Tbh, it really is a toss of the coin. With Russia solidifying their ties with North Korea and China, it kinda depends on how much of his foreign policy will be to scapegoat the east.

Trump was dependent on Russia for their ability to boost his election, now he doesn’t really have to worry about that. Just like with anything else, it depends on what Putin is able to give him vs what he can get by turning on him.

An unarmed bomb can be dropped from cruising altitude onto a hard surface and not detonate. The US military has had nukes fall out of planes without breaching the radioactive core.

And yet you don’t think they could produce the same safety features for less volatile materials?

diesel electric hybrid on the other hand is a proven technology.

Yeah, you just have to add a diesel engine, electric engine, and a giant battery…The whole point of moving to electric is to increase efficiency and decreasing the weight of primary motive components.

My point is that if your tank’s armour is compromised by modern antitank weapons, it doesn’t really matter where it hits you. You’re going to be turned into chunky marinara, or your shells are going to cook off.

A pressurized fuel cell is already more protected than any fuel tank, and is smaller and lighter and more efficient than any ice engine. Which means you can add and divert even more armour to protect the cell and the occupants of the tank. Basically any danger associated with hydrogen is vastly overshadowed by the fact that tanks already carry high explosives. And that’s not so dangerous that we’re trying to replace them with non combustible weapon systems.

It’s not like Rotem is new at making tanks, the K2 is one of the best tanks currently in production. If the engineers thought fuel cells increased the likelihood of catastrophic failure, I highly doubt they would have tried it with the K3.

Personally, I think most people are just buying into the propaganda that shut down hydrogen power in the first place. To my knowledge there hasn’t ever been a death associated because of an explosion or fire involving a vehicle with h2.

The problem with diesel is that there has been a cap in their efficiency for quite some time. We’ve pretty much tweaked as much speed and efficiency out of what is possible with diesel tanks, which is why the Abrams has a turbine engine.

As tanks become heavier and heavier the only real solution is to migrate to electric motors, which are more efficient and vastly more reliable than diesel or turbine.

Just like with trains, the future of tanks are electric motors, and until we find a battery material more efficient and safe than lithium, hydrogen fuel cells are likely going to be the solution.

Right, but you are going to want to choose a fuel that has the least chance of flaming up if you’re making a military vehicle.

Why? If something has gotten through the armour, your fuel is the least of your worries. I mean you are sitting next to a stack of shells filled with high explosives.

My dude, the military transports more volatile materials than hydrogen every day. Just because something doesn’t make sense for civilian use doesn’t mean it’s never going to be viable for military use.

If you’re worried about the dangers of transporting something like hydrogen, you’re going to lose it when you find out what bombs are made out of.

Electric motors are just more efficient in just about every way at scale, the current diesel motors being used in tanks aren’t really able to be improved upon. They’re at their technological peak, so the only way to move forward with mbt is by figuring out how to make electric motors work.

K2 is just running on a big diesel engine, so it’s not going to be as maintenance prone as the turbine on the Abrams.

They’ve already kinda been doing that, just indirectly. Western partners have been giving their old stock of 155 to Ukraine and then resupplying with Korean made 155s.

I think a real game changer would be if they actually decided to give them access to the K2 tank. It would be interesting to see what an actual modern tank could do in Ukraine, especially considering they have layers of protection against drones and atgm. Plus they can crank them off the production line faster than any other nation.

My dude, nothing in that blog supports your claim.

First of all, it’s talking about the metallurgy of the 16th century and after, which is after Japan had imported blast furnaces. Secondly, it ignores the amount of labour needed to actually produce refined steel from iron sands, which ultimately dictates the quality of the finished product.

This isnt a debatable topic, any steel made from iron sands before modern electromagnetic sorting contains a large amount of impurities when compared to steel made from rock ore.

Even during WW2 the Japanese had a hard time producing high quality steel even with the use of blast furnaces, because the iron sands contains a large amount of titanium.

This blog which falls over itself trying to engage in revisionist history, can only claim that the quality was “perfectly fine”…not good.

That’s not true, no matter how many times you make that unsupported claim.

You are conflating the elemental molecule of iron with the finished product of an alloy of carbonized iron aka as steel.

Yes, there isn’t a molecular difference between the iron found in sand vs the iron found in rock ore. However, the medium in which you harvest your iron and how you’re able to heat that iron, dictates the quality not your final product.

Lol, my dude. No one is claiming that modern japanese steel is of poor quality.

Im speaking of the time period contemporary with the accusation. You know, how arguments typically work…

Do you think the guns Japanese Samurai used were made from steel refined from sand?

Just pointing out this one because it’s funny. Yes, a lot of the early firearms made in Japan were still made from iron sand (Satetsu). Which was the main source of iron in Japan until the 16th century.

According to whom?

The reason why Japanese iron is inferior is because of the source of the iron itself, they utilized iron sand instead of rock ore. Rock ore can be made up to 90% ferrous material while the iron sand contains as little as 2%.

This means when you smelt your source material into blooms of iron and slag, the blooms made from sand iron were much smaller. Instead of utilizing a single bloom to make a sword, the Japanese had to work several blooms together. Which is much more labour intensive, and can lead to a lot of imperfections in the final product.

This is why katanas were made out of so little material, and had to be handled with care. They were much more fragile pieces than similar swords made in Korea and China at the time.

Plus, the Japanese developed their iron working much later than their mainland contemporaries, as they never independently invented furnace technology. The technology for furnaces was imported, most likely from the Korean peninsula.

