Ukrainians eventually overcame it and now produce entirely China-free drones apart from IR lenses (when they are needed), and magnets. If that was possible surely bigger countries can do it easily.
Most of the drones, sure, but they also have a low-level (a few thousands per month) production of those with almost no China-origin components - only Ukrainian or Western made. They are still pricier than all-China though, at almost $1000 per (night vision) FPV drone able to carry 2kg.
Only really hard-to-replace part is magnets for electric motors.
Or maybe even buy the components from Ukraine if they’re producing at scale, not their priority at the moment but would provide some leverage for support.
In practice, it may be that NATO desperately needs Ukrainian military personnel to personally share their experience with drone warfare, or risk being Blitzkrieg'd by an equally drone-experienced Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZL1KzV54Cw
In reality, drones only matter because neither Ukraine nor Russia has a viable air force able to operate in SAM-rich environment, and they both ran out of artillery shells having to make do with the small amounts they can produce/buy. So it's not like that drones came out as superior to everything else, but everything else went out of business.
Drones are too low and too slow to counter planes. If either side had an air superiority, drones won't matter as theatre isolation will make them irrelevant.
If drones look like some uber weapon these days it's an aberration coming from archaic nature of both armies otherwise, at least now after their stock of munitions have been expended. Surely if there was a war of Iran vs Iraq nowadays, drones will probably be just as relevant. But not US vs China as both sides have workable air forces. And navies.
But you can ask, how come they’ve run out of artillery shells and haven’t run out of drones?
Answer: because drones are cheaper and easier to produce.
That suggests that drones will be a significant factor in any future conflict that occurs over an extended period of time. Russia is a country of 143 million people under an authoritarian regime that has been able to switch the economy to a war footing. If Russia can’t produce enough artillery shells, probably no-one can.
The effects of attrition on air power are also hard to predict as there’s very little recent data to go on. How long would it take the US to run out of F-22s during an extended war against a capable adversary? Possibly not very long, unless those planes are absolutely everything that they’re cracked up to be.
Quit all social media 8 years ago, never missed it one bit. It was all good and i truly enjoyed it before ~2014 but then it started deteriorating so rapidly due to political polarisation and domination of "influencers" that kept peddling worthless trash, by about 2016 i no longer understood wtf i was doing there.
Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem - it's an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do a lot of those "filler" posts to allow oneself one real one, thus SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it's not some evil bots who's creating noise, but actual live people, and not even dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this - for what? To get a chance to participate in one more "someone on the internet is wrong" debate?
Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by at least something and where is at least some real barrier of entry. These are not the social media. They can't afford filtering who gets in because that way they'll lose viewership and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as a surprise to anyone.
These days it does not matter anymore if something is legal or not. Which may be bad news for the tech industry actually, because it's all about valuations, and valuations suffer if property rights are not guaranteed.
200 kill sats is laughably little. The Earth is rather big and they will be uniformly distributed, putting closest sat at almost 1000km from target while whole boost phase of a solid fueled ICBM is 350-400km. So there's no chance it could work. It will take tens of thousands of sats, like Starlink.
It’s an ABM system. It is not supposed to _work_, it is supposed to lead to the transfer of money from government to manufacturer, much like previous efforts.
Well, problem with nuclear power is timelines. Before any new nuclear can be built, renewables will fill all energy needs. So it will be wasted money. Gotta wait.
You gotta get a downconverter and a bias-tee to power it (or use the bias-tee built in the RTL-SDR if the downconverter is 4.5 volt - most aren't though). Then you can access high-freq. 10+ GHz must be a satellite right? There's no way for terrestrial to work at that freq.
And yes this is all easy this day. Hard stuff comes when you transmit, and harder yet when you do both. Then you can do crazy things, but that isn't at all easy... Like https://hforsten.com/ is doing. Still accessible from components pricing and regulations perspective, to almost everyone.
Isn't it an obvious way to grab and keep more attention? I think any outlet that depends on people's attention - which is, anything on the internet - is doomed unless they do the same, because they all compete.
Also, i think we have arrived to the point where publishing open source code becomes hard to sustain even from a moral perspective. Because it is immediately mined by AI giants, it does little but enforces and perpetuates the power of monopolies. Few people will see open source contribution from all but a few most prominent people - but AI mill will see everything.
This hits the nail on the head for me. When I built my open source project, I felt like a part of society, I was happy to be a part of it. I was proud to contribute even if I didn't capture much of the value I created...
Now I feel like all of this structure is exploiting and manipulating me and others psychologically. The level of ethics is so low, it is beyond what I could have imagined. I simply don't get the same feelings as I once did. Working on open source doesn't make me hopeful and feel like part of something, it makes me feel like a naive fool.
My comments may sound negative but I'm trying to help others, who may be slightly younger versions of myself, to avoid a lot of pain.
This pain doesn't teach you much besides resilience and the gains there become extremely marginal... On the other hand, it doesn't seem very useful career-wise to see things as they are.
To succeed, you need to be on the same wavelength of optimism as existing successful people. My worldview is holding me back. Ignorance can be an advantage.
I can't see why it's a bitter prediction. It's an observation from all my life that boring, mind-numbing but high impact work makes the best money. Now smart people go into coding because it's a thrill, they enjoy doing it for the sake of it. Once this is no longer the case, these people will be out, and competition will become lower and there will be easier bucks to make.
reply