N-L-M

FROM THE FILES OF LFS ORDNANCE DEPT.
 - Lone Free State proprietary information -
9.18.2247 
To: LFS central command
CC: relevant industrial concerns
 
@Sturgeon
@Toxn
@Fareastmenace
@delete013
@Sten
@Dominus Dolorem
SUBJ: RE: candidate heavy armored truck designs

Kind sirs,
we apologize for the delay in responding to the technical request in your last communication on this topic. As you are no doubt aware, the LFS Ordnance dept. was set up only recently, and administrative affairs have delayed the trials and testing of the proposed vehicle designs.

With the above said, enclosed are our recommendations for the selection of a new heavy armored truck for the newly formed 1st Heavy Ranger Brigade.

FIRST PLACE: 
Brownsville Armour Engineering Systems FV601 “Cossack”

LFS Ordnance was very impressed with this design, featuring a very good blend of features both for the current threat environment and for future threat environments.
Congratulations, @Fareastmenace!

 
SECOND PLACE:
Persson Engineering Solutions and Brewing, Main Battle Tank, MBT-01, "Gigan"


Another very impressive beast, again featuring a design focused not only on the current threat environment but on the future as well.
@Sten, very well done.

THIRD PLACE:
East Oil Company MBT-1 Monolith


An extremely large, extremely powerful beast, which while perhaps somewhat poorly tailored to the requirements of the LFS nevertheless would offer substantial performance in service.
@Dominus Dolorem, good show.

Detailed opinions on all designs to follow shortly.
 

FROM THE FILES OF LFS ORDNANCE DEPT.
 - Lone Free State proprietary information -
9.18.2247 
To: LFS central command
CC: relevant industrial concerns
 
@Sturgeon
@Toxn
@Fareastmenace
@delete013
@Sten
@Dominus Dolorem
SUBJ: RE: candidate heavy armored truck designs

Kind sirs,
we apologize for the delay in responding to the technical request in your last communication on this topic. As you are no doubt aware, the LFS Ordnance dept. was set up only recently, and administrative affairs have delayed the trials and testing of the proposed vehicle designs.

With the above said, enclosed are our recommendations for the selection of a new heavy armored truck for the newly formed 1st Heavy Ranger Brigade.

FIRST PLACE: 
Brownsville Armour Engineering Systems FV601 “Cossack”

LFS Ordnance was very impressed with this design, featuring a very good blend of features both for the current threat environment and for future threat environments.
Congratulations, @Fareastmenace!

 
SECOND PLACE:
Persson Engineering Solutions and Brewing, Main Battle Tank, MBT-01, "Gigan"


Another very impressive beast, again featuring a design focused not only on the current threat environment but on the future as well.
@Sten, very well done.

THIRD PLACE:
East Oil Company MBT-1 Monolith


An extremely large, extremely powerful beast, which while perhaps somewhat poorly tailored to the requirements of the LFS nevertheless would offer substantial performance in service.
@Dominus Dolorem, good show.

Detailed opinions on all designs to follow shortly.
 

With the kind permission of Colli, I present to you the 2021 update, as well as a certain retrospective, as I fairly recently dove head-first into this topic for the first time in years.
 
So what’s changed over the past year? In the field of GPUs, Nvidia have released their 30 series cards, to great joy and great anger, depending on who exactly you ask. There’s no question that the 30 series brings great performance gains (with the lower end currently available matching the higher end of the 20-series, for instance the 3060Ti is largely equivalent to the 2080 Super), and that the Founder’s Edition cooling solution is both affordable (being offered at MSRP and not above, unusually) and effective (the through-flow solution being fairly highly regarded).
 
AMD, likewise, has released its 6000-series, which appears to be lagging behind Nvidia’s offerings for performance at a given cost point, excepting some of the more over-priced Nvidia cards. In terms of raw capability, Nvidia cards put more of an emphasis on ray-tracing at any given performance category over plain ol rasterization, and slightly less on shaders, and a wide array of benchmarks show a distinct advantage there, with the latest AMD offerings falling behind the last gen Nvidia ones. 
So where is the controversy regarding these cards? Largely in the cost, marketing, and target market. The higher end, 3090s, 6900XTs,  and 3080s are marketed as gaming devices yet seem better suited to graphics workstations, and are very steeply priced. The lower end is perfectly acceptable, if you can get your hands on them.
The graphics card shortage is perhaps even worse than it was last year, though that shows signs of reversing as of mid August. The extremely high demand has been driven by 2 major factors - the first, the Cryptocurrency market, which exploded over the past year, and the second being lockdown-inspired demand for high performance desktops, both for “working from home” and for lockdown entertainment. 
 
Both of those, however, are showing certain signs of abating. The Crypto market took a few major hits over the past year, after its meteoric rise. Notably, the Chinese outlawing mining both tanked the value (reducing the value of mining in the civilized world), and flooded the Asian market with used graphics cards, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world. And with the end of serious lockdowns in most of the civilized world, the demand for high end gaming-capable computers is dying off and many are available secondhand (and indeed the buyers thereof aren’t competing for the latest and greatest equipment any more).

For what it’s worth, per the Steam hardware survey, the most popular of these newer cards is the 3070, followed by the 3080, then the 3060, with the 3090 falling far behind and the latest AMD cards not even making the list. The Nvidia 10 and 16 series still hold the lion’s share of the market, of course. Intel’s new foray into graphics cards, rather than just integrated graphics, may expand the market options from the current duopoly. The new line of Nvidia CPUs, if they venture into the consumer level and not just the datacenter class, will mean we’ll have 3 giants doing both CPUs and GPUs, which will hopefully only do good things on the consumer side.
In the field of CPUs, Intel still holds the lead in single thread performance, but the “11th-gen” flagship performance has left much to be desired, with the i9-11900k being noticeably worse than its predecessor, the i9-10900k, in many benchmarks, as an example. Popular opinion is that they were to a certain extent rushed out to maintain Intel’s image as the market leader, even if AMD is neck to neck if not overtaking them outright by this point. In fact, the perception of being a market leader is so important, that Intel is renaming their node size technology to better compete (though as we all know the “node size” in nm doesn’t actually correspond to any actual real physical measurement, and Intel have consistently squeezed more performance out of any arbitrary self-reported number than competitors). 

