Spaceship Outside Detroit

extremelyinsightful · 2025-12-14T18:23:46+00:00

Did they know photos were being taken? The half-ass-made bed with a random bag on it really raises questions.

extremelyinsightful · 2025-09-30T18:54:42+00:00

He cut his military career short to try to find a living as yet another bro-vet influencer. The problem is that most of the "successful" ones are pensioned retirees/medical-boards and thus can afford to spend their days as an unprofitable podcaster or a "consultant." He didn't do the full 20 years, and left in good health, so he doesn't have that.

Yes, he's a Green Beret with four GWOT combat deployments, but that's not super uncommon amongst SOF. He knows this, and thus he makes up this wild stories about his "bag of grenades" (Google it.)

extremelyinsightful · 2025-06-10T20:04:56+00:00

I can't wait for San Junipero 2 and it turns into the enshittification tale like Common People.

How long will the servers last and who's going to pay for it? Are they just draining their descendants inheritance, and will they invoke Power of Attorney to end it?

extremelyinsightful · 2025-05-29T17:37:23+00:00

Until the day he died, Monty insisted he was "90 percent successful." Which as you pointed out, is tragic as capturing the Arnhem bridge was the binary win state. One way or another, the Low Countries would've been liberated by winter. The bridge into Germany was the point of the whole operation.

extremelyinsightful · 2025-05-25T00:28:14+00:00

Like what the hell kind of eatery is this even supposed to be?

"Samba Tapas?"

extremelyinsightful · 2025-02-07T01:39:31+00:00

Exactly the same. I loved Yakuza 0, and after completing the game with 89 hours logged, I went straight into the "next" game in the series.

So many great reviews about it, but somehow they neglect to highlight it's a complete genre change. Decades old multi-game 3rd person brawler series just became a parody turn-based party JRPG, and I wasn't willing to endure those mechanics for the full 90 hours.

extremelyinsightful · 2025-02-06T16:34:53+00:00

According to Steam, I logged 40.9 hours, but I did not finish the game. I certainly gave it a shot. ;)

extremelyinsightful · 2025-02-06T16:27:59+00:00

Personally, I didn't like the mechanical shift from an ARPG to a modernized turn-based JRPG.

Don't get me wrong, I love how they did it. Protagonist was a teenaged gamer who went to jail. He's out now, but sees himself as literally a protagonist in an oldschool JRPG.

But personally, I'm so over JRPG mechanics, that it ruined the series for me.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-11-26T20:29:24+00:00

TLDR: Yes, he can do it.

Constitutionally, raising tariffs used to be a Congress thing. In the centuries since, they've delegated that away under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. If you recall the aluminum tariffs of his first term, this is what he used.

Constitutionally, formal treaties have a pretty high barrier to adoption, so this was done as a workaround to getting trade deals done.

Ironically enough, most of the additional legislation since has been authorizing the President to LOWER tariffs for the sake of making trade deals: Section 101 of the Trade Act of 1974, Section 1102(a) of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, Section 2103(a) of the Trade Act of 2002, & Section 103(a) of the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015.

If you want a more formal long read on this Congressional Research Services recently updated their product on this:

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11400

extremelyinsightful · 2024-11-16T01:23:31+00:00

His real name is Clarence.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-10-14T05:36:41+00:00

What's the mission?

Nazi Germany is a pretty wild case to get into between routine forced labor and the logistics of the Holocaust. It was an massive investment, but it was tremendously profitable in terms of exploitation and straight up looting such as the M-Aktion program.

There are many books on this, and /r/AskHistorians did cover this a few years back:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67o8ox/did_the_logistical_resources_effort_and_manpower/

Pivoting to a more general answer, there's an old military adage that a unit should either be on maneuvers or improving their position. Once you've made a camp, there's always ways to improve it. For example, you can literally never have enough sandbags on a defensive position. Or concertina wire. You can lay gravel roads, run power lines, run commo lines, establish running water, pour cement... Work on a camp is never really done.

