supersquirrel

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"One of the advantages of this design is the ability to relatively quickly transfer the device from combat to stowed position," armor observer AndreiBtvt noted. "In principle, this is yet another timid step in Russia toward fold-able protective structures."

F.Y.I. PLEASE do NOT break OPSEC and post images of hinges of anykind, do not post a link to the wikipedia article explaining hinges.

Russia may never discover the true power of hinges unless YOU ruin it. Squeeky hinges sink ships!

Turtle, porcupine, and hedgehog tanks don't normally function as tanks. Instead, they're assault vehicles. Up-armored against drones and fitted with mine-clearing rollers, their mission is to lead less heavily-protected infantry carriers across the drone-patrolled, mine-seeded no-man's-land, detonating mines and absorbing strikes by small drones as they shepherd the infantry carriers toward contact with the enemy.

The most pathetic thing here is that actually... this is exactly the role tanks were originally designed for... WW1 tanks that is....

The thing is, tank development moved on while Russia seems to have regressed to the very crudest tank designs and doctrine.

Throw a Ukrainian style foldable drone cage on this tank, and you have a genuine modern main battle tank, which russia dubiously seems to be essentially incapable of fielding at any scale.

A stabilized 125-millimeter gun is still useful for suppressing enemy troops during the dangerous run across no-man's-land. But the gun is only as useful as it's aimable.

^ let me add here that a stabilized 125-millimeter gun is only useful if you can see out the sights and they aren't entirely obscured by a bunch of hastily applied nonsense scrap metal collapsed into a heap, on fire and billowing smoke that totally obscures the gun optics and pretty much every viewport out of the armored vehicle for that matter....

How do turtle "tanks" catch fire? From pretty much everything including especially drones repeatedly hitting the frame and imbuing immense amounts of kinetically and chemically derived heat into the makeshift armor.

https://en.defence-ua.com/news/ukrainian_assault_brigade_hunts_and_destroys_russian_heavily_armored_turtle_tank_video-14142.html

What good does a fully articulate turret do if you can't see outside of the burning and smoking cage you welded to yourself?

 

The Canadian military has developed a model of a hypothetical invasion by the United States Army and the country’s possible response.

 

Perhaps the most underrated armored vehicle in Ukraine's arsenal is the M1117, not Ukraine's fault, for one thing the V-100 Commando is an old machine with a long confusing history, variously referred to with vague names in its current form... "The Commando Select", "ASV Guardian", "M1117" none of the names stick out and the unremarkable look of the vehicle makes it instantly forgettable.

For another, the M1117 was supposed to be the next generation Humvee that addressed its lack of protection against mines and small army. Unlike the humvee, the M1117 was genuinely optimized for diffuse conflicts and security operations over large areas where mines, improvised explosives and crew served weapons posed the primary threat.... which seems like it should be a good thing but the US military during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars saw that kind of warfighting as a threat, a box that civil society could force the military into, and endlessly hammered on about needing to prepare for a war against China even as the US was still deeply enmired in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As such, the M1117 represented a very good solution that was fundamentally unwanted at the time. It didn't help that right when production was most needed Hurricane Katrina knocked out one of the main factory complexes in Louisiana and as a result the proliferation of MRAPs rushed into fill the gap.

To understand why the M1117 ASV Guardian is such an important armored vehicle design you really have to understand the tension between MRAP design philosophy and APC design philosophy. They both have disadvantages and advantages, MRAPs being traditionally better at diffuse security operations against irregular forces and APCs being better at fullscale armored warfare. The M1117 more than any other currently existing armored vehicle represents an intelligent compromise between those two extremes while being far more affordable, mass producible, up-armorable and heavily equipped in weapons capability while still remaining airliftable in a combat ready loadout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1117_armored_security_vehicle

The US military wants to believe the future of organic troop transport looks like the M1301.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1301_infantry_squad_vehicle

Which it certainly does, but I think the US military is making the same mistake they originally made with settling on the Humvee, high mobility vehicles are existentially necessary and yet armor is always useful, even if it isn't the heaviest.

