Kalbear

but being literal is on my checklist of things to bring

Yes, I WANT to not have a massive depressive episode and withdrawals from lack of medicine while I'm on vacation

I'm really curious about this, honestly - what assessments of the technical components have been so strong? I'm entirely willing to believe I've missed a lot but the notion that tanks are being used in a critical way and therefore must adapt seems to be something that most military theorists are already going away from.

So why emphasize what you need to do to make a tank okay against certain types of drone strikes? I have seen that - the Gepard is exactly the sort of thing that is needed more of, not less - and it is not a tank. Then why defend specifically against drones? I like how you answered a bunch of the questions you asked. That makes it much easier. My point is that an infantry can fire some of these - especially drones that go after other drones - but more importantly they will either have to live with the idea that they will simply rely on not being found or being killed if they are, or they'll have to be under the umbrella of the defensive stuff. Which happens all the time apparently At least in Ukraine that's simply incorrect. A lot of manpads have hit things, mostly because the Russians didn't know that there were infantry waiting for the helicopters. No, it's not a joke; Russia has shitty night equipment and doesn't tend to fight at night. Sure, but it doesn't matter because of all the other factors. They did, but notice how they're not happening any more thanks to defensive structures and combined arms and the Russians learning how to counter them? No, I don't think they use salt water; submarines have passive cooling (which is what I said). They have the water around them and that makes a difference. They don't rely on it to cool actively but they absolutely do use it. Diesels use it even more than that. Seriously, why are you so upset about this? Why the personal attacks? The submarine is, however, and batteries ARE very hot if you want them to stay at reasonable performance. The Nissan Leaf got away with aircooling and they have a ridiculously shitty battery life. Teslas use more cooling. Just as a thought experiment - how far and fast do you think drones are going to advance in the next 6 years?

First off, again - drones aren't the only problem. Second, the systems needed to shoot down drones before they can see you or target you are not portable on a tank by itself, at least not any that we have seen so far. They are their own units and require combined arms use, which if you'll recall was one of the main points I made. And all of that STILL doesn't answer 'what is the value of an actual tank'. Sure, you can mount all of this on a tank - you can also mount it on a significantly faster, more mobile, lighter armored vehicle. Or just have it as part of the infantry kit. Or have guys in bunkers doing this from 10km away for you. And none of that - NONE of that - solves the problem of things like longer range ballistics that target you in minutes. They're still not used at the scale or scope that you're talking about, and running a battery on a 100-ton object that has passive cooling via the ocean and is several hundred feet long is not the same as running it on a car that is being jostled repeatedly by driving. "Almost" is not the same thing as here. And if you're talking a Toyota Prius as the option, well, it's way too gutless as a choice in terms of power and performance. Good luck with that. And AGAIN, all of this ignores the central premise: what is the actual battlefield value of a tank? Russia largely doesn't fight at night so that's largely irrelevant. Among other things, yep. What I said was that their role as a dedicated armor killer is not as valuable any more, and that role has evolved to a 'exploit this one place in particular' or ambush tactics. My point is that there is no reason that you MUST have the role 'attack helicopter' any more than you MUST have the role 'tank'. If you are going to adapt in warfare you should adapt. You don't see horses dying in combat and think 'I should build a better horse'.

So...my point was correct? Cool to know. Abrams have been heavily modernized recently. It doesn't really matter; they're not dying because of drone strikes, they're dying because of mass fires and accurate fires. Top armor ain't gonna protect against that. Again, the problem is that there exists no amount of sufficient armor to deter the weapons that are currently in use. That includes drones, indirect fires, direct fires, man-portable fire, mines, and all sorts of craziness. Heck, it's not entirely clear how well that armor can sustain something like a Bushmaster's attack. It isn't just dealing with drones (though how a tank can deal with individual fleets of drones is I guess left as an exercise to the reader). You didn't write anything about solid-state batteries or natrium batteries, and neither of those techs currently exist in the way we'll need to use them in vehicles like this. In any case it hardly matters. The problem is not that tanks can explode or that they produce heat. Fixing imaging to spot tanks is not difficult and exists as retrofits for most of the US and Europe-supplied weaponry anyway. Heat signatures are not what are being used to spot things. If you want to talk about future tech that doesn't exist you might as well talk about active camo - that would be significantly more useful. I confess modern designs might defeat some of the more creative cheap drone attacks like dropping a grenade or a RPG that was held by a off the shelf drone with a 3d printed harness into the open turret of a tank, but that's really not the main way drones are being used right now.

