Xlucine

First comment: "DERPA".

Doctor Who taught me that the best defense against killer robots is stairs.
 
I am glad to see that this advice works.

Hehe yeah, been busy, very very busy. But, I figured it was about time that I actually post instead of being some creepy lurker.

Yeah. I kept scrolling down, expecting it to pick up elsewhere or wondering where the Jump to next page link was. I'm assuming the author's lower intestine leaped out of his sphincter and strangled him and the War is Boring guys decided to run the piece anyway.

What is ITAR?
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is a set of U.S. government regulations that control the export and import of defense-related articles and services on the U.S. Munition List (USML).[1] These regulations implement the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act, and are described in Title 22 (Foreign Relations), Chapter I (Department of State), Subchapter M of the Code of Federal Regulations. The Department of State interprets and enforces ITAR. Its goal is to safeguard U.S. national security and further U.S. foreign policy objectives.
 
Is this a Democrat thing?
No.  It was passed in 1976 and supported by congress since then.  
 
This recent furor is because Obama is trying to get rid of guns?
No, the ITAR changes listed in the Federal register are mostly being done by technocrats who hold positions on civil service contracts that prevent politicization of their jobs.  That is why they are put into the Federal Register.  Technocrats have to tell everyone when they monkey with a reg so people have time to react.
 
Could This Affect Bloggers?
Absolutely, if they are exporters.  An exporter is someone who sells a product to a foreign entity for money.  A blogger who knowingly sells information, even openly available information, to a nation or NGO on a watch list can be fined or charged for violating ITAR.  This does not mean that they have to stop foreign nationals from visiting their blogs and earning them advertising dollars.  It means that if they get a paycheck for their writing for a foreign source they need to do due diligence to find out what the money is for and who is giving them the money.  So, for example, if a blogger is hired by China to write an article on the capabilities of US ships, they can be fined or jailed for this.  The big ones that are of concerns is ISIS, Boko Harum, the Taliban, and the like.
 
Do You Have an Example?
Yes.  ISIS contacts a blogger and asks for an article on how to execute soldiers wearing standard US helmet without removing them from their heads.  They offer the blogger $10,000 for the service.  The blogger complies and gives them the article and gets the money.  They have now violated ITAR.
 
What About the First Amendment?
Justices for 200 years have provided less freedom to commercial speech than political, so this speech, as it is commercial, faces stiffer regulations.
 
If the blogger writes an article on how to execute US soldiers and posts on their own website?
They need to talk to a lawyer, but they have not exported the product, as they received no money, and they were not contracted by a foreign power for the information.  Distasteful information is covered by the First Amendment.  
 
What changes actually happened?
The changes to ITAR are mostly on the subject of collation of open information. It is possible under the old regulations that a person who merely collated public information as a service for ISIS could be innocent as they were not providing new information.
 
Why then is the NRA concerned?
We are coming into a presidential season and the NRA's top candidates are already in trouble in the polls.  The NRA is a massively expensive organization to run with hundreds of people paid six figures or more, and a larger member base of lifetime members.  The only way to raise the HUGE money needed to keep the current political influence is to rouse the party base on trivial or non-existence issues.  This also confirms to Washington NRA power.  If the NRA can create buzz around a lie, then it is more powerful because it could bring down politicians who do not follow their fiat for any reason, even one without a factual basis.

This is not Sturgeon demanding this of us, but a request.  Out of respect for Sturgeon we should remember it is his income and this is his forum.

I'll be honest. It does have a sort of a cheap 1980s Action Movie feel to it. "Wait a second", you're saying. "This isn't just an excuse for you to post a trailer about the 1982 cinematic triumph "Megaforce" that puts the force into tour de force is it?"
 
Well, yes. Yes it is.
 

 

Otters could kick your ass. Otters could kick anyone's ass. Otters kick crocodile ass all over the world

Here's the nature article, and a summary by the beeb. They think they've found flakes, cores that have flakes removed, hammers, and even anvils. For scale, this is from about 100,000 years before lucy

By 2015, the Germans were reduced to crewing their Toyota Yaris fleet with barely trained teenagers. 

Jeez, those guys at Osprey Publishing work fast.
 
Duel 198: Challenger 2 vs Toyota Yaris
 

Almaz-Antey showed results of their analysis of MH17 plane damage. They managed to point at possible place of launch, based on given material. Material was given by official European/Netherlands investigation team.
 
Pics (a lot of them):
http://twower.livejournal.com/1683243.html
 
Missile was 9M38M1 with 9N314M warhead, launched by Buk-M1 from Zareshenskoe.
 
Some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

There is more forest growth in the world than deforestation. Most of that growth seems to be in Russia, I can suspect a correlation between the fall of the USSR and the growth of forests in Russia.

