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[Helgoland]

Fakeedit: Actually, that reminds me of an old Civilization series bug where it would be possible to defeat a tank with a squad of spearmen, heh.

This one. Maybe you're getting old

[smjjames]

Har har Helgo.

[Reelya]

Fakeedit: Actually, that reminds me of an old Civilization series bug where it would be possible to defeat a tank with a squad of spearmen, heh.

This one. Maybe you're getting old

That assumes that the spearmen charge directly at the tank. Since combat in Civ is completely abstract and the regions are huge we don't know what happened. All we know is that the tank moved into an e.g. the same city that also contained the spearmen, then the spearmen managed to disable the tank. Assuming some infantry could never outwit a tank in any terrain is actually a huge assumption.

[Starver]

Sending a tank in without additional support (and that additional support in without a tank) is an awful tactical decision. They quickly learnt to use machine-guns from one early tank¹ to 'wash' a fellow tank of the squishy enemy attackers trying to crowbar their way in, after sneaking/rushing their way through under its larger artillery pieces.  (Adding addtional manned turrets/MG bubbles (T-35) got awkward for crew and crew-space reasons, and grenade tubes became the more used solution.)

But just sending a single tank into (say) an urban area, without (ideally non-tank, though maybe APC-held) backup forces is tantamount to multiple suicides.

See also Fougasse emplacements (could be operated by spearmen!) and, finally sorta back on-topic, look up North Korean hero Li Su-Bok.


¹ That was before anyone started to insist that a 'tank' must be a capable of being a 'tank killer' as well as armoured and mobile enough to not be something else. Otherwise it's just 'armoured vehicle', 'mobile artillery', 'pillbox', etc. But Civ played it safe anyway, with 'Armour'. Which looks like a tank.

[Akura]

Besides, it's not a bug, just a really lucky combat roll. A defender can roll a 0. Source. Then again, according to the same it's also possible to cram several units into a stack with a strategic nuclear missile so that missile survives its own detonation and can explode a second time.


I wonder if that's what North Korea will do. Send so many of their troops on a nuclear attack to try and reuse the nuke.

[wierd]

**Visions of Space-X like ICBM with detaching MIRV warhead.  Warhead deploys while missile body flies back to NK to be reused.

[Reelya]

Some articles are also talking about NK having nuclear-armed satelites that can fire warheads anywhere on Earth. I think we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves here and start speculating that NK is going to develop tech that nobody else has.

[Helgoland]

Wouldn't that be comparatively easy? They know how to put up satellites, and controlled re-entry should be easy to accomplish if you know the exact position you're starting from. There's treaties against that kind of thing though, so nobody's deploying that kind of stuff.

[smjjames]

Controlled re-entry wouldn't be difficult to accomplish, true, and none of that is secret. The warhead surviving that re-entry that they supposedly haven't solved yet. Sure, they could borrow some tricks from various space programs, they still have to design and manufacture it.

[Akura]

Pretty much the only thing we have that we can actually perform orbital bombardment with are Rods from God: tungsten carbide rods dropped from orbit. The upside is that they're entirely legal, as they are technically conventional munitions(damage is entirely kinetic, they don't even explode) and as such the Outer Space Treaty doesn't cover them. The downside is that they're 20 feet long and 9-10 tons each, so it's extremely difficult to get them into orbit to begin with, so it's unlikely NK could deploy them. I don't think the US or anyone else even uses them. Maybe if we got off our asses and built a space elevator already...

Mostly they're only good for taking out deep bunkers.

[smjjames]

Pretty much the only thing we have that we can actually perform orbital bombardment with are Rods from God: tungsten carbide rods dropped from orbit. The upside is that they're entirely legal, as they are technically conventional munitions(damage is entirely kinetic, they don't even explode) and as such the Outer Space Treaty doesn't cover them. The downside is that they're 20 feet long and 9-10 tons each, so it's extremely difficult to get them into orbit to begin with, so it's unlikely NK could deploy them. I don't think the US or anyone else even uses them. Maybe if we got off our asses and built a space elevator already...

Mostly they're only good for taking out deep bunkers.

*AHEM* You can't 'drop' something from orbit, if you let go of something in orbit, it's going to stay in orbit, just not attached to you. Unless you want to let the atmosphere drag it down in a reasonable time, you'd have to use some sort of propellant to slow it down and bring it out of orbit.

[Starver]

Ultimately, as well, you need to pump around as much energy into getting them up there as you hope to get out of them when they land. (And, if you've spent the energy to nudge them into a stable-ish orbit, as said, some energy is needed to nudge them back out.) It doesn't have to come out as zero-sum, exactly, but the amount of thrust needed to guarantee transitions mops up most of the leeway.

There's a different set of requirements of you go further out there to use masses already in space, but still horribly horrible unless you're finding a convenient nudgable Earth-crosser to make the best use of your capabilities to redirectnsubtly.  When NK goes that far, though, we'll likely know about it with time to spare to do whatever we need to do to nudge back, physically, militarily or politically.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

how will blumphtcucks ever recover

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm pretty sure he has seen a ballot box, there is voting in North Korea, and it's an interesting perversion of everything about democracy. Apparently it mostly exists to be a census and to catch the really unwise dissidents.

He's probably also seen twitter, unless there's no twitter in Switzerland, which I concede is plausible.

[Starver]

He's probably also seen twitter, unless there's no twitter in Switzerland, which I concede is plausible.

There was no Twitter in Switzerland prior to 2002 (because there was no Twitter anywhere until 2006ish), and it seems KJu was back in Pyongyang after 2002, at a cursory glance at the speculation about how he lived until the death of his father.

I still imagine he's seen Twiter, unless he's been utterly cottonwooled by his cadre of generals/advisors, but I don't know how likely it is it's been anything more than a carefully shepherded demonstration of what the Rest Of The World(/Those Crazy Yankees) are doing that indicates just how superior his own ego deserves to be.