Posts by I ain't Spartacus 11296 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
In the inevitable war with Scotland, I'm not worried about Iran arming you with drones. It's the bagpipe gap I'm scared of. If we can't find some counter. and the Northumbrian pipes aren't loud enough to count, then we don't have Musically Assured Destruction and we're doomed to inevitable defeat, while Scotland's massed ranks of pipers commit their war crimes unavenged.
Jellied Eel,
"The lesser Satan" was mostly the Soviet Union in Iran-revolutionary-government speak. Israel are the "Little Satan" apparently. Although a quick Google suggests that Iranian government propaganda isn't entirely consistent on this, and that the UK has occasionally been promoted to "Great Satan", but us and the French also sometimes have to languish as "lesser satans" as well.
Bebu sa Ware,
I'm pretty sure that the Iran / Scottish Nationalist Twitter thing is true. As you say, not exactly big news, but the Iranian government have invested a lot in cyber and intelligence. Admittedly if they'd spent more on counter-intelligence then Israel wouldn't have blown up their air defence command on day one of the last war, and their Supreme Leader on day one of this war...
Various security researchers have commented on it, and it seems to be that they've got a lot of bots involved.
It's a pretty rubbish investment, but the Iranian government have been blowing tons of cash on pointless stuff, like giving ballistic missiles to Hezbollah and pissing around with Scottish politics (not to mention the billions invested in nuclear posturing and damage from sanctions) - which is why they've got a water crisis, economic crisis and large chunk of their population that would like to get rid of them.
Keith already managed to get the UK involved
Surely Iran managed that? We had stayed out of it, not allowing the US to use UK bases, until Iran attacked our base in Cyprus - at which point Starmer allowed bases to be used to hit missile sites.
Is the dollar truly freely convertible?
Yes. That's why it's the currency used for large chunks of the oil trade. If I sell a billion dollar's worth of oil to someone in China, and they pay me in Yuan, I can't freely spend that - because I'm not in Chain. More, I can't change that Yuan into Pounds, Euros or anything else, without getting approval from the Chinese government. And I'd imagine that's harder for a foreign company to do, than a Chinese one.
Also, it's common for lots of internationally traded commodities to have a price in a fixed currency. This means everyone knows what price they're talking about. So the International Metals Exchange is in London, and I believe quite a few metals are therefore priced in Sterling.
However there's no conspiracy here. If I want to buy a bunch of oil, I can pay in whatever currency is mutually agreeable. The price will still be set in dollars, according to the market price, but we can convert that into anything. Cuba paid Venezuela for their oil in a combination of not very good bodyguards for Maduro and doctors for the Venezuelan government clinics.
One of the other reasons for global currencies is trade imbalances. If you're buying natural gas from Qatar, they've got a pretty small economy. They aren't likely to be buying enough things in Europe to make up for the fact that they sell loads of LNG. So the Europeans don't have the Dihrams to buy that oil (not enough trade going in the other direction), and the Qataris might not want the Euros - so everyone agrees on dollars. If Qatar has a use for the Euros, such as buying sports teams or investing in the European capital markets, then they can do the deal in Euros.
Similarly, Russia is selling lots of oil to India, at some nice discounts. But they can't use the dollar, because of sanctions. So how to pay? India don't have an Rubles. India export foodstuffs, but that bit of the Russian economy is doing very well, so there's not need there. Some of the difference might be made up in sanction-busting, India imports stuff Russia can't get - and shifts it to Russia for the oil. Or they could trade in Yuan, but Indian companies can't get hold of that, because of Chinese capital controls. That's why people normally use the dollar, because everyone can find a use for those.
If the Chinese government are so concerned about the evils of a dollar dominated world economy, all they have to do is make the Yuan freely convertible and removed their exchange and capital controls. Then they can have a fair fight with the dollar, and then complain about dirty tricks. At the moment, none are needed to keep the dollar dominant. The Eurozone can't even manage the Euro properly within their own economies, and no other currency is big enough - although the Yen and the Pound are still important global currencies.
