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orange juche posted:L/55 guns are higher caliber, longer barrels (55 calibers vs 44 calibers, so higher muzzle velocity) but otherwise they fire the same round. The L/55 was designed specifically to deal with the T-72 but the M1A1 Abrams was quite capable of killing T-72s with its licensed reproduction of the Rheinmetall L/44 gun in Desert Storm. The thing that will matter more is probably the length of the penetrator in the APFSDS rounds that they'll be using. Same caliber but longer barrels, surely? (Both are 120mm, so that makes the barrels 5.28 and 6.6 meters long, if I'm not entirely mistaken)
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Feb 25, 2023 13:36
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Tai posted:Hello fellow vets, I'll try not to poo poo post but forgive me if I slip too much. This, too.  (I do actually have a year in a cozy Norwegian army office back in my past, but that feels entirely irrelevant.)
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Feb 25, 2023 13:38
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That feels like a "we're both right" thing - it's the same caliber (diameter) and different caliber length.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:46
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zone posted:I remember when Ukrainian soldiers looted an abandoned Kadyrovite camp and reviewed some of the rations they got. By comparison to the rotten and expired and just plain poor quality rations most of the rest of the Russian army had, the Ukrainians said that those rations the Kadyrovites were using were good enough that they compared them favorably to their own, and that they wouldn't mind eating them given the chance. I guess that indirectly says something about how much Russia is willing to pay to keep Chechnya - they pour enough money into it that their pet dictator/commander can give his troops notably better gear and consumables than their own. Then again, it may be better to compare the Kadyrovites with OMON - they're mostly there to pacify the local population, not to invade the neighbors. And I suspect OMON has decent food.
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Feb 25, 2023 13:56
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psydude posted:At the beginning of the war they were sending OMON/Rosgvardia (other police forces) ahead with the other main bodies and they were all getting slaughtered. That probably ties into the entire "they'll welcome us as liberators" thing? If they genuinely believed that (lol, lmao etc), it makes sense to have a good amount of police/security troops in the initial wave.
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Feb 25, 2023 14:03
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Duzzy Funlop posted:Jesus Christ, with the amount of new posts in the thread i thought some even more horrible development must have occurred in Ukraine. Thanks! It looks like we may eventually get our own thread back at some point, but this seems like a nice place to visit. e: That said, it looks like we're seeing the beginning of the retreat from Bakhmut, which is threadworthy news in its own right. Not enough information to really say anything just yet, though.
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Feb 26, 2023 03:24
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Rust Martialis posted:Hey, as a resident of Denmark, I understand the feeling here, but in times like this we simply need to put up with Sweden. Yeah, hard times require hard sacrifices. 
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Feb 26, 2023 19:30
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It was, but it's still interesting. It's not the first we've heard about sabotage and resistance in Belarus, either. If this war drags out, as looks sadly plausible, I wonder what will happen over there? Lukasjenko has proven very capable of balancing "don't anger Russia" and "don't anger his own people" well enough to stay in power*, but with Russia losing money and manpower, and pressuring him to take a more active part in a war his people dislikes, that looks increasingly difficult. My bet is that this will end with Luka or a successor still in power, but nothing outside of them applying to join NATO would surprise me. * With only a little bit of Russian armed forces to help him out...
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Feb 27, 2023 10:36
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HonorableTB posted:heh those wagners got absolutely obliterated. I think in the course of the battle they got hit with AC-130s, F-22s, F-15s, some Reaper drones, a few Apaches, and a B-52 strike and that's not even getting into the artillery and HIMARS support Wasn't there a translated post from a wagnerite a few weeks back explaining how they weren't humiliated, actually, because a surprising number of them survived?
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Feb 27, 2023 19:04
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I can of course not find a trace of that post when looking for it, so consider it unsourced at best.
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Feb 27, 2023 19:10
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Besides, didn't we just discuss how ancient machine guns (with new barrels) are perfectly useful?
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Mar 1, 2023 01:29
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McNally posted:That's assuming those old guns have had parts replaced, it's not just the barrels. The small parts need replacing too. Right, that makes sense. Still, it's not like a 1939 weapon necessarily must be a huge downgrade from anything modern - especially for a static defensive position. As long as we don't know what sort of weapons from 1939 they have dug up, it's not especially useful information.
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Mar 1, 2023 01:48
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M_Gargantua posted:How? AliExpress is so easy to do stuff via VPN? To me it sounds like the listings are just coming down in general A VPN doesn't hide your shipping address, though.
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Mar 2, 2023 20:51
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PurpleXVI posted:I thought this was interesting and hadn't seen it posted in the thread yet, a reminder that Ukraine isn't just relying on old Soviet hand-me-downs but actually has a competent defense industry of its own that hasn't stopped innovating. See also the Neptune - they seem to be doing well.