Per the director it has a lot of mecha-inspirations: https://www.gamesradar.com/atlas-netflix-jennifer-lopez-sci-fi-movie-brad-peyton-director-interview/ "Avatar, Aliens, Titanfall"

Pretty sure that's part of the Clan stuff but I could be wrong. It's been a while. D Va does, as does Halo/Cortana, as does Into the Spider Verse and Peni Parker. There's a lot of that out there.

It's not ideal. I don't know it's the worst, but it's an engine designed and optimized around not a ton of interactivity, a ton of multiplayer/networking support and lag-tolerant, a matchmaking system, poor communication tools and a large-scale amount of state transferrence from other disconnected entities. The good parts are that it's great at rendering and keeping in scope large scales of areas and does a decent job of interior and exterior systems. The real problem is that the tooling and modifications and systems that a RPG would want - NPCs moving around regularly, location and event triggering, large amounts of objects being modified in state, in-game cutscene rendering, inventory management, a large amount of different actions and interactions with environments - are things that basically none of the other users of Frostbite want. Which means you have to branch off and hope that the core frostbite engine doesn't break all your shit.

Or Overwatch, or Mechwarrior, or...

Look, if you can't laugh at the burned and steaming corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru I don't know what you're doing in life

They really don't. Russia largely uses helicopters in limited indirect fire methods now. They are no longer patrolling the battlefield or being used as direct fire attacks against tanks and APCs and infantry because those forces - especially the infantry - have so many portable antiair weapons. There's more details about how helicopters are being used here, but the mission has changed significantly from what they were designed for in both cases. For the Ukraine they use them differently than Russia - but not against general battlefield targets. They use them for rapid deployment and attacking high-value targets under night and ECM cover, which again - very different than what Apaches were planned for. I'll note that Ukraine has asked repeatedly for things like F16s, APCs, and munitions. They've not once asked for more helicopters. The tanks that are being designed today - the Abrams and the T14, and their replacements - are equally garbage against the types of threats that are being faced. Again, the problem is not just drones! For the same reason that we don't use cavalry charges any more. Because the need for a self-propelled source of direct fire is not nearly as important. Because man-portable weaponry is common, cheap, has long range and is effective. Mostly, because the reason for it - having a weapon that is very difficult to kill that can breach defenses and can also fire a large weapon that can deal with high-armored targets - is not a major mission any more. I guess I really don't understand the reluctance to even think that the idea that a 'tank' is not a viable weapon. We don't think battleships are very useful any more either. Warfare changes, and the need for a specific device changes. I don't take for granted that we will always need something like a tank. Batteries are notoriously explosive and batteries run hot and need active cooling, but yes, please continue. (this assumes that sighting on things is going to be hard to deal with, which it isn't) And those will get absolutely roflstomped by indirect and direct fire missions. They might be okay against drone attacks but they'll be garbage against HIMARS and other longer-range shots, they'll still have problems with most MANPADS, and more importantly what value are they actually providing? This is the real crux of the issue that I don't really understand. The value of a tank is to deal with high-armor targets that cannot be killed easily while having significant survival and the ability to breach some static defenses. It's still going to be super vulnerable against mines and the like, it's not going to be some kind of stealth tank that can't be seen. It still is going to have to go on ground. It still is very vulnerable in cities. It still is a big ass object on the battlefield that can be easily seen and spotted. Its cannon is not particularly special compared to man-portable weaponry in terms of lethality. I'd advise against thinking about 'how can I make a tank better' and instead start thinking about what the needs are on the battlefield, and then how to solve for those first. Drones are absolutely not being used to compensate; they are a vital and integral part of the weaponry and systems of war. The idea that drone use isn't going to dominate the battlefields is nonsense.