The Ryzen 5000 series is seriously kicking Intel in the nads, with the Ryzen 9 5900X, at comparable price to the  i9-11900k, offering many more cores, lower TDP, and only slightly lower clock speed, for what is a very spicy package Intel has a hard time matching. Intel’s 12th gen, which should be out any day now, may offer a worthwhile response, but then again may not. Other than for compatibility and stability reasons, it’s getting ever harder to recommend Intel, so they’ll have to step up if they want to not become the underdog themselves.
 
Unusually, this year also brings RAM news - DDR5 is right around the corner, once again offering increased capacities at higher speeds. Available likely in late Q4 2021, along with the Intel 12th gen CPUs which are reportedly the first which will be compatible.
 
In conclusion, it’s been quite a year, and competition is running hot. Hopefully the following year will bring more fancy new products.
 
So, where do I see this going?
Looking back 7 years, to when I was last really paying attention, we see a few interesting developments reaching their ends, and a few new ones opening up.
One development which appears to be reaching its end is screen technology. We now have screens which refresh faster than the brain can actually usefully recognize (240 Hz), and screens at resolutions greater than that of the human eye (4k, 27” monitors at reasonable distance from your face). Clearly, once those two factors are combined, perhaps even in a curved wide monitor which are ever more the rage these days, there won’t be much more to be done in that field, which also implies a limit to target performance for GPUs, at least for gaming applications. Doubly so, when one considers the various “AI” techniques being introduced such as DLSS, which reduce the workload of rasterization. Unless something major comes along which requires much more processing power, while the end is far away it definitely appears to be within sight. 
 
RAM, on the other hand, appears to be getting ever faster and ever larger, with the most interesting development being, in my opinion, Intel’s Optane, which is a kind of middle ground between SSDs and RAM, with most of the attendant advantages of either. Current programs do very much like their RAM, and that’s not a trend that’s showing any signs of stopping, either.
 
Another interesting development is the gradual reduction in number and types of cables, both from wireless communication and inductive power delivery, and by the USB standards slowly displacing everything else (other than graphics, though that too may change soon with USB4 allowing DisplayPort tunneling). This convergence has done much to address the e-waste problem, as well as the “rat’s nest” of cables of the computers of yore.
 
Along with the cables disappearing, so too have physical data storage media, to a very large extent. Internet-based “cloud” data storage, streaming services, and the like have entirely displaced such things as the CD, to the point where not only do many computers come without, they don’t even come with the bays required to install one. This has of course resulted in external, USB-powered ones, for those occasions where you do need to read one, which do unfortunately add clutter rather than remove it. 
And now, whither cloud storage?

Over the past few years, and the last year in particular, we’ve seen a rush to both get into the cloud business via an absurd explosion of streaming services all requiring a subscription to access their exclusive content, and to monetize existing formerly free internet services. Beyond the usual “freemium”, “free but tons of adds”, and “free but we steal all your data”, we’ve seen free services cut down significantly in favor of the paid versions, “software as a service”, and increased executive meddling in what you do on said platforms. While highly unpleasant if you are on the wrong end of things, it does once and for all answer the question of “who’s paying for all these free internet things”. But bottom line, if you’re one of those people who keeps all their data on the cloud, best ask yourself what happens when your data host decides to unperson you for wrongthink of whatever flavor, real or imagined. Doubly so if your data is also a source of income.
 
So, how should you store your data on your own PC?

The conventional wisdom of past years has been to have at least a small SSD for your OS and commonly used programs, and an HDD for the heavy lifting. In the current year, and doubly so in the near future, it appears that if you only intend on keeping around a small quantity of data, you can get away with only having an SSD, and no HDD at all. Of course, this approach isn’t fault-tolerable, and recovering data from a damaged SSD is not really possible in the same way it is from a damaged HDD. So it seems an HDD is still desirable for the near future, at least, and perhaps onwards. External HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, and you likely have some digital media you really don’t want to lose, so getting a couple and storing one in a different building is not a bad idea. And if you’re into really long term read-only storage, for things like family photos, DVDs or Blu-Rays are pretty cheap and last basically forever, and are likely more forgiving of rough storage than the HDDs. 
 
That more or less wraps up my opinions on the topic, yours may of course vary.
 

With the kind permission of Colli, I present to you the 2021 update, as well as a certain retrospective, as I fairly recently dove head-first into this topic for the first time in years.
 
So what’s changed over the past year? In the field of GPUs, Nvidia have released their 30 series cards, to great joy and great anger, depending on who exactly you ask. There’s no question that the 30 series brings great performance gains (with the lower end currently available matching the higher end of the 20-series, for instance the 3060Ti is largely equivalent to the 2080 Super), and that the Founder’s Edition cooling solution is both affordable (being offered at MSRP and not above, unusually) and effective (the through-flow solution being fairly highly regarded).
 
AMD, likewise, has released its 6000-series, which appears to be lagging behind Nvidia’s offerings for performance at a given cost point, excepting some of the more over-priced Nvidia cards. In terms of raw capability, Nvidia cards put more of an emphasis on ray-tracing at any given performance category over plain ol rasterization, and slightly less on shaders, and a wide array of benchmarks show a distinct advantage there, with the latest AMD offerings falling behind the last gen Nvidia ones. 
So where is the controversy regarding these cards? Largely in the cost, marketing, and target market. The higher end, 3090s, 6900XTs,  and 3080s are marketed as gaming devices yet seem better suited to graphics workstations, and are very steeply priced. The lower end is perfectly acceptable, if you can get your hands on them.
The graphics card shortage is perhaps even worse than it was last year, though that shows signs of reversing as of mid August. The extremely high demand has been driven by 2 major factors - the first, the Cryptocurrency market, which exploded over the past year, and the second being lockdown-inspired demand for high performance desktops, both for “working from home” and for lockdown entertainment. 
 
Both of those, however, are showing certain signs of abating. The Crypto market took a few major hits over the past year, after its meteoric rise. Notably, the Chinese outlawing mining both tanked the value (reducing the value of mining in the civilized world), and flooded the Asian market with used graphics cards, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world. And with the end of serious lockdowns in most of the civilized world, the demand for high end gaming-capable computers is dying off and many are available secondhand (and indeed the buyers thereof aren’t competing for the latest and greatest equipment any more).

