What Ukrainians are requesting and what they might eventually use are two wholly different things. At present they want it all , planes ,tanks, drones ,antishipping missiles ,nukes, on the other hand . one wonders where are all their soldiers.

Conflict is a month old, by now Ukrainas should have drafted and put through 2-3 week course way more than a million men in addition to 300+ k they had under arms day one, its military is by now basically supported and supplied by NATO, has all the intel and targeting data NATO can provide 24/7 way beyond what Russians have, was the unlimited budget we pay for, safe havens for training supply and superior gear to the Russians ! And yet They are still losing ground every day to what we are led to believe is an incompetent force of 200k spread thin on an extremely long front. 

Ukraine even before all this had more small arms than most of NATO Europe combined, the same goes for Tanks. Ukrainian stock is larger than the whole of Nato Europe they really don't need all the shit they are requesting.

Mr. T (MrT4) said:

And yet They are still losing ground every day

Hum, you would probably have difficulties to demonstrate that point...

While Ukraine is absolutely and decisively winning the information war, on the ground the winning is modest at best. A much larger Ukrainian force from day1 has been unable to maneuver and bring their numbers to bear in any place. By now i reckon they have a 5:1 or more advantage in numbers and are still not able to maneuver at all.  

By any measure, they are still losing ground south while not taking much of anything North all while having extraordinary numerical, technological and intelligence superiority. Even if Russians now pull out around Kyiv to concentrate on Donbas it's hardly a good result for having such a numerical superiority.

Mr. T (MrT4) said:

By any measure, they are still losing ground south while not taking much of anything North

I don't know how one can draw such a conclusion with a map that is a "snapshop" of the situation.

So, the Ukrainian Army should have been capable to push the Russian Army up to Moscow by now?

On the fire rate situation, yes the gun I'm talking about had a much lower fire rate than the mg3 as originally designed and built however this wasn't an implicit limitation in the designs ability to handle faster fire rates but rather a deliberate choice on their part due to what they had calculated as an optimal rof.

You could in fact speed it up very significantly without hurting the gun itself though handling characteristics would take a hit.

Frankly though I don't think that if someone dug out this old design you'd want to keep it entirely as Is for a multitude of reasons.

Luckily said design was extremely amenable to re engineering parts swaps and etc. It's actually one of the things I like most about it. 

As far as your supply chain and etc talk and your assertion that things will go back to business as usual quickly, while I'm inclined to think this is what businesses and governments WANT I don't actually believe it's what they're going to get.

Even mainstream news channels have taken to calling the pre covid etc era as "the before times" for a reason.

We will attempt to go back to business as usual at our own peril Frankly and if that's indeed what happens we will fail as players on the world stage and see our influence prestige and military capabilities wither and die on the vine if we do so.

My statements and posts here are about what we SHOULD DO not what I think is actually going to happen.

It's not hard to see that what we've been doing for the past two decades is entirely untenable and it definitely hasn't actually benefited us to operate this way. It has made us weak, brittle, eroded our technological and logistical edge away to almost nothing, and actually cost us semi permanent knowledge and capability loss in several areas.

I have no interest in seeing that continue.

roguetechie said:

As far as your supply chain and etc talk and your assertion that things will go back to business as usual quickly, while I'm inclined to think this is what businesses and governments WANT I don't actually believe it's what they're going to get.

Not only them. As far as Germany is concerned a large part of the population wants that too. Back to blissfull and ignorant happyness. There are lots of people wo want to live like we are an island.
I agree that things will not go back exactly to the way they have been before. But even if they do in parts that would be bad enough. People will try to make things go back the question is how much damage will that do.

roguetechie said:

Even mainstream news channels have taken to calling the pre covid etc era as "the before times" for a reason.

If the mainstream media are a benchmark we are really, really fucked.
 

roguetechie said:

We will attempt to go back to business as usual at our own peril Frankly and if that's indeed what happens we will fail as players on the world stage and see our influence prestige and military capabilities wither and die on the vine if we do so.

