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Snowdens Secret posted:I'm not sure if you were referring to the P-3 / P-8 stuff, but subhunting is sexier than general maritime patrol to Congress funders and there's definite need for modern shore-based fixed-wing patrol even if the ASW capabilities are mostly nominal. One thing that's seriously unsexy and why you'd want your navy and coast guard to have fixed wing assets is Search And Rescue ops. Back when the cruise liner Estonia sank in the nineties, the Finnish coast guard had no fixed wing assets at all, which led to an awful lot of people dying since the helicopters had to do both parts of Search and Rescue by themselves, and what with limited fuel and range issues that helicopters have, that doesn't work out well.
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Jan 25, 2014 10:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Do you know what would survive the firestorms after a Cold War style exchange of nukes? One of the interesting Cold War relics in Finland is the system of free library copies (the system existed before 1945). Everything published in Finland is required to be filed into seven different libraries (one of which is the national library), to preserve cultural heritage. This includes stuff like magazines so all the libraries have a complete set of every porn mag ever published in Finland. Most of that stuff is at least here in my city placed in huge underground vaults under the universities.
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May 10, 2014 12:41
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TheFluff posted:The Swedish air force operated almost 300 Viggens well into the 90's, but well, "neutral" and all that, so not exactly comparable. These days we're supposed to have 100 Gripen C/D on paper but I'm pretty sure not all of those are actually in service. For the next generation we're supposed to get 70 Gripen E; originally it was 60 but they added 10 more recently because of the old Russian arch-nemesis starting to rattle sabres like it's 1699. A lot of old school people (and quite a few new school ones as well) are very upset about both that and the lack of dispersed basing and are talking a lot about The Good Old Days. Defensewise, it seems to be good news that your latest defense review does actually say that you done hosed up with your defense reforms. I just hope Finland and Sweden can actually get something going now that we have that defense cooperation treaty, so we could buy the new Gripen instead of the Super Grover.
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Nov 17, 2014 07:37
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Europe's able to enjoy that better society and vastly superior standard of living because we've been stupid enough to augment and cheaply (through incentives) supply most European militaries for the better part of a century. Sweden and Finland built their own militaries though along with the welfare state. If your military is only intended for national defense, one gets away with spending a lot less.
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Nov 18, 2014 17:10
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iyaayas01 posted:Yeah brain farted, meant Nordic states (Denmark I know had some, I think Norway or Sweden had some or a similar land based system) who intended to use them primarily in the relatively close confines of the Baltic (since a land based ASCM system only really works if the geography forces the ships close to the land). Finland has a bunch of Swedish RBS-15 systems mounted on trucks. For shits and giggles, we even still have (at least for the next 10-20 years or so) fixed coastal artillery emplacements.
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Jan 5, 2015 15:15
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iyaayas01 posted:Also because regardless of what was said in public British leadership as well as Bomber Command leadership (i.e., Bomber/Butcher Harris) had waaaaaaay less compunctions about intentionally going in to a city and wrecking shop without any intention of only targeting military targets or really any target other than the city as a whole. There's a story about Harris being stopped by the police because he was driving too fast. The policeman says to him "if you drive like that, you might kill someone." Harris replies, "my friend, do you know how many people I kill every night?"
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Jan 9, 2015 11:53
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Wonder why no one figured out that for either side, just surrendering would always be a better option than a nuclear exchange.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:51
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TheFluff posted:When it was being developed in 1954, a lot of people doubted it'd be effective against modern aircraft, but the commander of the army didn't want to cancel it because "it is dangerous to go to war with antiquated weapons, but it is equally dangerous to go to war with weapons so modern that they do not yet exist". In other words it was intended as a hedge against missile technology turning out to be unworkable. In the end though that did not turn out to be the case and the single prototype gun was quietly stuffed into a barn somewhere. It was on the equipment list of a special AAA company until 1973, and it survives to this day at the air defense museum in Halmstad. Unfortunately it's not on display. I had to check, and the same gun was later mounted on the two gunboats of the Finnish Navy, the Karjala and the [link]Turunmaa. The surviving one is now a museum at Forum Marinum in Turku, which I recommend for anyone visiting Turku. My dad served on the Turunmaa for a while and absolutely hated it because it has got an open navigation deck up to and surprise, in the Baltic it means actually being posted on the navigation deck is utter rear end for most of the year.
