StrelaCarbon

I see the Fact Checkers and Clinton campaign are unable to grasp that if Trump/Pence says that Putin is a stronger leader on the world stage doesn't mean that he is a better person.

I found a weird picture of Tim Kaine with Bill Clinton...


Seriously, that's who Kaine reminds me of.

Liberal talking heads seem to fetishize gotcha questions and one-liners. If you can have a smug response to something then you must be right. Stuff like this wins over nobody's vote especially when its a rather shallow point being made. 

So something that's been bugging me about WoT recently, is that they've stopped putting tanks for sale in the tech tree. Something like 80%-90% of the premium tanks they've put out in the last year are only available to buy in bundles. If someone buys gold and wants the tank, well fuck them, if someone earns the gold and wants the tank, fuck them. Only option left to be able to catch 'em all is to spend $40 on whatever shitty premium tank they release for the month.

I'm sure that all the SH regulars will know this backwards and forwards, so this is more for the benefit of newer people, or people who stumble in via google, or people who want a quick link they can throw out as an answer to anyone who asks the question.
 
So, what's with the goofy-ass road wheel design on German WWII AFVs?
 

A puzzled and terrified worker struggles to comprehend and assemble the suspension of a tiger I
 
You may have run into a variety of explanations for this running gear design; that it provided a smoother ride, that the design saved rubber, or possibly some other rubbish.  Like the myth that frontal drive sprockets provide more traction (seriously, how in the hell is that supposed to make any sense?), these wrong explanations of the merits of interleaved road wheels seem to rise from some quote taken out of context.
 
The interleaved road wheel running gear may have saved some rubber relative to an alternative design that was particularly wasteful of it.  But interleaved road wheels are not particularly economic in this respect because, and I realize this is a complicated concept to explain so I'll try my best, they have more wheels.  Interleaved road wheels do allow for large wheel diameters, and a larger diameter wheel will spread wear out over a larger circumference.  So interleaved road wheels might allow for the rubber on the wheels to last longer, although their construction would require more in the first place.
 
Interleaved road wheels would not improve ride quality either.  The ride quality of a tank is not a function of the size or number of wheels it possesses, but of how they are sprung.  So, it is possible that in certain competitive trials an interleaved road wheel design outperformed a design that lacked this feature.  I could readily believe, for instance, that the tiger (H) had a better ride quality on rough terrain than the tiger (P), or that the SDKFZ. 251 had a smoother ride than the M3.  However, this would be because the tiger (H) and SDKFZ. 251 have independently sprung road wheels on torsion bars while the tiger (P) and M3 do not.
 

 
Torsion bar layout of the tiger II
 

Volute spring suspension of the M3 half track
 
So, what do interleaved road wheels do?
 
They have two principal effects; one is a small benefit, and the other is an enormous detriment.
 
The small benefit of interleaved road wheels is that they spread the weight of the vehicle out more evenly on the track links:
 

 
The weight of a tank is not completely evenly spread out on the contact area of its tracks.  This is because tracks are not rigid.  If they were, they would be mainly ornamental and tanks' engines would just be for show.  More of the weight of a tank is concentrated under the parts of the track that the road wheels are sitting directly on top of.  Additionally, once a tank starts to sink into the soil a bit, larger road wheels work better than smaller ones because the larger ones have more contact area.  But you can only fit so many large diameter road wheels in the space of a tank's hull.
 

Dynamic!
 
 
So, the only way to have lots of road wheels and have big road wheels at the same time is to interleave them.  Simple as that.
 
If you would like an exhaustive look at the development of the semi-empirical MMP equation, read this.
 
The major, crippling downside to interleaved road wheels is that it makes changing the road wheels extremely time consuming.  
 

A pair of workers perform maintenance on a panther tank, and contemplate the futility of all human achievement
 
Lucas Friedli reprints in his book on big cat maintenance a report from a training unit complaining that replacing the inner road wheels of a tiger tank took ten hours.  That is completely outrageous, and was a contributor to the poor operational availability of the big cats.
 
For this reason, interleaved road wheels have rarely been used after World War Two; only on a few French prototypes and a Swedish APC:
 

PBV 302 variant with interleaved road wheels
 

Some bizarre French tank

Slightly relevant:

Gee Larry, don't you LIKE Democracy?Every election season, the Republicans who don't like their candidate blame it on the Democrats coming over and voting in their primaries.
Well, gosh, if all you Republicans get cucked so hard every year by Dems who set you up to lose, why do you keep voting R? Why does the Republican leadership keep allowing this?
Well, whatever the reasons, it can't possibly be that Donald Trump just appeals to Republican voters!

The world is so crazy right now that it's only Donald fucking Trump that talks a sane foreign policy:




I greatly dislike the guy, so I feel like I live in an alternate universe right now. 
So here are the points he talks about in that video that I've been squawking about for ages:

1. The US acts like a fucking schizophrenic to its allies and enemies, alike. One day we're you're friend, the next we've left you high and dry.
 
2. US military power is scattered and unfocused, making it too costly to do simple things like bomb a bunch of goatfucking ISIS fighters to ash.
 
