Thank you!

Experience in the past few years makes it seem that the viability of tank-based warfare has dramatically declined.

I do disagree here though, I think this is a serious miscalculation that arose from as a narrative primarily from two things. The first was Ukraine having to innovate with what they were actually given (not enough traditional AT) and had access to in order to stop Russian assaults (quadcopters) and the second is Russian armor has fatal flaws that haven’t been meaningfully been addressed despite decades of feedback and indicators of those fatal flaws.

Drones have radically changed land warfare, but in the end I think they will make armored vehicles more crucial as part of combined arms land operations.

Take the Bradley for example, it simply outclasses almost all Russian armor, Russia can’t compete even against much older cold war western military equipment like this. On armor thickness alone most Russian armor fails to meet battlefield realities, even smaller artillery calibers shred their armor to pieces. This forces Russia to focus on drone tactics and also to HEAVILY propagandize the idea that traditional armored vehicles are obsolete lest they look weak and stuck in the past on a dead end of obsolete armor design like they are.

Drones have transformed the role of armor not made it obsolete, Russia is just trying to desperately bullshit the rest of the world this isn’t the case with a firehose of propaganda about it.

Look at the most recent iteration of the Abrams, it incorporates a capacity for hull mounted PERCH systems for launching loitering muition/surveillance drones from within the vehicle, integrating the use of drones tightly in with the use of main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, further the CROWS system on Abrams tanks highly emphasizes the capability to observe and target fast moving targets with advanced optics and apply kinetic force to them. The Bullfrog turret program meant for Bradleys and other armored vehicles fulfills a similar role. This is the way forward rather than considering tanks obsolete unless you build a massive unwieldy metal cage on top of them and pretend artillery and other direct fire weapons don’t exist as decisive counters.

Drone cages/cope cages are likely here to stay, I am talking about the Russian turtle “tanks” that are basically barely moving deathtraps for the crews.

https://www.twz.com/land/m1-abrams-tank-armed-with-switchblade-drones-tested-by-army

These conclusions must be hard science because we used math and numbers!

The muscle memory is hard to fix

Also this is software, we should celebrate and embrace the fact that the same tool can be customized to look and be organized differently to maximally ease users into learning it. This is one of the super powers of software!

No thanks, I prefer human DJs and you should too, they are better.

The cuts to NOAA aren’t because trump doesn’t want people to know the weather. They’re cutting NOAA so that the only way you can get weather info is to pay one of his cronies to get it:

Yeah and guess what will happen to the quality and basic integrity of the forecasting!

Honestly even if they were comically old timey trains that burned coal the efficiency of scale might still keep emissions technically lower than cars when you truly add it all up.

Speaking about the US the cuts to NOAA, climate science and general rising hostility to science will absolutely make this statement age like fine whiskey in a nice barrel.

ughhh

Welcome to the future! Who needs science or scientists when we have AI!!

yes!

Hundreds of thousands of years and people living on that island still haven’t quite figured out how to use fire to make good food…

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give the Fediverse (Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation.

Participation awards are given out here, this is just that kind of degenerate place where that kind of stuff happens. I have seen the underground storehouses filled with participation trophies made of solid platinum and gold under some of the larger instances, it is staggering. We are the deplorably thanked for participating, witness us in our moral decay.

Go on Russia, piss off Turkey, I am sure that will work out well for you.

Some key points

It is important to briefly cover who the operators of Russian SAMs are. Unlike the bulk of personnel in line units, SAM operators are overwhelmingly contract soldiers with significant technical and tactical training. Russian air defence systems have withstood modest damage [edit I might say “moderate” here? I wouldn’t call it “modest”] during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, enabling the force to steadily build experience.

At the same time, the war has shown the dependence of the operators on operational integration to make the right decisions. When isolated, under pressure from multiple threats, faced with uncertainty as to the performance of their equipment, or simply exhausted, operators have made important errors, including shooting down friendly aircraft and even a civilian airliner.13 Understanding declining operator performance and their degree of confidence in their equipment is beyond the scope of this paper, but remains critical to effectively disrupting Russia’s IAMDS.

…

The Russians also rely on Western technologies to calibrate and measure the performance of their own radars. These are important for the initial acceptance of radars into service, but also for the continuous process of improving radar performance against threats.