Even the BRICS bank won't invest in many projects in Russia, because they're incapable of raising capital within the BRICS economies - and so have to tap Western capital markets, where many Russian organisations are sanctioned. So the BRICS bank would be unable to raise capital to invest in other BRICS projects. I mean, all they have to do is to raise their capital from the oil rich states, I'm sure the Saudis could create an investment fund not linked to any of their other ones, which therefore doesn't care about sanctions, because it only invests in the BRICS bank. But then, part of the problems, is that nobody outside (and not many inside) China trusts the Chinese capital markets - so they might have to look at having some kind of rule-of-law. Not something a communist party run government likes to have.
Of course, Trump would like to torch rule-of-law in the US. He's unlikely to last long enough to do that on his own, so the next President is really going to matter.
Isn't the approved car for space travel a Reliant Robin? I'm sure I saw a documentary about one going into space sometime back in the day... Well ploughing into the ground at full speed and exploding, due to a failed fuel tank separation, but I'm sure they got into space with the next launch...
I have an idea. As I understand it, the Trump administration are in favour of Battleships. So all they need to do, is to fit a Wave Motion Generator to one of the 4 Iowa class battleships. I suggest Wisconsin, which had the latest refit - but you can pick, depending on who pays the biggest bribe needs their museum ship least. Make a few compartments airtight, fit a few space toilets and fill 'er up with fuel. Bish! Bash! Bosh! New spaceship. Get it up there, do a few tests in LEO - then off to the Moon, plant flags, take photos, few quick samples, game of golf, back in time for tea and medals.
I believe they've got very good machine shops on these. So could also drop by the Hubble space telescope and give that a quick service - maybe pop to Mars and do some maintenance on all the rovers and fix up that helicopter - or even take a new one.
I also deal with heat all the time, but in water engineering. Almost universally you put your cold water storage tank in your plant-room. Along with your boilers, HVAC, pumps and all sorts of other kit that puts out heat, plus hot water pipework.
That's the Cold water storage tank, the one where if the water goes above 20°C - then you're at risk of bacterial growth and therefore Legionella. The one that feeds your drinking water. This never creates any problems ever...
I listen to an F1 podcast, called Missed Apex. Excellent, since you ask... The main guy is ex army (engineers) and was a field tech, who went into design. The thing he says that people always miss, is heat. He describes it as a blind spot. Says you can't get design engineers to appreciate what heat does to their shiny toys - show them the specs, explain field experience to them - the answer is always, it'll be fine - now make the thing even smaller! And then everyone acts surprised in testing, when things keep breaking. This is also true in F1 - Mercedes had consistently the best engine for the last 3 regulation sets, since 2014 - but also fitted it the most aggressively, in the smallest package with the least cooling. To the extent that they've been slower at all the high altitude hot circuits and have repeatedly had to take cutters to their beautiful hand-made carbon fibre to increase the size of their cooling vents.
I guess made worse, by the fact that people "know" space is cold. So maybe it sounds like building a data-centre in Iceland?
Pen-y-gors,
You're comparing a cheap propeller driven one way attack munition, against a re-useable air-to-air combat drone. These aren't the same thing. Depending on your aims, the idea is actually to have both - but you may not need both in the same war.
Also, you're comparing two different nations with totally different geo-strategic positions. Ukraine's enemy is its immediate neighbour. It's currently fighting a massive defensive war to maintain its existence. When this war ends, Ukraine's defence industry will have to prepare for the same thing to happen again in future, until Russia changes its system of government and political objectives.
The USA is unlikely to be fighting a defensive war against either Canada or Mexico any time soon. It therefore has to build its forces to project power across an ocean of distance. And therefore bring every weapon it uses with it. Plus the war it's preparing for is one to defend Taiwan from China. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a war dominated by air defences, which neither side's air forces have been able to defeat, and so both sides have been forced to resort to various missiles and drones. China may have a much more powerful air force than Russia - and the US are planning for a major air war in order to try and break an expected Chinese blockade of Taiwan.
Hence the US are researching fighting that war.
The F35s stealth aspect is certainly nice but the Ukrainians are doing OK-ish with F16s.
Bloody hell! You try telling the Ukrainians that? They can't even fly safely in their own airspace, let alone get to the front lines to engage in combat with any reasonable expectation of surviving. They're mostly using their F-16s to interdict missiles that are being fired at them, not in offensive strike missions. That does not meet any reasonable definition of "doing OK".
