xthetenth

Yeah, then people blame the nerds going batty on the nuke training, and they can't jump overboard and try to swim for civilization because the room is too cramped. Jokes aside, the submarine is going to be the only really truly stealthy ship that is still potent in combat, since sensors work differently underwater. For all the rest, RCS reduction is just going to be another parameter the designers consider.

This. The main concern is just the ability to generate sorties in airspace near China is going to be low enough that it may not even matter if the US planes kill with every AAM they get up in that airspace, there won't be enough sorties to prevent a concerted Chinese attack from knocking out vital support elements like AWACS birds.

Quite. There's a real serious fight against the water to achieve serious stealth, there's a reason that when they built the Sea Shadow for stealth and only stealth it was a SWATH hull with seriously oblique angles between the hull and the water so it didn't get much wake and would be guaranteed not to make a reflective shape as well as having decent stability unlike a tumblehome design. The main problem is that SWATH is a pain to deal with the facilities for it, and those angles make the problems greater and compress the amount of room you get, and modern ships are in general volume-critical (roomy weapons, spaces for smart people to work them, and enough space that smart people won't just leave adds up, which is why modern warships are so underarmed looking compared to older ships).

Life doesn't care what looks goofy. Life is just a means by which DNA molecules make other similar DNA molecules. Life cares what works better than what came before (not to be confused with what actually works best, mind).

That too. I think there's a lot of good reasons why the Skjolds weren't very popular. It's a very expensive solution to a problem that could be better solved by more cheaper corvettes skulking in fjords. The Chinese approach is more like that, with enough ships to give good coverage without ridiculous speed and the low hanging fruit RCS reductions from superstructure shape without going all in on stealth at the expense of seakeeping and other useful traits.

That would explain why the asymmetrical training experiences regarding the plane put its successes in the "experienced instructor manages to catch pilot who hasn't seen it before unaware with a tricky maneuver or somehow they talked the referees into letting them take off with Genies". As far as the accounts I've read, I remember this one.

If I remember right part of the problem is that it was an AIM-4 armed interceptor back when avionics really couldn't be changed easily. So fitting it for everything else would be a non-trivial problem.

About the tumblehome, I remember someone who spent quite a while designing ships saying that it was great for reducing RCS except for the fact the things are in the sea, and thus pitching will sometimes cause the acute angle it sacrifices to achieve anyway and the wake the ship will throw has the potential to give a worse RCS underway than a more traditional hull. I believe he mentioned the Skjolds as a great example of a stealthy design that wasn't stealthy at all underway. They also have the problem that any steady leak from holing will cause a progressively faster sinking from the ship, rather than a traditional hull which will have its sinking slow as it gets lower because each progressive bit of the ship is bigger, and overall there's less reserve bouyancy. The guns are a fantastic feature for winnning battles against the greatest foe the US faces, the USMC and their perfidious schemes to sabotage the US defense of their interests by insisting on the preservation of their fantasy of recreating Guadalcanal against a peer competitor in the modern day. This in a period where the role of force in international relations is basically as a regime veto card to deal with governments judged worse than the horrorshow of a smoking crater and a power vacuum, and any discussion of fighting with another power is in the sort of situation where the US is desperately short of the vital parts of any fight, like the ability to put ships and planes where they need to be. I am of course somewhat joking, but the point stands. My general impression of the Zumwalts is they were a kind of crazy late Cold War plan for ships when we were if we want to put a positive light on things trying to do things that would break our economy but make the Soviets totally shift their behavior to cede land superiority in Europe or break their state trying to keep the status quo. They got everything. When the Cold War stopped they kind of became the equivalent of concept cars. They've got just about every idea the Navy thinks would be an improvement, and it's going to be interesting seeing what sticks.

Yeah, I was going for a joking tone on the second half, I've been pretty wiped out tired so my tone might not be pitch perfect today. I personally feel like a clean sheet redesign for a considerable number of things would be a seriously good idea to give people a goal to migrate towards with an end in mind rather than adding new components in a situation where the effects on the whole can't properly be measured. Our systems have been evolving rather than being designed, and evolution is the basest form of "design". However, that leaves the question of what you base your design on, and that's where the experiences of the past are utterly vital. The things that work should be considered on that virtue as well as on the virtue of not requiring serious pain to implement since they're already in place. I think the real thing was that WWI lasted a lot longer. The Franco-Prussian war was hideous, but after the French raised a few units of draftees and they got mulched, the war was basically over without widespread demographic damage. I don't really think it's an accident that the US was pretty keen on staying out of WWI, the ACW was an ugly slugfest in recent memory. The Napoleonic wars were nasty but they predated mass media so I don't think they'd be able to cement the horrors of war. Before that it's the 30 years' war and that's its own special brand of awful. WWI however, cost the British their empire and left France in terrible shape and they were the putative victors, and did this in a time of daily newspapers, and I think that's what gave it a disproportionate effect. We've got the power to break things trivially, I feel the values we need are more the wisdom to know when and where to use that force because it's like pruning a tree with napalm.

