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dan/california

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dan/california last won the day on February 4

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About dan/california

  • Birthday 05/11/1968

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    california
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    military/scifi/history
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    engineer

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  1. They love it of course. Five round per edit:second of forty millimeter seems like it would utterly wreck anything except and MBT, actually I suspect it do for quite of a few of those, too. And it has a built in cooker! Whether or not IFVs are about to be obsolete is a completely different question.
  2. GPS jamming seems to be reaching a degree of severity where I would expect to not work in more places than it does, at least in places you might want to shoot cruise missiles at. You could obviously have the drone/missile use GPS as well, but I would expect you would want to tell it to always believe the terrain following system in stead of GPS if they diverged. You would need GPS over water obviously. How to deal with GPS jamming over water is an interesting question actually. I mean obviously you still have inertial guidance, but it is plan B for a reason. And of course there are all the questions with classified answers regarding the actual effectiveness of jamming, counter measures, and counter counter measures. Historically I think creating the pathing/guidance info for the non GPS guidance system was very labor intensive, but that seems like something computers would be a lot better at now.
  3. The amazing percentage of taxes on higher incomes that comes from Moscow is even more impressive when you figure how much tax cheating goes on. Furthermore it is probably exponential with income since people with increasing levels of political power probably pay ever less in taxes.
  4. All of the above is just one example of how even medium budget purpose built military drones with significant AI, even for targeting in the last kilometer, will turn the volume up to 11 as soon as someone builds a real automated line to build the things. Of course the way Russian oil refineries are bursting into flames the Ukrainians seem to have taken this thought to heart. Among other things it seems like longer range drones could move "back" to the terrain following guidance the U.S. used for its cruise missiles before GPS, with image recognition for the last bit.
  5. You are quite right that the election was simply a bad joke. Putins cronies put numbers from 75 to 100 percent on a wall, or perhaps a handy political prisoner, an threw darts at them. Unless of course the Czar himself had a preference. Having said that, expecting our Ukrainian friends to be entirely rational about Russia two years into an existential war is perhaps more than can reasonably be asked for. And that "party" outside of the Russian embassy is exhibit one on why we STILL need a visa ban.
  6. Another take on the same basic thing. He seems to think Putin is at least considering changing out some of his top people for younger models that can that can be relied on for the rests of Putin's presidency/life. In part this seems to be an attempt to forestall anyone developing anything resembling an power base. Let us hope he chooses poorly.
  7. Caesar felt the same way about his German bodyguard/calvary. The more things change....
  8. The more forward looking U.S. military stuff is starting to refer to the FLOS, and the FLOR. The forward line of sensors, and the forward line of robots. This would seem to be case study.
  9. We really missed the boat not getting Afghans who were not on the Taliban's good side set up in Ukraine with their whole families. It worked really well with the Chechen exiles.
  10. It is amazing what happens when you pay cash in hard currency. Edit: And the Czech President deserves a top job at NATO or the EU for getting this one edit: done! In midst of and endless blathering panic he has gotten shells on trains and headed to the front.
  11. There is at least some evidence that DARPA is working on an MHD drive. Apparently one of the biggest problem is that the electrodes wear out, that matters a lot less when it only has to work for ten kilometers, once.
  12. But there no reason at all the UUVs can't come in slow and quiet. That is why I agree with The_Capt about big ships, unless somebody makes a major breakthrough. On the plus side if Taiwan gets on this bandwagon the way it should, the bill the Chinese would have to pay to invade would be astronomically higher. Naval dolphins may become a MUCH bigger thing.
  13. A couple of years from now I expect that anything we now consider a major surface combatant will have a continuous circuit of drones somewhere between two and ten kilometers out. I suspect that looking for the wakes of the USVs might be one of the more effective strategies, at least until they start to operate underwater full time. Barring a full bore physics/engineering miracle I am not sure underwater USVs are a solvable problem. And a tech break thru that size would be truly world shaking since I suspect it could https://www.threads.net/@meme.lawd.kenya/post/C4kOhTDs1VO In this interview I referenced earlier about Russia's nuclear threats, Koffman states that he didn't think the Russians have been all that close to using nukes yet. But he also thinks it IS a real risk if regime survival is at stake. It will be very interesting to see what the Kremlin says about the campaign against its refining capacity once it is done with its fake election silliness. I can see at least a possibility that Putin goes all in threatening nuclear retaliation over them once it doesn't interfere with the everything is fine theme he has been pushing for this so called campaign.
  14. Burn baby burn! Is there a good source for Russias daily/weekly production of refined petroleum products? I vaguely remember something about a commodities firm that tried to track the level of more or less every large storage tank on earth by satellite? If Ukraine can really dent Russian refining capacity it will be as big a success as they have had in this war.
  15. An interview with Koffman about the risk of Russian nuclear escalation. He makes some good points. He also unintentionally makes an excellent, though unintentional, case that Poland needs its own nukes.
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