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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • I just hope the US isn’t just protecting the sale of military equipment and supplies by drawing out the war.

    I think the US military industrial complex absolutely was, 1000%, but two major things happened recently that don’t give these forces the aperture to sustain the conflict anymore.

    1.) Ukraine has reached a steady domestic production of towed and armored self propelled 155mm artillery, they also have a steady supply of shells or at least steady compared to what they had before.

    2.) The delivery of the first AH-64 Apaches happened to Poland from the US Military/Boeing, along with the entire process that entails. In a darkly hilarious way, I don’t think even Boeing wanted to deliver these to Poland, but rather delay them being delivered, profit off more fear mongering and sell more expensive military arms (yes, they get much more expensive than an Apache… somehow…).

    Apaches and specifically the Longbow system are meant to integrate with combined arms networks of aerial, ground and littoral naval units, the impact of these weapon systems extends much farther out than just the range of the cannons and rockets on them… and Poland will in a few short years have a brutally dangerous fleet of Apache helicopters that Russia will have a much much much harder time pressuring militarily. Neither European militaries or the Russian military have any depth of similar capacity in their heavy attack helicopters if they even have any… as for Ukraine I don’t know… but I just want to emphasize… these aren’t glorified slow ground attack aircraft… that isn’t their point. They are networked sensor and target tracking heavy weapons platforms that also carry human pilots.

    These two changes fundamentally change the power balance of the region and make selfish agents far more likely to seek profit from accelerating the end of the war rather than extending it, at the very least it makes other powers far less likely to want to hitch their horses to Russia which only has a good outlook in the nearterm so long as they can sustain a massive offensive that is killing off their own population at a staggering rate… Once that fails… Ukraine has super artillery production, superior drone pilots and drones, superior armor and mechanization, superior training, superior morale…

    The rest of the world is looking at the conflict in Ukraine and realizing the time to dally around and profit off the brutal stalemate is over, and if there is money to be made it is in jumping in now and decisively helping Ukraine.

    Again, I am sure Trump and other people in the US military industrial complex realize this too, and that is one of the big levers that probably is exerting a fear onto Trump that he will look weak not bandwagoning with the rest of the world’s arms companies of any note in the masculine power rush that comes from being on the winning side…

    Unless this is a triple fake and Trump won’t actually send arms to Ukraine (which is still very likely too) I don’t know how to interpret this as anything else. Trump and Putin’s plan (insofar as Trump “plans”) was for this to be much a scarier offensive for Ukraine, Putin has failed to deliver and Trump is mad that messes up his own plans…

    ughh it is disgusting honestly, I hope I am wrong… well not about Russia being weaker than the western narrative portrays them as right now, I stand by that and am confident in that conclusion… I am talking about arms companies playing with people’s lives… which is another one of the most awful parts of war, it is a business for some like anything else…


  • I think the reason is much simpler and much more selfish, Trump is simply angry Putin is doing so terribly at the war in Ukraine. It is making Trump look weak, so he has to host a UFC tournament to try to restore that rightwing toxic masculinity vibe.

    I am not kidding, I think Trump is actually genuinely afraid to be seen as close to Putin based on what Trump is hearing about the strategic position Putin is placing Russian forces into from Trump’s own military staff.

    The winds have changed and Trump is a coward. Why the hell would people expect Trump to come to Putin’s aid when Putin looks weak? Trump doesn’t help weak people, he is far too weak himself to do that and retain power.


  • Motor Town, Operation Harsh Doorstop, Easy Red 2, Sailwind, Hydroneer, Liftoff!, Shredders, Old Market Simulator, Cold Waters Dot Mod, Nebulous Fleet Command, From The Depths, Helicopter Gunship DEX and Out Of Ore are all great “sims”.

    I also consider extremely mechanically deep rpgs with realistic systems like Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead or Unreal World to be simulators and both are superb.

    I am trying out Ships At Sea but don’t have enough experience yet to give a thumbs up or down yet on it (Check out Sailwind!).

    Sailwind is a “sailing simulator” as in actual sailing!



  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoArt Share🎨@lemmy.worldHey stranger
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    14 hours ago

    I like that it makes space travel seem fun, colorful and spontaneous… so much scifi art with spaceships is 1) war 2) dystopia 3) serious vista or 4) sky traffic… or some reductive combo of those basic flavors…

    Not that this couldn’t be a panel from a story about those things, rather there is a great vim to the style that begs the context to expand. This feels like a light moment between neighbors of what nature we can imagine that somehow also feels like a handmade valentine.

    It gives me “The Sea Claimed Space” vibes, which are indisputably good vibes.

    https://jonaskyratzes.itch.io/the-sea-will-claim-everything


  • At this point, I think what is important is Ukraine keeps VERY good documentation of where it puts mines, whether from personnel, UAVs or artillery launched methods… SOMEWHERE.

    Honestly, I might just do it on paper records with many duplicates in different locations, if not the digital air-gapped equivalent of that… but I would keep very good records no matter how I did it.