I misunderstood then. I understood it in the context of the thread as a discussion primarily about the fighting man. I think that my point stands regarding the potential worth of traditional values in the modern military environment.

I believe they also handle better at extreme angles of attack, helping the maneuverability of missiles, such as the R-77.

I'm not equating what you said with that sort of adventurism so much as saying that emphasizing the virtues that might lead to strong manly men who make tough, hardy infantry is not a position that has historically held up well in combat past the middle of the 1800s and certainly hasn't since the days of modern industrial warfare, and that if anything the traditional values are not particularly consistent with a powerful modern military and most certainly are not consistent with a powerful military for the expressed goals of the US military and their overall strategic posture. We live in a very different world from when those values were codified. We've seen huge economic gains by making women part of the workforce, which has significantly increased our per-capita productivity and doubled the number of people whose minds we can potentially put into jobs that require smart, well educated people, but that requires a different social dynamic. The society that has a highly trained and capable combined arms team with the best technology may not be the society with the toughest and most inured to hardship infantry, but in wars between superpowers, the former is far more likely to matter. Were you to have had the argument along the lines you mentioned, I'd say the cultural shakedown has already happened, and the proposed benefit of traditional values are in the section of the military least useful to the battles we should be fighting, where dollars and trade policy are the first and most potent weapon, and trillions of dollars of machines would be the go to in case we had to choose between losing and losing badly. Edit: remember that I always argue from the perspective where the first question when some system isn't doing as well as you'd like is whether it's necessary, and the first question when a change is proposed is whether it will damage other more important systems, so discussions of combat effectiveness will lead to analysis from the perspective of US defense policy.

I thought that was for star wars fans who wanted to roleplay being an AT-AT.

Last I checked the world isn't gallant knights engaging in honorable combat anymore. It's multitrillion dollar systems of thousands of people squaring off and killing each other no matter how dirty or nasty the means. Glory and Honor died riddled with bullets and splinters somewhere in France a hundred years ago. Militaries reflect the societies they spring from, and a highly technical society has to use the mental gifts of all its members to maintain a technological lead, and that technological lead wins the wars that are worth fighting. As time goes on, more and more highly educated specialists are going to be needed, and frankly it's much more worthwhile wondering about how we're going to produce the people to make the absolute most out of things like a combined force of Air Force and Navy assets projecting force. The strategic goals of the US or even the entire world aren't served by us being a little bit better at having our infantry shooting the people we're notionally trying to help, when the fact that we're doing that is just causing more problems than it ever solved in the first place, and to get them there we're sacrificing our ability to hang over local disputes like the sword of damocles and keep the world playing by the rules we choose. It doesn't make sense from a bleeding-heart perspective and it doesn't make sense from a steely eyed imperialist perspective. If you brought Disraeli here and told him that we sacrificed our two-power criteria to pour blood and money into a godforsaken sandbox just to break things even more he'd know for certain the future's gone irrevocably mad. The way of the future is a society where the intellectual capabilities of as many members as possible are used to create as sophisticated an economy as possible, and use that strength to provide a powerful military. I mean unless you for some reason think the Imperial Japanese military is something to aspire to. Focusing on the aptitude of the individual soldier to combat rather than the fitness of the overall military machine is the thinking of failed racist states like Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Confederacy trying to pretend that being on the back end of serious technological development is okay, because they're totally going to kick the butts of those effete pluralistic weaklings because of the strength of their traditional values.

If I remember, the Israelis had co-ed infantry all the way back in their earliest fights, and they couldn't get rid of it soon enough. The reason was that the men would take mindbogglingly stupid risks to protect the women and that did damage combat effectiveness. If I remember right, the women performed fine. The question is how much stuff the soldiers are getting loaded down with. Regarding the rest, differences between races aren't really that huge, and differences between individuals are larger. There are plenty of people of all races with the right build and disposition for being infantry and even more without those traits. Finding the people with the best physical and mental traits for a given job should be more important than digging out the junior phrenologist's kit.

In case you wanted to start a shooting war with a combatant stranded in an exposed location, duh!

Right. There's serious amounts of money to be lost there. I personally think that there's relatively few fields in the natural sciences where that sort of ramification is possible and vanishingly few in the sciences that are hard because variables can be properly isolated rather than it just being a bad way of denoting natural sciences. There's always been a few things that were this hot-button, It's been a real progress getting tobacco universally recognized as harmful, for example. Demanding ever-stricter standards of proof bought them a lot of time. Very little awfulness is actually new, and science falling by the wayside when there's money at stake probably predates science in its modern form. Politicizing social science on its own merits may be newer, but that probably dates back to the first revisionist history, and frankly we've gained a ton by not just having an accepted viewpoint and ignoring everything else. Historical syntheses are nearly always stronger than either the thesis or antithesis.

