SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
It's hardly surprising that countries with significant Serbian minority would have anti-NATO sentiment after NATO struck Serbia. That doesn't reflect the rest of the Europe at all at the time.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Though we were all retarded teenagers at the time
Which is rather different than ”a lot of Europeans”. It’s like trying to seriously claim that ”a lot of people are lizardmen” because a bunch of edgelords put a mark there on a survey.
Eh, what?
The main perceived problem with the Serbian bombings for a layman on the street was that NATO took forever to actually start doing them. Certainly not that NATO bombed Serbia in the first place (outside niche edgelord or old communist far left circles).
In fairness, I don't remember a lot of Europeans openly celebrating, but there certainly were a lot of Europeans saying, in so many words, that we had it coming, and the real tragedy would be if we retaliated against poor innocent Muslims in any way.
Were there? Because I don’t recall any of that and I’m European and old enough to have watched the second plane hit WTC live on BBC at work.
What reason would Europeans even have had to dislike US en masse outside the pseudo-communist far left circles back then? Clinton era US was generally liked and GWB was a somewhat bumbling but seemingly largelt irrelevant president until after 9/11.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
East Germany
I don't think East Germany is a good comparison given how thoroughly Stasi had infiltrated every aspect of life in East Germany.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
This has historically been the case, but I have heard rumblings from Ukraine that mass production of drone interceptors for Shaheds has actually pushed the price of those to below that of the attack drones.
This may have effect on future wars but has no effect on the current war on Iran or even other near term wars the US participates in, particularly given how slow such procedures change in the US military.
For the moment the attack side has significant cost advantage.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
If you need skilled workforce for manufacturing you fucked up royally during the design phase.
You can't build modern high tech equipment (which interceptors definitely are) with 70s low skilled manufacturing methods. The failure rates would approach 100%.
this is why stuff needs to be able to be produced at scale, with untrained personnel, sometimes under terrible conditions.
You can do this. The inherent tradeoff is that you're going to be stuck with Vietnam war era designs. If you want things to be buildable with only a hammer and screwdriver, you're going to be limited to things that can be built with such crude tools and no skills.
Consider this: Any high reliability electronics using BGA or QFN parts need x-ray inspection to filter out boards with short circuits caused by uneven solder flow. A shitload of components are only available in BGA or QFN packages and many are fundamentally impossible to build in any other packages (simply too many pins). That means you need highly skilled labor to build them or beyond state of the art automation which is only viable at massive cost which in turn means massive production amounts. The same goes for modern passive components that can be literally the size of small sand grains. And that's just one small part of the entire supply chain.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
If we produced more the cost per unit will fall dramatically.
Only if everything in the entire supply chain is reshaped with that in mind.
Mil spec anything costs ridiculous amounts because there's loads and loads of red tape, the parts have to be available for many decades, extra QC checks and parts binning, rigorous additional testing and of course because there fundamentally can't be much competition because it's not mass market so manufacturers have little incentive to reduce prices.
Yes, if the interceptors were built from COTS parts and modules with minimal bureaucratic processes, prices would fall dramatically but that's not how the US military does things.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I was just thinking about this gem yesterday.
To be fair to him, hair metal did AFAICT get mainstream airplay during Reagan's first term, so that's at least one campaign promise filled!
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Yeah I wonder how much of their stock of interceptors they've already burned through.
FWIW, similar speculations have been aired in Finnish newspaper analyses about USA's short term available stockpiles for the war. Fancy defence missiles are expensive and limited while Iran's ballistic missiles and Shaheds are much cheaper. Further, Iran doesn't even have to hit all that regularly and as long as they can keep the threat level up, that's going to have a major effect on the economy of several of the gulf states and shipping (which in turn will have global economic effects). Iran can't win the war but they may be able to prevent USA also from winning.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
The interesting part is the "vaporizing" here. I'm pretty sure that most failure modes of such a launch would not vaporize a significant fraction of the payload or even the engine cores. The "fallout" would quite literally be tens of thousands of 1-kg pits (and a few fuel pellets) raining down from the explosion. Compared with the alternative, that contaminates a much smaller area. Manual clean-up would be possible, economical and necessary from a proliferation (and ecological, of course) perspective.
Uranium is not the problem unless you vaporize tons of it (and I do mean vaporize, not just scatter tiny nuggets around). It's far more dangerous as a toxic heavy metal than due to radiation due to its very long half life of a billion years or more. Reactor meltdowns on earth are a problem because the reactors contain significant quantities of shorter lived and thus very strongly radioactive components, most notably Cesium-137 and Iodine-131. A reactor that has barely begun operation hasn't yet had time to accumulate significant quantities of those.
Fallout really doesn't apply here as it means small heavily radioactive particles that fall down downwind of the detonation. Those particles are generated by the neutron activation of the surrounding materials and mixing up the tiny debris with radiation products from a surface burst. For airburst the quantities are smaller and are so high in the atmosphere that they've had time to decay to safer isotopes by the time they fall down in months to years.
I can't help wondering how much of this is North America specific and created by the pop culture. I'm sure there are some people who enjoyed their high school more than anything later around here too, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone take that position publicly. The trope here is that your university years were the best time in your life (for some people), although that might have changed in the recent years (or not - I haven't seen much talk of that lately). There is certainly a lot more partying in university for those who want it.
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