3. US home security is weak and subject to political whims, including the political fashions of the day.

4. US military security is poor, our enemies find us very predictable.
 
5. The US without question allows our allies to totally piggyback on our defense, without even meeting the minimum requirements of our agreements.
 
6. The US is obviously desperate to reach meaningless accords with nations like Iran, which means we can never strike a truly landmark deal.
 
7. The US nuclear arsenal is decaying and rotten and desperately in need of upgrade. 
 
8. The US lets China and Russia walk all over them for no reason. Trade with China's great, but we're hemorrhaging industrial capital to China and other countries.
 
9. US military equipment (Trump uses B-52s as an example) is old and worn out and must be replaced.

10. President Obama does not have respect internationally. Probably because he gave the Queen of England a goddamn iPod.
 
11. The VA is broken and must be fixed.
 
12. American foreign policy must be based on American interests.
 
13. The US needs to promote stability in the Middle East, not radical change for democracy.
 
14. The US needs to improve relations with Russia from a position of strength.
 
15. The US needs to balance its trade with China to improve its positioning with the PRC.
 
 
 
Don't mistake me, here. I really don't trust Trump, and I definitely don't like the guy. But holy shit, why is he the only candidate talking smart about this stuff?

It's sort of like Bernie Sanders, he's the only candidate that talks at all about the college crisis. We live in a ridiculous time, absolutely crazy.
 
So, think about all these things the next time you wonder why anyone would vote for Trump. He simply has no competition on a lot of these issues!

Based on a true story:
 

 

Of course, the best solution could probably be achieved by locking the A-team into a garage with some welding equipment.

We all know Sparks is fond of advocating for continued upgrading of our M113s. I spotted this youtube comment the other day of an Iraq veteran giving his perspective on the matter: 
 

Bernie Sanders won the Alaska and Washington state caucuses. Considering the number of white hipsters that have infested my home state, that isn't entirely surprising. 
 
Also I guess a bird landed on Sanders' podium in Portland which is supposed to be hilariously funny for anyone who has wasted their time watching Portlandia which I haven't because no self-respecting Seattle native watches a show about fucking Portland.

The past few election cycles (including the current one) have basically boiled down to this. 

flawless victory
 

Given his girth, I think you mean Herman Goering edition silk panties.

Graft is absolutely murderous on US infrastructure spending at this point.  In certain instances the US has moved from the Asian Dictator model to the African Dictator model:
 
 
But let it not be said that Yankee ingenuity is dead.  In most cases it won't do to have the people who arrange the contracts just plain steal all the money.  In most cases.  That is shamefully transparent theft, and Americans won't stand for it.  You have to put on a theatrical performance to convince people that it's not theft.
 
I have personally seen bridges with roads that dead end with signs next to them proudly declaring them to be the product of the 2009 American Recover and Reinvestment Act.  In the particular case I am thinking of the road dead ends because the people who put in the road couldn't be bothered to see if the maps they had of the property upon which the road was to be built were accurate.  You see, if you cleverly disguise graft as incompetence, people are suddenly OK with it, probably because they expect incompetence and are inured to its annoyance the same way they are to mosquitoes, small yappy dogs, and children at weddings.
 
But there's this magical double standard applied when it's Federal funding that's being wasted this way.  If the city or county had raised funds to build a bridge by raising taxes or selling bonds or what have you, and then they'd built this monument to idiocy that goes literally nowhere, the people responsible for it would be hung upside down from the damned thing Mussolini style, the prime contractor and his family would be garroted and their flesh consumed in an orgy and then everything would be OK again.  But for some reason when the money comes from the Feds it's perfectly acceptable to go through whatever murky bidding process occurred to award the contract to whomever's brother before the surveyors had even come back and confirmed that the land in question was even the city's to build upon, and they throw up their hands and say "haha, we goofed, and we could go through the necessary steps to adversely possess the land in question so we could build the road we promised that would make this potentially not an obvious waste of time and money, but we're just so inbred and feckless that we shan't!"  This contains an implied "and besides, we already shoveled that delicious Federal money to our preferred contractor, so we don't give a damn if this stupid thing ever gets finished or not at this point.  Sucks to be outside the system, doesn't it, you damnable greasy plebes?"
There are a great many necessary large-scale infrastructure and organization projects that are impossible in the Western USA because they need to go across jurisdictional lines.  Wildfire fighting, for instance, requires the coordination of multiple firefighting organizations on land belonging to various private owners, cities, counties, and Federal landowners like the BLM and Forest Service.  This makes it a total nonstarter.  You could sooner reunify the Balkans then get these actors to work together in a cohesive way.  Every time someone tries anything on a grand scale its probability of failure increases as a power function of the number of fiefdoms it crosses.  And by the end of it something half-assed and obviously useless stands where the shiny, useful project was supposed to be, and all the money has disappeared down a thousand rat holes.  This may not exactly meet the Transparency International definition of corruption, but it's still graft.  It doesn't happen by accident and any investigator who's gotten their teeth into one of these cases will tell you so.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/28/donald-trump-former-kkk-leader-david-duke
 

OH MAN, THIS IS MY CHANCE TO MOVE TO JAPAN AND BECOME A NATURALIZED JAPANESE CITIZEN JUST LIKE IN MY JAPANESE ANIMES~