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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My point is that if your tank’s armour is compromised by modern antitank weapons, it doesn’t really matter where it hits you. You’re going to be turned into chunky marinara, or your shells are going to cook off.

    A pressurized fuel cell is already more protected than any fuel tank, and is smaller and lighter and more efficient than any ice engine. Which means you can add and divert even more armour to protect the cell and the occupants of the tank. Basically any danger associated with hydrogen is vastly overshadowed by the fact that tanks already carry high explosives. And that’s not so dangerous that we’re trying to replace them with non combustible weapon systems.

    It’s not like Rotem is new at making tanks, the K2 is one of the best tanks currently in production. If the engineers thought fuel cells increased the likelihood of catastrophic failure, I highly doubt they would have tried it with the K3.

    Personally, I think most people are just buying into the propaganda that shut down hydrogen power in the first place. To my knowledge there hasn’t ever been a death associated because of an explosion or fire involving a vehicle with h2.


  • The problem with diesel is that there has been a cap in their efficiency for quite some time. We’ve pretty much tweaked as much speed and efficiency out of what is possible with diesel tanks, which is why the Abrams has a turbine engine.

    As tanks become heavier and heavier the only real solution is to migrate to electric motors, which are more efficient and vastly more reliable than diesel or turbine.

    Just like with trains, the future of tanks are electric motors, and until we find a battery material more efficient and safe than lithium, hydrogen fuel cells are likely going to be the solution.



  • My dude, the military transports more volatile materials than hydrogen every day. Just because something doesn’t make sense for civilian use doesn’t mean it’s never going to be viable for military use.

    If you’re worried about the dangers of transporting something like hydrogen, you’re going to lose it when you find out what bombs are made out of.

    Electric motors are just more efficient in just about every way at scale, the current diesel motors being used in tanks aren’t really able to be improved upon. They’re at their technological peak, so the only way to move forward with mbt is by figuring out how to make electric motors work.




  • Eh, for a country that’s not in Europe, let alone NATO, they’ve done more than most. South Korea’s main goal is to counter North Korea’s geopolitical agenda. They’ve had laws on the books that prevent them from openly giving lethal aid to countries for decades now.

    They are allowed to, and have circumvented this rule when N Korea gets involved, but they’ve done it in a tit for that manor. Sending shells through third parties to vicariously give lethal aid when N Korea “secretly” supplies Russia with rockets and shells.

    This escalation from Russia and North Korea will likely be met by an escalation in a similar tit for tat manor. I don’t think they’ll send actual troops to Ukraine, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they ramp up shell production, as well as making the K2 tank factory go brrrr.


  • This post, at this time, is very obviously pointed at influencing the US election.

    Criticizing a genocide doesn’t automatically mean someone’s trying to influence an election, especially considering that it been constantly criticized for over a year.

    trump and his people have literally talked out loud about how great the “beachfront property” will be for Israel once they annihilate Gaza and the Palestinian people.

    If both political parties geopolitical goals align with Israel, what exactly leads you to believe this is meant to influence the election? It’s not telling you to vote for stien, or trump.

    Maybe if people didn’t go out of their ways to shield any level of criticism of their representatives we might have a more functional democracy, and maybe there would be less kids dying in Gaza.



  • Public trees already have a maintenance schedule and budget, public fruit trees don’t need to be about filling hungry people, they’re just as much about finding small moments of joy in your community.

    Unfortunately, fruiting trees take a lot more maintenance just to keep alive, even moreso if you want them to produce anything worth eating.

    I have two plum trees in my front yard that I planted about 5 years ago and they take about as much work to maintain as a small garden patch. Modern fruit trees aren’t really natural, they’ve been bred over time to produce more and more fruit. With so much of its energy going to produce fruit, it leaves them more susceptible to disease and especially pests.

    If you like gardening it’s a great little hobby, but I couldn’t imagine the amount of work it would take to maintain hundreds or even dozens of public trees. Plus, I’m not so sure how comfortable I would be eating the fruits of trees absorbing all the petrochemicals from road wash.




  • saw an open source project for 3d printing prosthetic limbs with a focus on making affordable prosthetics for kids since they grow so quickly they need new fittings quickly as well.

    Unfortunately 3d printing has mainly been a bit of a gimmick in the field of prosthetics, especially the more diy projects. Most people think that prosthetics is an engineering field with a side of medicine, when in reality it’s more of a medical field with a side of engineering.