For what it’s worth, per the Steam hardware survey, the most popular of these newer cards is the 3070, followed by the 3080, then the 3060, with the 3090 falling far behind and the latest AMD cards not even making the list. The Nvidia 10 and 16 series still hold the lion’s share of the market, of course. Intel’s new foray into graphics cards, rather than just integrated graphics, may expand the market options from the current duopoly. The new line of Nvidia CPUs, if they venture into the consumer level and not just the datacenter class, will mean we’ll have 3 giants doing both CPUs and GPUs, which will hopefully only do good things on the consumer side.
In the field of CPUs, Intel still holds the lead in single thread performance, but the “11th-gen” flagship performance has left much to be desired, with the i9-11900k being noticeably worse than its predecessor, the i9-10900k, in many benchmarks, as an example. Popular opinion is that they were to a certain extent rushed out to maintain Intel’s image as the market leader, even if AMD is neck to neck if not overtaking them outright by this point. In fact, the perception of being a market leader is so important, that Intel is renaming their node size technology to better compete (though as we all know the “node size” in nm doesn’t actually correspond to any actual real physical measurement, and Intel have consistently squeezed more performance out of any arbitrary self-reported number than competitors). 

The Ryzen 5000 series is seriously kicking Intel in the nads, with the Ryzen 9 5900X, at comparable price to the  i9-11900k, offering many more cores, lower TDP, and only slightly lower clock speed, for what is a very spicy package Intel has a hard time matching. Intel’s 12th gen, which should be out any day now, may offer a worthwhile response, but then again may not. Other than for compatibility and stability reasons, it’s getting ever harder to recommend Intel, so they’ll have to step up if they want to not become the underdog themselves.
 
Unusually, this year also brings RAM news - DDR5 is right around the corner, once again offering increased capacities at higher speeds. Available likely in late Q4 2021, along with the Intel 12th gen CPUs which are reportedly the first which will be compatible.
 
In conclusion, it’s been quite a year, and competition is running hot. Hopefully the following year will bring more fancy new products.
 
So, where do I see this going?
Looking back 7 years, to when I was last really paying attention, we see a few interesting developments reaching their ends, and a few new ones opening up.
One development which appears to be reaching its end is screen technology. We now have screens which refresh faster than the brain can actually usefully recognize (240 Hz), and screens at resolutions greater than that of the human eye (4k, 27” monitors at reasonable distance from your face). Clearly, once those two factors are combined, perhaps even in a curved wide monitor which are ever more the rage these days, there won’t be much more to be done in that field, which also implies a limit to target performance for GPUs, at least for gaming applications. Doubly so, when one considers the various “AI” techniques being introduced such as DLSS, which reduce the workload of rasterization. Unless something major comes along which requires much more processing power, while the end is far away it definitely appears to be within sight. 
 
RAM, on the other hand, appears to be getting ever faster and ever larger, with the most interesting development being, in my opinion, Intel’s Optane, which is a kind of middle ground between SSDs and RAM, with most of the attendant advantages of either. Current programs do very much like their RAM, and that’s not a trend that’s showing any signs of stopping, either.
 
Another interesting development is the gradual reduction in number and types of cables, both from wireless communication and inductive power delivery, and by the USB standards slowly displacing everything else (other than graphics, though that too may change soon with USB4 allowing DisplayPort tunneling). This convergence has done much to address the e-waste problem, as well as the “rat’s nest” of cables of the computers of yore.
 
Along with the cables disappearing, so too have physical data storage media, to a very large extent. Internet-based “cloud” data storage, streaming services, and the like have entirely displaced such things as the CD, to the point where not only do many computers come without, they don’t even come with the bays required to install one. This has of course resulted in external, USB-powered ones, for those occasions where you do need to read one, which do unfortunately add clutter rather than remove it. 
And now, whither cloud storage?

Over the past few years, and the last year in particular, we’ve seen a rush to both get into the cloud business via an absurd explosion of streaming services all requiring a subscription to access their exclusive content, and to monetize existing formerly free internet services. Beyond the usual “freemium”, “free but tons of adds”, and “free but we steal all your data”, we’ve seen free services cut down significantly in favor of the paid versions, “software as a service”, and increased executive meddling in what you do on said platforms. While highly unpleasant if you are on the wrong end of things, it does once and for all answer the question of “who’s paying for all these free internet things”. But bottom line, if you’re one of those people who keeps all their data on the cloud, best ask yourself what happens when your data host decides to unperson you for wrongthink of whatever flavor, real or imagined. Doubly so if your data is also a source of income.
 
So, how should you store your data on your own PC?

The conventional wisdom of past years has been to have at least a small SSD for your OS and commonly used programs, and an HDD for the heavy lifting. In the current year, and doubly so in the near future, it appears that if you only intend on keeping around a small quantity of data, you can get away with only having an SSD, and no HDD at all. Of course, this approach isn’t fault-tolerable, and recovering data from a damaged SSD is not really possible in the same way it is from a damaged HDD. So it seems an HDD is still desirable for the near future, at least, and perhaps onwards. External HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, and you likely have some digital media you really don’t want to lose, so getting a couple and storing one in a different building is not a bad idea. And if you’re into really long term read-only storage, for things like family photos, DVDs or Blu-Rays are pretty cheap and last basically forever, and are likely more forgiving of rough storage than the HDDs. 
 
That more or less wraps up my opinions on the topic, yours may of course vary.
 

With the kind permission of Colli, I present to you the 2021 update, as well as a certain retrospective, as I fairly recently dove head-first into this topic for the first time in years.
 
So what’s changed over the past year? In the field of GPUs, Nvidia have released their 30 series cards, to great joy and great anger, depending on who exactly you ask. There’s no question that the 30 series brings great performance gains (with the lower end currently available matching the higher end of the 20-series, for instance the 3060Ti is largely equivalent to the 2080 Super), and that the Founder’s Edition cooling solution is both affordable (being offered at MSRP and not above, unusually) and effective (the through-flow solution being fairly highly regarded).
 
