Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always the straight man, I asked, what’s your job? It sounds unreasonably interesting to me.
I have a strange feeling that Mark was a Marine.
furiously takes notes
F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
691–693 of 693 posts
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL, OK. You've listed a lot of problems that have been largely solved already, and are trying to convince us that they are harder than a problem that has eluded the brightest people in the tech industry, armed with computational tools that the aerospace community never dreamed of and backed by more-or-less infinite capital. Nothing is harder than self-driving cars. Nothing. We'll colonize Mars before we have a solid…
You've been watching too many movies and are just making things up. Those problems haven't been solved in tactical aviation.
No, it's just that every time I drive somewhere, I try to maintain a low-priority thread in my head to work on the problem, "How would I write code to do what I just did?" Frequently the answer is, "I have no idea, and wow, I'm glad it's not my job."
That simply doesn't happen when I fly my quads. "How would I write code to dodge an attacking drone? How would I modify my drone to drop a grenade or a Molotov cocktail, or otherwise cause a large amount of grief to people below? How would I build a SLAM model that allows the drone to do this without intervention from the ground?" None of these engineering problems bug me the way driving a car would. They are all addressable with multiple degrees of freedom, both literally and figuratively.
Meanwhile, on the road:
"Hmm, the light at this intersection is out. There's a cop with an angry look on his face, flapping his arms at me like a dying chicken. What does he want me to do, exactly?"
"Huh, here I am in Seattle, and it looks like they have chosen to mark the stripes on the road with some sort of paint whose complex impedance at optical frequencies is identical to that of rainwater. I'm sure glad I'm driving, and not my lane-keep assistant, which I had to turn off because it tried to steer me into the median the last time it snowed."
"Whoa, where'd that ambulance come from. The law says I have to move right, but the only way I can get out of his way is to move left, and in any case, that's what the car ahead of me is doing. What to do, what to do."
In most of the airborne scenarios you mention, doing nothing is a fail-safe answer when confronted with a situation the hardware or software can't handle. If we approach driving that way, a few miscreants can brick an entire city, intentionally or otherwise.
I'm not surprised Karpathy tapped out at Tesla, let's put it that way. My guess is, I've thought about this a lot more than you have, and a lot less than he has.
Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
T55 can't even shoot while moving my man. The fact remains: the big war you're talking about is being fought with incredibly obsolete weapons.
T-54/55 can shoot while moving, but the accuracy is bad. The real question is whether that matter. If the T-54/55 is going against tanks, it has already losing because those should have been taken out with ATGMs and HEAT drones. If it's going up against trenches, inaccurate fire while moving doesn't matter because the tank will be getting super-close anyway. If it's firing at APCs, then stopping really doesn't put it…
One MACE and all drones in 3-mile range are effectively negated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Cheap bullets firing airburst rounds effectively negate drones in a close range. The issue with MACE is that it remains vulnerable to helicopters and other more advanced weapons. Etc. etc.
-----------------
But that's... fine. Its war. Each weapon has a cheap-and-effective counter. If you know what the opponent is bringing to the frontlines, you can kill them easily.
Your argument style is fundamentally flawed. You're arguing about counter-weapons as if they're the main threat. You should instead be discussing the capability the tank brings to the frontlines.
* Immunity to all small arms fire.
* Immunity to anti-personel mines (and I've seen plenty of Leopards clearing up anti-personel mines by just rolling over them, providing highways for infantry to travel through later).
* High-power gun that kills a vehicle every 6 seconds
* Advanced therman and night-vision sensors enabling accurate 3mile or 5km shots.
* Resistance to artillery: infantry die to shells that are within 100m of them. Tanks require a more-direct hit, closer to ~5m instead. This forces inaccurate enemy artillery to expend far more shells to kill a tank rather than a group of infantry.
--------
Tanks have always been vulnerable to airplanes, helicopters, and now drones. That's never changed in their 100+ years of use and history. Taking to the skies is the tank's greatest weakness. But against any ground thread (including against lesser tanks), the tank reigns as the supreme anti-ground unit in the world.
-------
Just because tanks negate AK-47 or other small arms fire doesn't mean that the AK-47 is useless. It just means that you've complicated the frontlines and have forced the enemy to bring multiple weapons to the frontlines to combat effectively. The more weapons you force the enemy to carry, the better. IE: Combined Arms combat.
You bring soldiers (who lose to snipers / AK-47s). You bring light-armor, that defeats those. You bring medium vehicles (like IFVs) to defeat the lighter-vehicles. You bring tanks to defeat the medium vehicles. You bring air-assets (helicopters) to defeat tanks. You bring jets to defeat the helicopters. You bring artillery to defeat different bits. Etc. etc. etc.