DDE

South-of-Center Africa

Czechoslovak take on a BMP-1 AARV, typically designated BREM-Ch/Cz Note the winch around the hatch

When it's WWII already, but you're still thinking 1914.

Terrain scatters: off.

Now with reasonable framerate, multiple angles, and intense watermarks https://t.me/zvezdanews/77359 Edit: no watermark https://t.me/mod_russia/14568

In military phrase sense, "hypersonic" refers to, I would argue, two groups of weapons. One of them is novel, namely hypersonic cruise missiles of the Tsirkon/Waverider variety. The other is really not. While one would make the argument the term is reserved for glide-enabled ballistic missile return vehicles, it has clearly become abused. Kinzhal from outset seems to be an Iskander with some sort of modifications, and the air launch pushes its maximum velocity into the hypersonic realm, but its ability for limited maneuvers is unlikely to be something Pershing II or SCUD-D/Aerofon hasn't done (curiously, Uragan and Smerch MLRS drop boosters while Tochkas and Islanders don't). Worse still, the terms gets thrown around with anti-ship and anti-shore applications of the Standard SM-6 anti-air missiles, or even the Hermes, an attempt to sell the missile portions of the Pantsir as a surface-to-surface missile.

Well, we can be reasonably sure this launch isn't indicative.

Speaking of nukes... https://t.me/mod_russia/14556 First all-up test of Sarmat: Plesetsk-Kamchatka, 15:12 MSK Framerate: glacial https://t.me/zvezdanews/77326

Speaking of math, wanting to link two parallel roads with a nice curve in Cities: Skylines has driven me back to trig. At 1 AM.

Milsurp landing craft

Space weather https://thespacereview.com/article/4369/1

I see red. In the XIXth century, opportunities to test naval technology were rare, and every major engagement led to dramatic change in trends. After Lissa, line abreast formations, rammings, and torpedo attacks in a close-range free-for-all were the rage. Then there was the Yalu River (pictured), where columns of lightly-armored cruisers with quick-firing 6-inch guns were able to quite freely kite the older but larger battleships. As a result, by the Russo-Japanese war the predominant doctrine was to press into medium-calibre range and use a hurricane of cruiser-bore fire to disable the enemy ship; the fore and aft main gun turrets of most battleships were a secondary weapon at best. So here comes the battle of the Yellow Sea, where both sides were able to score 12-inch hits at over 8 miles despite the Japenese having Barr & Stroud rangefinders fated to 5 miles, and the Russian handheld micrometers only considered effective at 4 km. By war's end, evidence was piling up: heavy guns have benefitted from much of the quick-fire technology, and gunnery practices and rangefinding had improved to a point where long-range fire was an option. Projects of what would be retroactively called "semi-dreadnoughts" had already been cropping up with a larger, turreted secondary battery, such as the 9.2-inchers on the Lord Nelson-class. Immediately after the war, a whole lot of people (in Britain, the US, Italy, Russia, et cetera) began to suggest maximizing the main gun armament and speed in order to take advantage of that shifting balance towards first-salvo power and keeping the range open. USS South Carolina, with her eight-gun broadside in a more efficient arrangement, was laid down before the ten-gun HMS Dreadnought - Jackie Fischer merely got the Admiralty to splurge out on overtime pay.

I'm not entirely kidding with the aircraft references - unlike the draft law on external administration of exiting businesses, the current decrees on leased aircraft amount to confiscation. The most recent one introduced some sort of mechanism for payments via neutral countries and local currencies, but otherwise... grabbity-grab.

Is the robotic arm an aircraft? Is it leased ESA property? Does it count as a forcibly reregistered aircraft - or parallel imports? Ah, so many exciting questions...

There's also just the possibility of lightening the ship, or preemptively cannibalizing the center guns as spares. The Soviets were able to keep land-based turret and railway versions of dreadnought guns in service until 1991 by sourcing more pre-Soviet barrels, including from the Finns. So, fun fact. The first five Italian dreadnoughts had five turrets, the lower fore and aft ones and the amidships one with three guns, and the fore and aft superelvated turrets with two guns, for a total of thirteen guns - one less than the record-setting seven-turret Rio de Janeiro/Sultan Osman-ı Evvel/Agincourt. During the interwar refit, they ditched the amidships turret, for a total of ten remaining guns... all promptly drilled out to thirteen inches. They did not exactly have good luck.

I mean, they're not even denying it. It's part of their self-image.

And that's a Crusader, no less.

Relevant and morbid:

The wording used suggested more than "electronic fires". That, and patching wouldn't confer immunity against radio jamming. Anyway, as per Medvedev: "That was fake news, but thanks for the idea". https://t.me/medvedev_telegram/47

You're not the only one. Some plans for an Angara A5-TEM stack feature a standard LES for the reactor core. I think the studies started all the way after Hiroshima, i.e. before the "nuclear mutant" stereotype had spread.

I think it's just an AV rule of thumb that you don't install stuff from people you wouldn't lend the keys to your home to. The level of access is just that great.

Local authorities report this was an OFAB-100-120 with a standard detonator but some sort of bootleg explosive filler. https://ria.ru/20220413/khorvatiya-1783369442.html It's a small gravity bomb with increased fragmentation effect.

As I said, they focus on acid since at least 2018. https://pythom.com/ps/Breaking-Bad-Rocket-Style-Cooking-Fuel-in-a-Trailer-Lab-2018-06-19-56983 Also, there's nothing in Ignition! that would point them to that combo over any other. The author is rather ClF5-tolerant, after all. Whereas I can plainly see how they've internalized Zubrin's rhetoric, I think they heard of the mixture from someone in the amateur rocketry community.

https://thespacereview.com/article/4365/1

Posted on April 12, no less.