The lethal effects of artillery were not put on a really scientific basis until WW2.
There were lots of reasons for this involving money & politics I won't go into.
When the operational analysts to their first bite. They made charts like this mapping fragment impacts. 2/
The previous chart wasn't accurate because because it mapped a static detonation.
Analysts knew these maps were wrong because of damage inflicted in WW2.
It took early vacuum tube digital computers in the 1950's to accurately model how velocity altered that frag-pattern. 3/
What analysts were trying to achieve was a consistent modeling of airburst frag-patterns to kill infantry in trenches.
Then this information was fed into engineering shell designs to get the metallurgy & design of shells 4/
...such that they consistently made fragments of the right size/velocity to kill infantry over larger areas.
Starting in the 1970's through early 2000's this technological avenue was abandoned for the deployment of cluster munitions. 5/
The movement to ban cluster weapons lead to a push to replace lots of little bombs with more efficient fragmentation with 40 years better computer technology, explosives & metallurgy.
This Rheinmetall infographic shows what that means in terms of shell lethality. 6/
PBX4 IM is a insensitive plastic explosive that fragments steel more efficiently than TNT.
# Pre-Frag means the number of engineered fragments the shell produces. Now read the infographic bottom line from left to right.
7/
Russian 152mm shells have not ridden the increased lethality technological development train because Russia kept artillery cluster munitions.
The M795 155mm shell has. And it much more lethal on a shell for shell basis than a Russian 152mm shell because it did.
8/
There is a price to be paid for US M795 shell being both more lethal in its fragmentation and safer to use because of the explosives.
It costs more than a Russian 152mm shell.
There are reasons why the defense budget costs more for fewer weapons.
This is one of them.
9/End
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Remember all the professionally incompetent yo-yo naval officers & hangers on claiming FPV drones were not a threat to naval warships in 2023 WHEN I TOLD THEM THEY WOULD BE?
Reality just kicked them one and all in the 'nads...
I told these professionally incompetent US navalists accounts on X/Twitter in 2023 that both containerized drones and FPV drones were a deadly threat to every naval vessel on the water they were ignoring to their crew's peril.
We need to have a talk about Russian military corruption and its effects on the Russo-Ukrainian War.
It's kind of like these sun-rotted missile truck tires that make my reputation on Twitter.
Corruption happens slowly, then all at once.
Corruption🧵 1/
The Russian Army issued a "live off the land" order in early March 2022 resulted in lots of Russian enlisted stealing outside the line of sight of Russian junior officers.
This hollowed out discipline the RuAF "Professional Volunteers" in early 2022.
More information has come out on the FP-5 Flamingo which gives insights io both the systems and production engineering involved for low cost production.
I'm going to use the WW2 F6F Hellcat & M4 Sherman as examples of Ukrainian FP-5 design choices.
The FP-5 GLCM production photos released today shows what looks like a combination of carbon fiber composite, molded thermoplastics, and sheet metal.
Cruciform tail controls are all moving.
Wings are attached before launch like a 1960s USAF MGM-1 Matador. 2/
The FP-5 Transporter Erector Launch (TEL) trailer looks like a new custom build.
Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point, stated to the AP that "Fire Point is producing roughly one Flamingo per day, and by October they hope to build capacity to make seven per day."
...With a similar configuration, drag will not be dominated by lift induced wing drag but will form drag which is typical for 500 knots air speed jets and missiles with low aspect ratio wings.
2/
...So a rule of thumb estimate is that you will need around 4 x the thrust of a Tomahawk F107-WR-402 700 lbf (3.1 kN) engine for an FP-5 Flamingo GLCM.
3/
Slowly, with a lot of notice, Trump is morphing into Pres. Biden
This territorial concession malarkey is exactly what the Biden Administration was playing games with in Nov 2021 via an op-ed by Samuel Charap of RAND in the Nov 19, 2021 Politico.
That Op-Ed advocated, in effect, that the US abandon Ukraine to Russia in exchange for other concessions by Russia, greenlighting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It was understood in Nov. 2021 era DC that Charap...