Tar_Alcaran

Weird, none of my friends have ever signed up to invade another country to commit genocide there.

Well. Life was escaped from

I fully agree. But the idea of reversing was always that you don’t. You don’t shoot at a target, reverse away and shoot at another other. You and your 49 buddies shoot at 20 targets, and then ~35 of you move forward. Repeat till Germany and France surrender.

It’s an entirely non-mbt philosophy to fielding tanks, and it’s demonstrably worse and has been shown to be worse repeatedly (pretty much constantly) over the decades. And they haven’t it changed it in the slightest. They’re literally doing the same with tanks as with people. Send em in, and if they make it they make it.

RENK of France has made a superior powerpack with proper reverse gears, this makes a T-72 into a real tank or at least begins the process.

Russians have always been dogshit at making engines. Imagine being so terrible at it that a French company makes an engine and transmission that’s both better AND easier to maintain.

Russia has always designed it’s entire military force with one doctrine in mind:

Start driving at the border and don’t stop till you get to Dunkirk before the Americans do.

It doesn’t involve such niche tactics as “reversing from an enemy”, at most there is “hold in place and shoot 5000 pieces of artillery, then start driving again”. It doesn’t involve the wild concept that at some point, the enemy might locally outnumber or outclass you. It doesn’t involve such problems as “maybe we won’t have enough troops”, or “what if we run out of tanks or guns”, because they could either win the war in three weeks, or everyone would start dropping nukes.

They’ve literally been working on the same things since the 60s. It might have worked back then, when they had a bazillion modern-enouh tanks, but today, when all they can do it drip-feed them into the grinder, it’s a shit doctrine. That’s not the fault of the tank though.

Even with an outdated sight, too little armor and no real reverse gear it’s still a tank. Those are still incredibly useful if used properly, and Ukraine shows it time and time again. But if you still think that you’re at the head of the grand soviet army towards Rotterdam, the problem is the crew, not the tank.

Tanks have always had to adapt, just like every other piece of military gear ever.

Anyone saying “tanks aren’t useful” should ask themselves why Russia is spending to much time and money and effort rebuilding even the most rusted out shitbucket, why Ukraine is spending so much money and political goodwill to get tanks and restore the blowup Russian shitbuckets they capture.

It’s because tanks are very much an important weapon. There are no other tools you can use to bring a big damned gun forward in a very survivable way very rapidly. It can respond instantly, and stick around constantly, which are abilities no other weapon system has.

Tanks have weaknesses, but so does every system. That’s why combined arm warfare builds doctrines to eliminate the weaknesses of individual systems by meshing multiple things together. But that’s very hard, and Russia is really quite bad at it. It also requires all those different systems, which they don’t have.

It’s hard to lose tanks they don’t have. The old Soviet stockpiles are empty, and the only tanks they have to lose are new builds.

Thanks ChatGPT

There are many, many “ethnically Russian” people in crimea whos families have lived there since long before the soviet union. Thats entirely different from the “oh look how cheap these recently unoccupied houses are!” people

Over a third of India still cooks on wood fires every day. That’s technically renewable, but it’s a bit of a stretch to leap to solar powered induction from there.

it is a psychoactive stimulant on par with coke

That’s… only true in the most pedantic of ways. The same kind of comparison would say that a supersonic fighterjet is on par with my inline skates, because both are modes of transport

Fresh-ground beans make SO much of a difference. It doesn’t even matter much how it’s made, slow drip, french press, who cares.

If you can’t get IFV’s, bring some IFB’s…

Yes, lots of people. By a tremendous stroke of coincidence all of them suffered tragic window-related accidents or committed suicide by shooting themselves in the back with a rifle.

giant pocket mares

I don’t want to Google if this is real, so I’ll take your word that this is how it’s done.

The point was that the more you keep compensating for other people’s dumb moves, the greater the damage when it all inevitably comes crashing down.

In other words, just do what they ask, get them to sign off on it and watch it crash and burn in an unmaintainable, unsecured mess

Russia’s frontline is in tatters, all they can do is fumble for more viral acts of mass terror like hitting water infrastructure.

It’s also exceedingly stupid. We’ve got nearly a century worth of evidence that while you can bomb a country, you can’t bomb a country into surrender.

At least by focussing on one type of infrastructure, you can exhaust supplies and hinder repairs by taxing existing civilian capacity. If you bomb 10 transformers a week and Ukraine replaces 9, you’re at least getting somewhere in the short term. If your weapons cost less than the target, it might even be a good idea to keep going.

But if you shift half your attacks from transformers to water treatment, guess what happens? Suddenly Ukraine catches back up, replacing more transformers AND fixing pumps faster than you can break them.

These are literally lessons from the 1940s. You can go to your nearest bookstore and buy several wheelbarrows full of books on this topic. This is why somewhat smarter nations attack either centralized facilities or military sites. There might be ten thousand people who can install a sewer pump, but I doubt there’s a hundred people who can build radar systems.

Let me give you a little parable.

There once was a juggler, who could juggle with three balls all day. Then someone from the audience threw a fourth ball, and he kept going. Someone threw a glass, then a flaming torch, and he kept going, occasionally burning his hands. Seeing he could do it, someone throws a machete, and the juggler almost never cuts his fingers keeping all those things in the air. A chainsaw gets added, and an open bottle of bleach, and occasionally the juggler gets his hair caught or spills some bleach, but he keeps going. As he keeps going, people keep adding more and more things. Eventually it’s too much, and it all comes crashing down, killing the juggler and several members of the audience and destroying all the objects in the air.

On the next street corner, a juggler stands with three balls. Someone from the audience throws in a fourth. He steps aside and lets it fall to the floor, happily juggling three balls.

Yeah, if there isn’t an unconnected hose or cable, that’s about the extent of my car knowledge.

It’s a delete request, not a deletion.

It works when it’s in range. And it’ll only occasionally spray allied ships because the Phalanx doesn’t check whats behind the target.