• Othello [comrade/them, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          oh I remember the trans cutie threads, i just had forgotten the degree of grossness. also I think things that seemed perfectly fine as a minor now seem extra gross as an adult… god this community is old. i do feel like some people use the concept to sexually harass people, but most of them have been banned. like the person who called me a pervert for saying that if i transitioned to a man i would want a big dick, like thats not something every transmasc thinks about. our mods got him but it still hurt. stuff like that. I agree with the principle, but Ill never stop the castro woogs that man is perfection.

      • VOLCEL_POLICE [it/its]@hexbear.netB
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        1 year ago

        The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.

        نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.

        volcel-police

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    So the problem with DU ammunition it’s it’s pryophoric. Self-igniting. When you slam that shit in to the atmosphere at several thousand meters per second it catches fire and sends particles of burning uranium all over the place. When it hits steel the uranium penetrator rod self-sharpens. Which means pieces of it sheer off in such a way that the point never dulls. It’s great for making dinner-plate sized holes in tanks then filling the interior with burning uranium. But you get a whole shitload of particulate uranium going in every direction. It’s dirty AF. And then the burning uranium touches off the fuel, ammunition, and literally oxygen in the vehicle and it all fucking explodes. If you’ve ever seen a video of tank spewing a fountain of fire out of it’s turret hatch, or even a tank with the turret blown clean off and spewing fire, that’s all the explosives and propellant in the ammunition cooking off. And sending particulate uranium all over the area.

    And the problem isn’t radiation. Like the dude says, uranium is radioactive, but not to a degree that’s any serious concern. The problem is severe heavy metal poisoning. You ingest that stuff and it’s going to cause problems, just like lead or copper or other heavy metals.

    The really cool thing about this is you don’t even need it. Tungsten penetrator rods work just as well as uranium does without being nearly as toxic. And against the older MBTs being used in this war conventional shaped charge warheads should do the job just fine. If they’re not getting results with conventional shaped charge ammo then DU is only going to be a moderate improvement. It’s totally fucking unnecessary. Afaik the US only even uses DU since there’s so much of it lying around from nuclear fuel production, and the US nuclear power system is really just an excuse for producing plutonium for the nuclear weapons program. It’s all totally fucked, both from a practicality level, an environmental and human health level, and on a big strategic level. They’re just turning Ukraine in to a wasteland because of a dispute over which group of crooked ex-Soviet oligarchs people are going to pay taxes too. It’s fucking ridiculous.

    Side note on anti-tank weapons. Pretty much only 105mm and 120mm cannons on UkkkS tank cannons and Bri*ish tank cannons use DU penetrators. The projectile is made up of a casing with the powder charge. The actual bullet is a plastic sabot that surrounds the penetrator rod. The sabot is a piece of plastic that allows the massive power of the propellant in the shell to push the very narrow penetrator rod with it’s full power. Soon after it leaves the barrel the sabot splits off, freeing the penetrator to continue along at massive velocities. Uranium is so much harder and more dense than steel, and it’s self sharpening, that it just pushes the steel aside penetrating in to the tank. They’re aces for killing tanks.

    Conventional tank shells use shaped-charge warheads. A shaped charge uses a very carefully shaped explosive to turn a metal disk in to a jet of super-hot, dense liquid. If it hits at the right angle that jet will cut right through steel armor, spraying super-heated metal and chunks of steel around the interior of the tank. A lot of modern defenses are designed around preventing the precise math and timing that makes that jet of super-heated liquid metal from forming correctly. If it doesn’t form at exactly the right distance from the armor in exactly the right way it’ll usually just spray on the surface or fail to form at all. The “Cope cages”, a 70 year old type of defense known as slat armor or spaced armor, serves to pre-detonate the HEAT round when it’s too far away from the vehicle to properly form it’s jet of armor penetrating metal. Other types of armor include Explosive Reactive Armor, ERA. When the round hits the ERA panel the ERA explodes, deforming the shape of the jet and preventing it from penetrating. The famous “Chobam” armor of British Challenger tanks is allegedly layers of ceramic, composit, and steel and can supposedly prevent penetration from HEAT rounds. And the US Abrams and some other vehicles use big fucking slabs of depleted uranium that are just so hard and so dense that the metal jet usually can’t penetrate.

    There are various types of weapons to defeat these modern armor systems. Tandem rounds have two war-heads. The first warhead it well forward, intended to detonate ERA panels so that the shaped charge coming in milliseconds later won’t be interruptedZ. Modern AT missiles can do what’s called “Top Attack”, where the missile pops up in an arc as it approaches the target and comes down directly on top of it. For a wide variety of reasons most armored vehicles have significantly less armor on the top of the vehicle and are largely helpless against modern top attack guided missiles. It’s generally agreed that the era of tank warfare is over since tanks are so vulnerable to anti-tank guided missiles, though the war in ukraine has called that long held position in to question. Both sides seem to have realized that if you can’t stop modern anti-tank weapons you don’t need modern tanks. Old tanks are just as not-survivable as cutting edge tanks, but still carry canons and machine guns. And if you don’t have good anti-tank weapons then tanks are just as unstoppable and deadly as they’ve ever been.

