Lord_James

bah! as if you'll find another!

I also think like, the A-10 has really twisted around people's ideas about what CAS is supposed to be. Close air support is ordnance delivery in close proximity to friendly forces. That's it. We now have this idea that it means some flying turd hovering around a platoon getting JTACs commands and brrrrting at anyone who looks funny. This is a hyperspecific artifact of the way CAS was conducted in the GWOT. But a 'Chief flying in at 800 miles per hour and dropping bombs on enemy positions and then zooming off is CAS, too. A B-52 dropping a JDAM from 35,000 feet onto a ground lased target is CAS, too. CAS is not just "that thing the A-10 does".

This is irrelevant to the question of the A-10, and it also isn't clear to me that in the case of CAS you get a different answer with either premise.

The reason it's irrelevant to the A-10 is that the A-10 doesn't exist as a "repository" aircraft, it exists to pretend to be a helicopter so that Congress doesn't take away scope from the USAF's mission-budget holdings. The USAF (circa 1965) doesn't care about CAS that much, it cares about any kind of tactical air being given to the Army, which it sees as a first step towards the Army being able to recapture scope that was split off from it in the 1940s. And you look at what the Army was playing around with at the time, and it's pretty clear that the A-10 exists primarily as a physical "lid" on the Army's tacair capability. In other words, the Army cannot have any aircraft as capable or more capable than the A-10. That's pretty much its entire purpose (even if no one person was thinking exactly that, there's a reason these things shake out this way).

Now why do I think the domination/repository models don't get you a different answer? Well, simply because fighting wars requires methods of conduct which use assets and which together are based on doctrine. So whether you think of the Air Force as a "battlespace dominator" or as a "plane battery" is irrelevant. It is a battlespace dominator that requires a plane battery and both are subservient to the doctrine. Which one has "primacy" does not change the math. I could maybe conceive of a structure where that did change the math, but it would have to be very tortured indeed to apply to CAS.

Wow, a confirmation that D-technology is an internal armour package. Years of debates can finally be put to rest.

Confirmed, the A-10 Threshold is below the Ju 88

http://tank-masters.de/?page_id=8790
 
good overview of the leopard 2a7v upgrade by ralph zwilling
 
"For example, the protection level of the chassis will be increased by replacing the internal protection modules in the front of the hull with modern protection modules in D technology, adapting a front protection module at the bow, a duel glacis plate protection as well as catchers in the side hull area and the installation of universal brackets for the optional mounting of heavy side skirts. Since the hulls of the 68 Leopard 2A4s scheduled for conversion to Leopard 2A7V were already too worn and the conversion would have been too complex and cost-intensive, new hulls are being built for these vehicles. 
...
 
Due to the new P 25000 HD final drives with modified transmission ratio, the Leopard 2A7V is now again able to adequately perform the tactical „jump“ from cover. However, this advantage is bought by a reduced top speed, which is anyway rather a pure nominal value without any practical use. In addition, the vehicle receives a 570 Z end connector track adapted to the increased weight, new sprockets, reinforced torsion bars and four additional hydraulic bump stops.
...
In addition to an Attica 3rd generation thermal sight and a new eye-safe laser rangefinder in the EMES 15A2 main sight, the gunner will have an additional display to the left of his control handles. This allows him to observe the EMES and PERI R17A3 fields of view more fatigue-free during longer operations due to the more ergonomic seating position.
...
All 68 vehicles originally based on the Leopard 2A4 main battle tank will be equipped with the new L55A1 120 mm smoothbore gun, including new breechblocks, recoil brakes and recuperators, which permits significantly higher gas pressure."
 
____________________________
 
Leopard 2a6a3 will also receive the L55a1 gun
source: infobriefheer_02_2021    page 15
 
 

Photos from the "IFV Sea Transportability" event
 

 

Interoperability testing for amphibious operations on Sydney harbour. 
 
 
 

The P-47 is crying in its grave that this is her legacy. 

It’s fine, I still understood what you were saying . The Queen E’s were very good, but still suffered from the typical British engineering practice of “penny wise, pound foolish”. 
 
However, this is about her majesty’s admirals, and not their boats, so I’ll stay on topic. I believe Fisher was a more intelligent admiral that the both of them, some of his ideas having very good foresight of future events, also his 2 legacy ships, all big gun battleships and battle cruisers, even if both were not used as effectively as theorized. 

The P-47 is crying in its grave that this is her legacy. 

