poesel

One thing that China would really like to have is a harbor on the Arctic sea. That harbor will be ice-free for most of the year real soon and give China a short and mostly unobstructed route to Europe. I can imagine some kind of reverse Hong Kong where China lends some piece of land for 99 years from Russia. Maybe in the delta of the Lena river. The Lena is navigable to Yakutsk and Yakutsk already has a railway connection to China. That would be a massive infrastructure project, but probably still much cheaper than what they invest to get out of the South China Sea. Also, building infrastructure is something the Chinese are good at. I don't know if this is feasible, but I would bet that someone in China already has the numbers for this project.

Sorry, this is off-topic, but I'm too curious to not ask where the military application of this type of copper band is? I use it quite often at work whenever we have to transmit a few thousand amps over a moveable joint in a converter application. But military application? Maybe for the lasers, but I'd guessed they would use water cooled cables.

Re: shooting down drones: a proximity fuze for infantry use would be a nice solution. But I don't know if you can actually make a round small enough that can be handled by ordinary infantry. The Gepard ammo has such a fuze, but then it is rather impracticable for the average grunt to lug around a barrel that can shoot 35mm rounds. Or you have a missile as complicated as an AT-4, but smaller. Another item to carry around, of course. But maybe useful enough for this war.

IIRC it was protection of minorities, influence of oligarchs and more anti-corruption. This is only about the beginning of talks. Those can take a loooooong time - ask Turkey. Even if Ukraine is still at war, the EU is not a defense pact (although there is something somewhere deep in the contracts IIRC). OTOH, the EU is not going to finance a bridge for Russia to blow up. If Ukraine joins the EU before the war ends, we are talking about a very, very long war...

Ukraine achieved 90% of preconditions for the beginning of negotiations to join the EU. Talk are planned to start in January. Also, Moldova and Georgia now have candidate state.

China builds the first drone carrier (article in German). https://www.wiwo.de/technologie/wirtschaft-von-oben/wirtschaft-von-oben-235-chinesische-marine-china-will-den-ersten-drohnentraeger-der-welt-bauen/29465318.html Seems logical to have such a thing.

Thanks for the answers to the mine roller. I guess some obstacles mentioned could be overcome, but in total that design it is just not useful and reliable enough. I guess we will see specialized UGS which are not much more than a combo of tracks, motor, plow & a remote control (maybe some armor). Low profile and comparably inexpensive. Hmm, if you make the profile low enough and add a ramp, a following vehicle could just drive over it if the plow is disabled.

I have a question regarding mine clearing with rollers: why do mine clearing vehicles have to be tanks? The survivability of mine clearing tanks in this conflict seems to be abysmal. So why bother with armor, and instead use mass. Attach a barrel to a civilian vehicle (4WD or small truck), fill the barrel with water, relieve valve and make that vehicle remote controlled (nothing fancy, just forward, left, right) - you have your el-cheapo mine roller. Works only in light terrain, and doesn't survive any decent shelling. But you can have a lot of them as they are very cheap. This must be a stupid idea because nobody is doing it, but why?

A bit of statistics about this thread. First post 11.2.2022. Page 1000 on 7.7.2022, 2000 on 3.2.2023 and 3000 on 6.11.2023. It took 146 days for the first 1000. Then 211 for the next and another 276 for the last. So we are slowing down. With a bit of extrapolation, it will take 318 days for the next 1000 - that would be September 19, 2024. Let's hope we are discussion the end of the war by then.

Producing ammo is not labor-intensive. What you need is machines and material. That costs (roughly) the same everywhere. The main advantage (for the manufacturer) to produce 'somewhere else' is, that the export restrictions may be lower than in the west. Also, there is no open market for artillery shells. You cannot produce that without state influence. You cannot sell without state influence. You cannot buy without state influence. That makes things complicated in case of crisis. Case in point: Germany couldn't deliver Gepard ammo to Ukraine because it was produced in Switzerland.

Because that is not how it works. Suppliers want contracts before they set up a production line. It takes at least a year (if you rush it) and 50 mil (a guess) per line. No one is going to invest that if they are not sure if they can sell their product. Such a production line is not really dual use. No civilian use without mayor retooling. You could mothball it, but then you still have sunk the investment costs for a war that never came. Scalability costs money. If the crisis comes, and you want to outsource, you need to find someone with free capacities. Difficult and costly in a crisis. And if there is no free capacity, 'they' also need time to build that. Outsourcing is not a magic wand. Well, maybe a cursed one...

I agree with him on the need of standardization. I guess it is not the lack of standards, but that there are too many of them. Probably national lobbying at its best. Where I don't agree is the outsourcing part. Firstly, manufacturing simple artillery shells is a simple manufacturing task. Any industrialized country can do that AND do a million other things. It is not clogging up any unreplaceable resources. If you calculate opportunity costs, it may not best the best choice, but you are still making money. Secondly, if you strictly look for the market solution, our future shells will all come from south-east Asia. I don't need to spell it out why this will be an undesirable outcome. Standardize the stuff and build it locally.

It is much easier: you just park a trailer with a container which is filled with drones in a 20 km radius of your target. Unless you are in a desert, it won't be noticed until the rooftop opens.

Ukrainian drone pilot destroys a Russian tank from 22 km distance (18 from frontline). The tweet also states, that Russia has imposed a 10 km no-tank zone from the front.

