Kinophile

Why bother with 3d printing? Its not faster for plastics than just stamping out forms. Would it not be easier to just create a mold (costly, sorta slow) and then just stamp out standerized bunker shells using heavy duty plastic mixed with kevlar? Once you get a floor line going it could complete hundreds in a day, using that one mold. These could form the basic interiors and act as the internal formers for rebar concrete poured over them in-situ. A further liner inside to catch shrapnel/flakes from impacts would help. 3D printing has certain applications but its hard to beat the 10,000 year old concept of simple molds for just rapid, fast production using basic materials. Way less moving parts, for one! 3D printed ballistic materials could offer significant breakthoughs - but I suspect we're quite a while away from beating the layering system of kevlar on cost & time.

I do have concerns about why RUS is launching such a large wave now. There have been consistent reports of dwindling AD supply. Patriot supply is in doubt (hello, Mr. Spineless Speaker) and several of these large waves, if repeated over, say, a two week period could rapidly eat into the existing stocks. Targeting Kiev could pull Patriot supply (but not necessarily the launchers) away from the forward zones. Once the Patriots are are used up then Kiev would be essentially defenceless to such waves. Such a surge followed by a burnout of AD could be a serious strategic and operational win for Russia. Counters to this worry are: We don't know just how many PAC-3 UKR have - but nothing is infinite. We don't know if Patriot resupply is being covered in other ways (eg through Allies) Ukraine has developed long range strike capabilities - if they're able to hit refineries 1,000km away, what's to stop them striking RUS bombers on home airfields? Oh wait, they're already at it

Fully agree, ref plastics. I think most proper structural 3D printing is focussed on other materials - concrete mostly but I've also seen liquified wood products. 3D printing is fantastic for shaping a form so its the darling child of modern architects for designing (speaking as a former architect). Engineers, in my experience, are usually a lot more circumspect - not because of ignorance or inability to see the possibilities but simple realities of physics and materials science. 3D printing does many things but not certain things. A gain somewhere (e.g. a hyper-parabolic wall built quickly) has a cost somewhere else (structural integrity under dynamic stress loads). Everything is a trade-off, physics isn't free.

Heh

Sounds like this will only maintain the current number,, replacing lost/ damage

Yay

Ryan Hendrickson on demining

Kosovo being smart.

This is what I'm thinking about ref Seababies in the Black Sea. UKR could start sinking RUS Maritime trade, starting with ships carrying stolen grain.

Ref The Invisible Ukrainian Navy Seababies are very easy to move overland into a new AO...

Ref economic grind:

It's a nerf gun but still... Shiver. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1ERDLCIWaf/?igsh=MWF4aGk1Nmd4cmQ3Ng==

He really gets it.

More talk, but yes good news. Like with all these announcements, it Could have happened months ago to have an effect now, but instead of months from now.

To be clear, Im not quite buying his argument here. It's possible (no drone) but I'm put off by two factors - his insistence on naming Photoshop as the editing tool (Premiere Pro and After Effects are the right tools), and shutter speed. PS can be used certainly, but it's comparatively labourius and awkward. AE and PPro are tightly integrated and much more flexible - they're designed to work together. If you have PS then you have PPro and AE - they all come with Adobe Creative Content as a single subscription. Why bother using PS if you have PPro and AE right there? Lack of this basic knowledge on his part gives me pause but is not a definitive point. Using a drone would be very easy, but they're are by now many RUS operators capable of doing this attack from a decent distance. Why bother not using one? In the same breath it's even easier to use a basic drone with no payload, fly it into frame and then scrub it in the timeline before it gets too obvious that it's not armed. The camera is locked so its very simple to scrub the drone out with empty frames - and anyone walking up to the helo as well. Its obviously a staged even (durr a fueled helo with missing windshield?) but I'm Not yet convinced by this argument of no drone. There are some counters to my doubt. The major one is the last section he highlights and gives not a lot of time to, but which I personally view as a serious question: The dark smudge travels with the cloud, yet the following darker cloud has no such tailing smudge (so it's not a lensing artifact). The "gaseous" cloud overlays the helo yet that would put it out into the sunlight, out of the hellos shadow and a Camera like this simply wouldn't pick up that fine gas. Also the gas would go out, and to frame left more than towards camera. It feels additive, ie a visual effect added in post. I even bet that one could find that exact explosion effect in some commercial VFX library. TLDR I suspect there was a drone, but it was unarmed. I suspect the helo was bombed manually and the explosion, though real, has been visually augmented with a preceding "explosion" that is actually a stock video file of a studio-shot VFX asset.

Yet more?