AMD, likewise, has released its 6000-series, which appears to be lagging behind Nvidia’s offerings for performance at a given cost point, excepting some of the more over-priced Nvidia cards. In terms of raw capability, Nvidia cards put more of an emphasis on ray-tracing at any given performance category over plain ol rasterization, and slightly less on shaders, and a wide array of benchmarks show a distinct advantage there, with the latest AMD offerings falling behind the last gen Nvidia ones. 
So where is the controversy regarding these cards? Largely in the cost, marketing, and target market. The higher end, 3090s, 6900XTs,  and 3080s are marketed as gaming devices yet seem better suited to graphics workstations, and are very steeply priced. The lower end is perfectly acceptable, if you can get your hands on them.
The graphics card shortage is perhaps even worse than it was last year, though that shows signs of reversing as of mid August. The extremely high demand has been driven by 2 major factors - the first, the Cryptocurrency market, which exploded over the past year, and the second being lockdown-inspired demand for high performance desktops, both for “working from home” and for lockdown entertainment. 
 
Both of those, however, are showing certain signs of abating. The Crypto market took a few major hits over the past year, after its meteoric rise. Notably, the Chinese outlawing mining both tanked the value (reducing the value of mining in the civilized world), and flooded the Asian market with used graphics cards, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world. And with the end of serious lockdowns in most of the civilized world, the demand for high end gaming-capable computers is dying off and many are available secondhand (and indeed the buyers thereof aren’t competing for the latest and greatest equipment any more).

For what it’s worth, per the Steam hardware survey, the most popular of these newer cards is the 3070, followed by the 3080, then the 3060, with the 3090 falling far behind and the latest AMD cards not even making the list. The Nvidia 10 and 16 series still hold the lion’s share of the market, of course. Intel’s new foray into graphics cards, rather than just integrated graphics, may expand the market options from the current duopoly. The new line of Nvidia CPUs, if they venture into the consumer level and not just the datacenter class, will mean we’ll have 3 giants doing both CPUs and GPUs, which will hopefully only do good things on the consumer side.
In the field of CPUs, Intel still holds the lead in single thread performance, but the “11th-gen” flagship performance has left much to be desired, with the i9-11900k being noticeably worse than its predecessor, the i9-10900k, in many benchmarks, as an example. Popular opinion is that they were to a certain extent rushed out to maintain Intel’s image as the market leader, even if AMD is neck to neck if not overtaking them outright by this point. In fact, the perception of being a market leader is so important, that Intel is renaming their node size technology to better compete (though as we all know the “node size” in nm doesn’t actually correspond to any actual real physical measurement, and Intel have consistently squeezed more performance out of any arbitrary self-reported number than competitors). 

The Ryzen 5000 series is seriously kicking Intel in the nads, with the Ryzen 9 5900X, at comparable price to the  i9-11900k, offering many more cores, lower TDP, and only slightly lower clock speed, for what is a very spicy package Intel has a hard time matching. Intel’s 12th gen, which should be out any day now, may offer a worthwhile response, but then again may not. Other than for compatibility and stability reasons, it’s getting ever harder to recommend Intel, so they’ll have to step up if they want to not become the underdog themselves.
 
Unusually, this year also brings RAM news - DDR5 is right around the corner, once again offering increased capacities at higher speeds. Available likely in late Q4 2021, along with the Intel 12th gen CPUs which are reportedly the first which will be compatible.
 
In conclusion, it’s been quite a year, and competition is running hot. Hopefully the following year will bring more fancy new products.
 
So, where do I see this going?
Looking back 7 years, to when I was last really paying attention, we see a few interesting developments reaching their ends, and a few new ones opening up.
One development which appears to be reaching its end is screen technology. We now have screens which refresh faster than the brain can actually usefully recognize (240 Hz), and screens at resolutions greater than that of the human eye (4k, 27” monitors at reasonable distance from your face). Clearly, once those two factors are combined, perhaps even in a curved wide monitor which are ever more the rage these days, there won’t be much more to be done in that field, which also implies a limit to target performance for GPUs, at least for gaming applications. Doubly so, when one considers the various “AI” techniques being introduced such as DLSS, which reduce the workload of rasterization. Unless something major comes along which requires much more processing power, while the end is far away it definitely appears to be within sight. 
 
RAM, on the other hand, appears to be getting ever faster and ever larger, with the most interesting development being, in my opinion, Intel’s Optane, which is a kind of middle ground between SSDs and RAM, with most of the attendant advantages of either. Current programs do very much like their RAM, and that’s not a trend that’s showing any signs of stopping, either.
 
Another interesting development is the gradual reduction in number and types of cables, both from wireless communication and inductive power delivery, and by the USB standards slowly displacing everything else (other than graphics, though that too may change soon with USB4 allowing DisplayPort tunneling). This convergence has done much to address the e-waste problem, as well as the “rat’s nest” of cables of the computers of yore.
 
Along with the cables disappearing, so too have physical data storage media, to a very large extent. Internet-based “cloud” data storage, streaming services, and the like have entirely displaced such things as the CD, to the point where not only do many computers come without, they don’t even come with the bays required to install one. This has of course resulted in external, USB-powered ones, for those occasions where you do need to read one, which do unfortunately add clutter rather than remove it. 
And now, whither cloud storage?

Over the past few years, and the last year in particular, we’ve seen a rush to both get into the cloud business via an absurd explosion of streaming services all requiring a subscription to access their exclusive content, and to monetize existing formerly free internet services. Beyond the usual “freemium”, “free but tons of adds”, and “free but we steal all your data”, we’ve seen free services cut down significantly in favor of the paid versions, “software as a service”, and increased executive meddling in what you do on said platforms. While highly unpleasant if you are on the wrong end of things, it does once and for all answer the question of “who’s paying for all these free internet things”. But bottom line, if you’re one of those people who keeps all their data on the cloud, best ask yourself what happens when your data host decides to unperson you for wrongthink of whatever flavor, real or imagined. Doubly so if your data is also a source of income.
 
So, how should you store your data on your own PC?

The conventional wisdom of past years has been to have at least a small SSD for your OS and commonly used programs, and an HDD for the heavy lifting. In the current year, and doubly so in the near future, it appears that if you only intend on keeping around a small quantity of data, you can get away with only having an SSD, and no HDD at all. Of course, this approach isn’t fault-tolerable, and recovering data from a damaged SSD is not really possible in the same way it is from a damaged HDD. So it seems an HDD is still desirable for the near future, at least, and perhaps onwards. External HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, and you likely have some digital media you really don’t want to lose, so getting a couple and storing one in a different building is not a bad idea. And if you’re into really long term read-only storage, for things like family photos, DVDs or Blu-Rays are pretty cheap and last basically forever, and are likely more forgiving of rough storage than the HDDs. 
 
