect the big donger, fire, then drive off. Except instead of nukes these would launch orbital satellites specifically to replace those lost due to warfare, and rapid emergency replacement of stuff like GPS/spy satellites isn't a capability the US has
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Nov 15, 2023 05:48
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Full feudalism where are brave troops furnish their own gear and are accompanied by a retinue of jrtc kids proudly bearing their high school banners
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Dec 1, 2023 05:21
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Xi masterfully outsmarting the US government at their own game, agreeing to sell the US drones for four times the cost to manufacture them, thereby giving China three free drones for each drone sent to the US guaranteeing drone supremacy
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Dec 1, 2023 21:22
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some mad lad uploaded a complete teardown of a javelin guidance system on youtube 
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Dec 2, 2023 19:48
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readiness problems? what if we took a small fraction of the mic grift fund and used it to generously raise enlisted pay across the board and reform military life to make it more appealing? ...no, surely it is better to make autonomous ships and have contractors maintain them....
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Dec 13, 2023 17:44
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They always like to talk about "combat readiness" but I guess this doesn't factor in stuff like "can only produce a fraction of the 155 shells needed to sustain a high intensity war" and "the navy can't replace their ships faster than they'll sink". Doesn't sound like they're ready!
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Dec 15, 2023 03:00
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Ardennes posted:American war films are never anti-war because the US is invincible in them even if what they are doing is outright evil. Think of half the choppers got shot down during the Ride of the Valkyrie’s scene? It would have probably been mostly forgotten about. the creator is pretty anti-war and the robo-vietcong are the good guys it depicts the us bombing literal buddhist monks lmao
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Dec 18, 2023 22:47
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I keep thinking about the prevalence of cheap quadrotors with RPG-7 warheads ziptied to them and how it's almost inconceivable the US/NATO will ever begin to have anything comparable that somehow costs under 5 figures per unit let alone 4 figures.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:35
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Trabisnikof posted:the fact that if the us buys a loitering munition it will cost 100x more than if China, Russia, Iran, etc bought it goes beyond the organizational threat to flyboys etc that these munitions pose. the cost is due to the fundamental rot at play in the american economic system. Yeah this was what I was getting at, obviously the Switchblade exists but it has the same capability as something a fraction of the price. Could the US MIC make something as cheap as a Lancet, or even cheaper like a commercial quad? Sure (lol) but if the Pentagon is writing blank checks anyway, why would they? I'm curious in the context of like what a creative supply sgt could even do for "field expedient" stuff, are there even any commercial quadrotors with an NSN number? Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 02:11 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 02:08
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This prosperity guardian poo poo is legit baffling, wtf is going on ("lol empire in decline") I'm thinking behind the scenes pretty much the entire world is going "gently caress Israel and by extension the US we aren't risking our rear end for them" and nobody wants to be the first to say what everyone is thinking.
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Dec 23, 2023 18:53
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Getting yelled at by my supervisor for buying an injection molding machine and a few equivalent widget price of mold tooling because "I'm not being a team player on additive" despite my process having thousands of times more throughput 3d printing is.... not something you use for scale and the fact they *need* to use it for JIT spare submarine parts is more of an indictment of the supply chain than it is a super duper technological innovation. Seconding binder jetting is dog poo poo too, I had a bunch of parts made using multiple processes and generally direct metal laser sintering was pretty good, not perfect but serviceable (typical oblong holes but those could be drilled out etc) but binder jetting was absolutely useless and every single part was hosed up in some way. I still like the technology though, it's perfect for one-off stuff or little jigs/fixtures etc Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 02:06 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 02:04
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Admiral Bosch posted:A little late to this part of the discussion and I quite literally can't talk about it in detail but I work in aerospace machining. Another department at my workplace makes a lot of sintered metal parts. The machines themselves are very cool and so are the parts they spit out but quite literally all of them require time consuming secondary operations on traditional machining centers. They're a pain in the rear end to set up, and the level of precision afforded to us by the printer's resolution relative to the final part tolerances mean we have to dial in each part in the machine, so setups are not repeatable. In my judgement, at the current evolution of the technology, what you gain in material savings(aluminum powder is cheap) you lose in print and secondary operation time. However there are some things I can think of where printing is sort of the only way to accomplish certain things(difficult geometry of the overall part that would otherwise require, say, complex bending that could introduce stresses). Idk. Point is I hate them because I have to do those secondary operations. Is powder truly cheaper than billets or shapes? I'd figure powders would be more expensive per kg due to their strict particle size requirement. I've only ever flown plastic 3d printed parts and only ever for cable routing components which basically could be used as-is since they're non-structural (and thus easier to get buy-offs from everyone to actually use it)
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Dec 29, 2023 18:31
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Cursory search shows 6061 powder around $100/kg which is way more than billet but I suppose you get less waste, true. I don't really do much on the cost side of things though since we never mass produce anything, there may be cost savings somewhere but with the long process time of dmls and aforementioned pain in the rear end setup for final machining there are definite tradeoffs.
