Xlucine

The ELKE test bed like many of its experimental cousins mounted the ARES "Super 75" 75mm main gun. This was an impressive gun with performance above and beyond what was expected from it's size. Here are a few pics of the Super 75 APFSDS round being live-fire tested against a fully loaded T-54...
 

 

 

 
  

Future submarine concepts from 2002 (twitter thread)
 

Probably the best place for this, the letter from Mattis to Williamson. Seems to be quite a bit different than what the Sun reported.
 


 

Australia has chosen the BAE T26 design for their new frigates
 
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/theresa-may-hails-biggest-naval-defence-contract-for-a-decade-as-australia-picks-type-26-frigate/
 
Hopefully canada follows suit - it won't really help the UK economy at all (as the canadian and australian programs are local production), but it'd be neat to have a commonwealth user group for T26

I just think it's funny that we had a tank transporter big enough to haul a Jagdtiger and the German's didn't.

I like the berlin camo

I did not know the forum could embed twitch videos
 
 

Since Xlucine suggested it in the general AFV thread, here is a new version of the old Tank ID thread that used to exist at the WoT forums, back before the great exodus to SH.
 
The rules are simple.  Post a picture of some sort of AFV and everyone has to try to name what it is.  Try to avoid posting a new picture until the previous picture is identified.  Generally, the person who was first to correctly ID the picture in question gets to post the next picture, unless they want to pass.  If a picture is not ID'd in a day or two, the person that posted it should say what it is and bask in their own sense of superiority.   They should then post a new picture for the sake of keeping the thread moving.  Please, no fictional tanks, paper napkin drawings that never made it to prototype or pictures where the vehicle in question is obscured or particularly hard to see.  Also, if posting a picture of an unusual variant of a relatively common vehicle, be sure to note that you are looking for the specific variant name, not just the general family of vehicles it belongs to (for example, if I post a picture of a Panzer IV with the hydrostat drive, I would say in the post something like "What makes this Panzer IV unusual?" since everyone can ID a Panzer IV)
 
It is perfectly ok to shame those that make spectacularly wrong guesses.  That's just how we roll around here.  
 
I'll start 
 

Lately I've been reading a book on beekeeping, and the first thing it goes into is the physiology of bees, their developmental cycle, as well as the "castes" of bees and what each does, which might be the most interesting thing about them. 
 
The queen bee is born from a grotesque, alien cell that juts out from the bottom of the normal brood cells:

 
Once a queen is born, if she isn't killed at once by a resident queen, she takes a nuptial flight and goes to one of several DCA's (drone congregating areas - areas where drones from all the hives in the area go) and mates with about 20 drones. After that, she is mated for life and does nothing else for the rest of her life except lay eggs and kill rival queens.
 
The drones are the only male bees, and they do nothing else but mate once with a queen and then die (the drone's package is actually basically the same as a worker's stinger, and it is ripped out of their bodies after one use) The drones in the hive just break open honey cells when they need to eat, as they are incapable of foraging from plants.
 
The workers do literally everything else, and they are by far the most interesting caste. The workers are actually the smallest bees. When they are born, the first thing they do is clean out their cell to prepare it for another egg. Then they become nurse bees, feeding larvae and sometimes the queen as well. Some nurse bees serve the function of incubators, generating heat for brood cells when the temperature is not hot enough. In certain bee races, the nurse bees also clear out dead or diseased larvae, a very highly sought-after, but unfortunately recessive trait. Next, after a week or so, they become guard bees, defending the hive from raider bees or other animals. After another week or so, they become foragers. The first thing foragers do is take an orientation flight to familiarize themselves with local landmarks. The foraging bees bring back pollen to become bee bread and nectar to become honey, as well as water. They also communicate the location of good sources of resources to other foragers via dances. Strangely, the dances are different for each bee race. Some races have 3 distinct dances and others just have 2. The different dances communicate that the food lies within various distance ranges. For long-distance sources, the bees "waggle" different number of times during the "figure-eight" or "waggle" dance for more specific communication.
all bee dances are done in the same spot in the hive, called the "dance floor"
Observing bees pick up on the visual dance as well as the scent of whatever the dancer is trying to communicate and then a few bees join together and exploit that resource for all they can. The foraging stage is hard on a bee, and this life stage degrades them physically. Very old bees become scout bees, and if they take part in a swarm (basically bee colonialism), they look for good new hive locations and then argue with other scouts about the best location (no joke, they do their dances repeatedly until all but one shuts up, and that's the hive location they choose.)

A Type VIIC u-boat. I'm going to try and call this U-1206.
 
My thoughts on the build:
Fuck the pre-albacore hull form Fuck the germans Fuck WW2 And most of all
Fuck 1:350 Railings  
Also, fuck the lack of common allied WW2 submarine models

SGDQ starts next week:
https://gamesdonequick.com/schedule

A Type VIIC u-boat. I'm going to try and call this U-1206.
 
