MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, any]

No one is going to nuke each other over Venezuela. China is not going to directly confront the US over Venezuela either. The US bombed Iran, where China buys a lot of oil, and China did not militarily confront the US in any way. China cares about projecting power around the first and second island chains. Everything else is secondary.

Yes, guidance is very complicated, especially if you want to hit a moving target like a ship. With static land targets it’s “easier”, but getting these high speed missiles on target with a high enough accuracy to do damage, using a conventional warhead or the kinetic energy from a high speed impact is still complicated. Especially in wartime conditions where there will be a mess of electronic countermeasures/jamming to mess with satellite navigation and datalinks. Aside from satellite navigation, a highly accurate inertial measurement unit (IMU) can help a lot, for instance using a ring laser gyroscope like ATACMS uses vs consumer grade IMUs. For hitting moving targets, optical guidance (essentially a camera in the missile), and/or an active radar seeker can be used, with automated target acquisition, the missile can find and hit a target on it’s own. If there’s a datalink between an optically guided missile and an aircraft or ground station, the missile can be manually piloted/guided onto the target by a person, this is called human in the loop guidance or TV guidance. But a lot of this gets complicated at hypersonic speeds, dust on re-entry can blind the camera, then there’s plasma sheaths that could blind it and make a datalink complicated. This may require the glide vehicle or re entry vehicle slowing down just before hitting the target.

and yet we have not developed hypersonic missiles

This really depends on what is classified as a “hypersonic missile”.

For just reaching over Mach 5, the US was doing this with modified V2s after WW2. The US did plenty of research on maneuverable re-entry vehicles for ballistic missiles during the cold war, and deployed the Pershing-II with such in the 1980s.

However, technically, none of those are considered hypersonic missiles, even if they reach hypersonic speeds at some point in flight and have portions of their trajectory that are non ballistic. Hypersonic missiles are usually about sustained hypersonic speeds within the earth’s atmosphere on a trajectory that is not ballistic for the majority of it’s flight, with glide vehicles and cruise missiles. Under that definition, the US Army has the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), also called the Dark Eagle, a hypersonic glide vehicle.

Aside from that, the US has developed lots of hypersonic manned aircraft/spacecraft and “missiles”, hell the first principles of what we know about hypersonic flight come from the X-15 test aircraft that was first flown by the US in the 1960s (essentially a manned hypersonic missile that could land on salt flats), “the most successful research airplane in history” according to Neil Armstrong. The Space Shuttle was also essentially a manned hypersonic glide vehicle. If you look at modern missiles (both interceptors and the ones made to take out targets), they take a lot of design cues from the X-15 and Space Shuttle. From lateral thrusters and thick control surfaces to maneuver at high speed in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere (first pioneered on the X-15, so it’s hard to disagree with Armstrong there), to every second hypersonic glide vehicle looking like a mini Space Shuttle. Then there’s the X-51 Waverider, which achieved over 200 seconds of hypersonic flight utilising a scramjet, for a total flight time of 240 seconds 12 years ago. There are plenty of hypersonic test beds around.

What the US hasn’t developed, aside from the LHRW, is a hypersonic weapons system. This is very different from a test aircraft or missile, for various reasons revolving around force structure and doctrine. The US could, if they wanted to, weaponise the X-51 and have a 700+km range scramjet powered hypersonic cruise missile tomorrow. Over the past two years we’ve seen how Israel was able to weaponise their Sparrow target missiles used to test the Arrow air defence system, into weapons such as air launched ballistic missiles that can take out targets in Iran.

So the US could do that to something like the X-51. The reason they don’t do it is because no one will buy it, not the air force, not the navy. And this is because of questions around force structure and what these branches of the US military want. The air force, in particular, wants a miniaturised hypersonic missile that can be launched by tactical fighter jets, and doesn’t require a B-52 bomber to launch it like the X-51 did and ARRW does currently. The US air force is also not interested in jerry rigging F-15s to carry a single large missile. They want a minituarised X-51, that a US F-15 or Australian F-18 can carry multiple of. That’s what the HACM is supposed to be.