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Dec 29, 2023 18:47
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Hatebag posted:yep, you need to consider the force imparted by groundwater moving up and against the structure. gravel and piles (columns driven into the ground) are typically how that is done. you can also use sump pumps, channelize the flow, or hell you could even have a porous section of a wall and make a mud river flow through the building. there's all kinds of solutions! I feel like the gains in heating/cooling efficiency are marginal vs the cost in building a deep-rear end bunker especially if you build to passivhaus/LEED standards, it's not like we are out of building space necessitating building downwards considering so much urban land use is bullshit parking lots It does make me think about stuff that DOESN'T necessarily need to see light, I swear I remember going to an underground Target in Raleigh once and I could see sticking big retail underground being interesting for urban development. A 4-over-negative-1 so to speak. Example, though ironically it looks to be totally covered in parking lot in a strip mall sprawl anyway which I guess is still better than if it were above ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPQjA8d-_cc Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 16:42 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 16:37
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Hatebag posted:well if you put all the people in holes in the ground you could have more trees on the surface. especially useful in a scenario where the surface becomes uninhabitable. stick everyone in these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa feel like it's just a symptom that plagues a lot of other aspects of our society in that without strong central planning/just leaving it up to developers, they're just gonna do it as cheaply as possible using whatever bog standard 4-over-1 template prints the firms use and stick a bigass parking lot/parking garage next to em. that big courtyard with the park between the buildings? stick a grocery store and target underneath, boom, huge chunk of people's non-leisure and non-work reason to leave the house is taken care of within walking distance without sacrificing green space or surface real estate Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 16:51 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 16:49
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Hatebag posted:yeah, there are fire prevention measures you could use. at high enough temperatures the steel reinforcement in the rebar can fail, though. and the water in the concrete can boil off and make the concrete friable, weakening it, so you could have a structural collapse with a hot fire. Offhand I'd assume a fire at the upper levels would create such a draft that the lower levels would get suffocated without some sort of bulkhead system which would just trap people anyway. The lack of sunlight though is such a non-starter for me, it's massively anti-human factors design and feels extremely dystopian right from the get-go it may as well be a space colony. now I want to live in one of those austrian-style stepped apartments full of greenery but built so it mimicks a meandering mountainous valley with a river running in between  cut off the top half though so it's green all the way to the top
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Jan 3, 2024 17:16
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cat botherer posted:drat, this nerd sounds like an absolute pain in the rear end. thats what everyone thinks until you're ordered on a road march and all your vehicles are deadlined we "lost" (a marine unit also staying on the training base we were on stole it while a guy watching a bunch of gear took a poo poo, as a prank) an m4 and not only did the entire base get shut down but the ATF got involved. the marines must have had an "oh poo poo oh gently caress" moment because they ended up cramming it (sans optic) in a rusty locker in the middle of the woods. a rare occasion where a hands-across-america everyone thought was bullshit (the item was stolen, not lost, why the hell would it be in the middle of the woods) actually yielded fruit, an entire battalion of dudes hooting and hollering in real, authentic celebration is a sight to behold you also get a rank up if you "refer a friend", which most unscrupulous recruiters interpret as "whoever enlists after you from the same high school", and for doing some "future soldier" training pre-shipping to basic. really if you go in any rank under PFC you got shafted and if you see anyone going in as an e4 you can safely assume they're a loving idiot because they could have went in as an o-candidate Justin Tyme has issued a correction as of 16:42 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 16:36
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mlmp08 posted:An eagle scout knows how to use a map, compass, and likely a protractor. probably worth a promotion for that alone. they teach you this in the pre-shipping training stuff that counts towards a rank up which takes like a month or two, way easier than the years of boy scouting requires i guess what i am saying is if you want to minmax your 3 year free college ticket, skip the boyscouts and hope someone from your school enlists after you but before you leave for basic
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Jan 5, 2024 17:32
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mlmp08 posted:Yeah paying to become an eagle scout is absolutely not the “efficient” way to go from E- to E-3. But I understand why the government decided someone who already has a basic understanding of dismounted land navigation and camping can be a higher paid private than some random recruit. yeah this is true, and i assume out of pocket that the whole historical/foundational purpose of scouting is heavily military in nature anyway similar to school gym class and school lunch programs
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Jan 5, 2024 17:41
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Raskolnikov38 posted:https://twitter.com/margbrennan/status/1743990425738748081?s=61&t=ekRyXxBjaNIALwWgK2O6xQ We must respect his and his family's privacy as he dies while secdef
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Jan 7, 2024 18:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:it's ridiculous how wide open China's tech tree is, on top of a powerful econ bonus. One of the best AOE2 civs. no hussar tho, suffers in late game trash war
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Jan 9, 2024 15:54
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TeenageArchipelago posted:It's wild because to me, a novice in naval warfare, it seems like the dominant technology has always been the one that can accurately hit at the longest range. The era of the battleship was defined by large naval cannons that could hit from over the horizon, the era of aircraft carriers was defined by carrier groups carrying hundreds of planes fighting fleets a hundred miles away. Ship and submarine based guided missiles seem like the obvious next step in that evolution, something that can be fired from hundreds of miles away in mass, from relatively cheaply produced ships. also you look at the development hell stuff goes through and the years of delays and poo poo then look at the specs and.... its got aegis and vertical launch tubes and phalanx ciws and a 5 inch gun? like every other ship from the last 40 years?
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Jan 12, 2024 21:15
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We spend like a trillion per year on defense and THIS is what it gets us? It's pathetic, the MIC needs kicked in the nuts
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Jan 13, 2024 05:39
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The Oldest Man posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMwWQktNlPk *gunner on surface warshipishly* ooooo im just a baby, im just a little guy, its my birthday and i cant hit a moving speedboat, oooo cmon dont target my ship i cant hit ya
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Jan 19, 2024 17:56
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