Busy morning at the office. Commentary status: limited.
Defense
- Richard Spencer maybe doesn’t want to be SecNav anymore? – The real headline: he blasts Congress and shipyards.
- A Chally 2 Streetfighter prototype – Regrettably, the Brimstone launcher is on a vehicle parked behind the tank, not the tank itself.
- Al-Baghdadi down
- Navantia unveils Joint Support Ship design – Does a little bit of everything—70% of the fuel capacity of the recently-retired Australian oilers, 70% of the load capacity of HMAS Choules (an LPD), a full hospital, and so forth.
- Dutch military police find 11 kilos of cocaine on a Dutch LPD – Evidently, someone decided to take a little side trip during a deployment to the Caribbean.
- Navy backing down from 355-ship plan – Why 355? we found ourselves asking. It turns out the number comes from a force structure assessment conducted in 2016.
Games
- A pre-alpha tech demo of Task Force Admiral, a really good-looking WW2 carrier command game – Items of particular note: cloud physics, seamless map zoom.
- Blizzard writes a buffer overflow emulator – Highly technical article, on how Blizzard emulated a bug in Starcraft which was used to create most of the Starcraft custom map ecosystem.
History
- Google and Facebook didn’t kill newspapers, the Internet generally did
- A 1924 shot of USS Langley transiting the Panama Canal
Grab Bag
- How Scientology bought downtown Clearwater, Florida
- Certain AMD processors’ high-quality random number instruction always yields -1 – The problem with randomness is that you can never be sure.
- Didn’t we try this once already? – Mortgages for anyone with a pulse!
- The collapsing crime rates of the 90s might have had something to do with cell phones – If you can sell drugs to anyone, anywhere by telephone, you don’t need to hold turf. If you don’t need to hold turf, you don’t need to kill people to keep it.
- California is on fire again.
I love how there doesn’t even need to be a link for the California wildfires story. At this point it’s basically the equivalent of American Monsoon Season.
I think even Californians would agree with that remark.
We put the Challenger 2 picture in this week just for you. I confess, I like the idea of a tank with a missile launcher on top, even if it’s only an illusion right now.
I think the Norks beat us to it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/795q7u/north_korean_mbt_pokpungho_stuffed_with_twin_mgs/
Chally 2 is a beaut, but even it can’t match the FEARSOME PEOPLE’S TANK and its TWIN ATGMS+SAMs.
If your tank needs more punch, just add more missiles!
A little preview for this Wednesday: we were incorrect on the Brimstone launcher being on another vehicle. New pictures have come to our attention, which show that the Streetfighter prototype does indeed have a two-missile pod on the turret roof.
Tomorrow’s article is a review of Armored Brigade, now that it’s released on Steam, so after finishing that, I went and added a Challenger 2 with Brimstone launcher to the DB, and a squadron of those, backed up by some artillery and air support, stopped a motor rifle regiment cold, with a little better than a 9-1 exchange ratio. It seems like a pretty good idea.
9-1? C’mon, you can do better than that against T-72s and BMPs. Don’t let the Queen down.
There’s actually a fellow on the War Thunder forums who has been active on that very project. Apparently they’re working with a BAE technician removing the old TISH, TPU, compressor units and coolant bottle packs and fitting the new TISH and TPU to the entire fleet.
https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/442882-challenger-2/page/164/&tab=comments#comment-8298991
The trouble with simulating it in Armored Brigade is that modern protection and missiles throw the game’s calculated point values a bit out of whack—a troop of Challenger 2 Streetfighters comes in at about the same point cost as a T-80B company, which means that the artillery etc. the opposing side can throw at you in addition to its cheap tanks makes for a difficult fight.
Parvusimperator and I are working on some 90s-00s vehicles to go along with the Chally 2, so we’ll see how it fares against more modern competition.