That more or less wraps up my opinions on the topic, yours may of course vary.
 

With the kind permission of Colli, I present to you the 2021 update, as well as a certain retrospective, as I fairly recently dove head-first into this topic for the first time in years.
 
So what’s changed over the past year? In the field of GPUs, Nvidia have released their 30 series cards, to great joy and great anger, depending on who exactly you ask. There’s no question that the 30 series brings great performance gains (with the lower end currently available matching the higher end of the 20-series, for instance the 3060Ti is largely equivalent to the 2080 Super), and that the Founder’s Edition cooling solution is both affordable (being offered at MSRP and not above, unusually) and effective (the through-flow solution being fairly highly regarded).
 
AMD, likewise, has released its 6000-series, which appears to be lagging behind Nvidia’s offerings for performance at a given cost point, excepting some of the more over-priced Nvidia cards. In terms of raw capability, Nvidia cards put more of an emphasis on ray-tracing at any given performance category over plain ol rasterization, and slightly less on shaders, and a wide array of benchmarks show a distinct advantage there, with the latest AMD offerings falling behind the last gen Nvidia ones. 
So where is the controversy regarding these cards? Largely in the cost, marketing, and target market. The higher end, 3090s, 6900XTs,  and 3080s are marketed as gaming devices yet seem better suited to graphics workstations, and are very steeply priced. The lower end is perfectly acceptable, if you can get your hands on them.
The graphics card shortage is perhaps even worse than it was last year, though that shows signs of reversing as of mid August. The extremely high demand has been driven by 2 major factors - the first, the Cryptocurrency market, which exploded over the past year, and the second being lockdown-inspired demand for high performance desktops, both for “working from home” and for lockdown entertainment. 
 
Both of those, however, are showing certain signs of abating. The Crypto market took a few major hits over the past year, after its meteoric rise. Notably, the Chinese outlawing mining both tanked the value (reducing the value of mining in the civilized world), and flooded the Asian market with used graphics cards, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world. And with the end of serious lockdowns in most of the civilized world, the demand for high end gaming-capable computers is dying off and many are available secondhand (and indeed the buyers thereof aren’t competing for the latest and greatest equipment any more).

For what it’s worth, per the Steam hardware survey, the most popular of these newer cards is the 3070, followed by the 3080, then the 3060, with the 3090 falling far behind and the latest AMD cards not even making the list. The Nvidia 10 and 16 series still hold the lion’s share of the market, of course. Intel’s new foray into graphics cards, rather than just integrated graphics, may expand the market options from the current duopoly. The new line of Nvidia CPUs, if they venture into the consumer level and not just the datacenter class, will mean we’ll have 3 giants doing both CPUs and GPUs, which will hopefully only do good things on the consumer side.
In the field of CPUs, Intel still holds the lead in single thread performance, but the “11th-gen” flagship performance has left much to be desired, with the i9-11900k being noticeably worse than its predecessor, the i9-10900k, in many benchmarks, as an example. Popular opinion is that they were to a certain extent rushed out to maintain Intel’s image as the market leader, even if AMD is neck to neck if not overtaking them outright by this point. In fact, the perception of being a market leader is so important, that Intel is renaming their node size technology to better compete (though as we all know the “node size” in nm doesn’t actually correspond to any actual real physical measurement, and Intel have consistently squeezed more performance out of any arbitrary self-reported number than competitors). 

The Ryzen 5000 series is seriously kicking Intel in the nads, with the Ryzen 9 5900X, at comparable price to the  i9-11900k, offering many more cores, lower TDP, and only slightly lower clock speed, for what is a very spicy package Intel has a hard time matching. Intel’s 12th gen, which should be out any day now, may offer a worthwhile response, but then again may not. Other than for compatibility and stability reasons, it’s getting ever harder to recommend Intel, so they’ll have to step up if they want to not become the underdog themselves.
 
Unusually, this year also brings RAM news - DDR5 is right around the corner, once again offering increased capacities at higher speeds. Available likely in late Q4 2021, along with the Intel 12th gen CPUs which are reportedly the first which will be compatible.
 
In conclusion, it’s been quite a year, and competition is running hot. Hopefully the following year will bring more fancy new products.
 
So, where do I see this going?
Looking back 7 years, to when I was last really paying attention, we see a few interesting developments reaching their ends, and a few new ones opening up.
One development which appears to be reaching its end is screen technology. We now have screens which refresh faster than the brain can actually usefully recognize (240 Hz), and screens at resolutions greater than that of the human eye (4k, 27” monitors at reasonable distance from your face). Clearly, once those two factors are combined, perhaps even in a curved wide monitor which are ever more the rage these days, there won’t be much more to be done in that field, which also implies a limit to target performance for GPUs, at least for gaming applications. Doubly so, when one considers the various “AI” techniques being introduced such as DLSS, which reduce the workload of rasterization. Unless something major comes along which requires much more processing power, while the end is far away it definitely appears to be within sight. 
 
RAM, on the other hand, appears to be getting ever faster and ever larger, with the most interesting development being, in my opinion, Intel’s Optane, which is a kind of middle ground between SSDs and RAM, with most of the attendant advantages of either. Current programs do very much like their RAM, and that’s not a trend that’s showing any signs of stopping, either.
 
Another interesting development is the gradual reduction in number and types of cables, both from wireless communication and inductive power delivery, and by the USB standards slowly displacing everything else (other than graphics, though that too may change soon with USB4 allowing DisplayPort tunneling). This convergence has done much to address the e-waste problem, as well as the “rat’s nest” of cables of the computers of yore.
 
Along with the cables disappearing, so too have physical data storage media, to a very large extent. Internet-based “cloud” data storage, streaming services, and the like have entirely displaced such things as the CD, to the point where not only do many computers come without, they don’t even come with the bays required to install one. This has of course resulted in external, USB-powered ones, for those occasions where you do need to read one, which do unfortunately add clutter rather than remove it. 
And now, whither cloud storage?