I don't think that IFF for drones is a problem. A quick search gives this: https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/expo/iff-transponders/ https://insideunmannedsystems.com/identify-friend-or-foe-iff-capability-for-small-tactical-attritable-defense-uavs/ There is a market and solutions. These examples seem to be a bit too big for small drones, but there is no reason why smaller IFF devices can't be made. Drone to drone combat is nearly hand-to-hand combat. Transmitters for shorter ranges need less power and are smaller.

I guess the confusion comes from the use of the term 'more powerful'. In a technical sense, it means 'more output power'. In a more common sense, it means 'more useful'. In the former, caps do not help, in the latter they do.

That is where math meets reality. P = W / t Double W and you double P - easy. Unfortunately not. The P on the left side represents a real machine (an engine, a laser, ...). It has a maximum power output which is limited by its construction (the CCs you have in a combustion engine or the heat dissipation in a laser to name some restraints). If you try to go beyond that power, you won't get it in the best case or destroy it in the worst. So P is fixed. What happens when you add to W is this: t = W / P t gets bigger. Meaning you can drive or shoot longer. Where caps help in the laser scenario is, that they can release a lot of energy in a short time. Much more than batteries or a diesel generator. If your laser can take that power - good! But just adding caps won't make the laser more powerful (in the sense of: more output power). This ends my basic physics' lesson to not further derail this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy

There is no relation between having a lot of energy to having a lot of power - at least the useful sort of power. If you put a nail through your Cap, the energy is released very fast, but not very useful (unless you need an explosion). Adding large capacitors to your laser does not make them more powerful. The power output stays the same. But you can fire for a longer time. The analogy to a car works quite well. Adding a gas tank to your car adds stored energy. But it does not affect the power output of your motor. You can, however, drive for a longer time.

You are mixing up power and energy. Caps store energy. It is like buying a bigger gas tank for your car and then expect it to run faster.

Temporarily blinding an optical sensor with a laser is probably instantaneous (unless the sensor has the right filter lens - then you need to melt the lens first). Permanently blinding: I don't know. Non-military sensor would be damaged quite fast, I guess. The overall answer is the engineer's preferred answer: it depends.

Some ballpark (or beer coaster) calculation wrt to shooting done the current generations of drones with lasers. A quad-copter propeller weighs roughly 3-5 g. Most plastics have a heat capacity of 2 J / kg K. Most plastics also melt or burn or get weak enough at 200 °C. So you need about 2000 J (or Ws) to heat up a propeller by 200 °C. Let's assume 10% of the laser's output actually reach the target (wild guess). Dividing the energy needed (2000Ws) by the power, and you get the time you need on target. Another good guess: a drone can accelerate with roughly 20 m / s^2. With that, I calculated the distance a drone could move (or deviate from its current flight path) until its propeller melted. Assuming it has a heat sensor and reacts automatically. Laser power - time to melt - dodge distance 20 kW - 1 s - 10 m 50 kW - 0,4 s - 1,6 m 300 kW - 0,067 s - 0,045 m First, it is easy to see why they aim for higher power. The target can hardly move away in time before it dies. Secondly, it is easy to see how to defeat this threat to drones: use steel blades. 250x times the heat capacity and 8x the melting point. You'd need lasers in the GW range to defeat that. I don't even know how long and how often you can fire these things. But it is probably less than you need against a swarm. You could also try to attack other things than propellers on a drone, but that is even easier to shield. You can probably punch a lot of holes into this calculation, but I guess the direction is clear. Lasers are not the solution for fast, maneuverable drones. I'd put my money on kinetic attacks, e.g. bullets. MG on a 2-axis motorized mount paired with some acoustic & optical sensors. Put that on a UGV that follows your squad, and you have a mobile 300m bubble that keeps the drones away from your neighborhood.

Since many of those who are dying now are from the 'undesirable' class which have a lower life expectancy. Over the long run, this may actually cause an increase in average lifespan. Also, mostly men are dying and these have a shorter lifespan anyway.

This seems to be another example of the fixed wing bomber drone in action. I'm really wondering how autonomous it is. Such a target seems to be comparably easy to detect by AI vision software (known location, unique shape, good contrast). OTOH, I have no idea how much EW is active in Belgorod. So autonomy may not be necessary.

This, but that is missing the other half: making the Russians an offer for a Russia without Putin and his apparatus where the average Ivan has a better life than now. Such an offer does not exist. And that is IMHO a severe mistake. The opposition in Russia, as small as it is, needs some hope. A Kindle which may spark a fire. Small chance of happening, but cheap to create. Why this does not exist is pretty obvious. It would be quite a hard sell with Ukraine and probably other EECs. But even they need to think of how their relation with Russia after the war will look like. You cannot count on that Russia will look like Germany in 1815 after this war.

An article that explains why Russia has so many volunteers and why their death is not a (perceived) problem for the Russian society. TL;DR: the volunteers are often poor, drunkards & violent and their death is a net social plus for their mothers/wives due to the relative high pay and the bonus the relatives get on their death. The money and the new state of 'veteran' mother/wive allows them to climb the social ladder. Article in German. https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/russlands-krieg-laeuft-auf-eine-soziale-saeuberung-der-gesellschaft-hinaus-ld.1758471