mircea_popescu: o hey check it out, gingrich and giuliani backing up the democrat election fraud trump thing.
mircea_popescu: on the other side, desperation tends to paint the map - they're now considering whether to declare az, georgia or utah blue.
mats: i wonder how the peshmerga feel about coalition forces being too cowardly to put troops in the fight
mircea_popescu: i dun imagine teh isis can afford to lose their only port.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-16 14:38 mircea_popescu: stuff like "domestic tranquility", "high density" and "handheld power tools" - pick exactly two.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-16 14:50 asciilifeform: why not natural cover, e.g., bottom of a lake.
mats: prob not. helluva bet for the pesh - usg offers statehood in exchange for the lives of tens of thousands of their young men
ben_vulpes: eh we've got a few more cycles between here and there
ben_vulpes: imagine the world in which the rank-and-file dems wish for an opponent like trump
BingoBoingo: <ben_vulpes> eh we've got a few more cycles between here and there << Trump's too old to have more cycles
BingoBoingo: Trump is single cycle. A second cycle is needed for a motor
mats: this cycle, 'nazi' is a catch-all word used by the unimaginative and slow
☟︎ BingoBoingo: If you only have one cycle you have a torch or a firecracker, not a motor.
mats: 'i can't properly describe what you believe so i'll use a word people commonly think is offensive'
mats: kinda like 'sociopath'.
ben_vulpes: "yeah sure, his campaign is dead. you realize that his base actually wishes they were as witty and erudite in public as he is in private?"
ben_vulpes: mats: got any intel on the latest salvos against the Mason?
ben_vulpes: your adoring public demand more insider baseball reports
mats: i suspect these were also 'soft kills' though
mats: electronic countermeasures interfering with e.g. radar, acoustic, EM signatures
ben_vulpes: mats: is there a 'hard kill' in this context?
ben_vulpes: some insane northrupgrumman "shoot a rokkit out da skye"?
mats: physical intercept with SM-2, ESSM, mark 41, or Phalanx CIWS
ben_vulpes: the leading two of that list having failed lolariously in the recent sorties, no?
mats: or maybe they used some other sekrit forward deployed countermeasure, like a directed energy anti missile weapons system
ben_vulpes: motors don't dissipate for what can be distinguished against bg?
mats: that could possibly cause incoming to dump into sea, and look like a soft kill to untrained observers
ben_vulpes: mats: granted they can handle 1, 2, 3 at a time.
mats: i dunno man, i'm not mp, i can't afford not-open-source intel
ben_vulpes: how many tonnes of fudge in the chocolate shop?
ben_vulpes: the point is that deployed systems have a hard upper bound of inbound targets they can handle, and there is no such hard upper bound to how many inbounds can be lobbed at them, much less any sort of constraint on btc/lobbed body.
☟︎ ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: this is effective enough to make them invisible on ir?
mats: i get that, i however haven't read any pentagon reports to suggest where that bound is at
ben_vulpes: mats: well why would they say anything, much less anything indicative of how badly the systems actually function
ben_vulpes: my money's on less than 10 concurrent inbound targets while the systems have payloads to deploy.
mats: well, that first statement is not exactly true, they do that all the time
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: pigeons and qcs are trivially differentiable on derivatives
mats: i have read reports by DoD that indicate dissatisfaction with the Aegis system's autonomous detection and tracking
ben_vulpes: mats: what all is actually going on in that video?
mats: specifically with smaller targets (smaller than airplane, which it was originally designed to track) at greater distances
mats: ben_vulpes: incoming getting cut up by automated guns
ben_vulpes: baww, targets shrink two orders of magnitude and billions of dollars get flushed down the drain.
ben_vulpes: mats: those are pure kinetic countermeasures?
☟︎ mats: (counter rocket, artillery, mortar)
mats: the SM-2, SM-3 are also known to be shite for ascent or mid-course intercepts (insufficient velocity iirc)
mats: but that report was about use against strategic ballistic missiles
mircea_popescu: mats yeah, except the usg is in no position to offer anyone anything. but w/e, all sorts of charlies ready to suicide, so.
mats: also important to note that the DoD's review office (OT&E) found Aegis to be very difficult to upgrade circa 2002
ben_vulpes: coincidentally, also the year of the Aguilera/Durst MTV awards collab
ben_vulpes: less than twelve months later, americans are wondering what we did to deserve the plane-bombing
mats: ultimately the report was about how unready the Aegis was for use against strategic ballistic missiles
ben_vulpes: mats: has the usg defense industry made a thing that was ready for use against anything-thats-not-goatfuckers-with-twenty-year-old-mortars?