Vaguely surviving while being able to intercept a limited percentage of the enemy's attacks on your civilians is not a good strategy for winning a war.
Although F-35 might not help Ukraine a huge amount either. You have to walk before you can run. Israel can walk into Iran's relatively modern integrated air defence system (IADS) - because the IAF are bloody good, extremely well-trained, well-equipped and experienced. But Russia's IADS is a huge step up from that. Russia, started this war with over 1,000 frontline aircraft - and most of the kit (if not the best kit) - and can't even safely approach the front lines against Ukraine's IADS - which was two generations older than Russia's at the start - and has since been given some extremely modern upgrades.
This is the environment that F-35 was designed for. But it'd still be hard to use it successfully, and you'd still need all the enablers like a tanker fleet, AWACS, offensive jamming, ELINT, good photo intel and the rest.
Deckard_C,
Lot 18 is basically $100 flyaway of which engine about $20 million that is the US Government price which doesn't include the R&D cost. Non US governments price will be higher.
F-35 is a genuinely joint project. In that everyone is being jointly screwed by Lockheed Martin. And
As I understand it, everyone in the program pays the same price - although all the purchases go through the US government and then the foreign military sales system, as usual.
But the program was designed in the 90s by the Bush and Clinton administrations. Europe weren't investing in stealth planes, and only the UK was willing to join a program, so the idea was to create a cheap one (oops!) that would replace F16 in US service and be an upgrade for European NATO. They built is as a joint program from the ground up. So everyone is a partner in the program and partnership gets you work. This means that nobody fully controls the program.
No country makes a full set of spares for F-35. No country makes a full set of parts for F-35. So if the US try to kill the program for someone else, they risk killing it for themselves. The US budget office said that it cost $9 billion to rebuild the capacity required when Turkey were kicked out of the program. They had the European engine rebuild centre, and made quite a few parts - and all of that industrial capacity had to be re-created elsewhere at short notice.
A problem with the F-35 is weapon choice you basically only get what weapons the US want to integrate
Again, this is wrong. You only get the weapons LM can integrate. That means the US government are also waiting.
Hence Meteor, Spear 3, plus Norway's NSM and the US JASSM, LRASM, small-diameter bomb, JAGM and AARGM are all in integration hell as well. AIM 260 has also been added to the list, but the others were supposed to be integrated by 2026 or so - and are now delayed until 2029 - and given LM's consistent failure to even be able to guess how badly they'll miss deadlines - who knows?
You absolutely cannot and only idiots are still repeating this piece of BAe propaganda. The American carriers spank the QEs at sorties per day and it’s not even close
The UK carriers are designed to be able to sustain 120 sorties a day. That's with an air-group of 48 though, probably 36 F-35 and 12 helicopters. We've not tested that, so claiming the QE's are at full operating capacity isn't true, despite them putting out that press release last year.
I think the US are designed for 160-170. Because their carriers are bigger. As I said, you get more sorties per area of flight deck with STOVL ops than with CATOBAR. This is because you don't have to set up for catapult shots, and you generally don't do landings and take-offs at the same time.
Whether the QEs can actually do 120 a day can't be known, because nobody has ever operated more than 24 fixed wing aircraft off a STOVL carrier, as was done last year.
My suspicion is the LM will fuck around so long integrating weapons that we'll not buy any more F-35 until we get a few replacements for early ones in the 2030s - meanwhile the RAF will have given up their Bs to the Navy and whatever money was allocated is spent on Tempest or maybe a few extra Tranche 4 Typhoon. At which point, short of an actual war, it'll be too disruptive of training to put a full air-group of 36 F-35 on a carrier. But equally we might order those 25 F-35B in the budget at some point in order to get a favour out of Trump - even without the integration of weapons we want.
Like a badger,
Nobody in Europe would stump up for a new stealth aircraft except the UK in the 90s. With no partners we'd have had to pay the vast expense to go it alone - so joined F-35. At least we're getting something like 15% of the workshare - and since LM have failed to get our weapons integrated we've only bought 5% of the aircraft ordered. The last government OK'd the purchase of another 25 - taking us to 73 - but that was on condition we were satisfied our weapons would be integrated. I believe it's still in the budget, but a budget is not the same as a contract.