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May 4, 2015 08:02
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Caconym posted:Having stockpiles is so last century, the concept of 'float' is where it's at. those things have a use-by date you know... There is probably a political aspect to this. Most European countries cut procurement in the 1990's since it was obvious that there isn't any longer a serious military threat against most countries. About ten years later, a bunch of these countries have got neoliberal governments who want to take part in interventions (for what purpose, I do not know) but they didn't really check first if it was even feasible to do so. Nevermind fixing defense issues while at it.
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Jul 12, 2015 14:18
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Mortabis posted:Nobody in Europe is willing to pay adequately for defense, conservative or liberal. Finland, the Baltic countries and Poland have at least kept their defense capabilities going since 1991, but since the end of the Cold War, the fact remains that countries like Belgium and Holland simply don't have any sort of existential threat directed at them.
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Jul 12, 2015 18:24
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TCD posted:Gripen may seem like the safe choice but my guess would be the super hornet or the Rafael given country size and need for multi role. Gripen is multi-role too.
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Dec 26, 2015 10:42
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TCD posted:The Rafale and Hornet carry more ordinance. Surprisingly, Finland actually might look into buying two different aircraft instead of having just one like now. Smart money bets on Gripen and some other plane.
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Dec 26, 2015 13:31
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Platystemon posted:Yeah, aluminium was tricky stuff to work with back then, but if you already know how it behaves because you’re from the future, you could probably make a plane out of it. One issue with aluminium from a late 19th-early 20th century POV was that it was incredibly expensive. For instance, the pride of the Russian court in St. Petersburg was an aluminium dining set.
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Feb 10, 2016 09:34
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Platystemon posted:Electrochemistry, and specifically the Hall–Héroult process, changed that beginning in 1888. While the process was invented in 1888, it took a while for production levels to rise though and it was WW1 that really got it going.
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Feb 10, 2016 11:37
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TheFluff posted:At least in Sweden a lot of the larger surplus bunkers on sale are prohibitively expensive for private individuals to own because they come with dehumidifier bills that can easily exceed 10k USD a year. Some TFR swedegoon (probably Heintron) told about his buddy who had land taken from him by the military and returned in the nineties in addition to a big compensation for not having cleaned the land up. So now the dude owns a huge underground parking spaces which he rents out to people who want to store their Winnebagos or trailers there for the winter.
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Apr 25, 2016 08:54
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I used to work on a shipyard and there is a bit more that goes into shipbuilding than "is there capacity and how much does it cost."
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Apr 29, 2016 12:06
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Panzeh posted:The fuel is less of a big deal- it's ammunition that makes armored vehicles explode. The BMP's run on diesel anyway which doesn't catch fire as easily as gasoline. And unless I remember my poo poo wrong again, the fuel carried in the doors is just for regular use, in a combat situation you drain that and replace it with sand.
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Jul 2, 2016 11:30
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VikingSkull posted:If that's tough to watch, never watch Threads. The Day After wasn't very impressive after Threads.
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Jul 5, 2016 12:41
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Should have named it USS Grover Cleveland.
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Jul 27, 2016 09:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's useful to think of the modern third world and poor drinking water as well. Yes, drinking water is a huge problem, to the point that the UN is trying really loving hard to get water purifiers out there that people in refugee camps etc. can use. I'm thinking in particular of that filtered straw thing that hypothetically lets you drink out of a mud puddle. However, you'll note that millions (probably billions) of people live in areas where they depend on natural, untreated fresh water sources for their day to day lives. DO they have more intestinal parasites than the average suburban American? Yes, but they also aren't all dead. You'll also note that the worst problem spots for that today are refugee camps and disaster zones that have the combination of concentrated people and poor sanitation that made military camps so bad. For the first four years or so of my life I lived in a house that didn't have running water. We drank water from a well where rats occasionally floated around. In hindsight, my parents are loving idiots, but the water didn't manage to kill anyone.
