[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Mk 70 containerised systems

But wouldn't such systems be incredibly vulnerable? The containers themselves obviously cannot move - you need to be on a vehicle, but ships are big and not very fast-moving. Ground-based launchers are really key to allow them to reposition and conceal themselves in order to avoid being taken out by counter-battery fire, or airstrikes, or drones, or ballistics. Ships seem like they'd be sitting ducks.

The Typhon system also includes a battery operations center - I assume this is pretty important, and just the containers without all the extra stuff related to programming and commanding the missiles won't be very effective.

Sending a bunch of Mk 70 containerised systems to Ukraine is not a complicated endeavour

Sending them might not be complicated - actually getting them to the country and using them is different. The Russians have struck numerous Ukrainian ammunition sites, including some alleged strikes on Western shipments. These containers are pretty big, and would likely attract attention. I guess the idea is to commit perfidy and disguise them as regular civilian cargo, but the Russians have already struck several vessels carrying grain (according to the Ukrainians of course), so they're not above just blowing up anything suspicious.

Bringing them by sea on the whole doesn't seem likely (in fact, isn't the Black Sea extensively mined at this point, at least around the Ukrainian shore?). I guess you could try bringing them via trucks over the Romanian border, straight to Odessa or something like that? But can regular civilian-seeming trucks carry such heavy containers? The US military itself is using one of its heavier models of truck for the Typhon.

The F-16s have been doing this for months, and one aircraft has been lost to Russian ground based air defence

Have they inflicted much actual damage? You're not at as much risk if you're not lobbing bombs at actually important targets, and the ability of Russian infantry to keep advancing doesn't seem to indicate they're being suppressed much by bombardment.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Is it this Fars report? Because that states nothing about aircraft specifically - why are we discounting ballistic missiles here? The Tucker interview also doesn't say anything, it was just Pezeshkian repeating "it's God's will when I die" like 5 times for some reason.

The problem with this whole narrative is that we are assuming bombing in Tehran to imply complete penetration of Iranian air defense. That implication makes sense if we are assuming that Israeli planes flew from Israel, through Syria, Iraq, and then half of Iran - but with those drop tanks getting fished out of the the Caspian, and accusations that Azerbaijan allowed its airspace to be used by Israel, it might imply a different story. Interestingly, June 16th specifically had a report of drones being detected flying in from Azerbaijani airspace

But anyways, presented with amateurish Paint drawing - these two paths of attack are very different, and imply very different things about Iranian air defense. Keeping close to the Turkish border, using geographic features to avoid radar, and then going through Azerbaijan, the Caspian and finally attacking Tehran from the North only implies a penetration of that specific sector of Iran. This is still a problem for the Iranians, but nowhere near the complete collapse of their air-defense network that is implied by F-35s flying the "direct" route.

We're also still not clear on exactly what munitions were used - trying to guess vague bomb or missile shapes based on grainy footage doesn't exactly seem like sound analysis to me. Use of shorter-ranged bombs implies greater penetration of Iranian airspace - usage of longer-ranged standoff munitions and cruise missiles doesn't indicate it to the same degree.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Y'know, I wouldn't exactly consider US military command to not be grifters, given the whole history of US military procurement, and I'm not sure why we should consider them to be significantly smarter than the typical US politicans given the performance of the US military in, like, everything since WW2? It isn't '91 anymore, the guys "understating" capabilities may well be right for the wrong reasons (like, the military facing a recruitment crisis is objective fact, and is already having effects - but it's obviously not because of "woke").

Does the Tomahawk have ground-launch capability? From what I read, there was the old Gryphon system from the Cold War, but that was dismantled as per the INF treaty, and more recently, with the INF becoming irrelevant - the Typhon system, but that was only introduced in 2023, and there's still just a handful of them around so none are going to Ukraine. Tomahawks don't have air-launch capability either, so... this is entirely irrelevant to Ukraine?

The same applies to the SM-6, although that one has an air-launch variant in development, but only the F/A-18E/F seems to be capable of carrying it, and it's too fresh of a system to send to Ukraine. So again, not relevant.

JASSMs could work, but how likely is it that Ukrainian F-16s could actually manage to successfully launch them? Just recently an F-16 went down down while doing air defense, has the F-16 fleet been able to fly any particularly extensive bombing missions?

