the Soviet ending for Yuri's Revenge is absolutely amazing

Soviet troops parading down Wall Street, as the stock market closed forever... the new golden age of space exploration... who knows what the future may hold, as communism leaves the boundaries of our planet, and expands across the solar system

The release also is on the side which feels like people could bump into

that was an actual problem on the AR-10 and early AR-15 prototypes, so they added a bit of fencing around the button to help against that

AK's catch has more mechanical leverage

this turns out to actually be very important in harsh conditions - see see this freezing rifle test for some examples of release button systems freezing up: [1], [2], and for comparison how easy the AK magazine catch was

Ostensibly, the advantages of the release button are ergonomics

• the first is the ease of inserting the magazine, but this doesn't actually have anything to do with the release button - it's the magwell helping you guide the magazine in, and there's nothing stopping you from having a magwell on a gun with an AK-style catch, like the G36 for example, or even just aftermarket modifications for the AK itself
• the second is ease of removing the magazine, since you can just push the button with your index finger and have the magazine drop free, instead of needing a whole hand to push the catch and pull the mag out. Now, the actual utility of this outside of tacticool larping seems dubious - soldiers in real life aren't just discarding mags left and right, they're typically trying to retain them, and in that case you'll be needing your other hand to take the magazine and put it back in a pouch anyway. Plus, if you're in a situation where the difference in reload speed between the two methods actually matters, you're probably dead anyway, since the likelihood of actually pulling off a fancy tactical reload under stress goes down pretty hard. But disregarding that, if you really need this feature, there's again nothing preventing a catch system from implementing it - AKs have had extended magazine releases for a long time (although those do have the disadvantage of increasing the risk you pointed out of something accidentally bumping into the catch, since there's just more catch to bump into), and HK figured out a pretty neat system for the G36, where the catch has another section that doesn't extend downwards, but backwards, towards the trigger guard, where you can push it with your index finger.

an interesting note is that Stoner, the guy who designed the AR, would use precisely an AK-style catch on one of his subsequent rifles instead of a button:

Did these guys do a terrorist attack on FaceTime

I mean, didn't that mass shooter in New Zealand literally do that (live-stream on Facebook specifically)? So there's some precedent at least.

Is the police response that slow?

I mean... yes? A patrol car could respond pretty quickly, but terrorist attacks require specialized units which take time to actually be put into action, and further time to actually figure out the situation, how many militants they're dealing with, and so on - just rushing guys in without a plan can very well make the situation worse, as the Russians themselves painfully learned at Beslan.

The simple reality is, there's no way for the state to actually ensure complete security in a massive metropolitan area without declaring martial law and deploying like, several army corps worth of cops or paramilitaries (which of course has political consequences, and besides, you could just suffer an attack somewhere else anyway). With this incident in particular, I also read reports that there were false shootings/bomb-threats being called in - you can essentially paralyze state security services that way, since they kind of have to respond, but there's no way for them to effectively respond to everything, and so the real attacks can slip through.

Determined terrorists will pretty much always be able to slip through the cracks eventually - it's just that, fortunately, contrary to GWOT-era propaganda, there actually aren't all that many well-equipped groups around to do stuff like that, and they're mostly fighting insurgencies in their own homelands rather than executing attacks in faraway capital cities.

are these like tankettes

Sort of, although oriented specifically towards usage by airborne forces. It's basically what it says in the name - an armored weapons carrier, a way to bring along an autocannon or anti-tank missile launcher that would be too heavy to easily lug around by hand. Tankettes fell out of favor since they were just far too light to be effective among conventional ground forces, but in the specific context of airborne operations the concept still sort of works, since being air-transportable imposes some very harsh limits on the weight and size of your equipment.

I love how the Booker has kicked of this "discourse" among military "experts" about whether it's a tank or not - it's a fucking assault gun! Like, an armored vehicle that's meant primarily to provide direct fire support to infantry (as opposed to a tank, which also does maneuver warfare)... we have a perfectly good term for that already. And we even have prominent examples of it from WW2, you couldn't have fucking missed those, right? Are people so unimaginative they just can't conceptualize of this being an assault gun because it happens to have a turret instead of the turretless casemate design of WW2 Stug and SU/ISU vehicles? Are they so MBT-brained they can't even imagine types of armored vehicle other than a 60-70 ton piece of shit, and that there might actually be uses for them?