Over the past few years, and the last year in particular, we’ve seen a rush to both get into the cloud business via an absurd explosion of streaming services all requiring a subscription to access their exclusive content, and to monetize existing formerly free internet services. Beyond the usual “freemium”, “free but tons of adds”, and “free but we steal all your data”, we’ve seen free services cut down significantly in favor of the paid versions, “software as a service”, and increased executive meddling in what you do on said platforms. While highly unpleasant if you are on the wrong end of things, it does once and for all answer the question of “who’s paying for all these free internet things”. But bottom line, if you’re one of those people who keeps all their data on the cloud, best ask yourself what happens when your data host decides to unperson you for wrongthink of whatever flavor, real or imagined. Doubly so if your data is also a source of income.
 
So, how should you store your data on your own PC?

The conventional wisdom of past years has been to have at least a small SSD for your OS and commonly used programs, and an HDD for the heavy lifting. In the current year, and doubly so in the near future, it appears that if you only intend on keeping around a small quantity of data, you can get away with only having an SSD, and no HDD at all. Of course, this approach isn’t fault-tolerable, and recovering data from a damaged SSD is not really possible in the same way it is from a damaged HDD. So it seems an HDD is still desirable for the near future, at least, and perhaps onwards. External HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, and you likely have some digital media you really don’t want to lose, so getting a couple and storing one in a different building is not a bad idea. And if you’re into really long term read-only storage, for things like family photos, DVDs or Blu-Rays are pretty cheap and last basically forever, and are likely more forgiving of rough storage than the HDDs. 
 
That more or less wraps up my opinions on the topic, yours may of course vary.
 

With the kind permission of Colli, I present to you the 2021 update, as well as a certain retrospective, as I fairly recently dove head-first into this topic for the first time in years.
 
So what’s changed over the past year? In the field of GPUs, Nvidia have released their 30 series cards, to great joy and great anger, depending on who exactly you ask. There’s no question that the 30 series brings great performance gains (with the lower end currently available matching the higher end of the 20-series, for instance the 3060Ti is largely equivalent to the 2080 Super), and that the Founder’s Edition cooling solution is both affordable (being offered at MSRP and not above, unusually) and effective (the through-flow solution being fairly highly regarded).
 
AMD, likewise, has released its 6000-series, which appears to be lagging behind Nvidia’s offerings for performance at a given cost point, excepting some of the more over-priced Nvidia cards. In terms of raw capability, Nvidia cards put more of an emphasis on ray-tracing at any given performance category over plain ol rasterization, and slightly less on shaders, and a wide array of benchmarks show a distinct advantage there, with the latest AMD offerings falling behind the last gen Nvidia ones. 
So where is the controversy regarding these cards? Largely in the cost, marketing, and target market. The higher end, 3090s, 6900XTs,  and 3080s are marketed as gaming devices yet seem better suited to graphics workstations, and are very steeply priced. The lower end is perfectly acceptable, if you can get your hands on them.
The graphics card shortage is perhaps even worse than it was last year, though that shows signs of reversing as of mid August. The extremely high demand has been driven by 2 major factors - the first, the Cryptocurrency market, which exploded over the past year, and the second being lockdown-inspired demand for high performance desktops, both for “working from home” and for lockdown entertainment. 
 
Both of those, however, are showing certain signs of abating. The Crypto market took a few major hits over the past year, after its meteoric rise. Notably, the Chinese outlawing mining both tanked the value (reducing the value of mining in the civilized world), and flooded the Asian market with used graphics cards, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world. And with the end of serious lockdowns in most of the civilized world, the demand for high end gaming-capable computers is dying off and many are available secondhand (and indeed the buyers thereof aren’t competing for the latest and greatest equipment any more).

For what it’s worth, per the Steam hardware survey, the most popular of these newer cards is the 3070, followed by the 3080, then the 3060, with the 3090 falling far behind and the latest AMD cards not even making the list. The Nvidia 10 and 16 series still hold the lion’s share of the market, of course. Intel’s new foray into graphics cards, rather than just integrated graphics, may expand the market options from the current duopoly. The new line of Nvidia CPUs, if they venture into the consumer level and not just the datacenter class, will mean we’ll have 3 giants doing both CPUs and GPUs, which will hopefully only do good things on the consumer side.
In the field of CPUs, Intel still holds the lead in single thread performance, but the “11th-gen” flagship performance has left much to be desired, with the i9-11900k being noticeably worse than its predecessor, the i9-10900k, in many benchmarks, as an example. Popular opinion is that they were to a certain extent rushed out to maintain Intel’s image as the market leader, even if AMD is neck to neck if not overtaking them outright by this point. In fact, the perception of being a market leader is so important, that Intel is renaming their node size technology to better compete (though as we all know the “node size” in nm doesn’t actually correspond to any actual real physical measurement, and Intel have consistently squeezed more performance out of any arbitrary self-reported number than competitors). 

The Ryzen 5000 series is seriously kicking Intel in the nads, with the Ryzen 9 5900X, at comparable price to the  i9-11900k, offering many more cores, lower TDP, and only slightly lower clock speed, for what is a very spicy package Intel has a hard time matching. Intel’s 12th gen, which should be out any day now, may offer a worthwhile response, but then again may not. Other than for compatibility and stability reasons, it’s getting ever harder to recommend Intel, so they’ll have to step up if they want to not become the underdog themselves.
 
Unusually, this year also brings RAM news - DDR5 is right around the corner, once again offering increased capacities at higher speeds. Available likely in late Q4 2021, along with the Intel 12th gen CPUs which are reportedly the first which will be compatible.
 
In conclusion, it’s been quite a year, and competition is running hot. Hopefully the following year will bring more fancy new products.
 
So, where do I see this going?
Looking back 7 years, to when I was last really paying attention, we see a few interesting developments reaching their ends, and a few new ones opening up.
One development which appears to be reaching its end is screen technology. We now have screens which refresh faster than the brain can actually usefully recognize (240 Hz), and screens at resolutions greater than that of the human eye (4k, 27” monitors at reasonable distance from your face). Clearly, once those two factors are combined, perhaps even in a curved wide monitor which are ever more the rage these days, there won’t be much more to be done in that field, which also implies a limit to target performance for GPUs, at least for gaming applications. Doubly so, when one considers the various “AI” techniques being introduced such as DLSS, which reduce the workload of rasterization. Unless something major comes along which requires much more processing power, while the end is far away it definitely appears to be within sight. 
 
