Toxn

2 minutes ago, Laviduce said:

Both sides do this but the US definitely has  significant  advantages over Russia in this field. I would rate US propaganda far ahead Russia's in terms of quality and general sophistication. The US is more or less in control of the largest "news" networks on earth directly and indirectly via its satellite states in Europe and elsewhere. It literally had 70 years time to perfect the art and science of propaganda, subterfuge and molding the minds of people around the world.  The Chinese are even worse than the Russians when it comes to propaganda.

 

 

The US is the ultimate exemplar of modern industrial propaganda, and learned from the old master (the UK).

This is easy to demonstrate (if filled with tedious quotations and references), because where else is the narrative of "giant, technologically-advanced country rolls over smaller country and dominates them for twenty years for no good reason, only to leave in shame as the local lads make it too hard for them to stay" Full Metal Jacket and not Red Dawn: Kabul edition. Who else could even think of pulling of the move of "these guys fought the Reds and so we armed them and helped radicalize them, then they sat around for twenty years and did more or less nothing, then someone completely different hurt us and so we decided that they were evil monsters and had to go". That's some Eastasia-level shit right there, and that's without even looking at the sequel where they go "so we just left, but never lost, but are going to punish these guys forever about it, but the real fight were the lessons we learned along the way".

2 minutes ago, TINDALOS said:

Well... the mod of Ukraine right now is just like the mod of Iraq in 1991, but with overwhelming western non traditional media support. The whole ghost of Kiev bs is probably the most insane mental gymnastics since gulf war... Remeber when Iraq announce victory in Khafji?

 

Most of the westerns on twitter simply reapond: aLt0uGh iT iS fAkE I hOpE ITs tRue....

Agreed. I'm getting real "Baghdad Bob but now we're all Iraqis" vibes from all of this.

2 hours ago, Pardus said:

 

You're so goddamn far off the mark is astonishing. Tell me, when did Ukraine, a democratic country, attack another country with chemical weapons? When did they commit crimes against humanity? When did they become a country controlled by terrorist groups? Things Iraq, Syria & Afghanistan were seperately guilty off.

 

Exactly what is it you consider an acceptable form of government type? Do you wish for people to be systematically oppressed by their government? 

 

Dictatorships & terrorist states are a thing all nations should strive to erradicate, not leave to grow and potentially spill over into other countries via aggressive actions. 

Dude, no. Just... I mean, did you fall into a coma in 2004 and only just wake up? Are you an amnesiac or something?

Knocking over other countries is a terrible idea if your purposes are to safeguard liberal democracy. Even if you grant someone the right to get rid of "dictators" and "terrorists" that run places in a way you don't like (and that's a planet-sized "if"), it never works. The locals never turn around, look at all the foreign troops lording it over them and go "you know what, we like these guys so much that we're going to vote for someone who aligns perfectly with their interests and never cause trouble again". 

If you actually believe in the concept of a liberal, rules-based international order, then the US declaring a bunch of countries guilty of a crime they didn't commit and invading them was one of the crimes of the new century. And even if you don't; it's results have been an unmitigated disaster by the very justifications that they themselves provided. No democracy flowered, no peace was achieved. The only beneficiaries were a bunch of defence contractors and an even more virulent crop of terrorists that the US effectively manufactured and spread around a quarter of the globe.

So if you are going to blame Russia for unprovoked aggression and breaking international norms, then you have to blame the US for showing them how it's done: never once apologizing for the act, and never facing any consequences except the inevitable blow-back that comes with some of the stupidest policy decisions in history. That's just basic mental consistency.

And if you really think that simply being able to paint your enemies as illiberal is all you need to justify any heinous act, then how is a democratically-elected Russian government, who sees the government in the Ukraine as the illegitimate result of a soft coup by the US, not also going to be able to use that to argue their case?

Learn to use your head, or get off this forum.

3 hours ago, Collimatrix said:

So...

I have a question, and I don't have an answer.

Right now, in English-language "respectable" news sources, I am seeing a lot of stories of Ukrainian bravery and staunch resistance and heavy Russian losses.  I am pretty sure that some of these stories might even be true.

But who exactly is collating these stories and publishing them to English-speaking audiences?  Does Ukraine have an incredibly slick media interface to their American allies that knows exactly what buttons to push?  Or am I watching mostly American self-deception?

I am increasingly convinced it is the latter.

As am I. 

You guys have always been incredible at propaganda.

The propaganda out there right now is insane...

12 hours ago, Domus Acipenseris said:

What if we built massive amounts of solar thermal and used the "waste" heat to desalinate seawater?  Pump the water in the daytime and let the water flow through turbines on its way to its destination in the night.  Excess heat can make hydrogen.  Hydrogen can react with carbon dioxide to make synthesis gas.  Synthesis gas can go into the Fischer-Tropsch process.  Other hydrogen can make ammonia, eliminating the need for natural gas to make ammonia.