I mean, even the name of the program which produced it - Mobile Protected Firepower - is just a fancy corporate way of saying assault gun (Firepower being the gun part, obviously, and Mobile and Protected being in reference to it providing direct fire support when assaulting enemy positions - just Mobile Firepower would be regular old self-propelled artillery, which is usually only protected against small arms & shrapnel since it provides indirect fire at large distances and isn't supposed to get shot at). And yet, dipshits like this guy keep writing articles about "light tank this, medium tank that", and pretending like they're actual military analysts, with their whole smug "you say it's not a tank yet it has armor and a cannon, checkmate"

the price is reich

I have been posting somewhat less, since I've just already posted a lot of the stuff I had - it's only really /c/guns that I regularly post to now, and /c/videos & /c/games to a lesser extent. My supply of sword pics was a lot smaller than the one of gun pics, so /c/history's pretty rare, although maybe enough time has passed to repost some stuff, I dunno.

I think with the Lemmy updates there were also some sorting algorithm changes - I think Active got changed, then Scaled was introduced which was supposedly closer to the original Active, but then I think maybe Active got changed again, and I'm not sure how things sit right now, I'm still on Scaled myself. And finally, it could just be timezone differences.

A note on something I can see becoming a problem after the Ukrainian War is over: the "Ukrainian Vatnik" cope. It will become an article of faith in the West that the AFU's failures can all be laid on incompetence, and Real NATO Troops would do better. Is this true though?⬇️

Let's examine the case of the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade, an organization that was intended to be the showpiece unit of the new NATO-standard Ukrainian Army. This was an organization that was stood up in late 2022, filled with young, highly-motivated volunteers, many of them already with high-intensity combat experience. These troops were then sent through months of additional training, both in the West and in maneuver areas in Western Ukraine. This unit was lavishly equipped with the pick of donated Western equipment fully equal to anything fielded by any NATO army - Leopard 2A6s and M2A2 Bradleys, supported by 155mm howitzers and HIMARS. It had distributed high-speed tactical internet thanks to Starlink. And it had something that no NATO formation has - a fully integrated drone group, created from the ground up to incorporate the hard lessons of the war by people who learned them personally.

In short, the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade was in all likelihood equal or superior in combat power to any heavy brigade in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when it attacked in Zaporozhe in the summer of 2023. The Russians proceeded to beat this unit so hard it became a meme. "Bradley Square," anyone? I quipped at the time it looked like the Battle of 73 Easting in reverse, with attacking NATO armor burning in failed breach after failed breach. But when this war is over - after the Russians break Ukraine and humiliate NATO - an awful lot of very senior Westerners are going to cope about how the Ukrainians were dumb brutes who just didn't get maneuver warfare. Couldn't be trained. Soviet dinosaurs. Wasted effort.

Anything to avoid admitting that could have been us.

I love all the "um, actually, real NATO troops wouldn't have attacked without air superiority!" responses... so, Western militaries are just never going to get around to actually attacking, because gaining complete air superiority in the modern day just ain't happening?

The Iraq War has thoroughly mind-broken westerners into thinking that they can solve all their problems with bombing, and they've completely ignored all the advances in air-defense, as well as the advances in long-range strike capabilities thanks to ballistic missiles and drones - where exactly are your planes going to fly from once the Russians hit your major airbases? Where are they going to get their fuel from once the Russians hit your logistics? Something that people forget about Iraq was that in both 1991 and 2003, Western forces had months to prepare, build up, and stockpile, during which the Iraqis couldn't really do much but sit and watch. An air campaign of that scale simply isn't sustainable normally - you'd just run out of fuel and munitions (and later in Libya, there were indeed ammunition issues, and bombing had to be paused for a bit). Westerners don't even understand why they actually won the victories that they did, and how in a different situation things might go differently, just complete

the UK would have to have a child monarch

I want to see a modern regency council so bad, can you imagine and and whoever else (I don't know any anglo politicians ) trying to do old-timey palace intrigues

