SuperComrade

Links to Jezebel...

He looks like Dark Helmet.
 

14.5 mm 6-barreled anti-missile machine gun

14.5 mm 6-barreled anti-missile machine gun

Landmark documentary on Aleksander Kemurdzhian and the Lunokhod program, as well as its ROV descendants





Torrent: http://torrentabound.org/torrent/3222417/zed.tank.on.the.moon..x264.720p..mvgroup.org.mkv.html

Happy Birthday Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin and the man who has probably responsible for more lives saved than any other in history.

Modernized PTRS.
 

Is it good time to post this?

"I am so done with this shit"
 

Those videos were created during different stages of Ukrainian events based on what was happening in political field. They are mostly in Russian, but i think you will have fun too, in anyway.
 

 

 
 

Not just any T-43, a second variant T-43 with the 85 mm D-5T

Not just any T-43, a second variant T-43 with the 85 mm D-5T

^ Accurate representation of Japanese armor quality in WWII ^

This nails it.
 
For those who haven't been keeping score:
 
-Gross horsepower is the horsepower the engine can put out on a test stand in a lab.  This is the biggest number, so it gets into glossy marketing brochures.  Diesels are losers here; they don't put out much horsepower relative to weight and bulk.  Gasoline engines usually beat out diesels here, as they usually squeeze out more horsepower for a given displacement.  Turbines beat both.
 
-Net horsepower is the horsepower after you account for losses from the cooling system.  Diesels are winners here; they typically use 8-17% of the engine horsepower to run the cooling system.  Gasoline engines are losers here; they can use upwards of 20% of their gross horsepower to cool the engine.  Turbines are huge winners here; basically none of their gross output is consumed by auxiliary cooling systems.  Adiabatic diesels would equal turbines in this parameter (and would clobber turbines, or anything else for that matter, in fuel economy), but sadly these exist only in Toyota laboratories covered in a thick layer of dust.
 
-Horsepower at the sprocket is the power available to actually move the tank after the losses of the transmission and final drives.  For the very best transmission designs at peak operating efficiency, this is about 74% of gross horsepower.  
 
Purely mechanical transmissions with layshaft gearboxes (e.g. T-55) are winners here, but these are more demanding for the driver (especially since the T-55 lacks hydraulically boosted tillers or a synchromesh).  Transmissions with torque converters are less efficient, but torque converters reduce wear on the engine and transmission, and give smoother power when the tank is moving over uneven terrain.  The majority of post-war tank designs feature torque converters save the ubiquitous T-54/55/62 family (and the Soviets were quite aware of, and enthusiastic about the potential benefits).  
 
Planetary transmissions (whether automatic as in American designs or with manual gear selectors as in chieftain) are less efficient, but are easier for the driver to use, and have the advantage that gear changes are basically instantaneous, without any pause where there is no power being delivered to the sprockets during gear shifts.  This is a significant advantage during, say, hill climbing.  
 
Electrical and hydrostatic transmissions are even less efficient than automatic transmissions with torque converters, but they have the advantage that they are continuously variable, lacking discrete gear ratios, so they can optimize torque and RPM for given conditions.  They also allow some flexibility in tank design, since power does not have to be provided to the transmission by a rotating power shaft.  You could put the drive sprockets in the front and have their transmission and final drives powered by electrical cables or hydraulic lines that could snake gracefully around the turret basket and not significantly increase the hull height.  I can't imagine why you would ever want to do this, but you could.

US 90mm guns in WT are the most glorious bullshit, and the best analogue I can come up with WT would be if all 90mm guns started doing 750 damage instead of 240. It gets better as you go up to Era 5, where only US and Russia are relevant.
 
"Hey guys, I've got the Maus now, and and a Jagdtiger!"
"That's nice Germany, can you go play while mommy and daddy talk?"

Like the pion, the gay man is his own antiparticle.

I'm glad to see he doesn't think that being gay is a bad thing to do, but I wish he'd also legislated according to that belief.

I'd like to know an accurate estimate of the deaths that can be attributed to Stalin's Regime. I'm fairly confident that estimates over 20 million are Cold War-era propaganda that attempted to portray the Soviets as equivalent to the Nazis. These are the figures of deaths I found on the massviolence.org page on Stalin.
 
Dekulakization
 
20,000 - The OGPU troika sentenced approximately 20,000 persons to death in 1930 (GARF 9401/1/4157/201). Mass arrests of "1st category Kulaks"
 
84,000 - Approximately 15% of deported(560,000) died in the months following deportation. First wave of "2nd category kulaks" deportations.
 
 487,000 -The first general census of the "specially displaced" population on January 1, 1932 recorded only 1,317,000 individuals when 1,804,000 had been deported in 1930-1931, indicating a loss of nearly half a million individuals over a two year period. Third wave of "2nd category kulaks" deportations
 
The Great Famine
 
1,400,000 - between 1.1 and 1.4 million died of hunger or epidemics in Kazakstan.
 
4,500,000 - The estimated number of death by famine in the Ukraine and in Kuban varies from four million to four and a half million (Shapoval & Vassiliev, 2001; Danilov, Manning & Viola, eds, 2003, vol. III).
 
400,000 - The most afflicted areas were the Lower and Middle Volga where excess mortality reached 300,000 to 400,000 in 1933 (Kondrasin & Penner, eds, 2002).
 
