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indigi posted:I know you’d use conventional explosives, fortunately that wasn’t my question. I’m asking if it’s technologically possible fissionable materials have a critical mass; that is, there is a theoretical minimum mass of material that needs to be present to make it go from sitting there menacingly to exploding, even if it is 100% purity in a perfect sphere for pu-239 (the material used in the W54 warhead on the davy crockett recoilless rifle and the us military 'atomic demolition charge' project) that's 10 kg. so no matter how you design it, it is going to involve a runaway fission reaction of 10 kg of material i'm not a nuclear physicist and can't do the math myself, but from my lay perspective the minimum possible explosion looks to be at leastwo oklahoma city bombings; somewhere in the 10s of tons of TNT order of magnitude
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Jul 19, 2022 21:14
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other, more implausible, fission sources exist but even the most impossible-to-ever-make-a-critical-mass-at-100%-purity isotope of californium that has had the figures declassified is only 1/4 the critical mass, not the multiple orders of magnitude difference that would be necessary
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Jul 19, 2022 21:17
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probably you can get some kind of mass savings that way? but literally everything about the assemblies used in nuclear devices is extremely classified so  you probably can't get multiple orders of magnitude out of it, like you would need to in order to scale it down far enough for this hypothetical. Trabisnikof posted:The W54 is supposedly configurable as low as 10 tons. And the British version contained a lot less than 10kg of material, probably through fancy design: that figure is why i said two oklahoma city bombings earlier, that was roughly 5 tons of tnt-equivalent atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 21:53 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 21:51
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tritium boosting etc would make the boom more efficient not less, though useful if you're iran's nuclear program not so for trying to make a nuclear weapon with the yield of like, 1 kg of dynamite as was posited
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Jul 19, 2022 23:07
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mawarannahr posted:seems extremely unlikely that Man and Nature would perfectly align so that a round number like 10 kg would be the official number where it blows up. that was just the reference value on a chart, the actual numbers vary depending on which dataset you use to calculate it it was accurate to within an order of magnitude which was sufficient for my point lmao
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Jul 20, 2022 00:28
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plutonium 239 literally only exists (beyond trace amounts) when it is intentionally created in a reactor for use in nuclear weapons so like, yeah where else are you going to get any figures about it lmao i'm sure those figures are intentionally inaccurate enough to impede someone else's nuclear program, but they're probably accurate to within an order of magnitude
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Jul 20, 2022 00:47
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unquestionably a more valuable and moral use of dod budget than anything actually on the books
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Jul 25, 2022 04:24
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Stairmaster posted:should be pointed out that the gundam was never one hundred percent invincible and was essentially obsolete once the gelgoog took the field at one point in the original show the gundam is disabled by some infantry guys driving by on hoverbikes and planting explosives on it the only reason the story doesn't end there is when a literal child left the cockpit and started doing EOD they didn't shoot him, on account of being conscript soldiers and not volunteer colonial policemen
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Jul 29, 2022 23:33
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The Oldest Man posted:Feddies will lose Side 3 War they did side 3 retained independence, zeon military forces broke off and continued occupying swathes of earth for decades and most importantly of all the rich people who ran the whole earth sphere were safe in neutral colonies for the duration, remained in charge, made fat stacks selling weapons to every side of every war for decades and all died of old age before any of the rich people running other parts of the solar system finally managed to invade earth successfully and kick them over as the rich-in-charge gundam is very cspam
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Jul 30, 2022 01:42
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the secret lesson of american military history is nobody has ever really been equipped to fight a war across the atlantic or pacific and nobody ever will
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Jul 30, 2022 05:01
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preparations for overlord began almost immediately after pearl and had the benefit of an immense island right off shore with massive docks and effectively infinite space to store and stage from* and the resulting invasion force was still inferior in number and capability to what the nazis invaded the ussr with three years prior with japan the us military expected to suffer more casualties in the invasion than in all us military operations before or since and that it would only be possible at all after having firebombed or nuked every single population center and having starved tens of millions (instead of the mere millions who were starved before the war ended) * - which is the 'why taiwan', in every discussion of america/china relations
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Jul 30, 2022 08:58
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The Oldest Man posted:because the us wants to use it as a staging base for an invasion of mainland china? i don't think the us right now exists in a way where it can want to do anything, but eisenhower definitely wanted to have the option, and china being worried about the us having that option has been clear in their strategic decisionmaking and weapons development programs ever since
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Jul 30, 2022 09:10
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A Bakers Cousin posted:This may have been the stated reasons but later released showed military intelligence knew this to not be true and that the nukes were mainly used to show they could the nukes were used because they were already killing every civilian they possibly could so why not use the new bomb, yeah my point was about the scale of the difficulty of fighting a ground war across the pacific and not about justifying anything
