kimbosbread

Neal Stephenson and William Gibson of course have written about this. Obviously we’ll get smart hand grenades that have multi-mode warheads, and maybe they’ll fly. I’d be more excited a drone that pipes data to infantry on the ground to a hud or little viewscreen like google glass. Then the next step is to allow soldiers, UAVs and UGVs to share/designate targets. Soldier level drone defense is very hard on the other hand. Maybe squad level where you have a some loitering anti-drone munitions set up, or lightweight mini missiles (ie drones) available at the squad level? More weight though. Yeah agreed. Coordinating attacks when you have these kind of obstacles is hard, and stuff will immediately get out of sync and bogged down.

When he promised that, Falcon hadn't even landed IIRC. So obviously there's some special Musk dust for investors, but these are not bad numbers, given that Starlink has huge demand. I promise you that investors are literally willing to sell their firstborn to get their hands on private SpaceX stock (per several investors I know who tried, and one who couldn't convince his business partners when they had a chance). Nobody in the business doubts that Starlink will be a massive moneymaker. They've solved their base station cost problem, which is pretty amazing. The next big problem is the larger new satellites require Starship to launch, so that's the gate on more users due to bandwidth constraints. But hopefully we'll have "excitement" in October when the next Starship test launch is likely!

Maybe there's gonna do the crossing of the river (in large force) or an amphibious operation with the Russians stretched?

I mean they do, but they’d rather not have it used against Russia. Starlink is a convenient fig leaf, as has earlier been pointed out.

It’s continually surprising to me in the big tech companies how many people skew right, vs the popular perception of these companies. When I worked at one popular social media company in 2016, IIRC all but 2 guys on my team voted for Trump, and the 2 of us who didn’t was because we felt he was a conman. My team was quite diverse racially, and this lent some credence to the fact that Trump got 50% of the black male vote. Mmmm, if people want to work on rockets, get great pay and not work hard, you have Blue Origin. Or Boeing. There are all sorts of other cool rocket startups like Stoke and RocketLab. But the thing is, SpaceX is probably 20-30 years ahead in every area (compared to RocketLab or Stoke, not Boeing which won’t progress past 60s tech). If you want to work on the cool stuff right now, or be part of the cool stuff there’s only one choice, and that becomes rapidly less cool with nationalization. That said, the nationalization stick isn’t needed. Starshield is the proper solution, and if you want Musk to stop attention whoring and go back to doing useful things (or interfering with them), promise him a nuclear reactor for his mars colony, or butter him and give him money to build a 100sqm solar plant in Texas and praise him for helping achieve energy independence and whatnot hippies like.

If this happens, I can see all the brainpower leaving the company. People aren’t going to work 100 hours a week years on end for some gov + defence partnership, especially with no mars dream. That’ll be it for any major spaceflight advancements for a long time. I think the US government realizes that, and Musk knows this, hence Starshield. EDIT: And the whole point of money for Musk is that mars dream. It’s not like he needs more money, it’s all for that ridiculous goal.

Meh there’s also a good chance of another coup EDIT: When we think of escalation, we have to think of the different factions in Russia and how they respond both internally and externally. There might be a few people left who are not down with being Best Korea 2.0.

SpaceX is offering the US government it’s own constellation, “Starshield” if they want to have full control of a similar system. EDIT: To be clear, I understand why Musk doesn’t want his system used for this sort of attack (Kessler Syndrome), even if I disagree. The US military could offer up it’s satellite guidance tech if it felt like it, so it’s not just on Musk.

Because it takes a lot more energy to land on the moon (no aerobraking), and it is much less interesting long term. Speaking of more videogames people should play… Kerbal Space Program, the best and cheapest way to develop an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics and navigation.

That’s not the kind of attitude we need if we want to have space marines! I’m bullish on a martian atmosphere. Given a few decades and mass driver or two on large icy asteroids or comets, there’s a lot of water vapor you get into play. The lack of magnetosphere isn’t a problem on the scale of a million years. Bigger problem: Generally, how do humans do at 0.4g? Can women conceive and bring to term babies? Can children survive? There are experiments (sponsored by you know who) to start looking at this with mice, of course. But if this won’t work, we either need genetic engineering or a giant rotating space station or just turn mars into a ringworld.

I’m gonna cross the rubicon… a Prigogine+Putin Romance themed Bear Bar.

Yeah. We won’t even judge you if you use ChatGPT to flesh it out.

Thank you jesus! Fortunately the marines don’t have this issue, as the concepts of marines is already sufficiently badass. Same idea with paras. “Space marine” EDIT: Didn’t see the later post which mentioned the marines. This cold medication is throwing me for a loop.

“Globohomo” is one of my favorite words of the last decade. It’s so silly it makes me want to establish Gayistan just to annoy these people.

Re T55s, I can’t imagine they are good unless you figure it’s easier to train crews, easier to maintain and easier to find ammo for the same probability of getting killed as a more modern tank. How much training are the new Russian tankers getting anyway? I assume the Russian military sees them as completely expendable.

That’s extremely possible, I had a half bottle of rioja on top of some dayquil as a result of whatever flavor of cold is going around in the US. I’m familar with the idea having good frameworks, and I consider them to be part of what I’ll term the “Batman Fallacy”. That is, Bruce Wayne is the smart man ever, and given time, can prepare for anything. Maybe I’m a contrarian and nihilist, but I don’t think you can be perfectly prepared for most major events. Limber state of mind, strong consititution, good principles, maybe, but something more fleshed out than that? As much as a I hate agile, I’m very much on team yolo we’ll adapt.

