Toxn

There definitely has to be a French Panthers iteration.

So I'm planning to kill this thing in the crib and have the first iteration be: "You're an Italian company in WW2 and, since the Germans just dumped a bunch of captured French tanks and equipment on Il Duce and all the bigger (by Italian standards anyway) manufacturers are busy, you get picked to fix the foreign stuff up for use in the field. Pick one of the tanks provided and fix it to suck less, bearing in mind that you have limited production capacity and cannot propose major new components without explaining where they'll come from. Also this is 1943, so your tanks will be going up against Shermans. Good luck." Edit: so, to flesh this one out... Mini-competition: fix-a-tank, 1943 Italy edition You are an engineer at an Italian locomotive and tractor-making company in early 1943. The writing is on the wall for the Italian army in North Africa, with a lot of equipment having been lost and the enemy on the brink of kicking the axis out of Tunisia and then heading across the Mediterranean. In short, things are looking more than a little desperate. However, all is not lost. Il Duce himself has stepped in and, with the assistance of the Germans, procured both some of their finest captured vehicles for use in the upcoming defense of the homeland. Since many of these vehicles have been... gently used, and the existing firms like Ansaldo are flooded with orders, your firm has been asked to work on them in order to bring them up to the standards demanded by modern warfare. In addition to these vehicles, the Germans have also graciously agreed to sell weapons from their existing stock of captured equipment, as well as providing production licenses for some of their more modern equipment. You have also been given permission to work with local weapons manufacturers in order to modify existing artillery to suit your needs. Italian automotive and engine manufacturers are similarly available to help. Finally; your firm's experience in locomotives and tractors means that you can modify hulls and put together turrets and turret rings. You can also produce castings (although not very large ones) and weld armour plates. Your job, which you have no choice but to accept, is to choose a vehicle from among the captured stock being offered for sale, and propose a series of plausible fixes in order to give it a fighting chance against the American and British equipment currently in the field. The submission should include one or more drawings or blueprints (at least a side view of the vehicle, but preferably a 3-point view and isometric view), a description of the modified vehicle, a description of how the modifications would be accomplished and a description of how the modifications would improve the design overall. Judging will be done on the basis of plausibility and effectiveness, with innovative solutions being encouraged in order to get the most bang for buck out of the base vehicle. Beyond implementation, the fixes should prioritise combat effectiveness while also improving reliability, crew ergonomics, communication, mobility and protection as much as possible. The foreign vehicles available for modification are: Renault R35 (already in service) Hotchkiss H35/39 Somua S35 (already in use for training purposes) T-26 BT-5 T-28 (only available in very small numbers, so need to be extremely effective) The foreign weapons immediately available for purchase are: 25mm Puteaux and Hotchkiss 37mm Pak 36 4.0 cm Pak 192 (e) 45mm M1937 (53-K) 47mm APX 7.5cm Pak 97/38 7.62 cm F.K.297(r) and 7.62 cm PaK 39(r) 8.8cm Raketenwerfer 43 Licenses are also available for the manufacture of foreign engines (Maybach HL62 TRM, Maybach HL120 TRM and Praga Typ TNHPS/II), periscopes, sights, radios, cupolas and automotive subassemblies. All foreign vehicle subassemblies and components are available for reverse engineering and manufacture. Edit 2: removed the Stuart and BT-7, as they don't need much 'fixing' per se.

Mini-competition suggestion: fix-a-tank Contestants will be given an existing, flawed AFV design (or a selection to choose from), as well as a country and a time period. They will then be asked to propose modifications, reworks, conversions or fixes to improve the design or modify it for a specific task. The submission should include one or more drawings or blueprints, a description of the modified vehicle and a description of how the modifications would be accomplished.

I can't remember if I've posted these already. Still good though...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDLEgELhK6I

Someone in Kurdistan must be a fan of C&C Generals...

I'm very interested in the fact that, aside from the obvious language differences, a bunch of the bands in the Soviet underground scene may as well have been bands in the late apartheid underground scene. I think there are a bunch of reasons for it - the same influences, the lack of recording equipment and limited instruments leading to a lo-fi feel and so on. But I suspect a big part of it is that, when singing might lead to jail time, you tend to end up with a certain type of singer.

In general I think we're seeing a slow turn to a less eurocentric view of history in the anglosphere. With it we'll hopefully we'll shed this attitude that tries to impose a technology-centred view on pre-industrial history, where anything quirky and particular to European societies gets seen as normal and/or superior, rather than a contingent result of local adaption and historical circumstance. Here the period of European history that culminated in the colonial era and first industrial revolution represents, in my view, this great anomaly that still lacks a full explanation and where technology really is a big part of the story. It's also been at an end for a long while now, to the point where a lot of underlying assumptions by earlier historians; of world history as some sort of linear path leading to European greatness ad infinitum; look silly. IE: just because post-Roman Europe became important to history doesn't mean that European historical events were by themselves important in their time. For instance: Hastings as 'one of the great battles of all time' can fuck right off.

Sort of? The longbow (which the brits, unusually, specialised in as an infantry arm which all their yoeman farmers were supposed to train with at least once a week) is still held to be this wonder weapon which singlehandedly gave them multiple victories over the French by dint of being monstrously powerful and throwing armour-smashing arrows from afar. I've written at length about why I've come to think that both are overstated. For this video it was nice to see confirmation, yet again, that speed matters more than momentum when punching through armour. Even for arrows. Edit: I should mention that there are also fanboys for the mongol bow out there who refuse to see it as just another horsebow and instead hold it up as some kind of perfection of the form, but they are thankfully too busy riding ponies and learning to throat-sing to write in forums or make obnoxious YouTube videos.