Further research has revealed that that journo really had no idea what they were talking about. They claimed it will be implemented on the LEAP engines in such a way as to suggest that LEAP will have Ceramic Matrix Composite (CMC) blades, when LEAP will only have a CMC high pressure turbine shroud per GE. Also according to that document there were CMC parts in the ADVENT variable bypass ratio engine (presumably only static parts like the high pressure shroud), and we should see CMC blades on the production equivalent of ADVENT. As a further point of interest, they claim that the fins lack of cooling channels means you can make them more aerodynamically efficient - so the lack of bleed air does have advantages for efficiency.
 
I also found this article, which makes for interesting reading. GE has invested over $100mil into making a new facility to produce CMC components, and they're far from the only ones interested in the technology.
 
ETA: this gets better - apparently the F136 was going to have CMC parts, until it got cancelled

The M4 had sloped armor!? What!? Madness! My 47 mm could still pen it with its Katana Bullits!

Front aspect of a Eurofighter Typhoon.  Note the PIRATE IRST up front, and the shape of the air intakes.  The curvature of the intake ducts hides the compressor blades of the engine, as these are a major contributor to radar cross section.  Even more aggressively curved intakes are seen in the F-22 raptor:
 

 
These "S-duct" intakes are also believed to be coated with radar absorbing material, so that any radio energy entering the intakes will be attenuated before it can ricochet down the intakes and into the compressor blades.  S-ducts do come at some cost of additional drag and additional distortion of the airflow entering the engines.  For this reason, the F119 engines in the F-22 are believed to be very tolerant of distorted airflow.
 
Curiously, the engine compressors appear to be visible from the front through the intakes of the PAK-FA:
 

 
Which seems like an odd oversight in an aircraft that is otherwise (planform alignment, horizontal stabs hidden behind main wing, avoidance of right angles) well-designed for low radar cross section.
 
The most likely explanation is that what we are seeing is not an engine compressor at all, but a radar blocking device in front of the engine.  The F/A-18E/F has a similar device.
 
However, other explanations are possible.  The PAK-FA prototypes have provisional engines, so it seems plausible that the definitive type 30 engine will have such different airflow requirements that the air intakes will have to be completely re-designed in the future anyway.  It is also possible that the compressor blades themselves will be made of a carbon-carbon composite, which would reflect radar less effectively than traditional metal compressor blades, which would make hiding them less critical.

People would say: "Oh my gosh, that's so racist! Someone's dressed up that poor sasquatch as an African-American civil rights activist!"

UVZ internal magazine.

 
PDF: http://technowars.ru/assets/content/article/174/tw-3-2015-cut.pdf
 
Some images:

 

 

 

 

 
And additional picture of the Kurganets IFV.

I've just remembered why this is a great idea, and I want to kick myself for forgetting it - they haven't made the ceramics ductile, they've made them resist crack growth which means you can put them in tension without major issues.
 
The stress field around a crack tip is rather complex, with the stress concentrated in a very small volume at the tip and peak values around 2 orders of magnitude higher than the average stress for a typical minute crack (i.e., ~1 atom tip radius). The pattern looks something like this:

(from here)
The exact stress field is complex and can only be gathered from direct measurement or FEA simulations, and it has some rather useful properties as well as the awkward peak values. Generally measurements will only give the magnitude of stress at a point, however with FEA you can output a graph of stress in a single direction only. Stress perpendicular to the crack is the bulk of the stress, so the values are not much different to that of the magnitude graph, but the stress parallel to the crack (and perpendicular to the applied stress) is very different. For reasons I don't understand (must be something to do with poisson's ratio) there is an area of high stress parallel to the crack a small distance in front of the crack tip (the distance is about the same as the tip radius), with peak values of around 20% of the maximum stress perpendicular to the crack. This is very handy!
 
In fibre composite materials it's generally rather challenging to bond the fibres to the matrix, so the tensile strength parallel to the fibres will be much higher - this is why they tend to have fibres woven is several directions, or random spreading of fibres (like in some examples of fibreglass). This lower strength is very useful when a crack is introduced into the composite - if the bonding between the fibre and matrix is about 20% as strong as the fibres are, then the area of high stress parallel to the crack will create a void in the material as the crack approaches a fibre. When the crack meets this void it is effectively blunted - the single atom radius crack tip is now effectively infinitely large, so the crack is stopped at the fibre. This is known as the cook-gordon mechanism, and here's a diagram:

From here
The new crack perpendicular to the old crack isn't an issue as long as the loading doesn't change, as cracks are not affected much by stress parallel to them. So in these turbine blades any small cracks that form will grow until they encounter a interface, and then get blunted. You'll probably need the fibres carefully aligned with the stress at that point, but with FEA it should be possible to create a map of the stress field throughout the blade. I also found a paper on crack mitigation in ceramics using this mechanism when googling for the pictures - I wonder if this would also work for multi-hit capability in ceramic armours?

I've just remembered why this is a great idea, and I want to kick myself for forgetting it - they haven't made the ceramics ductile, they've made them resist crack growth which means you can put them in tension without major issues.
 