Do we have precise numbers on how many ATACMS were sent until now? The Ukrainians did manage to destroy some air-defense systems and planes with them, but how effective that counts as really depends on the numbers they expended for such results. What I could find was "at least 500", which they have mostly expended by now. The Russians have also shown themselves to be capable of both intercepting ATACMS, and efficiently destroying the launchers themselves, so again - if the Ukrainians receive them, could they actually perform more than a handful of effective attacks with them before their launchers get tracked down and got?

The PrSM has been in service for a year-and-a-half, I highly doubt they'd send something this new. It literally just entered mass production, and the numbers for it up until now that I could find seem to be 42 (in 2023) + 110 missiles (2024), and some proportion of the 230 planned for 2025 - so, let's call it ≈270 up until July of 2025, and some of these would have been used up in testing and military exercises. Hardly a sufficiently large stockpile for the US to start handing these out willy-nilly, and the more advanced Increment 2 phase of the procurement process has already been delayed once.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 13 hours ago

Yeah, StarCraft 2 massively improved the pathfinding, plus it removed the unit selection limit, leading to a tendency towards big clumps of units effortlessly gliding around the battlefield and smashing into one another, since it's no longer a battle against the UI to actually move those big armies around.

This is an idea I actually find very interesting, the "actually, the game needs to be shit in order to be good" principle (well, that's it stated hyperbolically of course, I guess a more proper phrasing would be something like "the game requires a certain degree of friction in order for its mechanics to work"). Another example of this is Deus Ex - the original game infamously had some pretty clunky shooting mechanics, so Eidos-Montréal "fixed" that in Human Revolution - except, they promptly realized that by making the shooting good and effective, they actually just made it the easiest and most direct approach and kind of negated the point of stealth, so they then had to run a fucking surveillance program on ammo pickups to make sure the player doesn't have too much ammo at any given point.

The original Deus Ex didn't need to worry about that and was free to give away some pretty juicy rewards for exploration, because it knew that you wouldn't be able to actually use all that ammo to casually headshot every enemy in the level with the starting pistol without first having invested a substantial amount of points in getting your respective weapon skill up to that point, and weapon mods in improving the gun's stats itself. Removing friction from games, while intuitively an obvious improvement that makes the game "smoother" to play, can in fact have all these weird knock-on effects that mess up some other gameplay system.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 15 hours ago

Starcraft has waypoints too (also with Shift, I assume this was a UI convention just taken from Windows)

But in this particular case, what's happening is an element of pathfinding where if something goes wrong and the unit ends up in an invalid state/location, it's bumped in a random direction to get it out. Here, I think the SCV and Dragoon end up accidentally occupying the same space, which causes the Dragoon to get bumped downwards - except that bumps it into the water, which is also unpathable terrain for a ground unit, and so it keeps getting bumped down until it eventually occupies a valid spot of land.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 16 hours ago

I think people are just hungry for big arrow moves, the "okay, but now the Russians will do a big arrow offensive!" has been going on for a while now, but it seems like the Russians are quite content to slowly grind Ukraine (and a substantial amount of NATO equipment) into dust.

There's a quote I like by Soviet chess grandmaster Karpov (of the final boss of chess memes):

People just love those "beautiful tactical blows", and those unfamiliar with more attritional styles (in either strategy games or actual war), when actually seeing one in play, tend to assume that the attritional player is just bad and missing opportunities for such blows - rather than considering that the player saw the opportunity perfectly well, and chose not to take it, because he's playing according to a different style and strategy. Now, in games at least, the argument can be made that one style is more entertaining to watch (Karpov himself calls it "beautiful" after all), but war is serious business, and should be driven by "ruthless logic" rather than trying to make sure the historians writing about your exploits in the future will have big beautiful arrows feast to draw in their books.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

The workers are distant and hidden in the picture

Here's a North Korean painting of a field, with the workers being distant:

Autumn in Anbyon by Kim Kuk Po, 1999

Here's another North Korean painting without a focus on people:

Untitled by Gong Chong Kwon

Here's a Chinese painting, one which is also clearly taking inspiration from traditional East Asian painting traditions:

Fu Baoshi - Heaven and Earth Glowing Red (detail), 1964

What is the value that solar-punk brings to the table over socialist realism

Okay, this I find somewhat more agreeable, I love me some socialist realism and wish we had more of it in the modern day... but like, let people draw their cute little fields and houses. I wish a lot of the art field was different from what it was, but that's a purely subjective, selfish value judgement of me wanting more of the art I enjoy and less of the art I don't enjoy, not a functional political program.