Strategic thinking/understanding in our populations? In terms of “la gentoosa” as my wife would say, and I quote William Gibson (my favorite book of his, Idoru): “[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.” I’m not really sure what you mean by this. These two crises are so different that I’m not sure any framework for thinking about them both is useful, or at least would hold up to any scrutiny before the crisis if not get me laughed out of the room (or have to pay for the spilled scotch). I think the best we can hope for is that our leaders and society are adaptable, have a sense of irony and are not stuck in some silly dogma. Biden had very good information on Russia’s plans, and still wasn’t able to stop it despite being very public about what was going to happen, at risk of great embarrassment, for months beforehand (for which he deserves massive credit, and this coming from a self-described reactionary conservative). And that’s the absolute best case. As was said earlier, “farting in the face of a hurricane”. And then Russia invades, and Biden and co. are faced with dealing with a bunch of irrational genocidal nuclear-armed maniacs whom with their is no negotiating and willing die by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason at all. It’s totally absurd, and yet here we are. For COVID, nobody had any idea what to do. At the start, there was zero consensus among doctors I know, well-educated friends with way too strong statistics background etc. Wear masks? Lock down everything? Or do you yolo it? It’s still not clear what the best approach is in terms of long term effects- the shutdown of public schools for 2 years is probably the worst problem in states like mine (WA) where lots of youth basically fell out of the net, and all the small business that dissappeared. And politicians do have their hands tied where they can’t say “Well a bunch of very old people in a hospice died, where mean time to live is 6 months before this new virus” (the place near Seattle where we had the first cluster of infections). And that’s before the CDC/WHO flip flopping on various things, all sorts of censorship and the Republicans going full retard on vaccines (that’s most charitable expression I can come up with) after Donald Trump decided to rush vaccine production and then lost an election. The funny thing is in central american kleptocracies, the whole mask + vaccine thing was adhered to religiously, as those people despite distrusting their governments do have experience with infectious diseases and want absolutely none of that, and have thrown their lot in with modern medicine.

Oh yeah I strongly agree with that. Putin bet the farm on taking the whole country, whereas he could have easily and successfully nibbled "noch ein paar meter". My comment is more around the fact that despite various challenges, the US continues to come up on top for all sorts of reasons, but we also just seem to be lucky that the bad people in the world, or at least those who want to cause instability, seem to just not be able to hold it together over a longer timeframe.

We wish we were that clever. We're just lucky. As Bismarck once said "God loves idiots, drunkards and Americans".

It rhymes with "bouclier inflammation", and it's coming everywhere, hasta pronto.

I think our political classes lack creative flair for tackling problems, honestly. I would simply offer visas at almost guaranteed rate for attractive women younger than 30 without children from axis of evil countries. Their demographics are already messed up, but it wouldn't hurt giving them an extra kick as they roll down that hill.

For all the talk about diesel shortages, what I’d really like to know about is the conditions of Russia’s trains. I know they don’t make bearings, and I know partisans have been burning signal boxes (the most vulnerable part of the network). Has anybody heard anything about the state of the rail network, both for military and civilian purposes?

I’m bearish on UGVs for one reason and one reason alone: Navigation on ground is way harder than in the air if you want significant autonomy. Air and sea are way easier. Progress is being made, but it’ll be even harder on the battlefield. The small wheel callout is huge, and robot legs don’t work yet as we don’t have a practical artificial muscle. Now near term if you’re telling me it’ll drive itself in a convoy follow along on the road, but require remote control on the battlefield, absolutely.

I’m gonna argue for obsolete. The manned attack helicopter rests of several pillars: The vehicle itself, the highly trained flight crew, the maintenance crew, the spare parts, the weapons systems, the fuel truck, and all the logistics to move the damn thing to the front. All of this has an upfront cost and then an ongoing cost, both in terms of money and also strain on the logistics system. And this goes for all of the big shiny expensive manned systems. For an AH64, the figures I saw online were something like $15m per airframe, $1m per year maintenance, several $m for weapons. In a combat zone, I bet it’s more. For that cost, how likely are you to destroy enemy equipment, and how likely is your helicopter to be destroyed (and how much will that cost you)? What’s the lead time on new pilots, engines, crew chiefs etc. Manpads already make helicopter life risky; AA loitering munitions will bring the extinction risk to high alert. Compare that to loitering munitions that are expendable, cheap and require minimal support crew, training etc. Ex Lancet, launched off what looks like a boat trailer towed behind a Lada, or your FPV drones that are a guy in a hole with a radio and quadcopter with an RPG strapped to it. The autonomous versions of these are coming very soon, and won’t cost much more. The total cost per kill just isn’t there for the helicopter, compared to the newer cheaper weapons. EDIT: The other thing to consider is what if loitering munitions make it impossible to base helicopters within 150km of the front. Doesn’t matter what sort of exotic capabilities they bring to the table if the support system ceases exist as soon as it deploys.

I’m very curious about your perspective on this. Why do you think the unmanned ground assets will be a such a big deal? Smaller logistics footprint? Harder to detect? Total agreement on this. The entire system from logisitics to training hours needs to be considered. Part of what makes autonomous drones so much cheaper is training can scale without extra humans.