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: omg own goals don't count
mircea_popescu: aegis being, of course, the one remaining "us superiority" item.
ben_vulpes: look my ex employees bike trip from vancouver to mexico is more impressive than usg defence contractor turds
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 03:50 asciilifeform: if the d00d weren't a zhirinovsky-style muppet, he'd be recruiting good old-fashioned brownshirts just about now.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform we're not discussing the aspie 14% fantasy here. usg dun got no money nor any workers.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: cascadia slavers for the clinton dirt
mircea_popescu: slavers my foot. any of them naked ? any of them work when dun feel like it ?
mircea_popescu: any of them whipped today ? any of them dead from whipping this morn ?
mircea_popescu: china got infinite slaves. usg got infinite expectations. you know, like elliot, peace be upon his name.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 04:01 mats: this cycle, 'nazi' is a catch-all word used by the unimaginative and slow
ben_vulpes: so i know that salver is a dish and that salivate is to drool, and was dead convinced that "slaver" was "to drool" but congugated
mats: ben_vulpes: railgun promises to be interesting
mircea_popescu lolz at the notion of a railgun array. because slow to fire and not really directionable.
mats: i dun see how a ship could possibly defend against a railgun
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 04:27 ben_vulpes: ~0? really?
ben_vulpes: and i dun see how one can place slugs accurately
☟︎ mats: on land you'd use passive, reactive armors like ceramics, composites, ERA, i don't think a ship could in practical terms carry it
mircea_popescu: mats by becoming <1meter above water. waves will protect you.
mircea_popescu: this is ~already the logical trend ; and used in some applications (the ones where idiots and imbeciles weren't involved)
mircea_popescu: (railgun is not useful as ballistic fire, because well, air friction ; as short range direct fire it has the obvious problem : your firing platform kinda has to be afloat too.)
mats: railgun doesn't change the 'kill chain', yes - you still need to detect, identify, track target, communicate this information to the firing platform, then launch the weapon
mircea_popescu: nono. think. railgun is a direct fire superfast projectile. if its target is not taller than 1m above "waterline", both the "ground effect" of flying so close to water and the actual wave/spray will make your trajectory impossible.
mircea_popescu: it's a dynamic pressure problem - on the bottom it's high on the top it's low, your projectile trajectory curves badly.
ben_vulpes: they'll just go for the ballistic approach
mircea_popescu: ballstic works for missiles, not for "10km/s at muzzle and no self power" railgun ammo
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 05:05 ben_vulpes: and i dun see how one can place slugs accurately
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes of the total energy available to the projectile, some % is given at launch and some % is given in flight. if you got a bullet (100-0) ballistics dun work. if you got a missile (0-100) ballistics work
mats: >The Florida test will place a static floating target at a range of 25 to 50 nautical miles from the test ship and fire five GPS guided hyper velocity projectiles (HVP)
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 04:30 ben_vulpes: the point is that deployed systems have a hard upper bound of inbound targets they can handle, and there is no such hard upper bound to how many inbounds can be lobbed at them, much less any sort of constraint on btc/lobbed body.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: but imagine a really really large KE mortar
mircea_popescu: no. this is jules verne stuff. dun work as per 1800s maffs.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 04:32 asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: 'invisible' is not the word, object above absolute zero is 'visible', just not to any device that doesn't also fire at pigeons.
ben_vulpes: eh, it's a mass-produced plastic thing at this point
ben_vulpes: wake me up when they coat benches along feral ave with it
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 04:36 ben_vulpes: mats: those are pure kinetic countermeasures?
mircea_popescu: they dun really have the proper buckshot-lattice firing devices up and running, but nature will teach all.
mats: i recognize that existing tech/tactics work well against railguns, they're not faster or longer range weapons than SM-2
mats: where the railgun tech is now, its only suitable against land-attack
mats: intimidating pyongyang, etc
mircea_popescu: actually, it's only suitable in outer space fights, and even there very dubious.
mircea_popescu: (the outer space idea being that you get up there a thing with immense rtg / solar panels, and a supply of bb shells. because far from heavy grav fields (as per definition of outer space) all shots are guided by default - you just gotta get close enough. fast flying bb projectile hitting the other ship is ~doom.)
ben_vulpes: y'actually are going to want lasers or microwaves in orbit
mats: also important to note that railgun (lack of) durability has been highly understated, the rails can currently handle ~400 shots, with plans to take it to ~1000
mircea_popescu: mats it hasn't been understated by me, last we discussed this.
mats: sure, just putting it out there.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: newtons 1st, see quadcopter/shotgun thread
ben_vulpes: getting the bb into the right spot with the right delta v either means shooting it from the orbital platform or letting it accelerate itself, no?
mats: pages 4-5 have the relevant information if you don't want to read the whole thing.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes the "interdictor" is this item which has a railgun, a supply of pellets, and a huge array of solar panels etc to power them. this item can then shoot fast pellets towards any other ship, crippling it.
