• 11 Posts
  • 131 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Just do a quick search for “mushroom cloud”, and you’ll find that all this combined is nowhere near what a nuke would look like.

    The mushroom cloud formed from a small nuke like little boy (small by modern standards) reaches up to about 8 km. that’s close to cruising altitude for an airliner. The reason the cloud from a nuke “mushrooms” in a different way than conventional munitions is that the intense heat is causing enough hot air to rise to form a literal cloud when it reaches high enough that the humidity condenses. This can even cause radiative rain shortly after the bomb has gone off.

    The fireball of Little Boy is estimated to have been almost 400 m in diameter with a surface temperature approximately equal to that of the sun, and every building within about 1.6 km was instantly completely destroyed.

    It is difficult to comprehend just how much more powerful even a small “tactical” nuke is than any conventional weapon. There’s a reason soldiers that were shown blast tests of them during the Cold War have told stories of breaking down crying at the sight, because they just couldn’t fathom what they were seeing.

    There was no nuke blowing up here.


  • Awesome to see the effectiveness og the Gepard like this. It seems perfectly suited for these kinds of slow-moving low-cost targets that you really don’t to send expensive interceptors at.

    Especially when the leading drone tactic seems to mostly be “send enough to saturate the air defences”, having stuff like this that can rapidly burst down a bunch of drones at low cost, using ammunition that’s quick and easy to produce, seems perfect.


  • it would seem crazy to sacrifice it if it wasn’t damaged

    To be fair, the best kit you’ll ever get is the right kit at the right time. If what you need is a tandem warhead that can track, hit and destroy pretty much any vehicle, or punch through a bunker, at anything from a couple hundred meters to a couple kilometres, and you have a Javelin… you’re in luck! On the other hand, if what you need is a tandem warhead to destroy a static armoured target that you can’t get line-of-sight to, and you have a Javelin… You’re carrying a very expensive but useless rocket and tracking system that just happens to also contain the exact warhead you need.

    Once a piece of equipment like a Javelin is in the field, it’s only real value is in whether it can help you achieve your objective. Its dollar value seizes to be of relevance. The only relevant questions are “Do I have a large enough supply of this munition to prioritise using it for that target?” and “Do I have another munition that I can and should use instead?” If the answer is “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, you use the munition in whatever way is most practical.






  • My test suite takes quite a bit of time, not because the code base is huge, but because it consists of a variety of mathematical models that should work under a range of conditions.

    This makes it very quick to write a test that’s basically “check that every pair of models gives the same output for the same conditions” or “check that re-ordering the inputs in a certain way does not change the output”.

    If you have 10 models, with three inputs that can be ordered 6 ways, you now suddenly have 60 tests that take maybe 2-3 sec each.

    Scaling up: It becomes very easy to write automated testing for a lot of stuff, so even if each individual test is relatively quick, they suddenly take 10-15 min to run total.

    The test suite now is ≈2000 unit/integration tests, and I have experienced uncovering an obscure bug because a single one of them failed.









  • Just look at some of the vehicles that aren’t burt out. Some of them look more or less fine at first glance. Notice that all their tires are flat.

    I remember seeing a video filmed by a Russian who’s vehicle had been hit by a HIMARS strike, and he showed how the vehicle looked fine at a distance, but up close you could see that the whole thing was perforated by tiny holes. These little holes were made by thousands of small tungsten balls moving fast enough to pierce clean through the engine block.

    It appears that all those flat tires are indicating that those entire trucks, and anyone who was on them, are similarly perforated.



  • Except those gas pipes already go through Ukraine so if they wanted to threaten cutting the gas supply they could just cut the lines deep in their own territory.

    Fact is, Ukraine understands that destabilising Europe by causing a gas shortage, while hitting Russias wallet, would make it much harder for European politicians supporting Ukraine to stay in power. They’re smart. They can see that their European allies are helping as much as they can, while still remaining popular enough at home to be able to keep up the assistance long term.