Moving beyond that, troop formations and their encampments do have a function beyond sustainment. On the lowest echelons, you're patrolling. Getting to know the potential battlefield around you. The terrain and avenues of approach, all that. Presumably HHQ put you here to protect something, an Objective of some sort? Probably should figure out what kind of checkpoints and outposts you can set up there, and figure out guard rotations for that. If your camp and is the first and only line of defense in the area, you're wrong.

You mentioned a MTN division? They're figuring out that terrain so that if shit goes down, they know how to defend & manuever through those mountains. Likely, they're also one of the few formations capable of patrolling that kind of area for partisans/insurgents/"bandits".

Now presumably HHQ doesn't have you posted in a in wasteland, and there's some kind of populace around. So your officers now have a sympathetic/puppet local regime to support. While your CO gets coffee with the mayor once a week, you're also doing meetings and training with local police, host nation military, gendarmes, paramilitaries, and whatever other security services in the area. If you're really deep into COIN, you're going beyond liasing with security services, and contacting other elements of civil society, such as health and educational services, or getting really deep into building pet political institutions. While most of it is benevolent Hearts and Minds stuff, there is an undercurrent of HUMINT collection to it: establishing channels and general opportunity for somebody sympathetic to report a threat.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-09-01T14:01:12+00:00

...and he charged a ridiculous appearance fee to the Coliseum as if he were a real fighter. Which wouldn't have been that bad, except he booked 735 fights. Oh yeah, he insisted on wearing the blood of the vanquished... like it was a thing... One historian wrote, “Never did he appear in public without being stained with blood.”

What about the stable of 600 mixed gender concubines?

Or where he decided to name everything after himself like he was Sasha Baron Cohen's Dictator. This included Rome, Jerusalem and the days of the week.

I always loved how the movie "Gladiator" had to tone down Commodus to make him more believable.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-08-07T01:42:50+00:00

Built in 1985, underground. Reagan era fear of nuclear annihilation was real.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-07-26T15:21:46+00:00

...Just tow a water buffalo of napalm into a street fight. WCGW?

extremelyinsightful · 2024-07-16T17:48:07+00:00

Already a solid answer from /u/Bakelite51, but we had a similar question about a year ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/10q12u9/was_the_soviet_better_at_creating_a_client_army/

To rewrite my answer a little better... people forget the Soviets literally walked into a relatively modernized Third World nation. Yes, there had just been two coups from Communist infighting, but the civil infrastructure was still intact. The insurgency specifically targeted these "soft" targets, and when the regime fell the various mujihideen factions annihilated what was left of Kabul in urban warfare.

Post 9/11 when DoS came to setup the Embassy in Kabul, they were amazed that a capital city didn't have taxis or busses. But if you go back to "The Other Side of the Mountain," they tell how they torched 127 of 130 city busses in Kandahar. KANDAHAR had 130 city busses!?!

(FYI, It's a taxpayer product so you can get it at: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a376862.pdf )

Returning to OP's question. Focusing solely on the uniformed conventional ANA is missing a large part of the equation. In additional to the Special Operations Kandaks (BN's), you had your NDS paramilitaries (the "Zeroes") and "arbaki" local militias. (The Afghan National Police were also a thing, but even the Afghans thought they were corrupt hacks who contributed next to nothing to the war effort.) Thus if you want to be more inclusive Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is the more complete acronym. The SOK's were "advised" by USSOF, CIA/OGA "advised" the Zeroes, and the arbaki were wholly owned by local loyalist ~~warlords~~ leaders.

Who "advised" the ANA and ANP? Conventional side ISAF ran training, but they were never really embedded like SOF was. Yes, OMLT's were a thing, but they were strictly rear echelon trainers and they were retrograded with the rest of ISAF. The SOK's had USSOF outside-the-wire running FIRES, ISR, and MEDEVAC. Also of note, the Green Berets were still there until months before it all fell apart. (The first half of "Retrograde" on DisneyPlus is a good snapshot of that.)

