Good Morning

Armored Car

A great vehicle for going to church and everyday commuting.

Via Non-Original Rants

Flakpanzer

Ukraine air defense
Preston Stewart
He's talking about the Gepard air defense system. It's quite the beast.

Gepard air defense system

Wikipedia article here.

Update December 2022. Apparently you cannot embed YouTube short videos. so we just have a link.

Update June 2023 figured out how to embed the video.

M1 AbramsX

M1 AbramsX

This AbramsX tank is a 'technology demonstrator' from General Dynamics. It's here because I am a sucker for cool looking war machines.

This is a Tank

Russian Tank in Ukraine - Maximilian Clarke/Getty Images

Since I posted Not A Tank yesterday, I thought I ought to post a picture of a real tank so you can see the difference.

That's Not A Tank

2S9 Nona self propelled mortar

Aljazeera included this picture with their daily update of the situation in the Ukraine, but they labeled it a tank. It kind-of sort-of looks like a tank with a big gun barrel and tracks, but it all looks too light duty to be a real tank. I posted a question on reddit and tarkin1980 was kind enough to answer.

The 2S9 is a Russian machine from 1980. They built a thousand of them.

Aston Martin DB5 Stunt Car

007's Aston Martin DB5: We Drive James Bond's Car From "No Time To Die" | Carfection 4K
Carfection
We watched the latest James Bond film No Time To Die the other day and it was wonderful. I started looking into the car and fell into a fantasmagorical world, much like Alice. You could probably write a book about all the Aston Martin cars used in this movie.

There is one scene where the bullet proof glass in the car's windows is put to the test, so I go to wondering and found this.

Bulletproof Glass | Outrageous Acts of Science
Science Channel

Texas Armoring Corporation armors customer's vehicles. They offer several levels of ballistic protection. Higher levels cost more and are going to increase the vehicle's weight. Glass is heavy.

If you are gunning for James Bond, you need to bring something will a little more oomph than those puny little 9mm submachine guns.

T-34

T-34 | official trailer (2018)
moviemaniacsDE
This was a fun movie about Russian tank crews during WW2. One crew gets captured and due to Nazi hubris gets a chance to escape and they make the most of it. The slow motion views of tank shells flying through the air are pretty spectacular, especially when they strike glancing blows, which happens more often than you or I or reality might expect, but hey, it makes a great scene. And then we have the body of the tank ringing like a bell, which perturbs the occupants just a bit.

The video above is just a trailer, but you can watch the whole movie on YouTube, presumably for free. If you don't have a subscription, I imagine there will be ads.

The T-34 was the standard Russian tank of WW2. A couple of years ago there were still over 100 of them in service in various parts of the world.

P.S. Reading about the Soviet T-34 and WW2 is depressing. How do madmen like Stalin get to be in power? Don't tell me, I know, it's when men of goodwill do nothing. But that doesn't really cover it, does it? Because there can be a zillion men of goodwill who aren't in a position to stop him. There were people who were in a position to stop him, but I suspect that Stalin used animal cunning to insure that the only people who were near to him were either too weak to do anything about it, or not of goodwill and wouldn't be inclined to act against him.

Aim Point Stabilisation

Bang On, Always! (1952)
British Pathé
View From The Porch got me started. Seems our tanks had gun stabilization systems from the late 1930s. They worked at speeds up to 10 MPH. The Sherman tank had a top speed of 30 MPH, so not totally effective, but better than nothing, which is what the Germans had. Modern tanks can shoot and run at higher speeds. I suspect the big difference is a more powerful gun elevation motor and the sensor reaction time.


German engineering at its finest
ViralTimeLapse

Brown Owl remarkable head stability
Alex Holcombe
There are other videos demonstrating the same behavior in cats and falcons, though they can't turn their heads quite as far.

Girls with Guns

Tank driver, Lance Corporal Mudondo Zabina of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces, in the drivers section of her tank. She is part of an all female tank crew currently deployed in Somalia.

Subterranean Tank

From a short video about experimental Russian tanks. This one reminded me of the subterranean diving machine from The Core.You will recall that that machine was constructed from unobtanium by "rogue" scientist Ed Brazzelton, played by Delroy Lindo, not Samuel L. Jackson like I thought. You can't blame me for getting them confused. I mean any movie that has a "rogue" scientist making things out of unobtanium sounds like it was made for Samuel L. After all, he was in Snakes on a Plane, and you can't get much sillier than that.

Pic of the Day

An M1A2SEP Abrams Tank during the night portion of a gunnery exercise at Red Cloud Range in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Tank Biathlon

Tank biathlon is a mechanized kind of sport invented by the Russian Military. It is supposed to utilize the complex training of tank crews including their rough terrain passing skills combined with the ability to provide accurate and rapid fire whilst on-route. - Wikipedia

I came across this picture a few months ago but I didn't realize it was called a tank biathlon, even though that was the filename of the image. Today I came across a news report that mentioned it and a YouTube video. The video is kind of long and is full of people speaking Russian, but there are some good scenes of tanks in action here and there.