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Oct 18, 2016 09:01
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winnydpu posted:I've never quite been comfortable with this line. When I was a kid watching documentaries in the early '80s there was always a german dude interviewed saying that Hitler held up development for a year by insisting that they add bomb racks, etc. All his fault, the German high command didn't make any strategic mistakes. I recently read Galland's authorized biography by David Baker, and Adolf Galland himself said that this wasn't true. Crossposting what I wrote in another thread: quote:Galland wrote a memo to Göring and Milch in May 1943 recommending the adoption of the Me 262 as a fighter, along with ditching the Bf 109 in favor of the Focke-Wulff 190. Milch backed Galland so production was set to produce 60 planes per month, starting from May 1944. Göring was unenthusiastic about the new jets tho. Degel and Althoff, lead engineers for Messerschmitt, planned eight different models of the Me 262, including a fighter-bomber version. In some other work Gallands owns up to loving up fighter pilot training and not developing a new tactical use for the jets in time.
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Oct 24, 2016 08:01
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Blistex posted:I'm pretty sure it was the other way around, and to a much greater extent since Willy designed the 109 to be as small and easy to produce as possible. If you look at the blueprints of a 109 and compare them to the 190 you'll see that the 109 has an amazingly spartan interior, and makes much better use of stamped materials and shared structures (etc. landing gear/engine mount). The most most widely produced version 109-G was averaging 4000 man hours to produce, and by 1944 was down to 2000 due to the production line being streamlined, while the 190 seems to be cited as being 5,400 man-hours to produce. The 109 was also 1000kg lighter than the 190, so there is that as well. Also the engines used have a huge price difference as well. The Bf-109's 600 series engine was 1/2 to even 1/3rd the cost of the FW-190's 800 series engine. Also your average 109 (the vast majority of which were F-G models) carried 3 guns, while your average 190 carried 6. One of Galland's issues with the Bf 109 was that it just wasn't as capable in shooting down bombers as the Fw 190, and the Luftwaffels ended up strapping gun pods to 109's to get more guns into it. The MG's didn't do jack against B-17's, it took 20 or preferably 30 mm cannon to shoot them down.
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Oct 24, 2016 20:04
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M_Gargantua posted:My fundamental point, and I think our point of divergence is that if Chinese J-11's are eating AMRAAMs like candy then losing F-22's is hardly the least of our worries. China is deterred from any true offensive action because out technological edge makes their losses unacceptable. If they go for it anyway, knowing the massive casualties they'll sustain, then the conflict resolves in one of two ways: That is exactly the sort of thinking that led to WW1 happening.
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Mar 27, 2017 19:47
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Rough guess: the Japanese take more aircraft losses, because the US ships are out to sea and have their AA fully manned, but like Baloogan said, it just really means that the battleships will sink in a rather less convenient location and a lot more sailors will die.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, I remember back around 2008 or so when TFR used to love to have arguments about SHTF rifles I was a huge advocate of a bolt action .22 and 2k rounds in bricks. I wrote a paper sometime back in 2004 or so about survivalism as a nonreligious eschatological practice and one thing I remember from reading the source material (by Kurt Saxon, that insane man) was that his recommendation was to have just three guns: a .38 revolver, a 30-06 rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun. He apparently felt that people who used survivalism as an excuse to get all the guns were kind of stupid in all sorts of ways.
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Apr 15, 2017 20:46
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TheNakedJimbo posted:Going back a couple of pages for this one (the thread's been moving fast lately), but do you have a link to the paper? Unfortunately not, I lost it a long while ago when a hard drive shat itself.
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Apr 17, 2017 21:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:Assuming that nuclear winter didn't get us all, one of the interesting byproducts of a cold war exchange would probably be turning the equatorial nations that are currently dumpster fires into the new major powers. I've been working on a story set in the nineties after Able Archer went hot. Essentially minor European countries who survived mostly intact due to blind luck are now the regional powers, and South America, Australia and NZ are the major players globally.