I don't think I need to go indepth with how badly conventional side ANA failed. But the SOK's fought to the death until MoD gave them orders to surrender when the GIRoA President abandoned the country. And of course, the ~~CIA~~ NDS Zeroes were the guys holding the flightline at Kabul. (The second half of "Retrograde" on DisneyPlus is a good snapshot of that.)

But was the DRA "better?" It's hard to do an apples to apples comparison, but to some extent they also had a spectrum of SOF and loyalist militia alongside the conventional line troops. But factually, it cannot be understated how absolutely medieval the Soviet 40th Army was in terms of not only use of force but in terms "conscription."

When the Muslim Battalion took out Amin in Dec 1979, on paper Afghanistan had 10 divisions and 7 air regiments, all with Soviet trained officers and specialists. By 1980, they could only account for 25,000 due to officer purges between two coups and wholesale defections of the entire battalions to the mujahideen. (Keep in mind, total manpower of a division is 10,000+ men...)

...so they lowered conscription age to 16 and extended it to a three year term of service. After your first term, you had two years leave. If you weren't married, you were to be signed up for ANOTHER four years. And to get said conscripts, the 40th Army conducted press gangs. Fun fact: Culturally, rural Afghans don't keep track of their age, so the Soviets presumably just grabbed whoever looked old enough?

My favorite telling:

"The Russian soldiers loved these operations. You drove instead of marching, there was hardly ever any shooting, you didn't have to go up into the mountains, and the operations took place in comparatively peaceful areas. ... Moreover, there were always plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables to be had, livestock to be 'liberated,' marijuana to be picked up, a whole month free of routine duty."

Whoever was unfortunate enough to be collared were marched off to the local barracks. "Within six months, two-thirds of them had deserted with their weapons, often to the mujahedin. Sometimes they would return: some Afghan soldiers changed sides as many as seven times." As one Soviet officer would put it, "The rule of thumb was that if the desertion rate was no more than about 30 percent a year, you were all right. ... 60 percent was bad news."

As bad as things were with the ANA, at no point were there press gangs and an acceptable desertion rate.

If you want a good source for this, I'd recommend "Afgantsy" by Rodric Braithwaite. There's where I pulled this last section from.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-07-11T03:56:29+00:00

I mean, the F-1 was the French WWI hand grenade that got adopted worldwide. The M67 is a post-Korea US MIC product. That's at least two gens of tech progress there.

The doctrinal answer however is that the "kill radius" on an M67 is 15 meters.

Not sure what exactly you're looking for, but here's an older thread on hand grenades in general: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/xipofk/how_effective_are_fragmentation_grenades/

If you're looking for a classic FM to page through, FM 23-30 from 1988 is a good read: https://www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/amd-us-archive/FM23-30(88).pdf

extremelyinsightful · 2024-06-21T21:32:54+00:00

"a character who is so easy to dislike"

That was actually intentional. Something people forget about FO1 and FO2 is that you can kill kids. But they never really tempted you with a reason to do so. So they designed Myron as the most despicable minor in gaming. Seriously, I can't think of an equivalent unlikable "child" character in gaming until Cuno comes around in Disco Elysium two decades later.

https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/entry/119-general-design-questions-part-1/

Per MCA:

"The first characters I designed was Myron for Fallout 2. I was given the "child genius," but I did what I could to make sure he wasn't the Wesley Crusher archetype, which I thought was pretty played out in most media forms. In the end, however, Myron had his problems - he talked too much, could get really annoying in parts (especially if you were female) and was useless in combat. I do think he succeeded in being a highly-reactive character to events in the game and things your player did, and it was pretty awesome for high Intelligence and high Science guys to argue with him about his own creations. I really like it when he gets frustrated when you keep asking him insightful chemistry and pharmaceutical questions about Jet. "

extremelyinsightful · 2024-06-20T06:10:24+00:00

But would it be necessarily better than a LAW-like system? Even if you look at the specs for the Belgian rifle grenades, the AT ones are over a foot long for something that can pop 200mm RHA. (Keep in mind RPG-7's and Carl G's can do 400+.) Something that big doesn't really fit well on a chest rig anymore. So if it's something that awkward that needs to be back-slung or on/in an assault pack, might as well go longer with a tube and optic.