    Either way, that’s my tank warfare micro essay.

    • Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The really cool thing about this is you don’t even need it. Tungsten penetrator rods work just as well as uranium does without being nearly as toxic

      I think part of the problem is that it just so happens that the vast majority of the world’s tungsten is in China, followed (after a very big gap, China has a truly massive supply) by Russia & Vietnam.

      The only Western country to have a decent amount is Canada (and I guess if you combine Austria, Spain & Portugal in Europe they’ll add up to a similar amount). The US does actually apparently have some, it’s just not actually being mined, I assume because it would be too expensive. So for the US, it is simply much more economical to use DU instead of tungsten (or we could go into the Fallout timeline and have the US invade Canada, just for metal rather than oil).

    • YuccaMan [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Frank, I’m late on the draw here, but I just wanna say it warms to my heart to know that I’m not the only huge armored warfare nerd around here, and for this I thank you

      • footfaults [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        It’s heavy but Tungsten has lots of other commercial uses besides tank shells so in classic fashion, why use the expensive material when DU which has no other economical use is available and basically “free”

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        It is extremely heavy. I don’t know if it’s toxic or not, I never thought to ask. Lemme go look.

        Okay so quickly browsing some articles I came up with this - Tungesten does not seem to cause heavy metal poisoning the way uranium and lead do. Tungsten can cause airway irritation and, if you’re exposed to a lot of it over a long time, serious lung problems. This is apparently because tungesten dust is ultra-hard and extremely sharp, so it lacerates lung tissue on a very small scale. I guess similar to what asbestos does but I’m not sure.

        So as far as I can tell it does have some risks, but they’re different risks than other heavy metals and they require high level exposure over extended time periods.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        It is extremely heavy. I don’t know if it’s toxic or not, I never thought to ask. Lemme go look.

        Okay so quickly browsing some articles I came up with this - Tungesten does not seem to cause heavy metal poisoning the way uranium and lead do. Tungsten can cause airway irritation and, if you’re exposed to a lot of it over a long time, serious lung problems. This is apparently because tungesten dust is ultra-hard and extremely sharp, so it lacerates lung tissue on a very small scale. I guess similar to what asbestos does but I’m not sure.

        So as far as I can tell it does have some risks, but they’re different risks than other heavy metals and they require high level exposure over extended time periods.

      • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        A little bit of reddit brain I still have is that “masturbate” feels too formal so I have to stop myself from saying “fap” instead. It feels so cringe but it’s locked in my head as the “proper” informal term.

        • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Well, let’s be honest, talking about masturbation is gonna be cringe no matter which word you use, so you might as well use increasingly grotesque and absurd euphemisms.

          For instance, I recently carried out some leftist agitation in the Southern District, which culminated in a mass deportation of Whites.

    • Why are Libs scared of the word Russia?

      I thought it was a way of suggesting that Russia is a nazi country? Which is whatever, considering the positions the government has wrt LBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities, but it also justifies a total war of annihiliation because anything else is “appeasing them like Chamberlain did with Czechslovakia”, because god forbid people learn any other history than WW2.

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Which is whatever, considering the positions the government has wrt LBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities

        Excuse me, are you suggesting that the policies of Russian federation with regards to minorities is comparable to Nazi Germany?

        • I didn’t mean to suggest that, but I can see how I didn’t make it clear, sorry about that. The Russian Federation is (very obviously) not anywhere near as awful as Nazi Germany, but I am not also going to pretend that it doesn’t have a track record of cishet supremacist policies and systematic erasure of ethnic minorities’ and Indigenous Peoples’ cultures and control over their own land and livelihoods, making it at best a highly reactionary state, foreign policy/current conflict notwithstanding.

          Back to the point of my post, what I was trying to explain was how I understood the liberal association between Nazi Germany and the Russian Federation, because someone historically illiterate would look at a country that:

          1. is (wrongly) believed to be lead by an autocratic ruler and a small group of militaristic, corrupt elites.
          2. has reactionary internal policies
          3. is engaged in (what has been widely propagandized as) a war to take over another nation’s land. I don’t agree with this read, but the average liberal thinks that the war’s sole goal is gaining territory, because again, historical illiteracy.

          And say “wow this is just like 1939”, because their understanding of geopolitics is based on a surface understanding of WW2 and the metric tons of propaganda that have been in production since february of 2022. It’s neither right, nor accurate, but it is the way the most propagandized liberals will understand it, because as I said, it allows them to cheer for the total annihilation of the Russian people without giving it a second thought.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    3 people upvoted a post that says it’s okay to litter Ukrainian farmland with toxic heavy metals because real life is like Warcraft, and remember how in Warcraft 3 the story was how the orcs are always bad forever?

  • egg1918 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    As a western liberal, I propose we give the UAF some sort of defoliating agent to use on Russian defenses built in the tree lines to remove their cover. If you disagree with me you are a putler supporting KGB bot 😊😊

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    But if the articles are all in dutch or Chinese or Japanese, how am I supposed to you know? Like do my thing. You know?

    外国語を勉強せよ、単一言語の野郎。