Lethaface

I surely never thought crashing ones own economy for whatever reason is ever a good idea. A wise policy would be to implement such changes gradually to limit hard disruptions/volatile movements etc, but with a clear vision about endstate (=no soup for you Russia). Anyway the hypocrisy caught my eye. Of course Poland and virtually all of the Polish people are on Ukraine side, that's not in question. Nobody said anything to the contrary.

That's interesting. I remember wondering whether Putin had gone mad because of the pandemic isolation and started getting high on his own supply.

No they use the LPG to gas cars. I call hypocrisy.

https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/04/04/poland-remains-eus-biggest-importer-of-russian-lpg-paying-e710-million-to-moscow-last-year/ I don't know this source but is at least interesting given the usual bashing against some other country.

Welcome! I think whole of NATO and especially in Europe we are quite a bit more stronger and united because of this. Hope Sweden can finish the process as well sooner rather than later. Cheers!

Ah, ok my bad I thought you saw some demonic form in a democracy lol. I know some about the US history, but the US wasn't the first republic to exist and the architecture of it's democracy doesn't define what is a democracy or republic. Anyway in NL woman were only allowed to vote from ~1922; most democratic countries weren't fully representative democracies until later in the 20th century.

A republic is generally considered to be democratic / a democracy. Aristocracy is something very different, a voting system in which only the aristocracy gets to vote is nowadays not considered democratic. Don't know where you got the demoncratic idea from, but it's not cognitive congruent. As an example; our country is a representational democracy disguised as a constitutional monarchy. But we could easily transform into a republic by replacing our ceremonial King with a ceremonial President. How much powers a president has, how many parties there are, the common law/constitution etc, all of those things ARE NOT defined by whether the form of democracy installed in a governing body of a nation state is a republic or not.

Yeah I decided not to reply to that one but now we are here lol. I wouldn't be too worried, but then we don't have much AR-15 shootings here. I guess it doesn't really matter whether you go by AR-15 or a kamikaze drone. Such things (drone attacks) will surely happen one day. But given that each year much more killings are done by and among ordinary citizens, instead of terrorist / extremist attacks, I wouldn't worry much more than one does now. Unless you work in security for infrastructure or similar; a gate with a guard and camera isn't of much help against a drone flying over the fence somewhere out of sight. Good business opportunity I guess: 'drone hunters' which you can hire as a service on a subscription plan.

Or Soleimani. The west has been assassinating people using drones for quite a while lol.

NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo

The art of destabilization through 'alternative news' and useful idiots (including (subtle) kompromat) is one which Russia did master quite aptly (on this subject they did successfully pull of concentrated/coordinated multi domain operations, unlike in their military 'special' operation), but like Steve and others mentioned the invasion in Ukraine undid a lot of their achievements. In the UK Nigel Farage is a good example. The man had quite some vocabulary gifts and at times I liked to listen to him trashing other politicians for a good laugh, but in my court he'd been tried for treason / given a public speaking ban for being a liability to national security. The difficulty on this subject is the fact we (West) are democracies and unfortunately in most of our democracies there are no hard laws or countermeasures against lobbying for funding from non-disclosed (or consciously vague) sources. Be they an industrial consortium/kartel or another nation state. The same goes for misinformation through 'news' websites/media. Russia isn't alone in that regard. China is very active as well, as is Israel; although each with their own interests in mind, not necessarily destabilization. At the same time 'we' are also lobbying inside other countries for our interests (or what we think is good for others), through NGO's and other mediums. Nation states with less democratic tendencies tend to have more strict controls to do something about those efforts, while in our democracies it's usually protected free speech / freedom of mind unless it can be proven with a smoking gun that someone is being paid by an external source to provide misinformation to the public. In our country we had an example of this problem during the covid pandemic. Some samba dance teacher turned into a 'virus expert' and his misinformed ideas (or cognitive dissonance) gained massive traction because he said what some people wanted to hear. I was all for locking the man up until after the pandemic, but our own checks and balances made that difficult. Probably for the better, when looked at what happened in the '30s of the previous century not that far from here. This (our 'freedom' being used against us by less free nation states) is a weakness of all democratic countries and probably needs to be addressed in this century if we hold democracy dear.

