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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • It has a active protection system which can handle incoming missiles, that will be a solid defence against drones too. Russia has developed an APS which they’ve used successfully in the invasion, but they only had it ready a few months before their full-scale invasion started, so it’s only on newly-built or fully-refurbished tanks. It also has the drawback that it was initially designed to deal with missiles; Ukraine figured out that it could eventually be overwhelmed by just sending enough drones at it to drain its relatively limited ammo, something that would be impractical with expensive missiles, but until then it apparently handles incoming drones pretty effectively. The Challenger’s one has the benefits of being designed with the knowledge of what drone warfare looks like

    It’s also worth noting that nobody publishes videos of drone attacks failing. A cheap little quadcopter with a grenade strapped to it is, ultimately, jut a way to throw a grenade unusually far. A tank like this can shrug off a grenade. Attacking them requires bigger, heavier, more expensive drones carrying bigger, heavier, more expensive munitions. Or you use the drone to sight artillery. But the point remains that even in the age of drone warfare, tanks are still harder to kill. There’s a reason both sides are still using them

















  • While I’m by no means an expert on the matter, as I understand it there is some solid reasoning here: whatever the best solution to fighting drones turns out to be, it’s probably going to require you to bring some heavy equipment and power generation to the frontline. We’ve got various directed-energy systems, guns similar to the CIWS on ships but scaled down, interceptor drones, jammers… But at the end of the day, all of them require you to be able to carry a bunch of heavy shit to the frontline and for it to be durable enough to survive there. At that point you’ve got something a lot like a tank again


  • This actually seems like a step closer to that future, doesn’t it? Most of the EU operates some variant of the Leopard, especially as the old Soviet and other Eastern Bloc ones age out and get replaced. This project with Italy is to be a variant of the successor to the Leopard, rather than a totally independent design like Italy’s current tanks. Hungary is doing a variant of this too, and France has signed up to collaborate on a tank with Rheinmetall (although the fighter program that collapsed makes this specific case less promising in my eyes). It seems like a general coalescence around the German designs



  • The thing about money is that it only has value because we collectively agree that it does. If you have a dollar or a euro or a yuan, it’s valuable literally only because other people will give you stuff for it. There’s not really anything special about it otherwise, it’s just really useful to have some way of trading things in easily-transferable numbers

    Crypto is theoretically the same in terms of what makes it valuable, except for that far fewer people agree that it is valuable and there’s much less agreement on how valuable it is amongst those who do