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Collimatrix

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Everything posted by Collimatrix

  1. Collimatrix
    So, for the record, this is how Obus-G works: See those little ports at the back end of the shell? Those let in propellant gas to the inside of the shell, which then vents out the ports in the front and through the gap between the nose fuze and the shell body. The inner HEAT warhead is "floating" on the high-propellant gas that gets vented inside the shell.
  2. Collimatrix
    I stand corrected. So what exactly causes the turret to swing around on its own like that? That sounds... bad.
  3. Collimatrix
    I am curious if this ammo is isolated as well. But I propose that isolated ammunition stowage doesn't make as much difference in a hull rack as it does in a turret bustle. With a turret bustle like on the Abrams, the ammo is behind the crew and the blast door is between the crew and the ammo. In order for the blow-off panels to do their magic and vent the overpressure of the burning ammunition propellant to the outside, those blast doors need to be both closed and intact. This is actually fairly likely in the case of the Abrams, because within the arc of the most likely lines of fire, it is probable that a round could go through the bustle but not penetrate the crew compartment and the blast door. The residual penetration of the threat round would exit the back of the turret. The rounds would then cook off, but the crew would remain alive. But with a hull rack, the blast doors are going to need to be between the turret ring and the rack, and there will need to be a firewall between the driver and the ammo. There aren't that many angles where a round can penetrate the hull rack from a frontal hit but not penetrate the blast doors. Unless of course the round has exactly enough penetration to get through the hull armor and the ammo compartment, but it craps out before penetrating the blast door. So, an isolated hull rack is good because it protect the ammo from cooking off in case of, say, a fuel or lubricant fire (or at least it means the ammo takes longer to cook off), but I don't know that it helps that much against incoming fire.
  4. Collimatrix
    I've also seen pictures of a stack thin Al alloy plates that were glued together compared to a monolithic plate of the same composition. The monolithic plate sheered, the layered one did not. There are a few ways to skin this particular cat.
  5. Collimatrix
    Per this site, the STUG IIIs only started sporting coaxial MGs in 1944.
  6. Collimatrix
    With Without That's for the cast mantlet. I know there are supposed to be box mantlets with and without the coax as well, but I'm not sure what the box mantlets with the coax look like. I also have no idea how the coax mount looks from the inside.
  7. Collimatrix
    Three videos on techniques for adjusting the harmonics of an AR-15 barrel: The techniques discussed are: 1) Adjusting the orientation of the flash hider in order to find the harmonic sweet spot 2) Tightening the barrel to the receiver (apparently this is covered in an American Gunsmith article in depth) 3) Adjusting the torque on the barrel nut 4) Applying a small amount of pressure on the bottom of the barrel via a set screw in a NM-style float tube 5) Adding an adjustable harmonic mass (similar to the Browning BOSS system), outside the context of NM
  8. Collimatrix
    We have these:
  9. Collimatrix
    This is a fascinating idea, but just to be clear, there's nothing in the armor calculation rules about additional protection gained by making the threat go through layers of alternating density. I spoke with N-L-M about this, and he didn't see a way to include it without making the armor rules too complicated.
  10. Collimatrix
    What the fuck is that nearest sign, land mines?
  11. Collimatrix
    I do not recognize that weapon.
  12. Collimatrix
    This is happening at the same time that Boeing is insisting the V-280 is a mature product that should be taken seriously, yes? And also at around the same time that serious problems with their airliners are being discovered, and all the while they can't do a fucking tanker right. BOEING. GET. YOUR. SHIT. TOGETHER.
  13. Collimatrix
    A nuclear-powered YB-49? All it needs now is a chrome bumper, a blonde chick in a poodle skirt and a shirtless man being menaced by weasels to make it the most 1950s thing ever.
  14. Collimatrix
    There has been a large explosion in Sri Lanka.
  15. Collimatrix
    Looking forward to your pictures!
  16. Collimatrix
    Sturgeon's House started with a community of people who played tank games. At the time, most of us were playing World of Tanks, but I think there were a few Warthunder and even Steel Beasts players mixed in there too. After nearly five years, we must be doing something right because we're still here, and because we've somehow picked up a number of members who work with, or have worked with tanks in real life. I know that @AssaultPlazma served as an Abrams loader, @Merc 321 and @Meplat have helped maintain and restore privately-owned armor, and @Xlucine has volunteered in a tank museum. I'm sure I'm missing several more! So, what are your favorite personal tank stories?
  17. Collimatrix
    I think he has some right ideas, and some dubious ones. The proposition that serious thinking about nuclear combat has atrophied strikes me as correct. The idea that nuclear warfare does not really introduce an entirely quantitatively different level of devastation strikes me as plain fucking ignorant. An all-out nuclear war between NATO and the USSR at their height would have left most of the population centers of Eurasia in rubble from nukes, the entire continental ecology unsuitable for agriculture for years since nerve agents kill insects, and the soils contaminated for who knows how long if the Soviets decided to get frisky with their weaponized anthrax stores. He brings up the European powers' decision to go to war in 1914 as an example of state actors' willingness to risk destruction and brave the risks of war. But none of the powers in 1914 foresaw the depth and breadth of the war. They thought it would be a quick, relatively painless conflict and had no idea what they were risking.
  18. Collimatrix
    Yikes! That seems like asking for trouble from General Mud.
  19. Collimatrix
    Cat Urbigkit sets the record straight on the realities of wolf reintroduction.
  20. Collimatrix
  21. Collimatrix
    The hardest limit to these sorts of upgrades is the ground pressure. Engines could be developed that are more powerful, but fit into the old engine bay (the original Leo 1 engine wasn't even turbocharged, so there's probably lots of room for improvement there). New transmissions that can handle the power could reasonably be developed. New torsion bars that can handle the weight could be installed. But there's not really any practical way to make the track contact area bigger.
  22. Collimatrix
    The Russian government has stooped to giving weapons to the Houthis, I see, by laundering them through the Saudi armed forces.
  23. Collimatrix
    Do they have to fly a fighter jet down the trench to hit the reactor?
  24. Collimatrix
    Yes and no, I think. They are setting up these real-time, photorealistic scenes in situations where conventional rasterization with shaders looks very good. There aren't any shiny objects, there's nothing transparent, and the lighting is fairly simple. With that said, the ability of the new NVIDIA cards to do shiny reflections and raytracing is limited. Most of their examples of how it makes a scene look better are very contrived. Battlefield V with raytracing on looks not very different from Battlefield V without raytracing... because most of the graphics are conventionally rasterized! Raytracing is still too computationally expensive to use much, so they only use it on certain lighting and reflection details. The most convincing argument I have heard for full raytraced games is that it will make game development cheaper if it completely replaces rasterization. The artists wouldn't need to do shader mapping (bump maps, etc); all that stuff would be built into the game engine. But that sort of technology is still many years away, and I am not convinced that the cost of paying artists is a large factor in video game development costs and timelines as compared to, say, EA's incompetence and greed.
  25. Collimatrix
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