I guess the TC was in comms with the drone camera operator.

Aren't those people the actual bureaucrats?

Although I had already congratulated @Free Whisky on discord, I thought to do it another time here. It was a close game, although not my favorite for a mirror tournament but after the TOW and Abrams came into play it became more interesting / dynamic. I see the top 5 of the tournament was very close, that's usually a good sign. Although we're always critical most of it is constructively intended ;-), my thanks to @BFCElvis for organizing the tournament and the rest of the team for providing the scenario's ( @The_Capt @George MC @slysniper ).

Yeah If get trashed (obviously never happens ) and it's obvious my opponent can remove my forces from the map without me being able to do much about it, I'll gladly surrender.

if 20 FPS is your high and 1 your low on a small map / tiny battle, you should probably try tweaking some settings. My I7 7700K + 3080 does better, but obviously no wonders it's still CMx2. Although my graphical petpeeve would be draw distance, FPS is usually good enough for me with a range of 15-40 during normal usage (large maps and med-large battles). Engine 5 will probably focus on performance but it's not known yet how much impact it can have.

Quite often, but they do indeed also manage to stop 105mm / TOW regularly. Usually it does better when it's fielded by opponents

USA has also threatened to invade The Hague if USA soldiers/* would be tried at the ICC and has implemented legal action against the prosecutors / judges for supposed corruption ;-).

Just-in-time manufacturing is largely about process optimization in a world where total cost of ownership and time-to-market are key in global competing industries. If we both manufacture X, but you are continuously stuck with a large stock of deprecated parts and paying for a lot of warehousing those, while I am able to deliver the required parts 'just in time' as the production facility requires them; I win. If suddenly some stuff happens which disrupts the supply chain of parts and you still have that big warehouse of parts and can keep selling the previous year generation of products, while my 'just in time' factory is running dry because of no parts; you 'win'. Those aren't zero sum games though, it's not like one can't come up with a way to have the means of production of 'parts' redundant or in control so that no global supply chain issue can affect it (or limit the affect). Producing large quantities of everything 'just in case' is one way to address the issue, not necessarily the brightest way imo. The problem was more that 'we' lost track of what critical capabilities we allowed to be outsourced/offshored and thus have became dependent on complex global supply chains over which we don't have control. It was rather ironic to read folks on twitter (and here) go all out on Germany for being so stupid having become dependent on Russian gas (which was stupid), but failed to see the big elephant in the room that isn't limited to Germany and is more critical compared to gas. It's not necessarily about 'just in time', it's about actually doing competent risk analysis and looking at redundancy / dependency from a pov of critical thinking. Instead of (out)sourcing things on the cheap / profit maximization and not looking beyond the length of ones nose.

Indeed, social media are imo one of the larger 'threats' to the 'West'. I too only use the minimally, but 'the algorithm' (or better 'a similar harmful algorithm') is also on youtube. I have created twitter to look at some Ukraine footage and usually manage to keep it at that (never post somthing), I notice it still has it's influence and is making me think about issues/problems which don't exist outside of social media. If I'd be the president of the world I'd end all social media as we know them now.

Depends on the battle / opponent imo. Often there is little interest/point to continue the game when the outcome is clear. Other times the writing on the wall is clear but there are still enough options for both players to enjoy it seeing it through to the end.

thanks, was wondering about the required turn rate but that sounds good

Do you know what is the round time for these battles?

Yes QBs aren't nice on them. They also lack RPG ammo

Hehe ok didn't know that. I have already exited most of my supply convoy, the rest probably won't make it there even if I'd ordered them . They can take the exit to the eternal pixelbattle grounds.