If I remember right, the PLA placed an emphasis on accurate fire compared to other armies for quite a long time, do you think the 6mm range bullet is a reflection of that trend?

Personally I think WoWP in the mid-beta stage did a reasonably good job of capturing the decision making process of fighter combat, and made it a good mix of ACM prowess and situational awareness, but it was hard to control without a joystick and it had an agressively, unnecessarily bland flight model. I can totally understand why a decent number of people weren't nearly as eager as I to forgive its flaws, but I do miss it. I don't know if I see anything like it coming along for a while. The other games with similar ideas don't have the same flexibility in UI, and often tend to be jets with missiles, which I feel fundamentally weakens the importance of gaining a dominant position compared to a game where guns are the main means of attack, and there isn't usually the same ability to really dig yourself into an energy hole. C'est la vie.

Of it coming for the hard sciences? That's specifically what I was wondering about. Something as messy as trying to calculate the population of an area where the records suffered far worse destruction than the sack of baghdad and burning of the library of alexandria combined is easy to introduce bias into, because there's got to be considerable assumption to cover gaps in knowledge. That's a lot of why history is not and cannot be methodologically equivalent with the hard sciences, because history is defined by the inability to conduct additional trials. In a hard science you can make a hypothesis, and then create a trial to test it, and if it backs up your hypothesis, you have a predictive model, which makes predictions that can be tested in other trials, either repetition of your experiment or other experiments backing up that prediction. History is a regression fit onto spotty data, and everybody's working from the same data. That fundamentally changes the mechanism because you can't just look at something unknown and perform a trial to compare against your preexisting theories unless somebody makes a new find, and even then the potential pool of information to find is decidedly finite and insufficient to cover everything. And as far as it getting worse, at least there's frank discussion about different views. The concept of historiography in the modern sense is relatively new, as is the idea that history should be related impartially for its own sake without the trappings of a morality tale. Compare Gibbon to modern work on late Rome. Remember that history is a discipline that counts among its fathers Herodotus and it's pretty impressive how far it's come even if areas without sufficient data devolve into people using different postulates and shouting past each other with all the delicacy and tact of a flame war. It's easy to forget how bad it used to be over the flaws of today, especially since we're producing so incredibly great a volume of data.

How exactly? Unless it's profitable to ignore or confuse an issue in which case any awful methodology will do, there's a lot less room for shenanigans when it's not just trying different methodologies for totally not ideologically driven reasons. Now the monetization of sciences has always been here on a low level.

I used to solopub a high 70's percent win rate in WoWP, and I did a pretty decent amount of synch playing against one of the other best in the process. He was a better duellist, but I tended to get kills faster. So yeah, I'm miffed that they killed it with some of the worst concieved changes I've ever seen in a game. In contrast, WT in the mode that doesn't burden the game with way too much simulationism and enforced bad situational awareness has a control scheme where joystick is massively worse, and catching someone unawares is a likely death sentence for them because the planes are quite maneuverable and it's just a matter of being able to point a camera and click in front of a plane. The effect of all the realistically modeled armament stuff is that the damage dealt is functionally quite random, with luck shots and unlucky full loads of ammunition aplenty. This randomness reduces the difference between a momentary firing opportunity and a solid advantage in position, diminishing the role of skill in dogfights. Even worse, the furball is dragged low by the ground targets, and planes respawn with an altitude advantage, meaning that players who get shot down can come back with an energy advantage that means unless they actively screw up they can pick someone and get a free kill. War Thunder is actively designed to mitigate the effects of high player skill. WoWP is the only flight game I played where skill in maneuvering your plane and maintaining situational awareness while doing so was paramount and could really decide a game. Every other one is about being better able to manipulate some sort of awkward camera interface better than the other guy with flight skill a distant second that's only really relevant if both parties are equally capable with the camera, or was something where the game was set up to minimize the effects of good management of the player's plane.

No, damaging the unity of opposed coalitions is pretty useful in coalition politics. However, reinforcing their dislike of you is probably a mistake.

That's been boats for me.

Yeah, it started out as a game whose main sin was being bland, but it was moving in an okay direction and had some cool stuff (like the picture in picture which was the first decent solution I've seen for being able to keep your eyes bouncing between an enemy and having a rough idea where your plane was pointed). I liked it. I was utterly fantastic at it. Like top ten players good. And then they made german heavy fighters an I win button, made a lot of the most famous planes bad to awful, and they released it in that condition, at which point a certain collection of morons who wanted to think they were way better than they were triple linked german heavy fighters, pubbed to a 95% win rate, and killed the game. God damn it.