jmsaari

The effective defended area of a SAM system is going to be very small vs something that fast but provided the Patriot happened to be sited near the target, i can't see any reason why a PAC-2GEM or PAC-3 wouldn't be able to intercept a Kinzhal. Prob S-300V also,  with some luck perhaps even IRIS-T SLM/SLX, ealier Patriots or S-300P variants for that matter... the effectively defended footprint does get very small though and Ukraine is a big country with what, is it now 2 fire units of Patriot, or what''s the current situation?

They make it sound like there's something weird about that.....
https://www.theonion.com/man-s-life-spent-occasionally-eating-barbecue-in-betwee-1840172790

Oh yeah, i realize i was in the wrong thread... somehow managed to mistake that as the continuation of the 57mm & drone discussion. And definately not an RPK-1 van, on second look, either.

7 hours ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

 

What are we looking at here, RPK-1 van? I could buy 1 cruise missile getting hit by 57mm by dumb luck, anything's possible, but that's well past what's even remotely credible...

5 hours ago, Markus Becker said:

Nice. UKR MTLB with the old 57mm(?) AA gun? That gun should be fine for anti drone work. On the bigger Iranian ones. 

Marginal even vs shaheed, due to the lack of time- or proxy-fuzed ammo. Even with radar and a battery as fire unit, it would take a lot of ammo and a good bit of luck to score that direct hit. It looks like they're using that vehicle for direct-fire support, which is prob what the gun is best suited for... bit of a shame nobody has made modern ammo and a fire-control upgrade for the S-60, with those it would be a fine drone-swatter. And without those, i wouldn't fancy the chances of even much higher rate of fire gun like the ZU-23 in Roman's post, not vs a lancet coming straight at you, anyway... no matter what the skills of the crew, it takes plenty of luck on top. Passing shaheed would be a bigger target but still by no means an easy one.

7 minutes ago, urbanoid said:

We should put some Common Sense One-Linerism Control in place.

If you outlaw one-liners, only outlaws will post one-liners.

5 hours ago, MiGG0 said:

 

Seems like the Lancet hits just a tad short of the Gepard, and no smoke, fire, or secondaries... I'd say 90% odds gepard no bonk.

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Bear in mind, significant chunks of the Ukrainian air force still exists. If they want to achieve parity over the battlefield, they will. No, it wont last. But then it probably doesnt need to.

I wouldn't be very optimistic about even a temporary parity over the battlefield with a force as badly outnumbered and technologically outclassed as a small number of MiG-29s with R-27R going against opponent with Su-3x with R-77/37 variants + extensive SAM coverage.

Ukrainian air force has still it's usefulness for the limited roles at lobbing JDAMs and HARMs & interceptor deep within it's own territory.. trying to go head-to-head with RuAF is going to be a suicide mission with what they have to throw at it.

14 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Isn't that the default mode when in Finland?

Some days (and nights) are worse than others....

At least some of Heller's claims were relatively easy to pick apart as cherry-picking, half-truths, red herrings or outright fabrications when i last looked into it a few years back, so i wouldn't exactly call it a baseless character assassination. I'm sure he's got a few posts out there that are more or less on the spot, too, if for no other reason that there's plenty of exaggerations and false alarmists that mirror Heller's loose approach to facts and truth, but that's not much to say in his favor and he's off often enough and disingenuous enough to not be worth serious consideration. 

Only now saw this... very sorry to hear that

17 minutes ago, Ivanhoe said:

The USian chattering classists going after Netanyahu are using the same tactics used against Trump, so I am going to assume the real criminals/fascists in Israel are Natanyahu's opponents. One rarely goes wrong in assuming that leftist accusations against the right are actually Freudian confessions of leftist misdeeds.

You'd probably go wrong about 50% of the time with that, and the fact that the traditional left has all but shrunk into oblivion in Israel and much of the opposition of bibi's latest shenanigans includes ... well, pretty much everyone, including right-wing nationalist parties, is a pretty good indication this is one of those times.