    Do it in a way that can’t be turned against you, which is of course the problem… and why mines end up being placed willy nilly… since any kind of documentation is an existential threat to the mine placing process after a certain degree of accuracy… **but in this day and age I think if you are going to use mines, you should do everything you can to help friendly forces figure out where the mines you placed are after you win the war without losing the war in the process by creating a cybersecurity target with a database of all the mine locations.

    One way Ukrainian forces can and probably are doing this if they are smart is to map large swathes of the Ukraine countryside with high resolution UAV mounted magnetometers so that if they are subsequently mined a high resolution magnetometer survey at a later date can identify the changes/anomalies and help direct mine removal crews. Cybersecurity around this process would of course be existentially important to the strategic war effort…

    This isn’t a solution, mines are an awful weapon, but I think this is where the realistic difference in lifesaving especially of civilians can happen.

    edit I am not talking about the idea that the Ukrainian military has no idea where the mines it placed are, but rather that the idea of geolocating each mine you dig into the ground into a convenient point database could be a serious threat to the fundamental tactical effectiveness of said mines… if the enemy can hack your cybersecurity than they have the map too and it is much worse for them to have a precise map than it is good for you to have one. That is the basic calculus of this type of warfare, and is only one of the reasons war is awful and Russia should not keep pretending it can win this war.

    I think for a long time the conversation from people upset about people dying to landmines has been “ok, STOP USING LANDMINES” but obviously at the scale of brutality of mechanized mass scale landwar that Russia has forced Ukraine into things begin to look very different understandably especially given the clear effectiveness of these weapons against Russian armor especially after it has been shaken by artillery fire or FPV attacks.

    In general, mine use should be heavily discouraged internationally as a method of war, especially internal civil war or guerilla conflicts, but in the case of Ukraine, Russia is rolling tanks through its countryside… so I think the rest of the world can recognize arbitrarily mining the s^%$ out of your home is a bad idea while recognizing that Ukrainians are going to mine their home to stop Russian tanks from literally driving through the backdoor of their kitchen with a tank. This isn’t a question of law, you would do the same, so would your grandma.

    I think what the international community should focus on is from a policy standpoint delineating the difference between those two types of mine use. To put this in precise terms, there is mine use 1.) Because it is a cheap way to create terror, deny a home to people, and indiscriminately murder people that is lazier and more evil than bullets. 2.) Using mines because you are actively trying to stop an armored fullscale landwar invasion of your home.

    There is a long history of international opposition to landmine use because forces can very quickly create a large amount of mines and place them into the ground… and the situation created can be a problem for far longer than the lifespan of any of the beligerants involved. It is a perfect weapon for authoritarian regimes as it directly enables crude but large industrial capacity to oppress and terrorize groups of people.

    This really… if you think about it… has NOTHING to do with how Ukraine is currently employing landmines and I think the international community really risks shooting itself in the foot here by getting hung up on this as if Ukraine was going back on any kind of desire to employ weapons the international community has agreed are weapons of nearly last resort…

    I will become concerned with how Ukraine is employing landmines when they are actively supplying them to guerilla groups in countries with active civil wars on entirely seperate continents that they have no business being involved in… I say that facetiously but I am trying to make a point here about how you can recognize landmines are brutal and also see why the Ukrainian military might keep using them anyways.

    Do you want to be the Ukranian general who watches as a Russian armored column rolls catastrophically through the backline of your defenses and there is nothing to slow them down… it wasn’t even your fault the intelligence given to you was wrong and you miscalculated… if you had mined the road somewhere though at least that would slow the Russian column down enough to keep the major civilian center from getting attacked immediately and give your armor, drones, artillery and airpower crucial time to react… but you decided against it because you didn’t want to use mines out of principle…

    Those are the kinds of things you think about fighting in a war like this, I am not saying I have the answer but concluding “only use them as a means of last resort” means something very complicated and nuanced to the people actually fighting the war…

    Modern warfare is all about not giving your enemy time in every meaning of the word, which means if the enemy is truly beating you, then you will never have the moment to go “ah! this is the last desperate moment!”. Fundamentally when constructing a defense you have to begin from this axiom, this is something that people fighting wars have been forced to come to terms with since the beginning of war.



  • Egyptian farmer thinking this during a break in working on the pyramids in the agricultural off season as they chisel a your mom joke into an inconspicous corner of a stone.

    The worker chuckles to theirself.

    1000 years pass.

    A tired archaeologist sits down against a stone block to take a break and notices hieroglyphs chiseled justttt out of view.

    The archaeologist bursts out laughing in the process of translating the “your mother” glyph.

    “Humans are hilarious, childish and cool af” is what they will think.









  • The number of destroyed artillery systems is very good.

    I think it is quickly putting Russia into a strategically existential situation. It might be that like much of the western military industrial world they actually convinced themselves cannon artillery was obsolete, or maybe it is that Ukrainian forces focused on sophisticated counterbattery sensors and doctrine and Russia just can’t stop the bleeding because not firing the cannons at intense flashpoints is clearly not an option either…

    North Korean Koksans are a definite help to Russia… but it looks a little desperate to me tbh.