Toxn

Bombers controlling drones also suffers a bit from the death star issue: you now give your enemy every incentive to concentrate on the manned asset in order to knock the entire force out with one blow. Drones controlled by an AWACS stationed well within friendly skied makes a lot of sense to me.

I think the empire was on its way out in any case. Germany winning basically gets you the EU in 1916, so that's sort of happened anyway as well.

Nah, it's pretty ugly. Like a Rooivalk with FAS.

Pole dancing was serious business in WWII.

We have the same issue: our air force actually does way too good a job at cheaply churning out pilots skilled enough to enter the private sector and thus has an abysmal retention rate. Edit: similarly, our medical and veterinary graduates basically represent a massive, continual handout to first-world countries as most of them leave the second their mandatory service period is up. We end up sucking in doctors from Cuba to make up the shortfall.

If it had been a normal goat rather than a miniature one it would been an ensign, and the entire crew would have been drummed out of the service.

Also taking exception to this a bit. The lifetime cost of a pilot might be high, but then so is the lifetime cost of a plane. The upfront cost of a pilot (in the form of training) is always a fraction of the cost of the plane. edit: infantry is where it gets weird, because the soldier himself is much more expensive in terms of training and upkeep than his equipment. You can gold-plate rifles all day and still have it be a fraction of the all-up cost of a soldier, yet here the procurement process usually prioritises cost over other concerns for some reason.

Look at the casualty rates for pilots in low-intensity combat: the border war produced something like 50 total deaths in SAAF squadrons over a 20-year period, including accidents. You can have reasonably trained dudes rolling around at low level in cessnas all day and not lose too many to replace. The issue is that they should be reasonably trained (not overtrained or undertrained) and that there should be a lot of them flying about wrecking stuff and making other people's lives a misery. Putting 10 pilots you've invested $3 million each (current US training figure) over the bush is madness when you could be putting 30 pilots you 'only' invested $1 million in over the same area. Ditto your $100 million super-fighters.

Plus, you get major advantages by focusing on more planes and eyes on the spot. It's the Sherman vs Tiger argument, basically.

No, it's a logical deathtrap (as Zin lays out). People are cheap (an 18-year-old will set you back by around $245000) and come pre-paid from mom and dad. Training and equipment is expensive. So you can either train up people and try not to expend them, or save on training and equipment costs and soak the occasional body bag. For light recon and CAS in low-intensity environments, I'd say that paramount actually has the maths right.

Funny that the thinking behind the AHRLAC is almost the opposite: CAS should be manned (because the ground is the most complex environment), so the best option is to make a cheap-and-cheerful plane suitable for operation by relatively low-skilled pilots: http://www.paramountgroup.biz/en/ahrlac-rad-aircraft.html

My money is on two approaches; very contested and sort of safe. For very contested areas, you can use something unmanned or something with low observability and good standoff (ie: B2 with the bays packed full of air-to-surface missiles and guided bombs). For safer zones, you can use something like a modernised, purpose-designed AC-130; combining long loiter time, a large suite of sensors, communication gear and ordinance (mainly guided bombs and missiles) into one lumbering package. I'm calling it archangel, because that name hasn't been completely overused already

My first thought is that economies, like ecologies, are controlled by rate limiting factors and bottlenecks. Find the bottleneck and you find where wealth will be concentrated. So what is the bottleneck of the future economy? edit: this article lays the issue out reasonably well (including some graffs) and then sort of muffs the conclusion. The comments also give a good insight into what average Joe commenter thinks about the issue: carping about working hours, calls for a return of communism, blasting the dissolute youth for using the ithings instead of getting out into the sun, misunderstanding the entire concept of IQ and so on.

Technological unemployment (aka: automation taking away your job) is a really hot topic right now. Like, to the point that putting links here is almost pointless. So I'll let people simply put them in the discussion. Anyway, from what I can gather all the writers frantically spilling ink on this topic* tend to forsee one of a few possible scenarios: Nobody makes any significant changes to the current liberal, globalist, capitalist model. Result: we all fall into a decreasing spiral as jobs get removed from the economy, demand slows and jobs are further cut/automated to compensate. This usually ends with us becoming serfs or homeless vagrants outside of the mansions of the 1%. Nobody makes any significant changes to the current liberal, globalist, capitalist model. Result: we all enter a golden age where people upskill to perform the jobs that can't be automated (creative-type stuff, mostly) and we get to eat cheap food and stare at cheap LCD displays while being freed from office drudge work. Nobody makes any significant changes to the current liberal, globalist, capitalist model. Result: 99% of the population lives in robo-assembled tenement flats and lives off of the dole in between popping out anchor babies. How the 1% can afford to pay for all the rest of us without having a market to sell to is left as an exercise to the reader. Nobody makes any significant changes to the current liberal, globalist, capitalist model. Result: we all enter the services/hobby/gift economy, where luxury goods and services are the only thing that hold value and we all take turns making artisanal cheese to sell to each other at fancy restaurants. This also gets combined with 1. to produce scenarios where the peons all sit outside of the mansions of the ultra-wealthy trying to sell them artisanal cheese. Now I don't know about you, but I can see a bit of a problem with all these predictions. For starters, they all seem to be running from the same playbook, where all of the newly-unemployed majorities don't suddenly say 'fuck it' and do away with the current liberal, global, capitalist model in favour of something else (I'm rooting for the return of communism, for sweet iconography if nothing else). Secondly, there seems to be very little thought given to second and third-order effects. I'm sure folk here will have some cogent thoughts on this matter. * I find it absolutely hilarious that the one thing that unites this lot is shock (shock!) at the idea that machines might come for their jobs now that we're done automating agriculture, manufacture and (in part) the service industry. That they've all, by pure coincidence, tuned in to luddite thought now that it's their bread on the line seems to go completely over the writers' collective heads.

Here at SH, we let you decide!

Dark side? Bitch please, your system is called Imperial.

Embrace metric and be saved, heathen!

There is an argument that the great war was going to happen come what may, but for my money it would have been very different a few years earlier or later.

It wouldn't have helped anyway - the neck wasn't covered.

To bottle and sell! Earth water tastes great!

I thought Germans got a racial bonus to beer making and genocide?

Well I've actually gone and tested a couple of approaches. Feel free to ask me about what doesn't work

Possibly the same thing? Brittle penetrator + high velocity = fail at opening can.

Spears, mate. Spears are the way forwards. edit: can I also mention that it's interesting how rare it seems to be (given the sheer number of guns in your country) that rioters show up armed and start blazing away at cops. Which is, of course, what lead to me starting this thread in the first place.

You would think that rocks or pieces of rebar would have been just as good. More evidence of American decadence!