*sad Chrysler XM1 noises* 

Boomerang became chonkier. Possibly new add-on armor modules on this APC variant.

 
Before:
   Also, state trials sceduled to start in ~April 2022 for changed model.

A render of the NGMBT from Hyundai Rotem's website
https://blog.hyundai-rotem.co.kr/616
 

The P-47 is crying in its grave that this is her legacy. 

More from our Discord. 

There is a myth I've seen online and had plenty of arguments about.  The myth says that Beatty was a superior admiral to Jellicoe.  Absurd to anyone in the know but it persists.  I believe it persists because some people see their own personality in Beatty and therefore stick up for him.
 
Where to start?  Jellicoe was involved in the building up of the technical side of the RN in WW1.  He knew that the RN AP shells did not work and that he had a powerful but flawed instrument under him.  Jellicoe knew that the RN was doing as much as it could against the Central Powers with blockade and amphibious warfare and that destroying the German fleet won the Allies nothing.  At Jutland Jellicoe had 0 scouting data from Beatty and therefore had to make decisions based upon instinct, hunches, and reasoning about what effect his choices would have given what the enemy might be doing.  He chose right and crossed the T, letting his superior weight of shell tell.
 
Beatty did not fire his signals officer for personal reasons, costing him battles given the fact that his flagship could not give orders in battle.  At Jutland he went charging after the enemy, leaving the 4 most powerful ships in the world behind due to the lower speed of those ships (Queen Elizabeth class) and once again, poor signals.  The magnitude of this error is clear when one realizes that Hipper had 5 ships to Beatty's 6.  Beatty could have had 10, 4 with 15 inch guns, had he wanted them.  Instead he left them behind.  Beatty's main task was to inform Jellicoe of German positions which he did not do.
 
I'm not sure why this is even a myth but I wanted to help bust it here.
 
The best book I've read on WW1 naval combat is Robert K Massie's Castles of Steel.  Very entertaining as well as informative.
 
 
Trigger warning:  I really hate link rot so I spammed this paper on Jutland.
 
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-229X.12241
 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303546167_Weight_of_Shell_Must_Tell_A_Lanchestrian_Reappraisal_of_the_Battle_of_Jutland
 
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Weight-of-Shell-Must-Tell%3A-A-Lanchestrian-of-the-of-MacKay-Price/af53aec74cccb3a10eac3489aa233dfc9b247cea
 
https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/weight-of-shell-must-tell(186a432d-44bc-4f9b-8ee5-6f6245e1ad44)/export.html
 
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99759/1/Jutland.PreReview.pdf
 
 

Very good video on a subject. Also, this guy understand some stuff that was actually happening in Soviet Union instead of brining up usual stereotypes, and yes, it is directly connected to this event.
 

I detail how superior the Su-25's gun is in this article: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/09/15/russias-10-warthog-su-25-rook-attack-jet-gun/

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).

Having had a look at the performance of the rounds, it looks like the propellant loads would be quite different for each round. The 60mm needs around 1.9dm3 of case volume for the propellant, the 76mm around 4.3dm3 and the 105mm around 7.1dm3.
 
This means less than you'd think in terms of the space that the rounds take up, though, since volume scales cubically. As a toy example: a conservatively bottle-necked case for the 60mm (1/3 larger base than tube diameter) would have to be something like at least ~450mm long, an equivalent case for the 76mm would be ~630mm long, and the 105mm would be ~600mm long.
 
The ease of handling of a round is more or less a function of the case length and weight (with weight being one of those factors that becomes exponentially more of a hassle as it increases). So I'd say that, within a certain floor of effectiveness and ceiling of round mass and size, your operational requirements will probably determine where on the graph of size/weight and effectiveness you land. For instance: the 25% jump in penetration performance from the 60mm to the 76mm at the cost of a 40% increase in case length is a decent trade-off if stowed ammunition and rate of fire is worth trading. As is the 30% jump from the 76mm to the 105mm (at the cost of something like a 70% increase in weight), if you need the extra effectiveness against more modern armour.
 
Again; I'm getting the impression that small-bore APFSDS slingers show up more in second and third-tier armies because those are the forces where the floor of effectiveness is lowest. Zapping T-55s and T-62s instead of T-64s and T-72s just gives you a lot more leeway when it comes to choosing what other trade-offs are worth it. 

Photo of DT-BTR APS (for arctic units).

Next full comp, which will be no earlier than next year, will be a strike fighter competition.