…

Russia’s air defence enterprise is also vulnerable to physical attack, largely because of its concentration of functions around some key concerns. To take Pantsir complexes as an example, there are two primary KBP assembly sites: KBP’s main facility and Shcheglovsky Val (Figure 15). The cannons for Pantsir are produced by TulaTochMash and TsKBA, which also play a key role in the production of radars for the system. The primary assembly facilities, all located in Tula (Figure 15), are around 350 km from Ukraine and heavily defended. Ukraine’s attack drones lack sufficient payload or kinetic energy to damage many industrial targets and have so far failed to damage key facilities around Tula. However, as Ukraine’s stockpile of indigenous cruise missiles expands, the ability to reach and damage the relevant targets improves.

While the clustering of these sites enables the concentration of air defence, it also means that once the defences are saturated, all sites become vulnerable. Ukraine could, therefore, mount an operation to saturate the defences on an approach to Tula before delivering a significant blow to Pantsir production with cruise missiles – ironically resulting in limiting Russia’s ability to defend other targets over the course of 2026. These are but a fraction of the points of vulnerability identified in Russia’s integrated air defence production. A systematic effort to exploit these vulnerabilities could have a disproportionate impact on assisting Ukraine to strike the economic backbone of the Russian war effort and reduce the barriers to NATO airpower, consequently deterring future Russian aggression by denial

I am not sure I agree with RUSI that Russia is capable of sustaining this rate of loss of air defense systems, I can’t help but feel this article may have been partially in the works for quite awhile and the narrative in the last month or two has begun to shift to a point that while I don’t think any of the fundamental points of this article are wrong I do think it portrays Russia as much more capable of sustaining extensive air defenses losses than they are. The fact that Ukraine is able to hit these systems so regularly with cheap, inexpensive strike drones is itself a strategically unsustainable relationship for Russia and is indicative of the state of decay the Russian military is at. To be fair to the article it treats training as outside the scope of its consideration but I don’t know I just don’t think you can place training outside the scope of consideration when talking about air defense, air defense requires an ensemble of assets all working together that are trained in effectively collaborating to defeat waves of flying bombs, cruise missiles and other threats. It isn’t just that lots training is necessary to teach people how to know how to do their individual job with the equipment they are trained on in an air defense network, air defense is like making sure a boat has no leaks, it is a wholistic pursuit where if one part of the hull is bullshitting about not having a leak the whole ship sinks… and I think it is a very safe bet to say there is a metric fuckton of bullshitting about air defense in the Russian military (which isn’t to say that there aren’t also plenty of highly capable Russian air defenses and air defense crews especially on paper).

ALSO all the time and resources to adequately train air defense crews which I am entirely unconvinced Russia is capable of doing at the scale that is necessary to replace the high rate of systems being lost. There is likely a veteran core of air defense crews but I imagine they are vastly outnumbered by utterly incompetent crews manning functional air defense equipment as basically nothing more than glorified decoys.

You can hand a random person an AK47 and say “GO” and have some success at a very high cost, you can’t hand a random person a highly advanced air defense system and just tell them “GO” and have any degree of success however unless your objective is to accidentally shoot down more and more of your own aircraft.

The Majority Report

Hell yeah!

No

Remember, Russia is primarily relying on glide bombs to put artillery pressure on the front because Ukraine has so effectively denied Russia the ability to move its artillery into forward threatening positions.

Ukraine’s use of drones here thus could collapse the Russian war machine if Ukraine gets good enough at this.

I have made this point before but this is precisely why helicopters that can mount radars are more relevant than ever and more survivable than fixed wing aircraft, they aren’t tied to massive static airbases and infrastructure.

Notepad± has returned to its true form of Notepad++

Most articles about wood banks wrap them in the same tired language. Community spirit. Rural generosity. Neighbors helping neighbors. It’s the kind of coverage you get when journalists focus on the people stacking the wood instead of the conditions that made it necessary. They never mention the underlying reality. Wood banks exist because without them, people would freeze. It’s the same everywhere: Local news crews film volunteers splitting logs while pretending it’s heartwarming, reporting on senior citizens splitting 150 cords a year for neighbors in need as if the story is about kindness instead of the failure that created the need in the first place.

Definitely do, as I said before Project Zomboid is a perfect compliment to Cataclysm DDA because they optimize for opposite experiences, one realtime and multiplayer the other turn-based, incredibly deep and singleplayer only.

One last thing, CDDA definitely feels intimidating at first but I have to say I actually think the interface is wonderful once you start to get the hang of it. Remember you can always press ? and search for commands by what they do! (i.e. if you forget what button is for throw you can press ? and type “throw” and see the keybinding is t).

The advanced inventory management system opened with / is the best inventory management system I have ever used in any game ever, I wish I had it for real life…

CDDA does not deserve its reputation as having an overwhelming and obscure interface, yes it is different than most games you have played if you haven’t played a game like Caves Of Qud, but wait a second why haven’t you played Caves Of Qud???!?!