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Mar 5, 2023 14:17
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bulletsponge13 posted:A Korean War Vet who won the Silver Star once gave me advice for fighting with a US Entrenching Tool- "Keep in an L, and go for under the chin. You'll cleave a face right off." I nodded solemnly, because dude had the real life experience. I never confirmed the number, but the common held belief was he killed 12 Chinese troops on a hilltop with his shovel when his unit overrun. I don't think it really matters much, but I am not going to argue with weirdo church pastor who had a painting of him killing Chinese soldiers with a shovel in his office. For reference, here's a WW2 US field shovel/entrenching tool. I carried one of these (stamped "US AMES 1942") in Norwegian basic training in 2002, though I think our actual field troops use something more compact and lightweight. I've chopped tree roots and hacked off a padlock with one and it didn't even dent the edge. I've got a picture of the one I had in genuine 2002 digital camera quality somewhere - but this one I found on google is obviously nigh identical apart from the markings.  My mom carries one in the trunk of her car in case she needs to hack away some ice or snow to get out of a parking space. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Mar 5, 2023 |
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Mar 5, 2023 18:32
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Like this. e: I'm slow. Though this one is closer to the right model.
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Mar 5, 2023 18:36
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Kallikaa posted:Like those Maxims also anti Shahed Degtyaryovs I love how Swedish looked at boring translations like "maskingevær" and decided that nope, a machine gun is clearly a Bullet Sprayer.
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Mar 6, 2023 01:17
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Kallikaa posted:Didn't you Norweigians go with the French mitrailleuse back then? Kind of. We use "maskingevær" (machine [long] gun - compare German "Gewehr") for what you'd probably call a light machine gun, and "mitraljøse" for heavy, usually mounted, machine guns. The line seems to be that an MG3 on a vehicle mount or tripod is a mitraljøse but the same MG3 carried with a bipod is a maskingevær - so it's more about the role than the weapon itself. I'm not sure when the different words came into use, though. Also, I have to admit I had to check - I had not really thought about the finer details of what each word covered, and I've never been in a situation where it was relevant. (Ref mitraljøse / maskingevær )
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Mar 6, 2023 01:48
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I should have guessed - so many fun words end up being German.
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Mar 6, 2023 02:06
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Short side note about the British attacking Copenhagen: There's a short and direct line from there to Norway being an independent country. Back in the late viking ages, Norway coalesced into one kingdom, though practically it took into the 1200s to settle down. Denmark was a few centuries ahead of us, and is one of the older countries in europe (and has the oldest flag, IIRC). This persisted up until the plague hit us especially hard in the 1300s, wiping out about half the population and the royal family, and we ended up the junior partner in a union with Denmark. (Sweden was in there for a bit, too.) This lasted a good 400 years. Then Denmark-Norway was forced into the French side of the Napoleonic wars by the Perfidious Anglos, and we know how that worked out. In 1814, when things were basically over, Sweden (which had joined up on the other side) dropped by Copenhagen on the way back and wanted some war loot - partially in compensation for having lost Finland to Russia earlier in the war. They got Norway, but in the chaos we bolted together a constitution in a few months and got the local rule going before the Swedish army showed up to take over. To keep things peaceful, Sweden agreed to mostly respect it. We had an administrative disagreement with Sweden, and that union split apart in 1905, but that was a much smaller change than getting out from under Denmark. So uh thanks, Britain? Computer viking fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 02:01
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Herman Merman posted:Plucky little Luxembourg also has the third largest GDP per capita in the world, which is perhaps the more significant figure here. Huge GDP-per-capita x tiny population = Not that much money on an international scale. Good on them for trying to find something to spend it on.
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Mar 13, 2023 16:12
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Oh that is extremely interesting news. Baikonur has been an obvious vulnerability ever since the USSR collapsed, and my impression is that all Russian attempts to build a space port within their borders have fizzled out in much the same way as all their prestige projects.
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Mar 14, 2023 01:56
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Checking in quickly with the ars technica forum thread, this has apparently been clarified to be the under construction systems for the upcoming Soyuz-5, not the active part of the launch site. Ref https://mobile.twitter.com/RussianSpaceWeb/status/1635386687894462465
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Mar 14, 2023 02:05
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Tbh, Lichtenstein is a Swiss canton with a convenient excuse more than a sovereign country; it's not like their border with Switzerland is well protected or even especially noticeable.
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Mar 14, 2023 09:56
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EasilyConfused posted:Nobody really covered themselves with glory in that respect tbh IIRC, Portugal made a valiant effort?
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Mar 14, 2023 19:29
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The Norwegian social security system was an early adopter - they wrote their own system for managing pensions and benefits and the like all the way back in 1967. Given the age there wasn't a huge selection of languages, so it was mostly PL/I with some COBOL. This system was known as DSF, "The central social security system" (Norwegian is compact). Over time, they merged this into the wider benefits system in 1978 (which is mostly COBOL), and then even later moved the benefits part to a newer system. The pensions stayed in DSF, though. The replacement system for that, Pesys ("Pension system") came online in 2011, a decent 44 years later. This still used DSF as a data store for anything entered before Pesys came online, though. The final final replacement happened in 2018, 51 years after it was first introduced, when they wrote a Java + database replacement for it known as Presys. They also open sourced the whole thing and put it on github, if you want to browse some decades old PL/I with Norwegian comments. There's an article about it here [in Norwegian], with pictures of some of the hardware involved. e: wait this is a Ukraine thread? In GiP? Oh well I assume you're all intimately familiar with ancient and clunky benefits systems. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Mar 18, 2023 |
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Mar 18, 2023 12:19
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With the small caveat that their only land links are through Russia and through a rarely used goods line to Sweden way up north.