I think that pulling in Japan has made a better Tempest coalition than the Typhoon one. Since Germany has acted as a roadblock to so much of Typhoon's progress. But that could still go horribly wrong, as a new country's defence industry tries to tie in with ours and Italy's (who are used to each other).
God knows what'll happen with FCAS. I suspect it'll survive though. I think it's too late for Germany to jump ship and join us. Although they're talking about it publicly, the workshare is all sorted out. Why leave being treated as a junior partner by France, to be an actual junior partner in an already sorted out program? Plus France maybe can't afford to go it alone this time, as they did with Rafale - so they'll have to make a reasonable deal with the Germans. Plus It's France's job to flounces out of the joint program...
The Dutch defence minister is talking about the nuclear option. If you need it, and the US screw around, then break glass to jailbreak aircraft. At which point you're in breach of contract and on your own. Of course, so are they - the relationship is dead and everything goes to court. You fight this immediate war then buy new, non-US, aircraft.
Hence Meteor, Spear 3, plus Norway's NSM and the US JASSM, LRASM, small-diameter bomb, JAGM and AARGM are all in integration hell as well.
af101,
Not everyone can indigenously produce a top line aircraft. But you can partner up. France has decided to go it alone with Rafale. The UK chose to partner up for Eurofighter and F-35. There are pros and cons to both options. But even the French decided that a 6th gen aircraft needed partners, for the development money, if nothing else. And yet they've still not got a single stealth aircraft, and FCAS isn't likely to be in service until the 2040s (if the program can survive that long), while Tempest is on course to have a flying demonstrator next year, and hopefully go into low-rate production in the early 2030s. So actually operational by 2035.
Caver_Dave,
We sold our Harriers to the US marines for spares. The US Marines are withdrawing them from service in June this year.
The Navy wanted to upgrade to fleet carriers from the small ASW-focused carriers that were the Invincibles.
That meant a much larger aircraft and the capability to go supersonic - so a totally new aircraft. As Harrier was so successful, we started a project, to partner with the US Marines. But when their needs got folded into F-35 we either had to join or go it alone. Nobody else was interested in a new STOVL aircraft. It would obviously have been cheaper if we'd avoided stealth, but stealth is a really useful force-multiplier for a relatively small carrier air-group that has to fight away from home, and against an enemy fighting with home (and probably numbers) advantage.
To put this in context, I think we've spent somewhere around £5 billion on Tempest so far. That's probably including Taranis (a stealth drone and test-bed from ten years ago) - and includes the cost of the prototype they're building now, but there's more in the budget for next few years). When Japan joined the Tempest program in 2023, they allocated about $9 billion, to be spent by 2030 - just on the R&D and ramping up industry to start building them in the 2030s. So between us, Japan and Italy that's something like £20 billion to be spent before receiving anything but the test aircraft. Our R&D contribution to F-35 was only £2 billion, from memory. Double that, to account for inflation over 25 years.
Tempest is also using some of the kit from Eurofighter, like the ECRS2 radar - which cost another few billion to develop, and is only coming into service now. But I doubt we'd have got much change from £10 billion in R&D for a super-Harrier, which maybe Italy and Japan might have bought. BAE wouldn't have got the stealth experience from participating in the F-35 program, and we'd only be buying maybe 50 of the aircraft at £150m-£200m each. Build 100 of a type that cost £10bn to develop and the R&D cost of each is £100m before you've bought your first wheel...
If we can sell Tempest to a couple of buyers, and we buy 400 aircraft between the 3 partners - we've at least got the R&D costs down below £40m per aircraft. Although the aircraft itself will be more expensive than a non stealthy super-harrier would.
You forgot to add that you can buy 4 Gripens for the price of 1 F35.
ComicalEngineer,
You really can't. And it's not even close. In fact an F-35 is possibly cheaper than a Gripen. When Norway selected F-35, they said that Gripen was more expensive, as you can imagine SAAB disagreed! Most of the Western fighters are pretty similar cost-wise, I think the big exception is the F-18, and maybe the F-16 - although that keeps getting upgrades, and so the costs keep creeping up again.