British wunderwaffe not doing so well after encountering mud (archived)

from the fucking Sun of all places (although most of the article is fawning about it, not sure how these bits slipped through, like it's literally an article titled "UP FOR THE CHALLENGE" and then halfway through it's like "yeah, it sinks in mud and breaks down all the time and we can't even get the spare parts")

But Kayfarick said the downside was the Challenger’s size and weight. At 64 tons it is roughly the same as a German Leopard 2 and a US Abrams M1A2 — but 20 tons heavier than a Russian T-80 and with a 30 per cent lower power-to-weight ratio. Despite its 26litre V12 diesel engine producing a whopping 1,200 horsepower, the crews in Ukraine said the Challenger 2 struggled with mobility. The squadron’s chief engineer, who uses the call sign Chol, said: “There are pluses and minuses with everything, and the minus is its mobility — its ability to manoeuvre across ground. “They keep getting stuck in the mud because it is so heavy.”

note that the ones in British service with all of the armor upgrades installed are 75 tons, so uh, that doesn't bode well

The crew invited The Sun to clamber aboard and we sat on the turret as the Challenger 2 roared over the countryside and its gun circled round the clock. But we soon saw what the soldiers meant about mobility when it sank into a bog. Kayfarick blasted the rookie crew for going too slowly though a gully, though they said they only went slowly for fear of bucking us off.

...

But the Challenger squadron revealed to The Sun that only seven of the 14 tanks donated in March 2023 are still fighting fit. Besides the one which was destroyed by a Lancet suicide drone in September — luckily the crew survived and the tank’s burnt-out hull was recovered — another was assigned to a training unit elsewhere in Ukraine. Two others were damaged in battle but have since been repaired, including one that had its barrel replaced.

But a bigger problem is reliability. Five have broken down and Kayfarick said spare parts from Britain sometimes take months to arrive and he had a shortage of skilled mechanics to keep the hardware fighting fit. He said: “It takes a long time to get spares. The logistics are very complex, at this end and your end.” And he revealed that a chronic shortage of fresh soldiers on the front lines meant trained tank crew had been removed from their vehicles in order to dig trenches for the infantry. Kayfarick said rubber pads on the tanks’ tracks and the wheels kept on wearing out. He said: “The parts in the turret and the parts of precision aiming are also not so long-lasting. They have been breaking from the start.”

the start of the article (which I've skipped in the quotes here) is all about how amazingly precise the cannon is, except it turns out the parts needed for that break really fast, nice

...

Kayfarick said the Challenger 2 did not have the right type of ammunition for attacking infantry. ... He added that he feared commanders had failed to grasp that Nato tanks were built for different roles from Soviet ones. He said: “Soviet tanks are battle machines built for multiple tasks. British and Nato tanks are mostly about sniping — tank versus tank.” Kayfarick and his crews were in the UK last winter training with British tank crews. But he said Ukraine’s top brass were torn between “the completely different approach of the Soviet school and the Nato school of fighting.” He said: “The main problem for Challenger 2s on the battle ground is a commander who doesn’t understand what it was designed for, what are its pros and cons.”

love to make a tank that costs over 4 million bucks and yet is also a highly specialized delicate little thing that can only ever do one job

interesting twitter thread about Russian ships and Ukrainian drone attacks in the Black Sea

How do you destroy an attack network?

Notice that I didn't say military unit. A military unit has assigned equipment, a defined area of operations, and clear lines of communication. Attack networks - generally but not always terroristic in nature - are far more amorphous, relying largely on a web of key people (leaders, technicians, financiers, "fixers," smugglers, system operators and expendable dupes) to create custom weaponry and deploy them in an asymmetric manner for maximum effects. During the war against ISIS we saw terrorist attack networks coalesce into military units that fought - and had to be fought - conventionally. In Ukraine we've seen the reverse: the devolution of military operations into terrorist-style attack networks difficult to destroy through conventional targeting of critical nodes simply because those nodes don't exist.