Oh I will laugh and laugh when someone finally gets around to testing a historically accurate mongol bow and longbow side by side, only to have the former just blow away the latter in terms of penetration...

B...but big arrow better arrow!

I know that you can be poisoned by eating parts of these plants, so presumably mucus membrane contact can do it. But skin is usually a barrier to all but a few, rare, poisons. Other than that your quickest results are going to be from hitting a large, deep blood vessel.

I'd love to know what tree that is that they're extracting the sap from so that I can cross-check it against my copy of poisonous plants of South Africa. Edit: my best guess (based on this and the not-very-good assumption that these particular Hazda folk are using the same tricks) is some species of Acokanthera. The poison would be a cardiac glycoside. Death would occur after a few minutes (perhaps up to 15) from heart failure, with a running animal speeding the process along.

A great new indie game for all the cool kids to gush about: Patents, Please.

So, having done a bit more testing, I can say that 1GW mega-lasers are indeed amazing so long as you're willing to sit 1000km away and stare angrily at your enemy for minutes on end:

No, optics and comms are magic and don't degrade. There is a strategy where you can use a small, relatively low-powered laser to attack a large laser and successfully disable it at range by shining into the laser's focussing mirror. As the low-powered jobs don't require a giant reactor and massive radiator farm to work, this means that it's a decent counter to plonk a few down on your hull just in case a mega-laser hoves into view. Apparently making your big laser's aperture smaller can ameliorate the issue, but this costs you in terms of effective range (which is half the point of the sodding things). Edit: so in researching to see if the meta has changed it turns out that the min-max kings are using engagement ranges of 1000km (for comparison, a stock ship engages at something like 20-50km). Which means that my 150km test ranges might not mean squat in terms of giving useful info.

So I've been futzing around a bit more with laser monsters, and the legends are real: absolutely unbeatable destruction per kg, but very vulnerable to eye-popper counter-lasers. I might have a go at making a broadsider and see if it works better than the umbrella/hammerhead approach.

https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html This is basically a matsci 101 and 201 course given by a German who likes beer. It's very good.

So here's a fun (ie: not hyper-optimised) design: It has decent armour, the obligatory baby sandblaster armament for scrubbing radiators and guns off, and a supremely entertaining set of 2km/s micronuke micromissile guns. This thing can take fleets on while giving the viewer epilepsy from all the white flashes.

Higher efficiency at the cost of thrust. It seems to indicate optimisation for long duration, level flight.

So a few things experience hath wrought: For those of us who want to use NUCLEAR FIRE to cleanse the solar system: big nukes are for bragging rights, but are otherwise useless. I'm really hoping to be proved wrong on this front. I've had very little success making mega-lasers, but hear that they are dominate if done right. Sandblasters FTW 100km/s railguns FTW. Seriously, these things are soooo good that they make some fights boring - just plinking away at 100+km while the other guy frantically tries to lase the weapon off. Which makes for slow, boring battles. Big guns aren't worth it: I made a 12' gun to spec (if massively overweight because fuck barrel profiling) and discovered that it will bounce off of ships. Ramming things, surprisingly, does almost nothing. Don't trust anything related to armour - the material science seems to be a bit wonky in this game. My best results so far are: a thin anti-nuke layer (TiC backed with spider silk) on the outside, silica aerogel interlayers between everything, at least 2 layers of thin whipple shields* with silica aerogel between them, and a base layer of boron fibre. A good armour design is exponentially better than those on the stock ships, and allows you to laugh off some of the more challenging missions. Cover your turrets in silica aerogel for anti-laser protection. For a balance of anti-laser/anti-kinetic, basalt fibre is a good but expensive option. For anti-kinetic only I've heard that chrome-vanadium steel is good. For missiles, the stock armour is balls. Put them in ship armour (thick silica aerogel layers are a must) and watch them laugh at multi-megawatt lasers for minutes at a time. All the really optimum stuff fucks your framerate: micro missiles, missile swarms in general, flack payloads on guns, using radiation shields to make APFSDS rounds, 10 000 rpm sandblaster guns and so on. In general: lots of small stuff, moving fast > a few bit, slow things, but this is also a recipe to have every battle play out at <1 frame per second. The two shapes which seem to work well are long and pointy (because angling armour is absurdly effective), and an umbrella up front (which offsets some of the weight from thicker armour by confining it to the first 5% of the hull). Of the two, I'd say that angling is much better overall except when dealing with sandblasters, which is where hiding your radiators behind a front umbrella is aces. Budget a lot more power than you think you need: 13.5MW is good for running 2MW weapons, but will choke hard if you put in a 13MW gun. Generally I try to have at least double the rated power on hand. *Aluminium, because I'm too basic to use gold or whatever the cool kids are optimising with.

Just a nice series of historical videos: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew

During the lockdown I found myself getting into space games for some reason, mainly Stellaris and Children of a Dead Earth/CoaDE/ChoaDE. These are both fairly... technically-focussed games, but ChoaDE takes it to the next level*. As such: here is a thread to talk about/post for discussion/brag about your designs for 100km/s railguns, 1GW reactors, 1MT pure fission bombs and the like. Fuck your framerate... *The rarified sperglord level where one of the common complaints is how the ballistics modelling package doesn't model barrel thicknesses properly rather than the fact that, you know, the game looks like something dug up from the early 2000s and yet eats system resources like it was sent from the future.

You're welcome. Edit: just checking, but you know that both methods won't allow through hardening (in your case, re-hardening) if the piece is particularly thick, right? There's a reason why explosive welding is used...

Why not just reinvent the Wilson/Ellis bonded steel plate? IE: pour high carbon steel between two lower-carbon steel plates and then hot roll the resulting sandwich?