65 M1117s for Ukraine isn't going to change the war, but I am glad Ukraine is getting its hands on more of these vehicles, they represent an important evolution of western armor design in the armored car/apc/MRAP hybrid realm and experience with the M1117 will certainly influence future Ukrainian armor design and procurement decisions in a positive way.

this "Weapons Of Victory" video from a month ago shows off a Ukrainian M1117

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=zkNkfnea8Tk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNkfnea8Tk

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Not really though I get how the game seems like it might be like that, in fact what I like about Farm Together 1 and 2 is that they are very focused on the actual moment to moment process of a running an arcadey farm. It is almost like a realtime boardgame or simple economy simulator, which makes the core gameplay loop immediately salient to anybody. You can pick up a controller, jump in and start helping out on the farm, it is a very simple, relaxed and rewarding gameplay loop and it makes the perfect co-op game because of it. There aren't long cutscenes and lots of stuff and context you have to explain, it is a pick up and play experience.

It isn't a shallow game either, while the game by no means "hard" in the sense that there aren't really fail states, figuring out how to create an economy with your farm is a really interesting challenge and the wide variety of unlocks encourage and reward strategizing. The graphics are deceptive, there is a genuine engine building game at the heart of Farm Together 2.

 

The Electra EL9 is a nine-passenger hybrid-electric fixed-wing aircraft designed to operate from spaces more commonly associated with sports pitches than runways.

Rather than relying on vertical lift, the EL9 achieves its performance through ultra-short take-off and landing capability of around 150 feet, enabled by a combination of distributed electric propulsion and blown-lift aerodynamics.

...

Flight testing is planned to begin in 2027, with certification and entry into service targeted for 2029.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 20 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Will you die already Ubisoft!??!?!

I don't wish for game developers at Ubisoft to lose their jobs, I want them to be employed somewhere that doesn't torpedo the end product of their talent.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

Farm Together 2 is AWESOME

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2418520/Farm_Together_2/

The graphics are nice but don't make the game stand out which is a minor shame since this is by far my favorite "build a farm" type game.

Splitscreen co-op and multiplayer is a blast and the game flow is very chill but rewarding.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 points 8 hours ago

Just wait til "Democratic" funding starts going to Platner's opponents, that will show how truly scared they are of a genuine progressive candidate.

 

The contract, signed between KNDS Deutschland and the Belgian procurement agency OCASC, covers the delivery of eight LEGUAN bridge layers mounted on a 10x10 wheeled chassis, accompanied by 17 LEGUAN bridges with a length of 26 meters. The overall package also includes dedicated logistics support and special tools, ensuring long-term sustainment and operational availability. Valued at approximately EUR 80 million, the program was awarded to KNDS following a competitive selection process against several international contenders.

 

On January 16, 2026, NRK, the state-owned public service broadcaster in Norway, announced that a parliamentary majority cleared the political path for the Norwegian government’s proposed financing for the acquisition of a long-range precision fire system with ranges of up to 500 kilometers from South Korea, identified as the K239 Chunmoo.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes and my point is that the architecture that is most conducive to countering that tendency in physical acoustics suggests the opposite conclusion people come to about echo chambers in abstracted metaphorical application to communities and systems of people in conversation.

I genuinely think it muddles discussion around human topics when the phrase "echo chamber" is used as the association people make is so backwards it hurts more than it helps.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Singing them! It is only natural, they are full of notes.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall.

It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.

The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction, what sound deadening structures such as acoustic foam do is increase that friction per unit of space.

The background effect of sound slowly losing energy simply from being conveyed through the air represents a minimum sound deadening capacity in terms of space not a maximum.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.

You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.

Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.

Isn't the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren't you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

But a canyon won’t echo regular speaking voices like a cathedral does

...because a Cathedral echoes more than a Canyon does! Which is my point! When people apply the metaphor of the echo chamber they almost always use it in precisely the incorrect mapping and speak of mitigating the "echo chamber effect" by creating large, enclosed spaces with huge unbroken internal voids where even whispers cascade all the way across the volume in a cacophony.

Conversely when people speak of systems of communication that are most like open celled or closed celled acoustic foam with many smaller spaces separated by manifold barriers and divisions, they are likely to refer to it as being prone to the "echo chamber effect" and I think it seriously hurts rational thinking on the subject.

I have never seen someone criticize a human communication system with the structure of a Cathedral as an "echo chamber" while gesturing to the structure of a Canyon as superior in that it lets echoes proliferate but doesn't concentrate them. Rather, it seems to be used almost without exception to argue in favor of making systems MORE like a Cathedral and less like acoustic deadening foam in structure.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

I agree though sometimes stairwells come out of nowhere and surprise with crazy good echoes, doesn't beat the accessibility of a shower however and people tend to look at you weird if you hang out in a random stairwell.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Clearly I am singing.

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