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BletchleyGeek

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  1. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Harmon Rabb in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Perun getting his feet wet. 😎
  2. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Panserjeger in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Operation Interflex (the training of UA troops in UK) is ongoing. I am enrolled in the Norwegian Heimevernet (Territorial Defense) and we recently were offered to volunteer for participation in the operation. Currently the norwegian instructors are from the Rapid Response Force of Brigade North, but now they are asking for more instructors from the reserves. 
    https://www.forsvaret.no/heimevernet/aktuelt/operasjon-interflex
    There will be two contingents, one January-April 2023 and one April-July 2023. The norwegian instructors will get a three weeks refresher course in Norway before leaving for UK, but there are of course requirements that they posses the required qualifications.
    The UA troops will get 5 weeks of intensive training. No details about how many troops are to be trained, but 10.000 were trained in the initial phase of 120 days. Hopefully a lot more can be trained now that the number of instructors will increase.
    Edit: There are rumours of gross salaries of 120k NOK a month (11.4k USD), so the pay is really good. But there will be work around the clock with very little leave.
  3. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to cesmonkey in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Has anyone been following the the US Army's development of robotic battlefield vehicles much?
    I just saw this article:
    ‘Lightning in a bottle’: Inside the ‘Origin’ of the Army’s future robotic fleet

    Which made me go look and find this article:
    Army Special Operations Forces use Project Origin systems in latest Soldier experiment
    "Robots Don't Bleed"
  4. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Sojourner in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Where do you stand on body armor?
     
    Saddens me greatly there's a need for this.
  5. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Haiduk in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    There is real vinery "Artway", which specialized on sparcling wines production by classical Champenois technology since 1950: https://artwinery.com.ua/en
    Bottles keep in alabaster adits on 72 m under surface. Vinery get a grape in southern oblasts of Ukraine
  6. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Speaking of 'flipping'

    Can we empty out the vintage warbird museums in a good cause?
  7. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    OK, ya got us!  A sinister cabal of Canucks has been pulling Steve's strings the entire life of this board.  What, you actually still believe Vermont is a US state?
    ....And as for @BFCElvis? Ha!  he's been our sock puppet all along. Just post an Eighties hit and that poor sap rolls right over.
  8. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Holien in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Hmmm undersea cables are getting damaged. 
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-63326102
     
  9. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to chrisl in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    The satellites themselves are actually *very* cheap.  A few articles are suggesting costs in the $250K/unit cost, with launch costs of $30M or less per block of ~50 satellites.  There's a bunch of ground costs on top of that, and I'd guess that the limiting factor on subscribers is bandwidth to the fat pipes on the ground.  They could probably sell quite a lot more subscriptions if they let performance degrade somewhat, but it's probably better for them in the long run to maintain a high level of performance over a limited number of areas so that as they open regions they get big blasts of subscribers.
    I suspect a few things:
    1) Elon has no clue about the details of the economics of them supplying Ukraine with bandwidth.  He's a loud AW who says all sorts of random things that may or may not correlate to reality.  It's common for engineers at his companies to found out about new "requirements" from his public tweets.  That they can deliver on a lot of them is a testament to their engineering capability and willingness to work in the chaos.
    2) Starlink is raking in money and even if they're taking a loss right now, they aren't going to go the way of Iridium.  Iridium was a nice idea but was too early and had too limited capability - there wasn't enough demand for poor phone service over the vast amounts of unpopulated space on the surface of the earth.  There *is* demand for high bandwidth data connections in the middle of nowhere.
    I've actually dealt with trying to debug hardware that was near the north pole while I was in California.  The people with the hardware had an iridium phone and they could call, or they could email, but they couldn't do both - if we wanted a picture of something, they had to hang up, create a data connection, send (slowly) then call back.  At probably a buck a minute or something.  If they'd had 10 Mbps for $100/month it would have been a *lot* less painful.  There's a lot of inexpensive environmental monitoring equipment that you can put out in the middle of nowhere that's cost effective at Starlink prices.  Or even a few times Starlink prices.
    3) People don't talk about it, but Starlink has the potential to offer to high school kids building cubesats a capability that was until recently really only available to the US government (SDS, TDRS).  The data relay system was arguably a bigger secret (and easier to keep secret) than the KH-11 telescopes (although their digital imaging that took advantage of the SDS was also secret).  Anybody who's ever read  the first couple chapters of an optics text can figure out the resolution possible with a telescope of a given size at a particular distance, but the data rates and speed of return are a big deal.  Starlink can potentially sell space nodes to anybody building a satellite and they can get realtime, high bandwidth data returned to the ground for a few hundred $K. That's going to be a very valuable market.
  10. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Butschi in Script to automatically set the elevation in the editor   
    By popular demand. 😉
    I'm certain I missed half the relevant points, so feel free to ask here or comment below the video.
    @Artkin
     