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Jul 30, 2022 19:30
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Best Friends posted:I’ve heard this a bunch, but did the Soviets have anywhere close to enough pacific naval and transport capacity to invade Japan? no, they lacked the effective transport space to land the insufficient landing force (all of two divisions) and would have needed two waves and that's even with hokkaido being very thinly populated and defended relative to the remaining japanese islands Aglet56 posted:the USAAF was practically out of civilian control at the time that the bomb was dropped, as targeting decisions were almost entirely within SAC's command. there are credible arguments that truman didn't realize that hiroshima was a populated city at all and may have believed that it was a mere ammunition depot or otherwise purely military target. one factoid that stuck out to me was that a common postwar argument for nuking both hiroshima and nagasaki was that a second bomb was necessary to demonstrate that the destruction of hiroshima was not just a one-off and that the US could destroy any other japanese city at will. gordin claims that this justification is entirely post hoc: there are no sources at all before the atomic bombings that describe this argument. a third bombing (most likely against the ruins of tokyo) was being prepared by hundreds of personnel when truman ordered a halt to the atomic bombings these are very accurate and important points that get missed a lot, the us military had gone fairly insane but this point in the war atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 05:37 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 05:35
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remember that the 'lesson' the us military learned from the pacific war was that killing as many people as possible no matter who they were or how you did it was how you won wars and there's a direct line from curtis lemay's staff of mass-murderers to all us military operations in vietnam
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Jul 31, 2022 05:40
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china and the usa are incapable of fighting a war with each other that could be won when i said nobody has ever been prepared to fight a war across the pacific i wasn't just dissing america, though i was doing that. comrade xi is not going to be swimming across the ocean to save the world from capitalism as much as we might wish
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Jul 31, 2022 19:25
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Rutibex posted:China has defeated capitalism by offering to build the rope it hangs itself with, and selling it at a steep discount. xi's mighty weapons arrive across the pacific daily and we let them in willingly 
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Jul 31, 2022 19:37
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Weka posted:Japan got half way across the pacific 80 years ago. America fought and one that war across that distance. Ignoring nukes the only thing stopping China from doing it in the next few decades is political will. japan got less than 1% of the way to being able to invade the us across the pacific to prosecute a successful war in fact, probably several orders of magnitude less than 1% of the way there, and they knew it and at no point was it even a glimmer in the eyes of the IJN's admiralty i think it would be significantly easier for china to invade the us across the pacific than it would be for the us to invade china across the pacific because the PLAN was built from the start for the specific mission of stopping the US from invading china via bases in japan (or taiwan) while the us navy was not and lacks the diesel electric submarine forces and anti-ship missiles and other defensive measures china has, but it is still frankly impossible even in a presumed future deep into the collapse of the us as a centralized power the us navy will exist long past the lifespan of a rump civilian federal government and rule the puget sound and southern california as their fiefdoms atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 02:36 on Aug 1, 2022 |
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Aug 1, 2022 02:29
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now after ww3, or merely after the complete collapse of global trade and capitalism, when america does not exist and is merely the cursed earth perhaps if we are very lucky china would come and liberate and uplift the survivors
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Aug 1, 2022 02:40
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just killing everybody you can doesn't actually win wars, ask saudi arabia how the war in yemen is going lmao more importantly, the apotheosis of war as mass murder is uncorking the bottled sunshine which is a campaign that cannot be won
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Aug 1, 2022 06:23
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MyushiVerSCOOTY posted:My guess is that they are using low velocity training rounds to reduce the risk of ricochet injury. its something like this, we have footage of most of the internals and patent diagrams of the rest and china's new rifle platform in mostly ar-15 with a few minor changes and a couple ak elements like the fire control group its a really boringly normal rifle, unlike the sniper grenade launcher they have and the west is too loving lame to develop
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Aug 1, 2022 06:39
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Goon Boots posted:i would like to see this tia the qlu-11, its absolutely hilarious and with the LG5s model is organic at the squad level
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Aug 1, 2022 06:55
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the difference between the boring qbz-191 where all the divergences from ar 15 design are described in the patent documents and statements as 'we have slightly changed the gas system to reduce wear by 3%, which combined with the reduced strain on the upper receiver will increase the lifespan of the system by 12% and reduce overall logistical overhead by 8% in exchange for a 1.6% increased unit cost' and the MIC's mcx spear going 'we doubled the weight of the rifle and ammo and also every barrel will need to be replaced after firing any amount of our proprietary 4 dollar bullets in exchange for shooting through armor better, also to do this we've given one european company a monopoly on all us military small arms' is a perfect little microcosm of us will lose ww3
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Aug 2, 2022 03:13
