I think this guy is a lost cause. He has obviously made up his mind. Why don’t we just cut our losses and get out of here?

This is going to be an adaptation of my current playthrough. For fun.

Rule 2. Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.

I understanding removing the ability for publishing reasons. It is the apparently mandatory apology which I find a bit humorous and pointless. “We’re sorry because of unforeseen player actions which were obviously not an intended part of design.”

Perhaps I’m just so deadened to the hollow “We will do better.” apologies belted out by companies and public personalities, where the apology reads the same regardless of the amount of actual fault.

Sims type games have always had that kind of appeal to be able to go full sociopath in a harmless way. Drowning Sims in pools is a classic of gaming. The devs can do what they want with their game, but (unless this was something they had to do for publishing reasons) it strikes me as strange that they apologized for players being able to hit kids with cars in game, or abusing interactions to kidnap NPCs.

Played a little college ball, you know.

Kind of sort of, but I was thinking more along the lines of the U.S. Army’s “MFP” M10. Essentially reviving the light tank but adding some Science on top.

BMDs were still made along the trajectory of IFVs where they can hold troops, and like you mentioned the lighter armor from the airborne desire for use makes them vulnerable even to smaller diameter HEAT rounds.

My vague vision would be something more like a light tank (by the modern definition of “light” which is more like 50ish tons bare and 60 with all the fixins), with enough armor to survive side hits from low 80ish-mm rounds, and very importantly investment in active protection. Thermal signature reduction like a lot of new showcase vehicles are adding. Maybe even something like the new KF Panther where they have a dedicated drone operator to control a drone that shadows the tank. This all is kind of “if I were king of the world” thought experimenting since of course Russia clearly doesn’t have the resources to even make proper upgrades to T90Ms to bring them up to a 2020s standard.

Who is “they”?

Users clawing at each other over anything, and mods power tripping has been an Internet trope since the BBS forum days in the 1990s, at least. Lemmy, or at least LW seems to have a lower than median amount although imperfect. Lemmy as a platform has the advantage that anyone willing to undertake it can spin up their own instance, preventing a 100% stranglehold on mod/admin powers.

Can you clarify.

I don’t think there was a good option that was also realistic. The T-90M is itself a long in the tooth design that hasn’t gotten the kinds of modernizations that tanks like the Abrams have to keep it relevant (and even then the Abrams is already being retired by the U.S.) Russian tanks needed an overhaul from the T-90M.

The T-14 on paper had a lot of good upgrades. The problem of course being that it’s much easier to draw something than make it work.

So the two options were keep building obsolete “modern” tanks or build a next gen tank that doesn’t work.

What Russian tanks needed was an overhaul to their fire control and ideally their protection to keep up and shift into active protection. The ancient curtain system is not cutting it.

Part of my wonders if maybe they should have invested in something scaled back and novel. Make a lightweight vehicle like the totally-not-a-tank-we-swear M10 Booker. Something lightweight, with a smaller caliber main gun to focus on taking out structures and infantry targets. Stick some active protection on it, and some missiles and you’ve got a vehicle that bridges that gap between IFV and MBT.

155mm, and the U.S. has about 1500 of its M109 self propelled guns in service.

Russia has spent up enough of of their mainline modern vehicles like T-90Ms to a point where the refurbishments have long ago stopped keeping up. Similarly IFVs are lost, especially many of their airborne models which were misused early in the war.

The war has become much more static, with Russian vehicle losses slowing them down. The final assault on Avdiivka for example was completely brutal, lasting a month and consisting of a lot of unsupported infantry charges over an open field. The Russians did eventually win, taking the fortified position they were assaulting, but the tactics used and amount of losses to do them are not something that would have happened if they’d had the vehicles to spare.

The shear scale of the war has had Russia brute force it from being a maneuver fight to an attrition fight, and Russia appears to be banking on having the higher population to win. How that will resolve is up in the air, Ukraine wants to turn it back into a maneuver war I think and I don’t know if they can. The propaganda from the war by both sides can make it difficult to get a clear up to date picture.

Also, pretty sure modern warfare has learned heavily that tanks are completely obsolete against drones. Or even less modern warfare tells us how useless they are in cities against [guerrilla] fighters.

Tanks are one tool in the box, and like any other tool they are adapting to drones. Drones are not a silver bullet, and they especially are not as useful in supporting or spearheading fast moving offensives, which is still an important role tanks will fill. Active protection systems, electronic warfare (both jamming and signal detection to track down enemy drone operators), and tank based drones are all in play to figure out how to best do things now.

As for cities, tanks have always had trouble in cities. This isn’t a revelation of this war. Militaries tend to be skiddish of putting tanks in city fights unless they really have to. Russia particularly still has memories of Chechnya in this regard.

It never really existed in production, of course. It is like the early builds of the AK-12 where one offs were made and shown off as if they were going into full scale production soon.

The more real BMPT was at least fielded in double digit numbers, although conceptually it seems more suited to being a terror weapon supporting a shock & awe type advance rather than something used in a prolonged war.

I’m not getting an image. LW has been weird/slow about attaching images to posts lately.

I don’t know, but I do know copyright and patent are two different kinds of protection, so it might be useful to look into how you think the shape would be protected.

Copyright would be for a creative work, and the enforcement by the right holder is allowed to be loose in selectively pursuing violators without losing protections.

Patent is for useful inventions or designs rather than expressive works. Skimming the Theodore G Brown soap, it seems much more involved than a simple shape and I can see why it was able to be patented.

My guess would have been drug addicts.

Just part of a larger example of a historical exhibit, but I like to think this model was imbued with a special personality.

I know this is a meme, but wow it makes my head hurt.

The feeling of cheaply produced 80s and 90s cartoon productions. Clean, minimal lines with no or very little lineweight variation. Bright colors and distinct silhouettes. Facial structures somewhere between to 80s TV cartoon anime, which were themselves often inspired by American cartoons and not nearly as distinct as modern anime most often is, and American comic books as drawn by Jim Lee or JRJR. Big influence of technology designs from blocky designs like Transformers, and comics like Liefeld where guns or robots are just stuffed with nonsense greebles.

Or at least I’m trying.

It’s on public display in a state building.