I'm not sure what you're responding to here tbh.

On 2/18/2022 at 5:35 PM, Lord_James said:

As a counter point, wind turbines kill many many birds, and tidal turbines will probably be just as deadly to ocean life, some of which is already struggling due to over-fishing and pollution in general. That is, of course, if it’s built like a wind turbine, and not like some kind of tidal dam, but the locations you can build tidal dams is limited, and could still pose risks with fish finding their way into the turbines. 

I think this is a bit of a misnomer - wind turbines without any bird-scaring features (such as painting one blade black) kill plenty of birds. But far, far less than an equivalent coal power plant does.

I'd expect tidal power to kill plenty of fish and crabs and such, but again far, far less than, say any form of technology which involves jetting a huge plume of heated or briny water into the sea (ie: nuclear power or desalination plants). 

Really, the biggest issue with tidal is just that it's damn hard to make anything with moving parts that doesn't degrade or get encrusted with sea life after a few years. The sea is not a happy environment for anything with moving bits that's also supposed to sit in one spot for years on end without maintenance.

So, Sherman vs Panther is a topic that has been chewed over on this forum until only gristle remains. I accordingly have very little to add except to urge the newer members to dig into some of our older threads.

In terms of chronological progression vs what hindsight tells us - as @Sturgeon has stated, a T-44/T-54 was entirely within the state of the art in 1939. If aircraft seem to have more quickly arrived at a local optimum, it's partly a function of more resources being poured into them than tanks*, partly a function of the relative utility of outdated models^, and partly a function of different operational and strategic tradeoffs.

Tanks are rigidly constrained by fuel supply lines, bridge sizing, tunnel width and train gauges. The result is that you want to get along with the smallest, lightest, most mobile vehicle you can until such time as it isn't tenable any more. With aircraft, the major limitation of runways only kicks in at the very frontline, and accordingly puts hard constraints only on shorter-ranged types such as interceptors and tactical support aircraft. Even then, this mostly bites around the point where jet aircraft become common and landing speeds start to balloon.

*Resources put into tank vs. aircraft production in WW2 are uniformly almost impossible to directly quantify given wildly fluctuating budgets, the different strategic resources needed by each, the inaccuracies of stated prices, and the fact that all the services kept their own accounts. On the Nazi side of things, wild swings in allocation were frequent but the luftwaffe nearly always ended up with the lion's share of resources (especially scarce resources such as aluminium). As for the Army, only around 20% of their budget went into tanks. The production figures of all combatant nations reflect this: around two aircraft were produced for every tank.

^An outdated tank can still provide valuable frontline service, while an outdated fighter or bomber is dead weight.

On 1/15/2022 at 6:22 PM, Domus Acipenseris said:

 

"The interesting contrast is, I wouldn't say the same about the fighter aircraft of 1940 even with all the hindsight in the world. I think they were about as good as you could hope for."

 

I've wondered about this.  How many good fighters are there vs how many good tanks?  It seems as if to make a good fighter required mainly a good wing and a good engine.  The good tank required so much more.  Is it that standards for rating fighters are lower, is it easier to design a fighter than a tank or is it the relative quality of the designers?

There were many more fighter programs than tank programs, many of them producing dogs that never went into service. Of the ones that went into service, most were a disappointment in some way. Of the few that weren't, only one or two were outstanding. This gives you a good idea of the numbers involved: around 240 types used or tested, including foreign types, trainers, utility aircraft etc. Of those, maybe half were used in any great numbers in service. Of that 100-ish aircraft, perhaps two dozen rose above the level of mediocre. And of that two dozen, a handful are considered superlative in their class.

Aircraft design is very fiddly, and requires a mix of easily-ascertained factors (power-to-weight ratio, wing loading, armament etc.), hard-to-ascertain factors (top speed, turn times in various configurations, landing speeds) and factors which defied empirical modelling and could only be found by experiment (stability, stall characteristics, maintenance and service niggles, random engine/landing gear/aerodynamic bugs etc).

Making a good aircraft in WW2 was as much alchemy as science, and resulted in a lot of dead test pilots. Tanks were actually comparatively easier to design, and accordingly got designed by lesser talents on lower budgets (see, again, the example of British tank building in WW2, which was the product of a bare handful of second-tier engineers). Even today, the best mechanical engineers are mostly doing aviation and aerospace. 

12 hours ago, Lord_James said:

Are you surprised that Americans cannot into culture, even their own? 

More that it confirms what I've heard (from a former actor) about Hollywood being a closed shop dominated by a remarkably small population of locals.

13 hours ago, LoooSeR said:

They do pretty decent Hollywood Russian accent.

{McCarthyism intensifies}

On 8/13/2021 at 2:18 AM, Sturgeon said:

 

This is an artificiality of Hollywood movies intended to make a character seem less like they come from California or New York. Which is funny because most US veterans from bumfuck can do Arabic pronunciation just fine. Anyone actually from "twang" country can recognize how stupid it sounds a mile away.