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the iranian navy has everything a navy needs unless it wants to land large amounts of troops somewhere they have boats with asms, boats with sams, boats with 4.5 in guns and diesel electric subs you don't actually need more than that unless you're trying to win the superpower olympics
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Aug 26, 2022 00:13
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evilpicard posted:Imagine blissfully going through life with the same opinions as the state department
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Sep 1, 2022 07:04
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not too surprising to me that the PLA ground forces suffer from boondoggles the PLAN is fairly straightforward in doctrine because they know exactly what war they are being built, trained and prepared to fight: sink the us pacific fleet in the south china sea similarly the PLA's strategic missile and air defense forces have pretty obvious missions they're designed to fulfill but the ground forces? the impression i've gotten from their development is that there really isn't an obvious mission in the same way. apart from some intensely weird and super local skirmishes on the indian border they haven't fought at all in more than 30 years. and there aren't exactly a great deal of plausible scenarios in which someone tries to invade china on land atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 00:24 on Oct 3, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 00:18
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there is a funny possibility that the chinese OICW leads to the squad carrying less poo poo overall, if only because they're in love with squad organic automatic grenade launchers already and 20mm launchers would be a net reduction but also they're just probably not actually going with it at all for general use, since the qts-11 is based on the qbz-03 and they literally just adopted an entirely new rifle with the qbz-191
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Oct 8, 2022 14:50
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classic blunder, literally the number one thing you actually have to do as a capitalist government is make sure your violence makers get paid inevitable consequence if you refuse to set up sinecures for your specialist murderers
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Oct 18, 2022 19:27
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Rutibex posted:it's possible to commit economic suicide, yes and the west being the west, we might even do it sometime
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Nov 15, 2022 16:04
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Cerebral Bore posted:you mean again i mean, europe destroying itself to prove its a good vassal has been incredible content, but nothing compared to if the us decides to onload into its own brainpan
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Nov 15, 2022 16:37
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Fish of hemp posted:Why would it be better to be a vassal of Russia than the USA? are you from the red alert timeline where that could possibly be a question for germany or terf island
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Nov 15, 2022 20:33
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Rutibex posted:so what reason does the pilot have to actually do the mission instead of fly the bomber to safety the primary role of most national governments for most of history was convincing people to die for them
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Nov 21, 2022 19:28
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Frosted Flake posted:Neoliberalism cut the legs out from under that too. yeah, lmao
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Nov 22, 2022 04:29
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animist posted:passive aggressive fire you can't make a narrative or a story out of that even all quiet on the western front made it more intimate than that for the purpose of actually writing a story
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Dec 1, 2022 19:18
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china winning the war for boondoggles lately
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Dec 6, 2022 13:04
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Raskolnikov38 posted:studying colonial North America owns because no one at any point wanted to spend any money ever on the new world. French North America was lost for want of half a dozen regiments and a squadron of ships tbf keeping a handful of regiments in the poisonous swamps of french colonial holdings would require many, many regiments worth of soldiers in a constant stream to replace the diseased, which is a constant across all the european colonial holdings in the americas across the whole era and a plays a role in how tf spain lost basically a whole continent's worth of colonies france was busy getting its soldiers killed in a whole bunch of other ways
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Dec 7, 2022 07:20
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The Demilich posted:Each mark represents a hospital bombed between 2009 & 2017 please, be fair sometimes it was ambulances or funerals
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Dec 28, 2022 02:27
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Cerebral Bore posted:also when you sell high-tech stuff to someone they're dependent on you for replacement parts and poo poo, so that's another way to build stronger bonds between russia and iran i don't think iran is at any risk of being dependent on anyone for spare parts for aircraft
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Jan 1, 2023 18:30
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Cerebral Bore posted:what, they have a secret stockpile of surplus flankers just lying around or something? they still fly f-14s decades after being sanctioned to hell and back by the us, if there is a single country in the world you could reasonably expect to maintain modern aircraft with spit and bailing wire it is iran
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Jan 1, 2023 18:36
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Frosted Flake posted:They now have more F-14s in service than under the Shah. It’s gotten some attention in military and aviation journals because it’s an unrivalled accomplishment. Not just still flying. They have created production lines for parts, restored airframes, made significant upgrades. It’s so far beyond flying “old” Tomcats. ah, that's really interesting and also i am incredibly unsurprised that general media has decided to just never address it
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Jan 1, 2023 22:38
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