So, a Russian Su-27 apparently scored a taran kill on a Reaper drone today: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64957792

No news yet on what happened to the fighter or how it happened, except that the Flanker apparently clipped the propeller which is in the rear. Maybe trying to come too close below the drone and one of the vertical stabilizers touched the prop or smth.

1 hour ago, Yama said:

If you ask them, Jesus obviously was white, because all the other great people (in their mind) were too.

Jesus is usually depicted differently in different cultures so as to have a familiar look:

https://twitter.com/ImtiazMadmood/status/1295413225954181121/photo/1

Talking of various efficiencies is easily confusing. In power plant engineering textbooks everything is nicely defined but already in the industry you hear operators having their own definitions for things like electrical, thermal, auxiliary efficiency etc. And in newspapers and such, you're lucky if they get the difference between energy and power right...

Just realized I forgot the bloody obvious: European plants report efficiencies on fuel lower heating value basis, those of Sam on higher heating value...not much difference with anthracite, but big difference with brown coal.

Well the furnace can extract pretty much 99+ % of the energy in coal in combustion, and put around 90% of that into the steam cycle... how much you can convert of that to electricity vs dumping out in the condenser depends on how hot you can get the steam, which is a material issue in the boiler superheater surfaces basically: how much you can pay for them, and how often replacing. The higher the temperature, the more of that you can convert to power, and the less has to be dumped to the environment in condenser.

Modern plants are now at around 650 °C and you could have 2 reheats, which should put the Carnot efficiency (thermodynamic max) at well over 60%... Turbine flow losses slice off bit over 10% from theoretical max, plant auxiliaries take several percent, and a few are lost in generator and transformer, so we're left below 50 still. 

The steam temperatures used to go up fairly fast and there were prediction's of over 700°C by now but that rate of increase has slowed to a snail's pace for several decades already so we prob won't ever see a 50% plant unless there's a major breakthrough in the material science for high-temperature affordable pressure vessel materials. 

33% is very low though, probably a lot of very old plants that haven't been modernized if that's the case... cheap coal killing invest in efficiency perhaps?

2 hours ago, bojan said:

*"White kidneys" aka Rocky Mountains oysters 

That reminded of in VN, last evening before flight back to FIN, asking the locals for dinner ideas while still could try something i wouldn't find in Europe. After having vetoe'd option 1(*) we headed to some traditional foods restaurant for some grilled bull dick. As it turned out they had run out of dicks though, so we had cow titties instead: nice, soft meat, mildly flavoured, not in any way an extreme food experience. Came as raw cubes and a tiny charcoal grill in the middle of table to cook it in like raclette or hotpot.

(*) it turns out that somewhere between the stomach and anus there is a part of bowel where the contents basically aren't vomit anymore but not shit yet either, and the whole things is just twisted into sausage. Forgot what it was called but apparantely considered too extreme to eat by 90+% of locals too. I generally try to go with the principle of trying anything cooked from a vertebrate once, but there are exceptions......

I'm divided. Had some very good liver and blood foods in Finland and Brazil, but some others were just horrible. A mix of thinly slized beef liver, pork belly, lots of onion and something called "jilo", all fried with plenty of butter, was one of the best things i've had in brazil, after grilled picanha&maminha anyway. Something called "moela" in portuguese, cooked right was awesome, too. Not sure what it's called in english, but it's that muscular part of the bird digestive tract the bird uses with ingested sand to grind it's food. It's slaughter waste / dog food in Finland and very tough, but turns out that softened with time in the pressure cooker with red wine, onion & spices, it becomes very good, flavourful meat.

And yes, black pudding was my favourite of the Irish breakfast table a few years back in a conference. Very familiar flavors from some Finnish blood sausages, but IMO even better.

For getting started with liver, bird liver is certainly a lot milder in flavour. And the key for me at least is the right balance of flavours, too strong liver/blood flavours become off-putting but thinly sliced liver for enough maillard surface, lots of onion for bit of sweetness for balance, plus butter, comes out great. (And bacon makes everything better of course, it's like butter that way...)

Now as for kidneys... if the food smells of piss when you cook it, i will pass, thankyouverymuch...