The US budget office said that the F-35A was costing them $75m (I think that's now gone up to $80m). Estimates for the Gripen seem to wander between $65-$85m. However the F-35 comes without engine, and those have been getting more expensive, due to upgrades and shortages, so the flyaway cost of an F-35A now is probably $90-$95m? The Eurofighter and Rafale both seem to be round-about the $100m mark, along with the F-15EX (maybe a bit more).
However, operating costs are a different matter. And there, the Gripen is king. From public estimates, you get about $5,000 an hour operating costs. The Rafale and Eurofighter are about $20k an hour, and F-35 is up around the high $30k mark, and operating costs are not falling, as promised. Partly because not enough was invested in spares production, and now we're amazingly, short of spare parts. Who'd-a-thunk it? Again F-18 are nice and cheap to run - that really does seem to be a highly capable, and affordable aircraft.
Part of Gripen's advantage here is being physically smaller. Against F-35 it also doesn't have to worry about stealth coatings, or an absurdly complicated supply chain. Although that complexity is partly deliberate, and what makes it a joint strike fighter. Even the US don't completely control F-35's supply chain, and various countries make bits that are vital to its operation, so that if anyone does get cut off, the whole thing could fall apart - making everyone's F-35s useless.
So you can operate Gripen for much less money. It's going to cost much less over its lifetime, though probably about the same at the start. But it's also less capable. And as stealth aircraft become more common, that will probably become more important. In ten years time the aircraft world is going to look very different again. There'll be new 6th gen (if that even means anything) aircraft coming into operations, Russia ought to have a decent number of stealth aircraft (admittedly of dubious quality) in squadron service, and are selling them to Algeria. Trump may have sold F-35 to the Saudis (and others) though he'll have to get a move on before he loses control of Congress. China has got two frontline stealth aircraft now - and many more in development - and once their new shiny comes along, they may be willing to sell to allies, like Pakistan. Hell, they might even be willing to sell to Russia - if SU-57 really is as bad as some people think. Ten years is not a long time in military procurement terms nowadays. People are buying F-35 for a reason.
Our decision to abandon any hope of refitting QE and PoW with cats and traps, and thus sinking billions into carriers where the *only* fixed wing option for the forseeable future is F-35B, is looking increasingly burdensome...
That decision was made for very good reasons. Basically you can generate more sorties per day from a given size of flight deck with STOVL operations than you can with CATOBAR. Plus you don't have the horrific pilot training requirements needed for arrested landings - which allowed us to operate a joint force of RAF and RNAS F-35B - where you can call on a squadron that's not done carrier ops in months and just fly them to the carrier and it'll all be fine. If you try that with arrested landings, you'd probably crash half the squadron, according to carrier pilots I've heard interviewed your landing skills start to become rusty after only a week or two of not doing one.
However, the capability still exists. The carriers were designed with a lifetime of 50-60 years. They've been built big enough, and with enough space, to be changed and upgraded. They could add the angled flight deck necessary to CATOBAR operations, but it would take a long refit. It would reduce the number of sorties the carriers could make, but allow them more capability, such as having fixed wing AEW (airborne early warning) aircraft and tankers. This couldn't just be plugged and played into the existing carriers though, when the Coalition looked at doing it back in 2010. They were already being built, decisions had been taken as to what they were doing, and none of the long-lead time items had been ordered, such as catapults and arrestor gear. We had the EMCAT research project, which was stopped when we decided to go STOVL, but given how much trouble the US had with their electro-magnetic catapults I'm sure that would have delayed the ships being built by several years - hence the huge cost estimates to make the change halfway through the build. Hence why they didn't go through with it. The carriers were even given space by the engine rooms for steam generators of some kind, so they could go old skool, but that will have been filled with stuff by now.
To point out though that France have ordered such goodies for PANG (their new carrier). And they're paying about $1.2 billion for the catapults and arrestor gear, and another $2.5 billion for just 3 E2D Hawkeye AEW aircraft. Those figures include for some support, plus training gear, but that's what we paid for one whole carrier! Another reason we went STOVL was price.