Fully agree. But to me it currently seems to be the most likly sceanrio.
Its allready starting as far as I can tell. In Germany the politicians are allready stalling on the 100 billion emergency funding for the military and the increase of the anual budget to 2 % of the GDP allready is up for debate.
Inflation is massively increasing and people are feeling how the loose wealth. The sanctions against Russia and the increasing prices for energy imports are hitting the German economy very hard. And its allready in the ropes because of the double strike of Covid and the green transformation. Our current minister for agriculture minister, who is from the greens, refuses to suspend environmental protection rules especially the ones for fallow land percentage and the ones on the maximum amount of fertiliser to be used... the fact that because Ukraine and Russia can not deliver grain anymore the world marked price will soar and hit the German consumers is of no concern to him. He repeatedly told the press the enviornment is more important and if people have to pay more for bread they should save on other things. He even ranted about how people should save by eating less meat and dairy products because this is also good for the environment and thus they would have enough money for bread.
The is the reality we are living in. There are plenty of people who outright refuse to accept the new reality. They allready had a very detached relationship to the old one but now they are completly gone.

roguetechie said:

It's not hard to see that what we've been doing for the past two decades is entirely untenable and it definitely hasn't actually benefited us to operate this way. It has made us weak, brittle, eroded our technological and logistical edge away to almost nothing, and actually cost us semi permanent knowledge and capability loss in several areas. I have no interest in seeing that continue.

Fully agree.
It also would be rather easy. But I really doubt it will happen.

On the topic of machine guns. I don't think fancy state of the art manufacturing techniques are needed. There are several well established and matured technologies that can be used. Its just a matter of applying them. Which ironically is the same problem as with the introduction of stamped steel parts in the past. The arms manufacturers have production lines and want to use these. They will not look what can be done in the design process but only what they can do with their existing equipment.
This one of the main reasons why there is such a lack of innovation in the firearms sector. Nobody really is trying new things anymore.
In addtion most governemts have stopped their own R&D. They just buy of the shelf... because they think they can save a dime here and there. Lots of expertise is allready gone. There is to little incentive to innovate anymore.

This is a large part of the reason why I fixate on the various designs I do in many ways...

One thing the vast majority of them share in common is them not being out of reach for a dark horse outsider company to realistically get built, tested, refined, and then pitched.

I'm very aware of the Industry effectively having all the incentive in the world not to innovate and push things forward, setting aside the fact that we've recently seen it demonstrated to a frightening degree just how little real ABILITY to innovate is left in them.

For a number of reasons I've understand for quite awhile that if some of these things better things were ever going to come to life it would have to be done by outsiders.

Scary times but far from hopeless friend.

One thing about the new technology though; yes, it has big capital costs, and is not necessarily faster; but it reduces  labor. 2 maintainers, 2 programmers, and a couple of extractors/material handlers can produce a lot of parts. CNC equipment isn't cheap either, when you look at it. So advances in manufacturing can help make better weapons, or at least free up labor for other uses.

Farmplinker said:

One thing about the new technology though; yes, it has big capital costs, and is not necessarily faster; but it reduces labor. 2 maintainers, 2 programmers, and a couple of extractors/material handlers can produce a lot of parts. CNC equipment isn't cheap either, when you look at it. So advances in manufacturing can help make better weapons, or at least free up labor for other uses.

The same number of people can service and entire factory hall full of CNC automats and pump out thousands of parts per day.
Additive manufacturing doesn't need much manpower but is much much slower than other methods. This is the problem. For the same cost in machinery and labor you get thousands of parts against a couple of dozzent in one day. Additive mfg only makes sense if there are benefits that can only be realised by these techniques.
Its also simply not true that something build with new techniques is automatically better than something build with traditional ones. It might be. But the quality of a product depends conciderable more on design and development, how production is organised and quality controll than the mfg methods used to build it.

For example a very good method to manufacture large quantities of high quality sectional steel is extrusion pressing. It would make lots of sense to design a GPMG with a receiver made this way. It would be comparable light but tough. Better than steel stampings. The method is cheap and fast. Way more efficient than any form of chipping production method.
The resulting weapon would have the potential to be tough yet lightweight, easy to mass produce and thus cheap.
No new technology needed. Just apply widely available industrial standard. It just has to be done.

schnuersi said:

But IMHO the question is if a LMG is really needed in mech inf squads if a SAW is available.

What is the distinction?