  11. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Fill yer галоши, mate!
    Specs (in Russian) are at front, drawings at the back.
    (I'm not a research genius -- well actually I am not bad, I just hit my event horizon of caring about the Bridge whodunnit a while ago. Anyhoo, it was embedded in some tweet or other)
  12. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    BTW, resort towns and bar districts here in Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand) now have a noticeable influx of Russian men in their 20s and 30s.  Sat next to a couple of loud but happy drunks last night.
    At least they're spending money and not killing anyone, including themselves.
  13. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    1.  Attrition (Heliosrunner, 1 hour ago, UA staff report).

     
     
     2. Antidrone?
    3. Our mobik heroes in action? Textbook tank + motor rifle assault, blowing the hell out of what looks like a completely empty hedgerow. 
    Still worth the 3 x 2 min clips: a CM game come to life!  Except the scenario designer forgot to include BLUE forces lol.
    4.  'Nother for the scenario design / flavor object files....
    ... aw hell, I can't resist.
    That's for making me read 3 pages about Elon's brain f*rt.
     
  14. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to JonS in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Huh. I kinda like Master and Margherita.
    There is a very amusing O'Brien article ('what Cruz doesn't understand') linked to from that one. I can hear the heads of manly men popping all round the world
     
  15. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to sburke in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    My solar array just went live yesterday... woot!  Love watching that meter run in reverse and with that let's go back to Ukraine and not US energy politics.
  16. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    ... nice! with a Ouija board channeling Barnes Wallis, Isaac Doolittle and Archimedes.
    For the record, I am kind of with this guy: the VBIED theory is the *least* problematic of all the theories.
    And btw, if I was the Russians I'd be auguring drain holes in all those tanker cars right now, damn the environmental consequences.
  17. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to FancyCat in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    I see people saying explosives under the bridge, can SOF via underwater or boat get close enough to attach the explosives and enough in the right places?
    I wonder if those USVs got used?
     
  18. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to FancyCat in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Missile?
     
  19. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to Zeleban in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    moment of explosion
  20. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek got a reaction from ibncalb in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Let's imagine for a second that video games were a thing in 1935, all other things remained equal in the world, technologically and politically. What would a CM-like game covering a hypothetic World War II look like:
    - Tanks would have multiple turrets and guns
    - Infantry platoons would be like those of the Italian Army 
    - Cavalry would be a thing
    - It would have an amazing model for fortifications
    - Uniforms would come in bright colors
    - Etc.
  21. Like
    BletchleyGeek got a reaction from poesel in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Yup, the 'gg' is also accepted spelling I think. It would be bad juju to piss off Yog-Sothot/Yog-Soggoth. You even found a picture with the weird green ray (since I am not Lovecraft I can't come up with a baroque juxtaposition of adjectives to describe it properly).
    Didn't know about that book @danfrodo, sounds interesting!
  22. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek reacted to FancyCat in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
  23. Thanks
    BletchleyGeek reacted to FancyCat in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    pretty photo.
     
     
  24. Like
    BletchleyGeek got a reaction from Raptor341 in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Let's imagine for a second that video games were a thing in 1935, all other things remained equal in the world, technologically and politically. What would a CM-like game covering a hypothetic World War II look like:
    - Tanks would have multiple turrets and guns
    - Infantry platoons would be like those of the Italian Army 
    - Cavalry would be a thing
    - It would have an amazing model for fortifications
    - Uniforms would come in bright colors
    - Etc.
  25. Upvote
    BletchleyGeek got a reaction from dan/california in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Let's imagine for a second that video games were a thing in 1935, all other things remained equal in the world, technologically and politically. What would a CM-like game covering a hypothetic World War II look like:
    - Tanks would have multiple turrets and guns
    - Infantry platoons would be like those of the Italian Army 
    - Cavalry would be a thing
    - It would have an amazing model for fortifications
    - Uniforms would come in bright colors
    - Etc.
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