Finally, during the Falklands war, there were days when flying ops would have been impossible in a CATOBAR carrier, because the weather was too awful. And the weather in the North Atlantic, Norwegian and North Seas can be almost as bad. Which is another reason the RN selected STOVL. It's a complex and nuanced decision. But given it takes multiple years to procure a new naval fighter, if we decide to take that step, we can change the carriers in time to be ready for the new planes.
I emailed a research project on aphantasia, after reading about it in the Guardian - and the article had a link to their site with a questionnaire, for anyone willing to be researched on. They didn't answer, so I guess I'm not interesting enough for them. Or, due to having a severe visual impairment it might be that my brain works perfectly normally, it's just that I haven't fully stocked my memory banks with images for my brain to work on. However I'd guess my brain won't process images normally, because it doesn't receive them normally.
I do regularly wake up with engineering problems solved in my head, but it's never like a visual diagram. It's always an idea of how to approach the problem, and which particular trade-offs to make to get a system that works and meets the desired criteria. My subconscious is quite good too, in that I've never not used the solution I woke up with. There's been no dud solutions, I guess it just keeps quiet if it doesn't have an answer, and takes all the glory if it does.
Czrly,
Not on the loo. It's always in the shower for me. If I go to sleep on an engineering problem I've not solved, the answer will often come to me the morning after as I'm showering and possibly singing. It's funny to have the complete solution to a problem you've not thought about for hours (at least not consciously) just pop into your head in one go. It really does make me wonder what's going on in my subconscious.
If we really are thinking about sex every 7 seconds, then I predict that on my 83rd birthday I'll suddenly wake up with Kama Sutra II Erotic Boogaloo fully formed in my brain and have to race to get it down on paper before my great insights are lost to humanity, like tears in rain. On that day I will truly know myself. Here's hoping it's not too shocking a revelation...
sedregj,
Plenty of people can control their dreams, at least to some extent. Some people can go to sleep while deliberately thinking about an idea/story/setting and then dream about it afterwards. I'm guessing it's a self-training feedback loop - which only works for people who often remember their dreams. And I've read about research where they've got people to keep dream diaries and then try to influence their dreams to show it working. But this isn't true for everybody. Some people don't remember their dreams at all, while some people can wake themselves up at the end of a dream, in order to write down what happened, and others only remember the last dream they were having - if they're woken up in the middle of it.
I personally only remember a couple of dreams a year, and usually not clearly. And it's only when I wake up during them. So for me it tends to be when I've been lying in bed lazily dozing, after I should have got up, and then gone back to sleep thinking about something, and then my dream has riffed off of that. I can remember a sort of semi-lucid dream when I was living in Brussels, and waking up being quite annoyed because I could speak better french in my dream, than I could manage while awake. It's a common trope that if you're immersed in a language, or trying to learn it intensely, that you start to dream in it. And this was a first time for me. But I must have been half awake, because at one point I remember trying to say something I didn't know the word for, doing that thing you have to do in a foreign language where you try a roundabout route to say something you don't have the vocabulary for, only for my brain to produce the right word - that I didn't even know I knew. It wasn't a case of forgetting a word, but a topic I'd not thought about before, and so hadn't learned the words - but I must have overheard it, or read it somewhere. A very odd experience, at least for me who doesn't remember many dreams.
Didn't Paul McCartney dream the tune for Yesterday?
I did have a recurring nightmare as a child, of being in the bath when I touched the bubbles with the soap. Which destroys them. This made the remaining bubbles angry and they started shooting lightning bolts at me. So I jumped out of the bath, to get away, weirdly always fully clothed. But the bubbles started expanding and chasing me out of the bathroom and round the house, trying to electrocute me.
I'm not sure what Dr Freud would make of that...
EvilDrSmith,
I suspect BAE may have taken some government cash - given that the new barrel plant is a joint venture with Sheffield Forgemasters - which the government bought in 2023. However, if not, they took an order to make new barrels for the AS90s we've sent to Ukraine. As we gave them all the stock, we've presumably given them all our spares, which would be enough for a shortish war, but not for the years they've been in operation now. Particularly as Ukraine use artillery way more than we would, in our normal doctrine (due to their lack of air power).