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Mar 20, 2023 16:29
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Der Kyhe posted:I kid you not but there has been actual talks on doing another "eurotunnel", this time between Helsinki and Tallinn. But that obviously kinda expects that the rail connection from Estonia to Central Europe works well enough to warrant this. I guess that's more reasonable than a bridge system via Åland, which was my first thought.
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Mar 20, 2023 21:02
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Herstory Begins Now posted:please shut up about a bog railway or my SO is going to get really excited and start trying to drag me on a scandinavian train trip That sounds like "post a 9 hour video of the train trip from Trondheim to Bodø" to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLUqXuViWxE Oslo/Dombås/Åndalsnes is also quite nice, and then you can rent a car and go up Trollstigen and over to Geiranger or something. Apologies if this ends up costing you a lot of money. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 01:45
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golden bubble posted:At least for Ukrainian infantry, the small drones are practically disposable since they usually only last half a day of operations. So of course Australia gave them actual disposible drones made of waxed cardboard. That doesn't seem like a half bad idea, really.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:24
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Saul Kain posted:Those alternate with the dream about having an exam in a class I forgot I was taking and never went. Anxiety sucks. Oh hi there's more of us. Mine alternate with having to watch myself never getting around to starting some sort of school work, up to the point where it's definitely too late. I did fine in school, and as far as I can tell I don't have anxiety problems while awake, but it still happens every now and then.
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Apr 6, 2023 04:36
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yurtcradled posted:Sometimes I read about what the young people are up to and my impulse is that it's messed up and someone ought to take them in hand. Then I realize that the nightmares I still have are from the same age and situations they're in right now. Yeah, same. I'm really glad I'm personally done with exams, but maybe we should arrange the system in a way that doesn't leave entire generations waking up with their hearts pounding 20+ years after they finish.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:19
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Coquito Ergo Sum posted:NDAs in the MIC are fun. If I said that the wikipedia entry for a particular air defense platform's effective range is a little shorter than the actual number, I'd be in trouble. I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case for anything fancy in current use, tbh.
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Apr 8, 2023 14:34
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Hyperlynx posted:It's also possible to donate directly to the Ukrainian government, who have set up separate funds for military and civilian use. I'm reasonably sure donating to the military one directly materially contributes to ending the war! Seems like it's a set of tradeoffs? - No drop or wind effects and effectively zero flight time seems nice when aiming at small targets high above you, but I guess bullets are less bothered by rain, snow and fog? - No ammunition seems fantastic; just hook it up to power and go. I bet the early versions will go through some (fragile, expensive, hard to make) spare parts, though. - You don't have to worry about the rounds (or worse, grenades) you're firing falling down on civilians - but I'd be a little bit worried about light scatter blinding someone looking at the spectacle, if there's anything shiny in the target? Best case, it's a box you hook up to power and service once a year that can shoot down anything it can see with no supplies.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:47
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GD_American posted:The Independence-class should count as an attack by Australia Should have bought some Skjold class instead. 
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Apr 16, 2023 12:27
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Computer viking posted:Should have bought some Skjold class instead. (I know they're smaller and not really meant for the same role, but I just think they're cool.) e: Also I just noticed that quote isn't edit. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 16, 2023 |
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Apr 16, 2023 12:28
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They started their life classified as torpedo boats, if that makes it better.
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Apr 16, 2023 19:12
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Stultus Maximus posted:I guess Big Navy is the same kind of stupid everywhere. The Norwegian navy has a tradition for gun sloops and later torpedo boats - so it sort of makes sense that a new class of "fast light coastal boats that do oversized damage" were thought of as being in the same class ... but yeah a torpedo boat with no torpedoes is obviously a bit of an issue. They considered Missile Patrol Boat before landing on "coastal corvettes". Also, regarding the seaworthiness: They crossed the Atlantic with one to let the US borrowed it and take a look (early in the preparation for the LCS program, I think?), and while it made it fine and at high speed, it still sounds a bit rough: quote:As expected, we had rather rough seas out from Iceland, but it gradually calmed down westward. It is quite tiresome to push across these stretches of ocean at 50 knots, and it can be difficult to consume both dry and wet. Our cook bakes whole grain bread and leaves sandwiches around the boat, and we take the coffee through straws. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 00:32
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As for the KMT, I wonder if one of the things the CCP dislikes about Taiwan is that they changed from an oppressive single party state to a multiparty democracy quite quickly after their economic boom - I'm sure they don't want too many of their own people thinking too hard about that.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:46
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It feels like Norway has a "tank sunk in marsh during exercise, two died" accident every ten years or so - the parts of the country where we prepare to fight are just not great tank terrain. That's what's between us (both) and Russia, though. E: Looks like it's actually been 20 years since the last loss of life in a marsh; 17 if you count "driving onto the ice on a big open lake". Computer viking fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 09:19
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