@Bironic, the problem is not just drones, and the most dangerous drones to modern armies are the spotters. And you're right that there is adapting - and those adaptations are exactly what I was describing. Where you can't have very large masses of units doing breaches because they lose the cover from things you were talking about. Because drones are dangerous (especially against troops) but when you can do a fire mission 50km away and hit something within 25m a bit of extra top plating doesn't matter. The other issue is that tanks - even Abrams - were made extra armored and tough to deal with the cannon of other tanks, while being able to deliver kill shots of armored vehicles accurately to places that support weapons could not hit. That mission is not as useful now. Weaponry is small enough and potent enough to kill tanks without needing an armored platform- drones, manpads, all sorts of stuff. You simply can't armor enough. The cannon power isn't needed either - you can deliver hits to tanks accurately from miles away from non tank weapons. The speed is becoming a detriment because again you can't outdisfance your defensive cover without dying. I guess I really don't get why your argument is that people will adapt and overcome and then you dismiss the idea that tanks going away are part of that adaptation. Another casualty in this vein are attack helicopters - they are also not being used nearly as much because they simply are too slow and too vulnerable.

Nah, that person has major issues. Looks good, and interestingly to me a more thematic return from Logan and something close to Old Man Logan.

As @Maithanet alluded to above the problem is that warfare has changed. Tanks can be useful in a few spots, but right now what defines warfare is the massive accurate lethality of long range or drone operated weaponry. Basically if you know where something is chances are good you can kill or disable it, and do so within minutes of seeing it. As another article I read put it, massed fires beat mass forces. And it is so much easier to coordinate mass fires now. A number of military theorists seeing Ukraine believe the future of warfare is slow advances or broad advances. A slow advance allows a force to not overreach their increasingly complicated umbrella of defenses and countermeasures that is needed. A broad advance means masses of fires can be overwhelmed with targets (at obviously high losses). Doing a mass of force to try and exploit one weak spot is. going to be increasingly difficult. The other weak spot in warfare is logistics - as exploited by Ukraine in 2022. I would expect a lot more focus on destruction of supply lines and using that + attrition to make some advances. But that isn't something you can consistently rely on.

My only addendum to what @DMC said above is that it does carry a risk - both to the country and to Biden - to have a house that cannot deal with urgent issues quickly. Emergency aid for disasters, aid to Israel or Ukraine or Taiwan, anything else that comes up is literally impossible to deal with via laws if the house can't get a speaker.

On his weight - chances are good he is taking Ozempic.

I can bring receipts, but honestly I don't see why - you'll just spin it in some other way. If you like we can talk about how shitty the UK's version of industrialization was as well, but the original outrage that you had was about how colonialism was NOT the reason that Britain became so amazing - that's what set off your outrage merchandising and caused you to get all atwitter - and other people disagreed. As you say, multiple things can be true at once. In this case, you being wrong about where the conversation was, you being wrong about the massive benefits of colonialism to the British empire, AND you being wrong about how beneficial Britain's version of industrialization were are all in play!

No, you just decided that's where it was going. I've been keeping up. You switched the goalposts when people talked about the problems with colonialism to meaning that it was just about industrialization and capitalism, and then DEMANDED that people justify why they disliked industrialization. I mean, sure - why defend something that sucks when you can defend something that sucks less? But you're the one who attempted to change the conversation.

Who is actually arguing against them happening? It's kinda telling that you equate imperialism and colonialism with industrialization and capitalism.

Seems like a pretty good response. Iran appears confused about it, it sends a message that unlike Iran Israel can do significant damage if they choose and Iran can do little to stop it, and there's no sign of otherwise large scale outrage. If Israel was going to strike back this seems like a good choice for deescalating.

I personally take the 'they must make as much money as I do' to be a shorthand for 'they must be able to understand the professional and personal obligations that one has when one takes their career this seriously and not expect significant changes'. Also, on the marriage stuff - have more sex! Marriage doesn't mean no sex, it doesn't even necessarily mean less sex (I'd personally say children and getting older do that, but not marriage itself). It means more freaky sex. Have more freaky sex, folks.

In theory just a few days.

The Mayorkas impeachment was killed without trial: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-trial-senate-04-17-24/index.html I have to say I'm a bit surprised that dems would do this given that it pisses off some of the conservative dems, and that it sets something of a shitty precedent for the inevitable impeachment of various Trump officials down the line. Not that precedent should really matter here and would matter that much, but I'm still a bit surprised.

BREAKING THE LAW EVEN MORE THEN, I SEE