    The project you were referring to never really took off because it ended up being detrimental to the patient’s long-term health. With how quickly children adapt to their conditions, if you don’t provide them with a prosthetic that provides more utility than their residual limb, they end up adapting to never wearing any prosthetic. Which in turn can vastly lower their mobility and ability to interact with their environments.

    The fact that much of our prosthetics technology isn’t that different from what they had in the Civil War is sad.

    I wouldn’t say it’s quite that bad. I mean I did carve a wooden socket in school, but haven’t ever seen one in a clinic setting. Prosthetic tech really advanced in the 90s with the introduction of materials like carbon fiber, titanium, new thermoplastics, and advanced mechanical knee units. With the amount of repetitive ground force reaction a human body can produce in motions, our field is pretty limited by the advancement of material science.



  • and she’s definitely not touching herself for any other reason.

    How dare you, the ancients weren’t tainted with the same levels of sexual proclivities found in modern society. They weren’t just grooming those boys because they just wanted to fuck them, they were engaging in pedagogy, not pedophilia! It’s why all my twink TA’s are underclassmen, someone must teach the youth. - every male art history teacher


  • The professional reviews are hilariously mixed, I’m pretty sure Coppola unwittingly made a movie that also serves as a litmus test to see how pretentious and up your own ass you are.

    The honest reviews are basically, this made no sense, I don’t know what he was thinking. The positive reviews can be boiled down to “if you have to ask, you’re not sophisticated enough to understand”.


  • Yeah, plus the “cutting edge” prosthetic tech we currently have is mostly overhyped marketing.

    There are about a dozen powered prosthetics I always see on social media that always look really cool and the “patients” always go on and on about how useful it is…What people don’t realize is those “patients” are being paid by the manufacturer, and usually part of the deal is that they get the limb for free.

    They don’t tell you about having to wear a heavy battery pack that only lasts for a couple hours. They don’t tell you that you have to pre-program routines like tying your shoe laces. That you have to purposely concentrate on flexing residual muscle groups in your limb to activate those routines. Nor do they tell you that the majority of patients who own those devices usually revert back to a manual prosthetic for functional tasks, or just choose not to wear a prosthetic at all because they can achieve more function with their stumps.

    While prosthetics have started looking more futuristic and functional, unfortunately we haven’t really advanced any technology that actually improves function and utility since the late 90’s. And I highly doubt we’ll ever make a prosthetic that provides more utility than the limb it’s replacing, not in our lifetime at least.


  • Right now Brent Crude is just 71.28. Oil prices are going down.

    Yes, and as soon as it gets cold oil the price of oil will rise once again. It’s not like countries are divesting from fossil fuels any time soon.

    Additionally Russia does not have the technical ability to fix all of the refineries that Ukraine has been blowing up nor do they have the ability to fix all of the upstream production problems being created.

    Russia isn’t a technologically deprived nation, and they have one of the largest oil producing and refining operations in the world. They may not be able to repair the damages with imported parts as they would have 5 years ago, but refining tech isn’t exactly a new science, or particularly complicated.

    Productions of raw products is dropping fast](https://ycharts.com/indicators/russia_crude_oil_production)and those declines are going to both continue and accelerate.

    If you examine that chart for the year it seems bad, but if you just click on the scale of 5 years, it’s pretty much just average. The important thing to look at is exports, which have been rapidly increasing.

    O&G is not going to be propping up Russia’s economy for much longer.

    I think that’s a bit optimistic given that the West is hesitant to actually enforce the embargo, and are equally hesitant to divest from the fossil fuel sector.

    We just don’t have the spine to actually give an ultimatum of “you can do business with the US, or you can do business with Russia” to countries like India or China. That would be putting the interest of the nation and democracy in general, before the interest of private profit.


  • The Russian economy cannot handle the strain of the war, and they can’t keep the economy up by being at war.

    Unfortunately, the collapse is very slow. Their national wealth fund is currently their bread basket, and that is maintained by their energy exports. With the price of oil being so high, they should be able to sustain their current economy for a couple years at least. There will be shortages, especially in areas where they were reliant on imports.

    However, from what I’ve read, oil would have to drop to around $60 a barrel to spur an economic collapse swift and bad enough to make the war unsustainable. That or the EU and US would actually have to militaristically enforce the energy embargo.