This is what the guy that Crisp Rat's character is based on sounds like:
 

No exaggerated accent.

Late to this party, but...

you're telling us that not only can Americans not do English, Scottish, Australian or South African accents, they can't even do American accents?

Random question: would it be possible to knapp a brittle alloy?

I had a half thought-out idea of quenching a high carbon steel, then shaping it by knapping before tempering.

1 hour ago, Lord_James said:

In retrospect, this is definitely the wrong thread to have asked this in, and I phrased my question poorly.
 

Attempt 2: Why do micro organisms just “fall apart” immediately after they die? Do the forces or biological processes, that occur when they’re alive, maintain their outer layer? Being a novice, I would think it’s similar to larger organisms where it just stops maintaining itself after death and decay is more gradual, as the bonds between all the molecules eventually fail over time (or are broken down by a scavenging creature). Maybe that’s just my engineering student brain trying to make sense of weird, stinky organic stuff by comparing it to machines and/or macro biology. 
 

(should probably move this discussion to somewhere more appropriate, but I’ll let someone else make that decision)

Perhaps move the conversation to an appropriate thread in the bio section?

8 hours ago, Lord_James said:

I have a question, but I don’t know where to put this, so here you go (I apologize for the click bait thumb nail). 

 

@Toxn, wtf is happening to the bacteria at 2:08? 

3 hours ago, T80U :DDDDDDDDDDD said:

I found this on discord

https://discord.com/channels/788349365466038283/788350217304277013

I'm on the discord and quizzed them about it a few months ago. I couldn't get a straight answer out of them on how they wanted to implement the cartridge/shell designer.

We'll just have to see how it plays out I guess.

So here's a question that touches on the whole A-10 issue in a more philosophical way: should a force/service be determined by role, or by battlespace? In other words: is the main point of the navy to attain sea superiority (however that's defined), or to act as a repository for sea-going assets?

I know that in the real world these considerations are usually secondary to contingent, historical factors (and in any case all the actors involved here pick and choose the framing they want to suit their real purpose - which is to get a bigger share of the budget). But it helps me to think about this when engaging with the whole debate about the to CAS role. If the main role of the air force is to dominate an airspace, then it having organic CAS assets is more or less a sideshow. If, however, its main role is to house air assets, then having CAS aircraft is essential.

3 hours ago, Lord_James said:

I think this is a bit unfair, similar to asking an A-36 to perform like a P-51, which isn’t going to happen. Now what would be a better ask is to give the luftwaffe the A-10’s and have them try to get past the British air defense. I doubt the warthog could get past the hurricanes and spitfires any better than the He-111 and Ju-88, but it just removes any bias about intended combat roles. 

True, but this is a plane design from the 70s struggling against aircraft from the late 30s. Put an A-36 up against a flight of Gothas and Fokkers and it won't struggle on any front except running out of ammunition.

6 hours ago, Jeeps_Guns_Tanks said:

 

Is that how it really went?

It's obviously a bit of a joke, but yeah. More or less.

Enough Ju-88s survived to get over the target and bomb it. Even with 4 sidewinders each and respawns, the A-10s were just too slow (and slow-climbing) to get up to the formation and take the prop bombers down in time. And if they'd had escorts then the A-10s would have been sitting ducks - they were barely hanging on at that altitude.

A-10s go back in time, lose the battle of Britain to un-escorted Ju-88s

4 hours ago, Dragonstriker said:

What is the Army going to do in the IndoPacific theatre again?

Presumably step in as replacement marines, same as their last go-around in the pacific.

On 9/18/2021 at 8:30 PM, molnibalage said:

Detailed explanation of the Cold War A-10A and the Avenger.

95% Cold War related content 5% post Cold War COIN.

 

 

For all the people who want to reward the creator of this video: go get in on the comment dogpile and drive that engagement metric. It's classic YouTube tier and therefore very much good for light entertainment.

4 minutes ago, Jeeps_Guns_Tanks said:

 

 

Yeah it's crazy there was an actual inter-service war over this, with the Marines mixed in because the Army was secretly giving them money for the Bronco program if I recall right. The Army had to hide it was looking into arming helicopters cause the Air Force was going to go apeshit when they found out. Crazy shit. 

Yeah, inter-service stuff is generally crazy when seen from the outside, but perfectly sensible and in line with incentives from the inside. And it gets worse the more politically powerful each branch is (witness Imperial Japan).

Another thing to note (apologies for all the combo posting): isn't there an argument that the biggest success of the A-10 as a program was in allowing the USAF to keep denying the army fixed-wing assets on the basis that it was providing CAS? By that metric it was stellar - the army got beaten back all the way to only being allowed rotary-wing aircraft and has never managed to successfully bring up the issue again.