Apparently their may also have been an option to provide more barrels for the 105mm light guns we've sent.
Finally, having given all our own heavy artillery away, and only acquired a handful of Archers as a temporary replacement, I wonder if BAE are hoping to sell some M777 to us? We've almost doubled our fleet of MLRS, but then we've got rid of the cluster munitions for those, so they're very good but not the artillery replacement they would have been if we hadn't. We're announced we're buying the German RCH155 - which is based on Boxer, that we've already bought - however I don't think a contract has been signed. Plus we don't have any tracked Boxer, so if they want tracked artillery to go with the armoured brigades, then BAE might try to get an M777 turret on something based on their CV90.
Four years ago we started sending kit and supplies...have we replenished yet? If we want Ukraine to survive we have to take action now
Yes we've replenished quite a lot of the stuff we've sent Ukraine. Although, saying that, having ordered more to restock we've then continued donations. We upped our artillery shell production in 2022 (sadly waited until Summer to sign the contracts, but you can't have everything - the EU pissed about for a whole year after that). We've also re-started artillery barrel production (I think in Sheffield) - I'm not sure if modern artillery needs a whole replacement barrel, or if you change the lining - as used to be done with the big naval guns. But they start becoming inaccurate after 1,000 rounds or so.
Us and the French also restarted production of SCALP/Storm Shadow - because the replacement missile isn't due for another few years - and I guess we decided we couldn't live off the stockpile and supply Ukraine.
We've increased production of NLAW, Martlet and Starstreak - we gave Ukraine half our stock of NLAW in the first week of the war (10,000 missiles), although some of the remaining 10k had a Swiss insensitive warhead that Switzerland wouldn't let us export. So hopefully we've changed that to one we can donate to Ukraine.
We're also making a new ballistic missile for them, that's supposed to be tested this year.
We've also donated a lot of air-to-air missiles, for both their aircraft to use, and in the various frankenSAMs that have been made. But I don't know if we've donated from stocks or raised production. We gave them our old AMRAAMs which were mostly superseded by Meteor, except the tranche 1 Typhoons and F35's (still) can't use that yet.
Sadly we haven't donated Land Ceptor, which being a relatively cheap surface-to-air missile is a mistake in my opinion. Although the land version is relatively new in service, and so we don't have many launchers and we've stationed some of our limited numbers of them to defend Poland. But as we don't have enough (in my opinion) it would have been good to up production and send some to Ukraine, as well as having more ourselves and raising missile production - which would also lower prices.
Given the desperate need for air defence I'd hope we'd also increased production of Aster (Sea Viper in UK service). We don't use the land version, but France donated a battery of SAMP/T - and so I'd hope we'd help by ordering some for Ukraine (and ourselves). Personally I'd like us to buy that to give us a long-range land-based SAM, as the Navy already use it, but that doesn't seem to be on the cards. It's, I think, a joint French/Italian missile anyway, that we only buy into via the weird MBDA Euro-omni-missile-emporium/manufacturer-thingy-corporation - but I don't see why we couldn't chip in for Ukraine to have more - and thus raise the production of a missile we also use. If production is high, you don't need the same level of stockpiles.
Not seen jelous before. But, if there's one thing we've learned from the internet, you can't trust those bloody KARENs.
The Americans have ruined cake! It's not just the frosting. If you talk to kids now, none of them like fruitcake. Their birthday cakes are sponge - and so are their wedding cakes! Bloody kids these days, with their long hair and their loud music... Whatever happened to proper fruitcake!?!?!
My mate married an American, 25 years ago. And they had an iced chocolate cake for her and the American family, who were all appalled by the evils of fruit cake, and a fruit one for the British lot. It wasn't a big enough wedding to need a two tier cake, but needs must. But the anti-fruitcake propaganda has now infected our younger generations. There ought to be compulsory fruit cake lessons in schools.
Do bots make typos?
That's an interesting question. The initial (human curated) training data may be perfect, and without typos. But their main training data, of harvested copyright material and random bits of the internet certainly does. Even published books have typos. And you've got certain words, like ridiculous, where you almost see it spelled "rediculous" more often than you see it correctly - so an authentic looking AI generated screed ought to have that particular mistake in it.