For the Navy, it’s even more complicated, they want a missile that can safely be stowed on an aircraft carrier in existing infrastructure (they do not want to retrofit every aircraft carrier for a new missile) that can target ships, and they Navy doesn’t operate large bombers so it has to be small, the air force still has the luxury of falling back on larger missiles if HACM doesn’t pan out, the navy does not. This means very strict requirements on size, fuels used in the missile, the guidance system for anti ship combat, while still meeting a high enough performance standard to make it worth the money and a leap in capability over existing weapons, like say the SM-6, which can be used in an anti ship role, and carried by F-18 fighters. This is why HALO is in limbo or cancelled, struggling to meet performance requirements and stay in the restrictions.

All animals want to keep living, that’s literally why animals evolved brains in the first place, to keep their bodies alive for as long as possible. How can you, who is not the pet, say for sure they would prefer to die than keep living? You can’t ask them, and you can’t get in their mind to determine how much they still appreciate being alive. Even the oldest, sickest pet will still make an effort to keep themselves alive however they can: eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc. As far as I know, no animal (at least the animals we keep as pets) have an instinct to just give up and stop going through the motions of life past a certain age.

While it’s not an instinct, I’ve known friends and family members who have had dogs and cats who stopped putting in the effort to eat and drink at the very end. At that stage, you know that it’s over…

• Mike Isratel.

Seriously look at his form. Turns every exercise and movement into a spinal erector exercise.

The war hawks and neocons obviously want to topple Cuba. But very little of what Michael Flynn says publicly should be taken seriously. He’s made multiple comments recently that are factually inaccurate . His connection to the current administration is tenuous at best, and he seems to be using his credentials to stir the pot on social media or grift.

I personally don’t think people should defend his poor behaviour and that the “online left” collectively deciding to hitch their bandwagon to Hasan years ago was a bad decision, but that’s just my opinion. Most people on the online left disagree with me on that one.

I’ll never watch a twitch politics steamer, sorry. Pretty much all of them always seem to double down when proven wrong or caught up in any controversy, when apologising would go a long way. Since when has apologising become a bad thing/negative/weak? Admitting fault and moving on is an important part of maturing. All these streamers seem like 30+ year old people acting like kids.

Unfortunately that’s just not true, this car (ITAOUA Sahel) is a rebadged Dongfeng Nanobox EV, it’s not a fully indigenous EV, it’s made in Hubei, China; and based on a Renault platform, it’s basically an electric Renault Kwid made in China.

Dongfeng Nanobox 2024 review

For starters, this small EV from Dongfeng goes by different aliases, depending on where it’s being sold. The Nanobox is basically a badge-engineered product of the Dongfeng and Renault-Nissan alliance joint venture. In its home market, the Nanobox is known as the Dongfeng Aeolus EX1 / Fengxing T1 / Fengguang E1 or Dongfeng-Nissan Venucia e30. But in the UK and European markets, the Nanobox goes by the name Renault City K-ZE, Renault Kwid E-Tech Electric, or the Dacia Spring Electric. Regardless of the name, they come from the same assembly line in Hubei, China.

Built on the Renault CMFA-EV platform, the Nanobox’s Alliance underpinnings were adapted for battery electric vehicle applications. The original Renault Kwid where the Nanobox was based, started as a crossover city car with a small 3-cylinder gasoline engine – very much like the Suzuki S-Presso.

This EV rebadging exercise likely has to do with a deal between Li Yubao, president of Yunhong International/Group, and Burkina Faso. Yunhong International is a Chinese special purpose acquisitions company part of the Belt and Road initiative in China. They already had deals going back to the previous government, and recently gave some EVs to Burkina Faso for their civil servants. If this rebadging deal includes a local assembly plant where the parts are built in China first before being put together locally, like it does in Botswana with the Skywell BE11, is not clear at this stage. The news articles say it does, but they also say this a fully indigenous EV, which is not true.