When you're in power you can put this in the state censorship guidelines and have those dang solarpunk fascists all shot or whatever. Doesn't seem like a particularly productive approach to building socialism, but you know, you do you.

Surely we can draw inspiration from actual socialist art when imagining the future instead of corporate aesthetics

Okay, but the whole 70 gajilion comment argument you've gotten in is with people, like me, who believe Soviet art has a greater diversity than just "workers workers workers, all day, just working", and we have worked to give you numerous examples of such art.

Here's a modern Chinese artist who I would consider to be working in something we might call Contemporary Socialist Realism - Fan Wennan. They're not your typical solarpunk fare, as they tend to feature some rather massive constructions rather than quaint little farms in the middle of nowhere, but they also often don't feature any focus on workers.

There are a handful more in the tradition of workers being framed centrally that you want, but the majority are more like the above examples.

This is clearly inspired by actual Soviet art - and yet, it still would not fit your expectation, because you've selectively latched onto one sub-genre of Soviet art and declared that to be the one and only true form of it, to the ignorance of all else that Soviet (and Chinese, and Korean, and Vietnamese, etc.) artists did.

Landscape painting is its own genre, with its own conventions, and generally does not feature a focus on the people in-frame - and when it does, usually the person is portrayed in contemplation or awe of the landscape, as in the famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Should we outlaw this entire genre? Actual socialist countries did not, so you have a more hardline stance any socialist government!

I would agree that there should be more solarpunk depicting a focus on workers - but this thread started with the maximalist assumption of "most solarpunk does not feature people" (trivially disproven by multiple paintings posted by others, at which point you pivoted to yeah, but those people aren't workers, and then once another poster disproved that, you pivoted to um, they're portrayed wrong - this is clearly bourgeois leisure berry-picking and not agricultural fruit harvesting, because, uh... and ad-hominem arguments about people having never "set a foot on a farm"), and "paintings of landscapes that aren't focused on people are fascistic", which is a rather extreme statement, given that, again, landscape painting is a genre that exists, and has been partaken in by many socialist artists.

Maybe if you'd opened up with something less inflammatory, this thread would have gone differently, and led to some more productive discussions (well, it was pretty productive to me, I've added like 30 cute little paintings to my image collection).

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The tweet very specifically says "the people who live in or work in or ...", it's not singling out just workers at all! You're arguing a completely different point.

Also, how the fuck do we know what the people in-frame are? By what metric did we determine that they're "culture afficionados" and not workers? They're not actively swinging hammers in the image?

And what's wrong with artists anyway, socialist countries obviously had plenty of those??

And, even if they were workers, they probably wouldn't be the ones who built it anyway! Construction is its own separate sector of the economy, most workers in socialist countries aren't in construction and thus live in homes they didn't build themselves, like, what are we even talking about here?

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world

Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I'm not an art historian or anything myself, but I'm pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I'm sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.

The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn't have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren't of workers at all, they're just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool

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Niko Bellic (www.youtube.com)
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luv' cute little military trucks, simple as

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The Austrians did have actual proper APCs too... but those are also pretty cramped:

The proliferation of bullpups was indeed largely informed by the needs of mechanized infantry - having long rifles was fine back when everyone marched with the rifle slung over, but widespread mechanization changes the game (and a lot of Western vehicles of the period aren't anywhere near as spacious as people imagine when they whine about how Soviet stuff sucks - this is a BMP-2 compared to a German Marder for example, the Marder is bigger but not by that much:

and here's a Swedish APC:

)

Modern APCs/IFVs solve this problem by just... being ridiculously big and heavy (the one on the left here weights as much as a T-55 tank!)

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some unfortunate "US and Soviets both bad" in this video (and I'd also disagree with the labeling of Cubans in Angola as mercs, a proxy war does not preclude the presence of actually ideologically-committed volunteers), but still pretty neat

kojima

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Ah, the Armscor M1600. Honestly, that one doesn't look that much like a real M16, but it's still neat

real "'80s villain henchman gun" kind of vibe, like the Muzzlite and some other polymer guns from that time

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Tervell

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