My thoughts on the build:
Fuck the pre-albacore hull form Fuck the germans Fuck WW2 And most of all
Fuck 1:350 Railings  
Also, fuck the lack of common allied WW2 submarine models

http://charly015.blogspot.com/2018/06/como-se-imaginaron-los-estadounidenses.html
It feels that some of thos pictures were done based on American designs and word description.

 

More in the link, including ground vehicle, satellites, space ships, radars, subs and so on.

Eurocentric bias much?

Isn't that just the european media?

SGDQ starts next week:
https://gamesdonequick.com/schedule

I hadn't thought of the weight savings in the structure with an evenly distributed load across the wings (avoiding the reinforcing to take the massive moment at the wing root). Other takeaways:
- This was meant to crab sideways into a long thin hangar
- post-war defence budgets must have been very tight with the number of times that they mention "efficiency"
- The fins on top weren't connected as rudders - the rudder was achieved with differential airbrakes in the wingtips. This meant that both rudder pedals were separate, and if you pressed both pedals then you got an airbrake

50 years to the day from the first UK SSBN patrol
 
 

That presentation also speak about Uran-9 combat use in Syria.

 
Well, not that surprising taking into account that company behind Uran-9 have no experience with robots and combat vehicles. Uran-9 is kind of POS. 
 
Conclusions
 
 

Baka; here's a quick overview of the technology successfully built into the SU-122-54 - many of the identified issues/problems associated with previous Soviet assault guns and 122mm-armed tanks were solved:
 
First Soviet production tank or assault gun fitted with a main gun bore evacuator (advantage over all previous Soviet assault guns and tanks)  Vertically stabilized main gun (advantage over T-10, same level as T-10A)  Two (human) loaders (advantage over all other Soviet 122mm-armed assault guns and tanks)  Mechanical rigid-chain rammer (advantage over all IS-series of tanks) First and only Soviet production assault gun or tank fitted with a stereoscopic rangefinder (advantage over all previous Soviet assault guns and tanks until the fielding of the T-64) From my perspective, the combination of lessons-learned from WWII and new (at the time) technology, make the SU-122-54 very interesting. We also need to remember that the Soviets thought it was interesting as well...the SU-122-54 was approved both for mass production and upgrading by fitting the M62-T2 122mm main gun (with its 3BM11 APDS ammo)...the upgraded vehicle was designated SU-122L. Also, just to clarify, I said that the D-49 made the D-25 (series) 122mm main gun what it was meant to be...which doesn't include the M62-T2. The T-10M had a more powerful main gun to be sure...but it was less accurate and had a lower rate of fire. Finally, while Kubinka is full of interesting prototypes, the SU-122-54 was produced, deployed, and would have seen combat had things gone differently in Czechoslovakia.         
 
 
      

LoooSeR; good question...first of all, it was right in the middle of the two most significant Soviet Army events of the 1960s: exercise Dnepr in 1967 and Operation Danube (the invasion of Czechoslovakia), in 1968. These two events shaped the Soviet Army of the Cold War and provided very real rehearsals for WWIII. You're correct, the SU-122-54 was the product of the Soviet Army experience in WWII...especially during the Manchuria campaign against the Japanese. The Soviets developed tactics for combined-arms organizations known as "Assault Groups," "Storm Teams," and "Forward Detachments," with assault guns/tank destroyers at their core. After the war, the SU-122-54 (probably known as the SU-122 (M1954) by the Soviets), was secretly fielded in companies/batteries that were organic to select/high-priority MRRs and TRs. As mentioned above, the SU-122-54 was deployed for both Dnepr and Operation Danube.                 
 
Since it wasn't forward deployed in the Groups, it was almost missed by Western intelligence through it's development, short life, and death (at Khrushchev's hand...guns bad, missiles good). The first mention of the SU-122-54 in an official US military reference manual was in a USMC MCIA manual in 1996...that's 41 years after it was fielded by the Soviet Army. There was limited intel available on this vehicle as early as 1958 but most of it was Top Secret so it didn't reach many folks in the field. The CIA gave it the designation SU-100 (M1968).
 
I could go on...the SU-122-54 truly made the D-25 122mm main gun (versioned for the SU-122-54 as the D-49), what it was meant to be...etc.
 

     
 

I received the “two minute product brief” (which included the use of augmented reality goggles to visualise the power train) on this yesterday. 
 
A couple of design considerations and concepts:
- designed for river crossings & use on inland waterways. 
- targeted customers are primarily South & Central American and Asian (including Indonesia, Colombia, & Singapore). 
- Operation in Sea States greater than Sea State 1 is questionable. 
- 5 metric tonne payload. 
- not intended for opposed landings. 
- can be fitted with a turret - but cannot carry troops if so fitted. 
- Armoured capsule is comparatively small, relative to the vehicle size. 
- wholly funded by KMW. 
- Marder based. 
 
My pics here: https://imgur.com/gallery/7zxppwb

Final scores on the SETC 2018:
 
For now it's a bit all over the places (and no source to be seen anywhere)
 
Wikipedia gives this:
 

 
Opex 360 and 4Chan gives this:
 

 
Edit: Apparently those numbers pops up on (or were taken from) the site of @Andrei_bt

direct ancestor of EMBT