☟︎ ben_vulpes: the stationkeeping fuel budget will be...expensive.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: spaceships suffer very much from the problem of transformers discussed ealier - no practical way to armor them.
mircea_popescu: space encounters also have much easier a time hitting targets.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes expensive ; yes. but comparable to trying alternative weapon systems. whereas on earth - not comparable.
ben_vulpes: no contest but that stationkeeping cost grows steeply, quickly.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: em is going to be a far simpler engineering challenge.
ben_vulpes: no moving costs, no stationkeeping costs incurred from firing.
mircea_popescu: em is very expensive. think : i want to shoot a ship 5500 km away. how do you em it ?
mats: mircea_popescu: what's special about the railgun IS NOT that it is better than other precision guided projectiles, but rather it is very-long-range artillery, with really small payload, and no rocket motor
mircea_popescu: mats how long range any item is depends on air friction and little else.
ben_vulpes: have another bird in that hemisphere at that time!
mats: public info sez ~200mi at this time
mircea_popescu: you could actually make bullets shoot 10x as fast as they do now. it's not worth doing.
ben_vulpes: 15 identical sats beat the crap out of a single sat with one finnicky fucking railgun on it.
mircea_popescu: 200mi is not long range artillery. railroad artillery of ww2 vintage shot that far.
mircea_popescu: long range artillery is if i can bombard washington from vancouver.
mats: mircea_popescu: iirc V-3 topped out at ~100mi...
jhvh1: mircea_popescu: Error: "schwerer" is not a valid command.
mircea_popescu: ok. so for the interdictor : can i have 1 MW of power ?
ben_vulpes: you're far better at the fudgestimations, so plz to lead
mats: its not a typical artillery piece, depends who you ask i guess
mircea_popescu: alright. i shall employ this to accelerate 10 gram pellets ; at the usual loss of 99.99% i will then have available 10kW for my pellets.
mircea_popescu: i fire them at a rate of three a minute, meaning each 10 gram pellet acquires an energy of 200kJ
mats: 'paris gun' topped at 80mi
ben_vulpes: i am more interested in the "never get close enough"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: now then. you happy with 100 kW per each of your 15 zergs ?
ben_vulpes: ho ho ho okay i see where this is going
mircea_popescu: let's agree that a hit means an interaction which delivers 1MJ ; let's agree we start our engagement 1mn km apart.
ben_vulpes: power dropoff between emitter and absorber?
mircea_popescu: well... you gotta aim more precisely than i do ; and light-matter interaction is much weaker than matter-matter
ben_vulpes is more than happy to slowly melt panels and controllers
mircea_popescu: and your 100kw won't actually allow you to make a laser strong enough to cut al alloy or w/e ther fuck i use.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform supposedly this is a battlefield far, far away.
ben_vulpes: if one's to consider the orbital-kinetic weapon, why bother accelerating the pellets when one could simply ballistically heave them into the path of the enemy sats?
mircea_popescu: note however that rubish is mostly stationary, and ships move kinda slowly. whereas railgun allows very fast pellets.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it means that they never hit you with a speed in excess of say 100m/s. and if they do, it's goodnight
ben_vulpes: i'm seeing buckshot in orbit where a target will pass in the next 2 seconds.
ben_vulpes: what materials strengths issues do i suffer in heaving them up there?
mircea_popescu: no, the point is, the dust in the rings of saturn doesn't enter spontaneous fusion because it all moves ~the same direction and ~the same speed. so sure, leave it there, it'll make a nice bing sound as it hits the outer casing.
ben_vulpes: no, ballistically. not at orbital speeds.
ben_vulpes: i throw it up. straight up. just in time for your railgun to go sailing through a relatively stationary cloud of shrapnel.
ben_vulpes: no way it spins fast enough to track and pop something coming straight up.
mircea_popescu: think what speed you'd have to have to bother me angularily at that distance.
ben_vulpes: you're providing all the angular speed by virtue of being in orbit!
mircea_popescu: that's the point here. a 10 gram pellet that got accelerated for 200kJ is now moving at 5km/s
ben_vulpes: no, your bird is moving at 9km/s by virtue of being in what, geosync?
mircea_popescu: and this isn't "in orbit". too much friction there. this is in outer space.
mircea_popescu: so yes, there is ONE possibly useful application of a military railgun : making the deep space interdictor. but this is slight.