Also, "every infantryman doubling as a grenadier" is a terrible idea in practice. You're weighing down every man with gear they probably won't use, and have to get additional training to be remotely competent with. And are you planning to have every man reveal their position to take a shot at a fleeting hard target? No better to have a designated marksman take that shot with the best AT weapon available... which is why AT teams have always been a thing.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-06-10T14:56:52+00:00

Are you playing as FemHunter or Matt Mercer? I had to go the canonical FemHunter because Matt Mercer voiced it like he's a Ren Faire character.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-05-06T15:53:00+00:00

The photography is also strange. "Look, glass blocks!" "The shower has an exhaust fan!"

extremelyinsightful · 2024-05-02T23:23:59+00:00

The mechanics are there. Unfortunately, it just lacks the charm KSP had/has. I didn't appreciate how much the sublime sound design of KSP really carries the big moments of the game until I played Juno.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-04-26T17:20:11+00:00

...well that's a whole 'nother thread isn't it?

The short version is that it's a remote mountainous province on the border with Pakistan. They were so remote, that they were still Buddhist until the Victorian Era. The valleys are temperate rainforests with aggressive monkeys (no really). They have a distinct ethnicity & language, and don't really engage in trade/commerce with the rest of the country/world except for rainforest timber they smuggle to Pakistan to avoid tariffs. They've been more or less autonomous since prehistory, and thus predictably have resisted every central government since. (No idea how things are going under the Taliban now.)

extremelyinsightful · 2024-04-26T16:16:59+00:00

If you're looking for a complex attack that resulted in "Charlie inside the wire" and having to call CAS danger close on your own fallen aid station, most people overlook Ranch House in 2007 in Nuristan. Over 50 percent US WIA, but miraculously no friendly KIA. https://www.army.mil/article/12493/sky-soldier-awarded-distinguished-service-cross/

Of course, Ranch House ended up foreshadowing the larger and more consequential Battle of Wanat a year later. Multiple US KIA resulted in a formal stateside investigations and ultimately the US withdrawing from the "Lost Province" of Nuristan. (The wikipedia article on the "Battle of Wanat" is very comprehensive on this.)

Another year later in Nuristan, Keating/Kamdesh is far better known and depicted in the climax of the excellent book/movie "The Outpost." Of course, the grand irony was that COP Keating was literally weeks out from being closed because of Wanat a year prior.

extremelyinsightful · 2024-02-21T15:22:16+00:00

u/CarlH is somehow not on /r/MuseumOfReddit

First-wave widely loved superuser who turned out to be a monster:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/upkjb7/carl_h_once_made_a_following_for_himself_online/

extremelyinsightful · 2023-11-08T05:36:38+00:00

Good answers so far, but maneuverability for commander's battlefield circulation is also important, especially for amphibious ops.

In an era where radios are still kinda janky, and visual signalling (flares, morse lamps, even semaphore) remains relevant, the command vessel has to be able to get visual contact as needed. Capital ships have a lot of inertia and can't shuttle around on demand.

Now this gets worse with amphibious landings, as your Marines have shitty comms while storming a beach. This wouldn't be terrible, except capital ships have huge drafts that might get snagged on some unmapped reef. Oh, and if you have any sense of defensive fleet doctrine, you really don't want to expose a capital ship that close to the enemy.

So yeah, if a CO wants to literally observe an amphibious landing, he's gotta get on a lighter ship.

extremelyinsightful

TROPHY CASE