Comments by "Laird Cummings" (@lairdcummings9092) on "Ed Nash's Military Matters" channel.

  1. Always good to have a backup plan. I daresay the M.20 would have done yeoman work, had it been pressed into service.
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  2.  @brianbrandt25  if you were sufficiently ST:OS geeky, you'd know that's not even a good joke; no one is making antimatter weapons.
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  3. 57mm AAA systems are very rare these days, as they fall exactly in the middle of the range between "Highly effective" and "Highly mobile." Simply put, 57mm ground mounts are just not useful in a fluid, mobile ground combat situation, and haven't been for many decades.
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  4.  @hatchet646  meh. It there's improvement to be had, and it's not too costly, that's probably for the best. Of course, there's always room for corruption.
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  5.  @hatchet646  i expect they're going to sell a LOT of Leo upgrades. Full chassis? Not so much. Not unless they can demonstrate a large value added for the cost. Especially not when the Leo chassis is already so good.
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  6. A very large percentage of the weapons that were officially "turned over" to the Afghan government were in fact undergoing repair or refurbishment in... The United States. Where they remain.
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  7. The media absolutely requires controversy in order to survive - no one is going to click on articles that say "Nothing to see here." So, of course they're going to be launching verbal firebombs such as "Tanks are dead."
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  8. Its not that it wasn't 'right;' it's just that it was competing with an aircraft that was just as 'right' - or maybe a bit more so - that was already mature, proven, and in production.
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  9. Dragons are real.
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  10. Looks like Burt Rutan's grandfather was here.
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  11. Never forget the salon! Must fit that in, somewhere.
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  12. Usually, if you throw enough money at a problem, it can be overcome. Not the smartest solution (usually), but a reliable one.
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  13.  @martinharries8689  ah, yes, playing the paranoid to try and undermine the UK's proper, moral, and righteous support against that fascist, Putin.
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  14.  @pennise  oh, they had their bean counters, absolutely. No project that large can succeed without bean counters. What they didn't have was mass quantities of regulators. Sure, there were some, but no more than strictly necessary. These days? We've got - literally - regulators regulating other regulators.
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  15.  @pennise  whistle true, you then have the problem when the Engineers nearly bankrupted Boeing. Because they were shit at counting beans. Bean counters MUST have a seat at the table (and did, except for that - fortunately brief - tenure). Saying there were no bean counters present or involved is factually and functionally wrong.
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  16. Suspiciously watching calendar - old hoax is ever-green.
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  17. They also have two ranks of Warrant Officer.
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  18.  @watcherzero5256  probably true, and addressed in my post, above.
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  19.  @Mr.Robert1  yeah, it's been gussied up. The airframe serial numbers don't change, though.
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  20. "very tricky" =! "Impossible." There are enough videos from the ground showing UAF fixed-wing aviation penetrating the FEBA that I'm not going to call the authors of this videos liars from my armchair.
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  21. Completely unknown to me; seems it could have been a significant force-multiplier if built in decent numbers.
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  22. Oh, and 'copter' drones don't have the lifting capacity for any useful countermeasures and their downdraft would automatically disperse any cloud or gaseous countermeasures, whilst winged drones move too fast to be protected by anti-laser measures - they literally leave the countermeasures behind.
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  23.  @megagamernick9883  as an illustration, it hasn't changed much, except getting worse for gun systems. Iraq had modern AAA systems (for the day). There's much less footage of AAA gun systems in use in Putin's War, despite the HUGE volume of video coming out of that war, because the AAA gun is much less useful, portable, and less effective than MANPADS and larger SAMs. But spending a US$1M missile to blot out a $300K drone is inefficient, and using $100k MANPADS to pot a $100 hobby drone is even worse. Blazing away at a drone that's dinking about just out of range, and / or maneuvering sharply whilst laughing at your gunners' inability to swat the mosquito, is just ludicrous.
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  24.  @JimmySailor  57mm towed and self-propelled gun mounts are a thing. They're not widely used any more, because they're no longer effective or efficient. If you MUST use a gun system, 35mm to 40mm is where the smart money is (See German SP AAA platforms). High volumes of fire, lots of ammo on board, quick tracking, useful warheads, etc. They're still not using them for drone hunting - they're expensive, fairly rare, and reserved for anti-aircraft defense of high value targets where drones would not be used.
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  25. Bird in the hand worth two in the bush.
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  26. You learn more from failure than you do from success. I wonder who got paid to force the engine selection?
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  27.  @mbryson2899  probably doesn't much care, being long dead.
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