The stress field around a crack tip is rather complex, with the stress concentrated in a very small volume at the tip and peak values around 2 orders of magnitude higher than the average stress for a typical minute crack (i.e., ~1 atom tip radius). The pattern looks something like this:

(from here)
The exact stress field is complex and can only be gathered from direct measurement or FEA simulations, and it has some rather useful properties as well as the awkward peak values. Generally measurements will only give the magnitude of stress at a point, however with FEA you can output a graph of stress in a single direction only. Stress perpendicular to the crack is the bulk of the stress, so the values are not much different to that of the magnitude graph, but the stress parallel to the crack (and perpendicular to the applied stress) is very different. For reasons I don't understand (must be something to do with poisson's ratio) there is an area of high stress parallel to the crack a small distance in front of the crack tip (the distance is about the same as the tip radius), with peak values of around 20% of the maximum stress perpendicular to the crack. This is very handy!
 
In fibre composite materials it's generally rather challenging to bond the fibres to the matrix, so the tensile strength parallel to the fibres will be much higher - this is why they tend to have fibres woven is several directions, or random spreading of fibres (like in some examples of fibreglass). This lower strength is very useful when a crack is introduced into the composite - if the bonding between the fibre and matrix is about 20% as strong as the fibres are, then the area of high stress parallel to the crack will create a void in the material as the crack approaches a fibre. When the crack meets this void it is effectively blunted - the single atom radius crack tip is now effectively infinitely large, so the crack is stopped at the fibre. This is known as the cook-gordon mechanism, and here's a diagram:

From here
The new crack perpendicular to the old crack isn't an issue as long as the loading doesn't change, as cracks are not affected much by stress parallel to them. So in these turbine blades any small cracks that form will grow until they encounter a interface, and then get blunted. You'll probably need the fibres carefully aligned with the stress at that point, but with FEA it should be possible to create a map of the stress field throughout the blade. I also found a paper on crack mitigation in ceramics using this mechanism when googling for the pictures - I wonder if this would also work for multi-hit capability in ceramic armours?

I've just remembered why this is a great idea, and I want to kick myself for forgetting it - they haven't made the ceramics ductile, they've made them resist crack growth which means you can put them in tension without major issues.
 
The stress field around a crack tip is rather complex, with the stress concentrated in a very small volume at the tip and peak values around 2 orders of magnitude higher than the average stress for a typical minute crack (i.e., ~1 atom tip radius). The pattern looks something like this:

(from here)
The exact stress field is complex and can only be gathered from direct measurement or FEA simulations, and it has some rather useful properties as well as the awkward peak values. Generally measurements will only give the magnitude of stress at a point, however with FEA you can output a graph of stress in a single direction only. Stress perpendicular to the crack is the bulk of the stress, so the values are not much different to that of the magnitude graph, but the stress parallel to the crack (and perpendicular to the applied stress) is very different. For reasons I don't understand (must be something to do with poisson's ratio) there is an area of high stress parallel to the crack a small distance in front of the crack tip (the distance is about the same as the tip radius), with peak values of around 20% of the maximum stress perpendicular to the crack. This is very handy!
 
In fibre composite materials it's generally rather challenging to bond the fibres to the matrix, so the tensile strength parallel to the fibres will be much higher - this is why they tend to have fibres woven is several directions, or random spreading of fibres (like in some examples of fibreglass). This lower strength is very useful when a crack is introduced into the composite - if the bonding between the fibre and matrix is about 20% as strong as the fibres are, then the area of high stress parallel to the crack will create a void in the material as the crack approaches a fibre. When the crack meets this void it is effectively blunted - the single atom radius crack tip is now effectively infinitely large, so the crack is stopped at the fibre. This is known as the cook-gordon mechanism, and here's a diagram:

From here
The new crack perpendicular to the old crack isn't an issue as long as the loading doesn't change, as cracks are not affected much by stress parallel to them. So in these turbine blades any small cracks that form will grow until they encounter a interface, and then get blunted. You'll probably need the fibres carefully aligned with the stress at that point, but with FEA it should be possible to create a map of the stress field throughout the blade. I also found a paper on crack mitigation in ceramics using this mechanism when googling for the pictures - I wonder if this would also work for multi-hit capability in ceramic armours?

I still want you to put it on a board with a ton of Wehraboos and declare it an AK prototype and see what happens.

Here's the nature article, and a summary by the beeb. They think they've found flakes, cores that have flakes removed, hammers, and even anvils. For scale, this is from about 100,000 years before lucy

Yeah. Nice try old man. What Tolkien REALLY wanted was nine hours of orcs and goblins running randomly into the swords of heroes, an Elf/Dwarf love affair, 92 seconds featuring Beorn, the Worms of Dune and Smaw-ooog getting killed by...
Oh screw it, I'm still pissed.

Fleet yaw GIFs, made by yours truly:
 

 


And an accompanying article.