☟︎ ben_vulpes: i resent being used to make this point.
mircea_popescu: mats ah i guess you're right, it never went past 50 mi.
mircea_popescu: well, so in 60 years "de impliniri marete" we got from 50 to 200 mile railroad artillery. only costs about 5000x. neat.
mircea_popescu: fun fact : the large cannons, much like the rail guns, actually wore down considerable metal off the barrel
mircea_popescu: so much so the projectiles fired were actually of increased caliber over time
mircea_popescu: no pretty sure the germans had ordnance in numeric order
mircea_popescu: yup. fired like 50 shots, send the barrel back to krupp
mircea_popescu: and yes the chamber varied, so they had a "top-up" propellant depot nearby
mircea_popescu: the large guns, esp of ww1, are an utterly lulzy subject of anthropology.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-17 05:22 ben_vulpes: the stationkeeping fuel budget will be...expensive.
mircea_popescu: lol someone's been reading the prev shotgun quadcopter thread ? :)
BingoBoingo: Eh, that kind of force and the center mounting bracket is likely to fail
BingoBoingo: Why destroy one ship when you can incur the cost of 8 ships in mold remediation?
mats:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-10-15#1555598 << .ru appears committed to turning the fight into a cage match among extremists, by diligently double tapping remaining civilian infrastructure - water & food storage facilities, courthouses, hospitals
☝︎ a111: Logged on 2016-10-15 05:05 mircea_popescu: anyway, it's pretty evident russia is pivoting from syria to a iraq spur via turkey. so yeah, sure, whatever, bazaar al-asado won't be there forever.
mats: .sy will be one big smoking pile of rubble once assad, the various insurgencies, IRGC, ru, and isis are finished
mircea_popescu: if there isn't any infrastructure, the difference between "extremists" and "civilised people" is nil. much like when there aren't any balls, the difference between usg presidential hopefuls is nil.
mircea_popescu: in other news, the b2b cocksucking season is open early this year. if anyone wants to receive those inane gift baskets corps keep trying to send on my behalf, drop me a line (with your physical address).
mircea_popescu: i have nfi what junk is in them. changes every year. maybe handicrafts, or w/e.
mats: lots of folks reporting on isis in .sy, attacks in Aleppo, Darayya, etc but nobody is discussing .ir, Hezbollah funded sectarian militias, IRGC commands on the battlefield, IRGC providing the majority of Assad's troops, active targeting and destruction of aid convoys, ru's efforts to destroy moderates and local civilian authorities
mats: syrians disinterested in any political cause, looking to live their lives in peace
Framedragger: mats: since i guess you're following news more than me, i'm curious if you know anything about how the kurds in northern syria are doing, assuming anything new in the last couple of months? (not really following news there but just curious)
mats: there's an ongoing truce with assad and they're very close to controlling the northeast
mats: i don't know that much has changed
mats: usg has done a good job helping the kurds hold down the area
mats: i'm sure the kurds lie awake at night waiting for the knife in their backs to materialize
mats: i give it 1/2 odds usg packs their bags and goes home if isil is routed from mosul
mircea_popescu: Framedragger they're pretty much on turkey's kill list. seems unlikely there's gonna be that many to celebrate 2020.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yeah, but usg is always very keen on counting the jwzs on its own lists. nixon's "silent majority" and all that.
mircea_popescu: whole steaming pile of droppings is predicated on "don't get involved and let us run things" after all. match made in heaven.
pete_dushenski:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-10-16#1555972 << cool. though gotta love how the only amason review is 1 star from james storemski. apparently the title is heavy on the numbers and politics. "stuff the nobody really cares about" mkay. because ofc he asked the entirety of the nobody and they all concurred with james in the most unambiguous terms.
☝︎ a111: Logged on 2016-10-16 20:02 asciilifeform: b00k r3c for pete_dushenski : 'the cruel hunters' (engl.)
shinohai: no results for the week pete_dushenski :/
scriba: Logged on 2016-10-17: [18:26:57] <mircea_popescu> Framedragger they're pretty much on turkey's kill list. seems unlikely there's gonna be that many to celebrate 2020.
pete_dushenski: "Craigslist ad for ‘personal servant’ a sign of growing inequality says UBC professor
pete_dushenski: "It’s essentially an ad for a personal servant, said one UBC professor, who added she was not surprised to see it given the country’s growing income inequality. “They’re not calling it a personal servant but that is what they’re asking for,” said Sylvia Fuller, who studies employment and inequality. “Its not surprising that you start to see more of this kind of arrangement because there are
pete_dushenski: people who can afford it and there are folks who don’t have any other options.”" << holy shit does this sort of libertard flailing grind my fucking gears
pete_dushenski: ad is included in article and is eminently reasonable. nothing a pa or nanny wouldn't do. i seriously dun get it and it drives me up the fucking wall. the gall of these impotent shits. to think that it's evil for employers to have specific expectations rather than being 'universally' 'inclusive'.
shinohai: They got a personal army of similar-minded folks to flag post and get it removed, that'll show 'em!
pete_dushenski: this is presumably what the employment alternatives look like. i) wash dishes for well to do couple, learn, maybe make productive connections along the way (you hope) ; ii) play 'flag the meanies' in your mom's basement ad infinitum.
pete_dushenski: that 'the press' would aim to shelter and coddle morons into the latter camp is despicable, unethical, and destined to fail - for both themselves and their moo-eyed readership.