On the other hand, it's also got the dictionary in its training data.
please tell me you are not going down the Bambi Burger route :o)
My brother used to sell Bambi burgers in his old pub. It was near a bunch of shooting estates in Berkshire, the gamekeepers drank there, and every so often he got a knock on the door and a Muntjac or two to deal with. They were very popular - and very economical at a few free beers for deer the estates were going to cull anyway. I think he said you could get about 80 burgers out of one.
Now, in his new pub, he's just made a deal with one of the London Parks and has 50 red (I think) deer on the way. So as well as burgers, there'll also be roast venison on sometimes. Or he may go for pies. He's always done good pies in his pubs. Proper ones, with lids (not a casserole with a pastry hat!). Nice, big square ones.
I remember hearing a loud degaussing doioioioing noise one night many years ago. It sounded like a CRT degaussing, but much louder. And my PC monitor was an LCD. So I ran downstairs to see if the TV had exploded. It hadn't, so I checked everywhere to make sure we weren't on fire - couldn't see anything, so went to bed. When I checked the news the next morning, the Buncefield oil storage depot had exploded, 25 miles away. My town being in a valley presumably did funny echoey things to the bang?
Even if the contract says that disputes are to be settled under German law - if the software they said they wanted to extend in the US isn't covered by that contract, then this isn't actually a contract dispute at all. It's a software piracy dispute. In which case it's the US subsidiary, so it would logically happen in the US courts.
Siemens have presumably refused to cooperate in an audit to see whether they're currently operating this software to try to get Broadcom to the negotiating table, and the response has been to call in the lawyers.
Broadcom are still in their zero tolerance, zero compromise mode. I guess because their whole strategy will fall apart if they start acting reasonably in a few cases. I guess they're going to test the theory to destruction that their software is irreplaceable.
The great thing about the AI industry is that profits aren't relevant. None of the companies make any money from AI. They're all massively loss-making, and funded by VC cash, or in the case of the big existing players - cash taken from the shareholders without them getting much choice in the matter. More importantly there's not much future prospect of profits without building out massive amounts of ludicrously expensive datacenters, and hoping they can put prices up enough without losing all their customers to some else still relying on VCs and hope.
So unlike car companies and movies, they can happily spend all they want. Either the execs believe they're the future, and every penny wasted spent now is fully worth it as an investment in the future - or the execs are just on the make and so you spend big to make yourself look more important to get more money you can trouser a percentage of as it leaks out of the company. Or possibly both.
Most/much of It's not really AI - but algorithmic data processing, and short-range networking. However AI and big data are cool, and that's how you get funding, so shut up.
if everyone's got a tablet, then everyone can see the output of the drone(s) you're using. If everyone's microphones are networked, then you can detect, and get a good idea of the position, of incoming drones. Also incoming rounds, if you've got it set up right. Drones can also be detected with electronic warfare systems.
less exciting, but all very useful.
My mate had one of the similar Sony Trinitron TVs, with the flat glass at the front and thick, but slightly less curved than normal glass of the monitor inside it. it was a 40-something inch widescreen. When he replaced that with a flat screen telly, he had to call me in to move it - because he was unable to lift it off the TV stand. It were a chunky beast. Getting it down the stairs was definitely a two-man job.
The most secure password is the password that cannot be entered correctly. The system remains safe from both hackers, and most importantly of all, users. Guaranteeing 100% uptime, and maximum gaming + beer & onion bhaji time for the operators.
Was your boss, by any chance, called Simon?
My favourite IT-related yoga position / back pain from back in the day would be called, "moving the 19" CRT monitor".
A fearsome task, to be approached with great care. Although, it's not so much a yoga position, as a whole dance. First you have to unscrew the horrible VGA cable from the back of the monitor or computer, which requires either crawling under the desk or leaning all the way to the back of it. This is a skill you need to learn to do by touch only. Then you have to move a horrible, heavy, unbalanced lump - that has 90% of its weight in the screen at the front - without dropping it.
I can still remember the relief with which I replaced one of these in my office, with a 23" LCD panel. And the way I could hold the panel in one hand, while making the connections with the other - something only the Hulk could do when removing the old one. Life is certainly easier organising desks nowadays.
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