European armies, as a whole, need to do something absolutely massive about their production rates. We’re scaling up, but still working at an order of magnitude lower production rates than what we see is needed in Ukraine. This applies to everything from tanks and artillery to aircraft and ships, not to speak of ammunition…
Looking at the state of production today would lead you to think that the amount of equipment produced on European soil in the 40’s was simply impossible.
With the massive proliferation of drones, I see it as only a matter of time until we have this kind of system set up to fire light flak capable of shooting down small drones at ranges of a couple hundred meters. Honestly, I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen it yet.
Conventional military doctrine is that infantry and vehicles should operate together. A couple vehicle-mounted automated flak guns capable of reliably shooting down drones at a couple hundred meters would heavily negate the absolutely debilitating threat that FPV- and dropper drones present to both infantry and mechanised columns today. If they’re able to build man-portable versions as well the drone threat will be completely changed.
Basically, the current picture of drone warfare looks to me like if people invented fighter jets but no AA. Eventually the AA is bound to catch up.
It’s one of the most fundamental principles of chemistry and physics. It was discovered by Antoine Lavoisier in the late 18th century, and you can only meaningfully break it during nuclear reactions (fusion/fission). If any container is gaining mass, it is either a dying star or there is more mass entering the container than leaving it. This also applies to the human body: If you are gaining mass, it is because there is more going in than out, otherwise you’ve broken pretty much all known physics (or you’re about to go supernova).
You won’t gain net weight my that mechanism though, you’ll just grow more dense. Mass is a conserved quantity, so if you’re gaining more muscle mass than you’re losing fat, that extra mass is coming from somewhere. That somewhere is your food.
Or conclude that they were accumulating mass some other way, such as
My bet would be on (1) and/or (2).
Water content could be increasing.
My impression of the russian military is that their strategy is to give the impression that they can keep going forever (which they obviously can’t), no matter the cost, in the hopes that Ukraine will fold before they themselves crack. With this in mind, I believe that russia will keep attacking at a high rate, even far past the tipping point. I don’t think we’re really going to see how depleted the russian army is before it suddenly can’t do anything anymore. That is, I think the collapse of the russian army will look a lot like the fall of a dictatorship: First slow and almost imperceptible, then sudden and total.
While I agree with the idea, there are practical issues to reporting “drone resistance”. Mostly that drones are used to deliver anything from small hand grenades, which even the side-armour of a light APC should handle with ease, to dropping stacks of AT mines or a heavy HEAT round, both of which should defeat an MBT if hit on the roof.
There’s also the point that you have both bomber-drones, which target the roof, and FPV drones, which typically target the sides, optics, or engine.
Basically, the most reasonable “drone resistance” metrics you can report are probably whether the vehicle can withstand standard RPG rounds, and (importantly) whether it has any form of proximity defence (like TROPHY). If anything, I’m actually a bit surprised that some form of mounted shotgun that automatically targets FPV drones hasn’t become widely used yet. TROPHY is developed to target AT rockets moving at several hundred meters per second, which is complete overkill for shooting down FPV drones coming in at < 30 m/s.
There’s been a lot of talk about how effective drones are against armour, and how cheap they are vs. what is used to target them. I’ve seen surprisingly little talk about the fact that drones should be orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to shoot down than rockets. Basically all you need is a shotgun and a targeting system that is much, much more rudimentary than what modern AA uses.
That makes sense, thanks! I’ve noticed that there have been a couple slow days lately, which backs up the explanation.
Regarding equipment, we’ve definitely seen russia dig progressively deeper into stockpiles to drag out progressively older equipment. I can’t imagine it will get better for them, as we’ve actually started seeing a decrease in the amount of destroyed artillery that could be indicating the environment isn’t as target-rich as it was a year ago.
Wow! That’s a lot more than we’ve seen for quite a while, isn’t it?
It would be interesting to see a compiled plot of how these numbers have developed over time, does anyone know where that can be found?
I seem to remember reading that the US navy comes in second (which makes sense considering that a single carrier has a larger air wing than most countries air forces) but the point still stands.
I don’t know for certain, but can’t really imagine that being the case. There are several reasons I can’t imagine something going viral off lemmy per now:
1a. This could be “worked around” if someone reposted from lemmy to some other, larger network. Still, I wouldn’t say that meant something “went viral off lemmy”, since that would imply it went viral before being reposted.
2a. I say “by default” because I’m assuming someone could set up an instance designed around maximising the views of trending material.
Basically: Too small user mass, no big personalities, and a “following system”/visibility algorithm built around promoting interesting and healthy media consumption rather than cultish behaviour prevents things from going viral off lemmy.—
With modern tv/streaming, tickets aren’t a limited resource anymore, in the sense that by far most of the viewers are not in place live.
Sure, you could price live tickets following “normal” market rules, since you still have the practical limitation regarding the number of people living in reasonable distance from the stadium. The idea of using pricing to regulate demand/consumption for streaming services doesn’t really make sense the same way, since the marginal cost of another viewer is essentially zero.
I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there’s a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you’re one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It’s not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let’s say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you’re still left with millions of dollars per match.
Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we’re in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they’re still going to be making buckets of money. I don’t really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
Edit: ignore the below, I forgot my pi-factor in the gamma function for half-integers…
Edit 2: Since you’re right, my missing gamma-factor completely changes this. An infinite-dimensional hypersphere will have zero surface area for any (finite?) radius.
Original dum-dum:
While I’m completely open that my factor is likely wrong here, the expression you provided is definitely wrong in the 3D case (I’m assuming the r superscript on the pi was a typo), since it doesn’t give n = 3 => A = 4 pi r^2.
I believe the surface area of an n-dimensional hypersphere is (n - 1) pi r^{n - 1}. In that case (I may have some factors wrong here, just going off memory), an infinite-dimensional hypersphere has infinite surface area as long as it has non-zero radius.
Really great article explaining how artillery has developed in Ukraine, the challenges around supporting a plethora of different systems, and why drones don’t make artillery obsolete. Thanks!
That almost seems like a wilful misinterpretation of what I wrote, since I never claimed anything of the sort.
What makes you completely wrong is that you’re using the fact that petroleum companies are filthy rich and bribe politicians to hell and back as an explanation for why we’re still reliant of fossil fuels. The basic answer to why is that “fossil fuels and combustion engines are pretty damn hard to beat” to the point where we still haven’t found a viable alternative for some applications.
I get why you would say this, but it’s an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong.
Fossil fuels have an absurd energy density. They’re just really hard to beat. Modern batteries and liquid hydrogen don’t even come close. Pair that with the fact that we’ve spent a couple hundred years optimising the steam- and internal combustion engines, compared to some decades (in practice) for electric-based stuff, and you start seeing why fossil fuels are so hard to push of the top of the hill.
Until very recently all alternatives were pretty much worse under every conceivable performance metric. There’s a reason electric planes are still in the prototype phase. It’s just technically really really hard to even get close to jet fuel and combustion engines.
Exactly. Air warfare has, since its inception, migrated towards more and more high-tech solutions. Modern fighters require modern AA missiles to counter, etc. Drones have flipped this in a sense by swarming in with cheap, low tech (compared to a modern fighter) weapons, that you can’t afford to shoot down with modern AA designed for those fighters. The response will have to be a cheap, low tech (again, relative) solution like flak. Flak went out of use because it didn’t have the accuracy or range to deal with modern fighters/missiles. That’s not a problem against drones. Additionally, drones are much slower and more fragile than a jet, so require far less heavy weapons to shoot down.