RAM, on the other hand, appears to be getting ever faster and ever larger, with the most interesting development being, in my opinion, Intel’s Optane, which is a kind of middle ground between SSDs and RAM, with most of the attendant advantages of either. Current programs do very much like their RAM, and that’s not a trend that’s showing any signs of stopping, either.
 
Another interesting development is the gradual reduction in number and types of cables, both from wireless communication and inductive power delivery, and by the USB standards slowly displacing everything else (other than graphics, though that too may change soon with USB4 allowing DisplayPort tunneling). This convergence has done much to address the e-waste problem, as well as the “rat’s nest” of cables of the computers of yore.
 
Along with the cables disappearing, so too have physical data storage media, to a very large extent. Internet-based “cloud” data storage, streaming services, and the like have entirely displaced such things as the CD, to the point where not only do many computers come without, they don’t even come with the bays required to install one. This has of course resulted in external, USB-powered ones, for those occasions where you do need to read one, which do unfortunately add clutter rather than remove it. 
And now, whither cloud storage?

Over the past few years, and the last year in particular, we’ve seen a rush to both get into the cloud business via an absurd explosion of streaming services all requiring a subscription to access their exclusive content, and to monetize existing formerly free internet services. Beyond the usual “freemium”, “free but tons of adds”, and “free but we steal all your data”, we’ve seen free services cut down significantly in favor of the paid versions, “software as a service”, and increased executive meddling in what you do on said platforms. While highly unpleasant if you are on the wrong end of things, it does once and for all answer the question of “who’s paying for all these free internet things”. But bottom line, if you’re one of those people who keeps all their data on the cloud, best ask yourself what happens when your data host decides to unperson you for wrongthink of whatever flavor, real or imagined. Doubly so if your data is also a source of income.
 
So, how should you store your data on your own PC?

The conventional wisdom of past years has been to have at least a small SSD for your OS and commonly used programs, and an HDD for the heavy lifting. In the current year, and doubly so in the near future, it appears that if you only intend on keeping around a small quantity of data, you can get away with only having an SSD, and no HDD at all. Of course, this approach isn’t fault-tolerable, and recovering data from a damaged SSD is not really possible in the same way it is from a damaged HDD. So it seems an HDD is still desirable for the near future, at least, and perhaps onwards. External HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, and you likely have some digital media you really don’t want to lose, so getting a couple and storing one in a different building is not a bad idea. And if you’re into really long term read-only storage, for things like family photos, DVDs or Blu-Rays are pretty cheap and last basically forever, and are likely more forgiving of rough storage than the HDDs. 
 
That more or less wraps up my opinions on the topic, yours may of course vary.
 

Stolen from otvaga, tankoff did a summary post on Arena systems.
 
   Arena (1993) patent:

   1 are countermunitions in their launchers, placed around turret. 2 is radar station on top of the turret.
 
 
   Arena-M APS with correctable trajectory countermunitions:

   Compared to previous version much less countermunitions and launchers are used, subsystems are more compact. Less weight, statistically less vulnerable to fragmentation damage.
 
 
   Countermunition schematics. CM is connected to launcher with a wire, BTW.

 
 
   Patent for BMP-3 equipped with Arena, pic showing possible use of APS as a system to automatically turn turret of AFV in the direction from which AFV was shot at.

 
   Looks like Arena was offered to Germans in 90s. Pics from Wehrtechnisches Symposium, 1995.

 
 
   One of first article about Arena, 1996.

 
 
   2012 - model of Arena-M (or Arena with correctable countermunitions) was shown.

 
   At RAE-2013 T-72 with shown with similar system, but with some additional changes.

 
 
   Arena-E with correctable countermunitions, video by KBM.
 
50m detection range, minimal reaction time - 0.04s, same direction is covered by at least 2 countermunitions, can intercept incoming projectiles with speeds of 70 to 1000 m/s. Can work of 8 hours without stops, weight - up to 900kg.
   Laser sensors (same as on Shtora) can be part of Arena. APS can be intergrated into BMS.
 

   Countermunition launch. Small holes just under cap/cover probably are impulse jets to rotate countermunition after launch.
 

   Upper schematics proably shows those impulse jets.
 

   Launch.
 
 
   Question if it is actually capable of intercepting top attack threats in configurations shown to public is still open. Max detection range is 50 meters, but how much radars can see "up" is question that i don't know answer for. Vertically aimed launchers suggest that at least ATGM that "overfly" target (like Bill 2 or TOW-2B) are covered by modernised system. Original Arena (at least in 1995 config) was not capable of intercepting overfly ATGMs.   
   Another question without answer is how much "correction" measures can change facing of countermunition. 
 
   Against top attack threats there were ideas to place CMs nearly horizontaly and aim them upwards.

 

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

I have been summoned.
Please keep it civil, guys.
We like high quality posters spreading their knowledge, and there's a difference between disagreeing and being an ass about it, so please everyone take a moment to read through your posts before pressing that button, k? We've had enough friction here over the years.

>animea pfp
>Shit opinions
It's like pottery.
@unreason you have around 12 hours to change that PFP to something that isn't animea.
For so it is written:

 

>animea pfp
>Shit opinions
It's like pottery.
@unreason you have around 12 hours to change that PFP to something that isn't animea.
For so it is written:

 

>animea pfp
>Shit opinions
It's like pottery.
@unreason you have around 12 hours to change that PFP to something that isn't animea.
For so it is written:

 

GDLS UK has announced that it will be providing verbal evidence to the Defence Select Committee on July 20. Also released ahead of the testimony is their written evidence: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/37866/html/
 
At this rate my suspicion is that in short order, this will be the case because nobody sane will want anything to do with British cavalry scout vehicle programs after this.

I'm not sure where the "racism" came from, unless Nazi's are a race? Highly doubt it, but if you think any of us are being racist towards Germans, we're not. 
 
 
Anyway, I added pictures and some more data on the Brahman. She's overweight and underpowered, but the armor is amazing. Dont know how much I can get done: never got this far so I dont know what I'm doing and I am disorganized. 

Note that the bottom-most row has twice the fittings for holding rounds. This is because once filled, those tubes tilt down and 5 more are placed between them and the rest of the rack. This allows better use of the space which would otherwise be inaccessible because of the torsion bars and other crap on the floor.
 