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Apr 18, 2017 12:50
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MrYenko posted:What European countries are you thinking would have survived a nuclear war in 1983? Well, it's fiction so Ireland, Portugal, most of Sweden and Finland and bits of Norway. The general idea is that the bombers that were supposed to paste Southern Sweden and Finland probably got taken out in the initial stage and a follow-up never happened. And re: refugees, a major part of the story is that they just got murdered in camps which was covered up later.
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Apr 18, 2017 16:35
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Collateral Damage posted:For content, I only today learned about the term Finlandization, meaning to bully a smaller country into accepting a larger country's foreign policy. So named because of how much influence the soviet union had over Finnish foreign politics during the cold war. For instance a lot of literature critical of Soviet was made unavailable in Finland under pressure from Soviet diplomats, and newspapers had to self-censor articles that might have angered the bear in the east. The Wiki is sort of lacking in many regard (then again, so is the Finnish-language version of the article), because when talking about politics, it's centers around the Moscow faithful communists into defending the interests of the Soviet Union in Finland. SKDL, the umbrella party of the socialist left, condemned the Soviet Union's intervention in Prague in 1968, when no right-wing party did that. There was a significant element of pro-Soviet thought in the Finnish right wing parties and their supporting organizations, on account of business interests, since bilateral trade between the Soviet Union was essentially a license to print money for Finnish industrialists.
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May 16, 2017 20:56
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Kesper North posted:That sounds awesome, will have to find this. The newer Finnish Navy patrol crafts have automated systems for that (they also have some stealth value for stopping heat emissions, apparently). The boats also look pretty good. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/Hamina-luokka_Hanko.JPG/1200px-Hamina-luokka_Hanko.JPG
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Jun 12, 2017 08:00
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It can be argued that post-1991 NATO has become somewhat of an issue for the non-Eastern European countries. Reliance on NATO has led to national defense capabilities getting ignored and even the most militarily capable country in the EU (France) is still reliant on US logistics in many cases. On the other hand, recent events have showed that European countries should solely not just rely on NATO for their national defense needs. But, since NATO still exists, there's little interest in rebuilding the militaries of those European NATO countries that have let their capacities degrade.
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Jul 1, 2017 05:46
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my kinda ape posted:Does anyone know of any books that are roughly the equivalent of "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB" but for the CIA? Obviously there hasn't been a massive archives leak of the CIA that we know of but just like a comprehensive history that looks at things pretty objectively. I've heard good things about it. The counterpart book about the FBI, "Enemies", is really good at least.
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Jul 1, 2017 11:02
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my kinda ape posted:Having some sort of super imaging recognition computer I have a friend who worked on a project like this and this is something that is amazingly hard to do. Like, probably impossibly hard at any point in the near future.
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Jul 2, 2017 17:46
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Mortabis posted:I'm struggling to think of an example where sanctions had any effect other than moral preening. South Africa.
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Jul 29, 2017 08:32
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LingcodKilla posted:Yeah I got a laugh after reading that too.... That's not how Americans work at all. It's not really a positive or anything to brag about. You'd end up invading a completely unrelated country a couple years later for no apparent reason.
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Aug 11, 2017 06:22
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Dead Reckoning posted:Think of it this way: if the Captain's XO, JOs, NCOs, and Seamen work together to save the world and sink an enemy carrier after he says "Make it so", his rear end is definitely getting a medal. It works the other way too. And at least in theory, it's also a way to clear the Captain's name if it's found out that it wasn't his negligence or whatever that led to other people loving up.
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Aug 18, 2017 10:08
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Captain von Trapp posted:Precisely because they're bottom line driven, they really don't want expensive and contract threatening violations assessed against them. Or prison. That's why you have subordinates take the fall.
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Aug 29, 2017 06:52
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I hope the nickname for the Archers is "Duchess". Also, the Archers are way less impressive when you realize they're all the artillery that the Swedish Army has got at the moment.
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Sep 24, 2017 07:13
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I'd be down with buying fighters based on how they perform in Wargame.
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Oct 2, 2017 09:35
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Enourmo posted:Looks that way. Kinda expected that the QE class would have holes in the deck where you can park the radar dome.
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Nov 3, 2017 09:18
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