I'm not a big fan of stuff that's overly sweet, but i've found a small amount of sugar works well in a lot of things. E.g. the bbq sauce, it needs some sugar to balance the acidity, and it needs the acidity to balance the fat in the meat you're eating it with, so sugar has its place... but i've found that most american bbq sauces work better for me if i divide the amount of sugar or syrup by 2 or 3. Not sure where it originates from in the US though, when you go south to Brazil etc where sugarcane is a big part of agriculture, the desserts become absolutely disgustingly over-sweet by north european standards, but the salty & savoury stuff doesn't get sugar, if anything people were surprised to see me adding a pinch of sugar to a lot of non-dessert things they weren't used to combining sugar. ..

21 minutes ago, BansheeOne said:

Oh, the memories of camping in the Finnish woods ... 😬

More seriously, I suspect Finnish media have reported on the story before, just not in English; which to the US-centric internet crowd means it didn't happen.

It did, all the major outlets anyway, in Finnish and Swedish. Now that i checked, the english-language versions which tend to be quite a bit more limited in coverage didn't, though. Was about to explain that at first but figured it doesnt warrant a serious reply, Strannik & co will twist their minds to believe what they want anyhow and anyone else will conclude just as you did without explanations. 

I guess i'm strarting to see where seahawk's coming from...

As for that "Helsinki Times", it's a tiny outlet founded by some Iranian immigrant 15+ years ago, the paper version was closed years ago but apparently the online version still lives.

1 hour ago, Strannik said:

Finnish paper has finally (insert a politically incorrect joke about speedy Finns published the Hersh story

 

It must have been an accident of censorship to let the paper publish the truth. We can expect the editors to have a tragic snowplow accident any moment now.

1 hour ago, ex2cav said:

By your writing I presume you take the official story that Russia blew up its own multi-billion dollar pipeline and revenue flow.

What revenue flow? There was no gas going through it and didn't and doesn't look like there ever would, even if it wasn't blown up. 

3 hours ago, sunday said:

Wonder what those three links have to do with these medical researchers:

Denis G. Rancourt, PhD; Marine Baudin, PhD; Joseph Hickey, PhD; Jérémie Mercier, PhD

who authored this paper:

Unless one assumes that everything that Kirsch quotes gets tainted by his quoting, of course. But that looks like a somewhat irrational assumption to assume.

Tried to look up those "medical researchers"; turns out the 1st author is a former physicist (not physician, a physicist) who got fired some time ago for grading disputes, the rest have negligible publishing records except for couple of articles on why the pandemic was a hoax and vaccines kill people, and a small handful of unrelated publications in unrelated non-medical field (biofuel production etc), and affiliations as "independent researcher"; their paper is a preprint to a journal that doesn't make even the lowest tier of recognized peer-reviewed journals. And they're trying to make claims that fly in the face of even the most rudimentary back-of-a-napkin test of credibility.

Yeah, colour me unsurprised.

5 minutes ago, JWB said:

It has already been pointed out he is a con man.

not to mention that the figures he's putting out are just plain silly. We've had 12 million vaccine doses given in Finland. With his figures that'd come out as double the excess deaths we've actually had - and we can be pretty sure that some of those excess deaths were due to COVID, others due to the restrictions that exacerbated the problems of sedentary lifestyle and mental health issues that were an issue to begin with, the accumulating problems of our health care system and staff shortage, the fact that the excess mortality has been creeping up since 2011 already, and finally (what i suspect could likely be the single biggest cause behind the excess deaths) in 2020 the diagnoses of cancers and heart diseases dropped to a fraction of the usual. Since that probably didn't come because the COVID pandemic suddenly cured cancers and opened blocked arteries, the excess mortality spike was more or less guaranteed already then with the delayed diagnoses and thus treatment.

The only major factor moving the figure the opposite way would be the flu seasons that were pretty much skipped during the pandemic-time restrictions - and even on that, there's a question of how much of what was skipped 2020-21 is just coming back with interest now on winter 22-23 with reduced exposure having lead to reduced immunity in the population. We basically made an experiment on how our immune systems react when exposure to bugs gets cut dramatically for a period of 2 years or so, and what you can see is at least regular flus seem to be more frequent and more intense this winter than usually.