A similar solution is used in the turret rack:

Note that the edge rounds cannot be accessed until the center ones are removed.
The same solution is used in the Abrams:

 
Perhaps best illustrated by this pic of the 105mm Abrams rack:

 

The full name of this combat vehicle is: TCV-47 "Brahman" (Tracked Combat Vehicle)
 

 
No, it's not done, i took a very long break; burned myself out. But since then, I have added commander's and loaders cupolas', vision slits, drivers hatch, turret roof applique, 12.4 tons of hull armor, and 7 tons of turret armor plus a 4.6 ton turret wedge a la Leopard 2A5. Still needs turret storage boxes, hull roof applique, and side skirts. Ammunition and velocity is going to be similar to that used on the M551 of yore, including a gun launched ATGM based on the BGM-71. 

Brownsville Armour Engineering Systems FV601 “Cossack” for Main Battle Tank 2247 [FINAL]

 



 
Isometric, left side, front and top view of the FV601. On the right is the base configuration, on the left the FIBUA configuration
 
3D model freely available at
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/9907c803-fb6e-434f-be49-4eb79f7b9c6b/FV601-Cossack 
 
Parameter
Base configuration
FIBUA configuration
Mass, combat
126600 lbs
143000 lbs
Mass, armour
53200 lbs (42 %)
70500 lbs (49.5%)
Length, combat
38’1”
31’7”
Length, transport
32’3”
26’6”
Length, hull
22’6” (without drop tank)
24’8” (with drop tanks)
24’11”
Width
12’2”
13’5”
Height (at minimum ride height)
7’8” (turret roof)
8’3” (top of periscope)
9’7” (top of machine gun)
Ground clearance
Adjustable between 18” and 22”
Ground pressure (psf)
1746 NGP, 4295 MMP
1972 NGP, 4834 MMP
Speed
45 mph on road
30 mph off road
Range
558  mi on internal fuel
658 mi  with drop tanks
558 mi on internal fuel
Crew
4: commander, gunner, driver, radio operator
Main armament
5” L/55 smoothbore gun, 5x24” unitary cartridge
16 rounds autoloader + 16 rounds stowed
5” L/40 smoothbore gun, 5x24” unitary cartridge
16 rounds autoloader + 16 rounds stowed
Secondary armament
 (1) coaxial 0.30cal Medium machine gun (900 rounds)
 (1) 0.30cal Medium machine gun (450 rounds) on gunner’s skate mount
 (1) 0.50cal Heavy machine gun (100 rounds) + (1) 0.30cal Medium machine gun (450 rounds) on commander’s ring mount
  (1) 0.50cal Heavy machine gun (100 rounds) on auxiliary mount
 
(900) 0.50 rounds stowed
(8100) 0.30 rounds stowed
 
BAE Systems’ FV601 “Cossack” is a fighting vehicle intended to not only meet all the requirement, but also exceed them, especially mobility requirements. The design also emphasises ease of maintenance and upgradability,  making it the ideal vehicle for the current as well as the next fight.
The FV601 is offered in two configurations: a base configuration, which was designed to achieve every requirement and counter the current threats of the battlefield while offering ample room for upgrades; an add-on FIBUA (Fighting In Built Up Areas) kit, to be installed on vehicles deployed in an area of operation where heavy urban fighting is to be expected. The FIBUA kit can be added to any base configuration “Cossack” in the field in a few hours, not requiring more than hand tools (except the installations of the barrel, requiring light engineering support).
I Mobility
 
 
1)     Link appendix 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gc4sadYGZEAemXzOxyERPgLGvRF2rgSr/view?usp=sharing
 
 
 
II Survivability
 
 
1)     Link appendix 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gc4sadYGZEAemXzOxyERPgLGvRF2rgSr/view?usp=sharing
 
2)     Link appendix 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wSJriDjGY9EeamhG7TuZ2EJRvt5aVtg9/view?usp=sharing
 
Summary table:
Unless specified otherwise, protection angles are given in degrees from centerline
“elev” = elevation
 
 
Base configuration
FIBUA configuration
Threat
Estimated penetration
Turret
Hull
Turret
Hull
6in HEAT projector
8”
180°, 10° elev
90°, 10° elev
180°, 10° elev
180°, 10° elev
4in/54 HVAP
12” @1200yd
50°
47°
61°
62°
8” @2000yd
63.75°
57°
79°
80°
3.6in RPG
14.4”
60°, 45° at 10° elev
40°, up to 10° elev
90°, up to 10° elev
90°, up to 10° elev
4in/54 APFSDS (*)
12” @ 2000yd
34°
32°
50°
53°
5in APFSDS (*)
20” @ 1000 yd
23°
N/A
30°
33°
18” @ 2000 yd
26°
23°
33°
36°
2in/4in tandem RPG
10”/20”
N/A
N/A
25°
41°
NUB tandem missile (*)
10.8”/26.4”
N/A
N/A
16°
N/A
 
(*) estimated future threats
 
(*) estimated future threat
III Firepower

View of firepower elements: main gun, autoloader, optics, fire control systems, secondary weapon stations, ammunition storage
1)     Link appendix 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gc4sadYGZEAemXzOxyERPgLGvRF2rgSr/view?usp=sharing
 
2)     Main weapon: L1 Gun (L1A1 Gun for FIBUA configuration)
 
3)     Secondary weapons:
 
4)     Optics and fire control system
 
5)     Link to appendix 3: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_t4XFbeko5CRqf4QwJDEQIdXiBQM3sMh/view?usp=sharing
 
IV Fightability
1)     Ergonomics
a.      Comfortable and adjustable crew seats
b.      Every tasks can be accomplished seating
c.      Fume extractor
 
2)     Communications
 
 
3)     Crew sustainment
 
 
4)     Other
a.      Self-recovery kit with tow bar and tools
b.      Frontally removable gun for easy maintenance, as well as easily removeable powerpack
c.      Possibility to fix a dozer blade for clearing operations or self-entrenching
d.      Infantry telephone for better coordination in combined arms operations
e.      White light and IR headlight for night driving + possibility to mount IR spotlight over barrel
f.       Ammunition loading hatch in turret rear to ease reloading the autoloader from the outside, in addition to the ability to reload the autoloader from the inside through the reloading hatch by elevating the barrel
g.      (4) crew members for easier maintenance and day-to-day operations 
V Upgradability
 
 
 
 
 

WHAT? SPEAK UP!

I for one look forwards to both of you sharing what you can, when you can.