151,000 - According to centralized statistics from the Department of Special Settlements of the Gulag, 151,000 "specially displaced" persons died in 1933
 
Great Terror
 
800,000 - Within sixteen months, over one and a half million persons were arrested. Half of these persons (800,000) were sentenced to death
 
Katyn Massacre
 
25,700 - Katyn Massacre
 
Grand Sum: 7,867,700 (approximately half that of the number killed by the Nazis in the USSR)
 
I assume many prisoners who were not executed died in prisons and mass deportations took a good deal of lives but I do not see how this number can increase signifigantly like the 20-30 million figure that is tossed around to "prove" Stalin killed more than Hitler. 

I don't think all of the famine deaths can be attributed to Stalin. Yes, he might have made it worse through mismanagement (willful or otherwise), but it's not as though he personally caused the wheat to die or rain to not fall. That probably drops the total down to about 5-6 million. Add in excess deaths in gulags, etc., and you're back up into the 6-7 million range.
 
I'd like to make the point that this is what happened when Stalin held power for over 20 years. Yes, 7 million people dying is horrible, but if a certain other asshole had ruled a similar area for over two decades, the death toll would have been at least an order of magnitude higher.

Every so often someone asks a question about the advantages of forward-swept wings, and usually they get a shitty half-assed answer about how they somehow improve maneuverability and stuff.  I will attempt to provide a fully-assed answer.
 
The short version is that forward swept wings do roughly the same thing as conventional aft swept wings; they increase critical mach number.  I found an excellent video explaining transonic effects, so watch that first if you don't already know what that is.
 
Typically, a straight wing starts experiencing shock wave buildup at around mach .7.  These effects are generally bad; control surfaces lose effectiveness, the aircraft's center of lift moves, stability can decrease, and drag greatly increases.
 
It's generally desirable to delay the onset of this badness.  The critical mach number is strongly affected by the thickness to chord ratio:
 
 

 
 
 
So, critical mach number could be increased by having really thin wings.  The F-104 does this, but at the expense of having ridiculously tiny wings that generate barely any lift and no internal volume for fuel storage.
 
Critical mach number could also be delayed by having wings with a normal thickness, but very long chord.  This would improve the supersonic performance of the wing, but subsonic drag would be negatively affected, because the wing would have a large amount of induced drag, and additional wetted area that would cause more drag.
 
Finally, the wing could be swept.  This would increase the chord length relative to the airflow, but would not give the wing undue surface area and thus subsonic drag.
 
In theory, the critical mach number could be increased by a factor equal to the inverse of the cosine of the sweep angle (much like calculating the LOS thickness of tank armor, and for the same reason), but secondary effects mean that it's less effective than this.  The practical effect of sweep on drag coefficient looks about like this:
 

(from Design for Air Combat)
 
This, incidentally, is why the ME-262 doesn't really have swept wings.  The change in Mcr is basically negligible for any leading edge sweep under thirty degrees.
 
Note that this logic applies whether the wings are swept forwards or backwards; as far as delaying and reducing the transonic effects, forward or rearward sweep should be equally effective.
 
There are some secondary effects that make forward-swept wings more desirable.  One of these is spanwise flow:
 

 
In any swept wing, the air isn't just flowing over the wing, it's flowing across them as well.  This means that while pulling Gs the tips of the wings will stall first.  Since the tips aren't producing lift anymore, but the rest of the wing is, the center of lift of the wing moves forward, which means that there's more pitch-up torque on the plane, which means that the nose goes up even more and the stall gets worse.  This is known as the "sabre dance," as the F-100 displayed this undesirable property.  With the wings forward swept, the root of the wings would stall first (although in practice, forward swept wing aircraft tend to have the wings attached well aft, so the CL still shifts forward during a stall)
 
To make matters worse, the air spilling out sideways and the early stall interfere with the effectiveness of the ailerons, which means that the aircraft can lose roll control effectiveness as it increases AOA.  This is a particularly alarming behavior during landing, as speed is low, AOA is high, and keeping the aircraft level is of paramount importance.
 
Additionally, the air spilling out outwards towards the wingtips reduces lift.  Reducing this bad behavior increases lift coefficient, therefore.
 
So, forward swept wings are a little more efficient, aerodynamically than aft swept wings.  Why aren't they more popular?
 
The problem is something called aeroelastic divergence; which is engineer-speak for "the goddamn wings try to tear themselves off."  I will attempt to illustrate with the finest MS pain diagrams:
 

 
The amount of lift that a wing generates is a function of the angle of attack.  The wing will generate more lift the more inclined it is relative to the airflow.
 
Wings in the real world are, of course, not perfectly rigid, so when they generate lift in order to pull the weight of the fuselage through the sky, they bend slightly.
 
In swept wings, the wings aren't just bending, they're twisting as well because the center of lift is not aligned with the structural connection between the fuselage.
 
In an aft-swept wing, the force of the lift tends to twist the wings downwards.  Increasing the angle of attack will increase the lift, which will increase this downward twist, which is a naturally self-limiting (negative feedback) arrangement.
 
In a forward-swept wing, it's exactly the opposite.  When the angle of attack increases, lift increases and the wings twist themselves upwards, which increases lift even more which increases the twisting...
 
This is why forward-swept wings had to wait until magical composites with magical properties were available.

Tanks Encyclopedia strikes again!
 

 
This was supposed to say ЧАПАЕВ (Chapayev), but it mysteriously morphed into ЧАИАЕБ (tea fucker).

This is the first time I've seen someone asian associated with the phrase "heavy beard".

Welp, if I don't post it, colli will:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTNp6L8Zd9I#t=667