Don’t defend the osprey, it’s not good for your health. It knows when you’re lying and will retaliate in the only way a rotary aircraft with even more moving parts knows how.

Yeah, helicopters are the apex predators of soldiers and rich people. Even if you pull off the perfect autorotation, the glide ratio is still only a maximum of like 3:1.

I think I remember reading a report somewhere that more people have been killed by practicing autorotation than have actually pulled it off in the wild.

Autorotation is mostly copium as well.

Explanation

Mainly just copium for the pilots. Helicopters aren’t like airplanes where you have glide time and altitude to decide what to do after something bad happens. If you watch fixed winged ejections there’s usually about 30 seconds to a min after something goes wrong before the pilot decides to bail. Helicopters go from everything being fine, to a debris field in seconds.

They already do that, but the gf’s name is always Jody. Who do you think writes all those Dear John letters?

Lol, I’m not gonna bother breaking down your arguments again. You clearly aren’t interested in any kind of honest discourse. The constant flip flop between being purposely obtuse and then aggressively pedantic is a wild way of trying to get your point across.

It’s actually kind of impressive that you can work in a variety of different logical fallacies into so many of the responses while never addressing the original topic.

Have a great rest of your day.

China has been actively dumping US securities for years now. Given the openly hostile stance US is taking towards China, I fully expect that this trend will only accelerate going forward https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202303/1287406.shtml

And yet there is obviously still enough demand for US securities to allow the US to borrow more money every year.

oil is a small portion of Russian overall economy.

It’s like 30-40% of their federal revenue and funds the entirety of their national wealth fund… Which is what they are utilizing instead of issuing securities. I would hardly call it a small portion of their economy.

The whole point of buying securities is that you expect them to retain value, hence why it’s important for them to be backed by something tangible.

The whole point of buying securities is to have a reserve of foreign currency with high liquidity at large volumes. Gold is tangible, but it holds no inherent value, it isn’t exactly the easiest thing to move around the globe, and is a fairly easy market to disrupt if attempting to liquidate at significant volumes. There’s a reason everyone moved away from the gold standard in the first place.

That’s a process of issuing currency, you’re not borrowing anything from anybody.

Ahh, yes. Lending value and then being paid back that value with interest isn’t “borrowing”. I have some calls to make to some credit card companies…

Fluctuations in trade obviously impact domestic economy, but they can be weathered and they’re not catastrophic in the long run.

I think you’re moving the goal post here… Also, “can be weathered and they’re not catastrophic in the long run” requires supporting evidence.

That’s precisely what Russia illustrated at the start of the war when the west put the most severe sanctions it could come up with.

How? The Russian government moved to a war time economy, growth isn’t exactly a surprise in that scenario. The hard part is sticking the landing, what happens if they are succeeded or fail in Ukraine? It’s not like war actually creates material value that is tangible and lasting for the majority of citizens.

Misallocation of labour and resources as I’ve explained several different ways in this very thread.

And what causes the misallocation of labour and resources…? You are just utilizing cyclical logic.

Politics encompass more than simply allocation of resources. In this particular case, the politics were that Yeltsin decided he’d rather be the president of Russia than a deputy of USSR

So economic collapses are always caused by a misallocation of resources and productive forces… but not in the case of the USSR. Their economic collapse was solely because of Yeltsin. Got it…

economic decline was the core reason, then you wouldn’t have seen high level of public support for USSR.

We weren’t talking about the dissolution of the USSR, when I brought up them as an example I was solely talking about the economic crisis of the late 80’s and 90’s.

You’d see a situation that’s similar to what we see in US today where majority of the population no longer believes that their country is working in their interest.

You’re conflating voting to keep the USSR and “believing the country no longer working for their interest”. It’s not like 30% of the country is voting to change their nationality/economic system.

grew up in USSR, so I’m speaking from personal experience here. The kinds of horrors that are happening in US today, were completely beyond imagination.

A bit anecdotal don’t you think? I’m sure if I asked some nepo baby if America is doing well I’d get the same exact answer as someone who grew up in the projects.

The shortages started after the dissolution, and introduction of liberal reforms. One thing USSR did quite well was ensuring that everyone had a decent minimum standard of living.

Your link is from 83’, aka not the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s one from 1990

Again, we were originally talking about a specific monetary policy. You seem to be wanting to bring this all back to a gish gallop about the Soviet Union, and not even about their economic policy.

Again, that’s my original point that labor and resources aren’t being allocated in the interest of the majority which is leading to discontent and civil unrest among the public.

And how does civil unrest connect back to debt monetization? How is modern Russia allocating nearly half of their federal spending on the military and “secret” spending, serving the interest of the majority?

I’m not arguing against backing debt with securities though.

What was the whole point of the entire conversation?

What I’ve been saying is that Russia is in a good position to do so.

I don’t agree with your assessment. If they were able to sell securities they would be selling more securities, it’s kinda a no brainer. However, securities are susceptible to sanction activities. They’d rather use their gold reserves as a way to move around sanctions than to give the US another easily trackable and sanctionable resource.

The main item with high liquidity that’s not being heavily targeted by sanctions is oil and gas. But, utilizing those for securities would effect revenue already earmarked for the Fed and their national monetary fund.

I never claimed Russia is on the brink of collapse or anything. So long as oil stays above $60 a barrel, allowing them to fund their nwf and maintain wartime spending, they’ll probably be fine for a while. But that doesn’t mean they can solve indefinite deficit spending via “printing money like the US”.