I may risk being too credible here, but a $80 drone is a lot more expendable than a $40m laser tank. The drone can be considered a consumable. Hell, mark the drones down as ammo.

I followed you all here from The Bad Place, of course I do. I love you all equally. Except the planefuckers. Y’all frighten me.

Anywhere else I’d take the OP’s username as a semi-alarming nod toward the former, but considering where we are, shit that’s just another tuesday at NCD

Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.

It’s “technically” a combat vehicle

More like, you know damn well that Jim keeps passing code reviews without reading a line in them, he’s been talked to, still does it, and you need something actionable to prove it so that you can get someone’s ass in his chair who does their job.

Seriously. Recognize a win when it’s handed to you, people.

I fucking love this post and reference it constantly to my programmer friends. It’s one of my favorite bits of writing to exist, honestly.

For that matter, actually, pretty much everything Peter Welch writes is great. I highly recommend taking a peek through the rest of his blog. I liked it so much I bought one of his books.

Once when I was mowing the lawn as a kid I accidentally stepped in a hidden hole near our garden that had a yellowjacket nest in it (yeah, the little fuckers nest in the ground). Fell over, almost broke my knee backwards because, y’know, stepped in a hole by accident. Found out about 1.8 seconds later that hole had a gorillion yellowjackets inside, when the entire nest immediately stung the piss out of me and then swarmed out of the nest to chase me across my own lawn. At this time I’m like 13 and already not a tough kid, I’m screaming, crying, blindly flailing my way back towards my house, falling over, getting up, falling over again because my leg is now made of fire, the entire time getting chased by a swarm of yellowjackets, they’re getting in my hair, they’re crawling under my clothes, I got stung multiple times on every fucking body part that exists. I got stung on the leg, on my face, on my chest, I got stung on my cock and balls three times by these sons of bitches and then in my infinite wisdom I crashed through the front door into my house and called for my mom to help, trailing 12,861 yellowjackets on and about my person, she was not very happy with me that day after the immediate danger was over. They got into everything. We ended up paying to bug bomb the house and I kept finding yellowjacket bodies in weird corners for the next two years.

Turns out, I’m apparently not allergic to those, because if I was I would definitely have died and even not being allergic recovery was the most intensely awful couple of weeks I’ve ever experienced in my life. Now, I do not fuck with the yellowjackets. I DO NOT FUCK with the yellowjackets. If I can’t immediately firebomb them out of existence I will call a professional to firebomb them out of existence the same hour I discover them. Fuck 'em.

How else are you supposed to conduct air-to-air combat if not via jousting?

Yes but this way you can hot swap in a fully charged battery from your carrier unit without needing to power down the vehicle. You could use both batteries in parallel, but the proposed solution minimizes charging time on any given machine by sourcing it all out to the carrier and allowing constant uptime of the target vehicle by never leaving it with two dead batteries.

The plan works perfectly. You are not in charge of the hive mind.

E-Jerry Can modular batteries

We’ve already established that weight isn’t really an issue so let’s just give it two battery racks. It runs off one battery at a time so the other one can be disconnected and changed. When the one in use runs low, throw the breaker over and either change the dead battery or keep running on the aux until that one dies too if you’re in an emergency situation.

Larger vehicles with higher power requirements can scale up the number of battery racks they have and still use the universal Grunt Power Brick just in larger quantities, and you can create a battery hauler with a generator and like 40 battery slots to carry around your fresh ones and recharge your empties. That generator might be the one thing in your squadron that still runs on gasoline, supplemented with solar.

Teaching someone the wrong way to do something frequently makes the right way make way more sense. Someone who just copy/pasted 99 near identical if statements understands on a fundamental level when, why, and where you use a for loop much more than someone who just read in the textbook “a for loop is used to iterate elements in a collection”.

I genuinely believe something like this is what some of my professors wanted me to submit back in school. I once got a couple points off a project for not having a clarifying comment on every single line of code. I got points off once for not comment-clarifying a fucking iterator variable. I wish I could see what they would have said if I turned in something like this. I have a weird feeling that this file would have received full marks.

“You guys are idiots. They’re gonna be looking for military guys.” dons fursuit

I command you to show me the manual

It’s less that they’ve actively made things better for anyone and more that some of their currency is actually circulating to these folks in the first place. Think about the most dirt poor shithole town you can imagine in Bumfuck Kentucky, where there’s no running water and barely electricity, and then make the place 30° and covered in ice for 8 months of the year. That’s real life for some Russians. There’s not any money to even make out there even if the effort was put into it. So being put in the army and paid a soldier’s salary, even if half of it is being skimmed, is probably more money than some of these guys have ever seen in one place before. Add to that the requirement ability to travel through civilization, and they’re suddenly living a whole new life they’ve never dreamed of before. I’d call that an increase in quality of life, even if you’re only upgrading from Russian Peasant into Russian Soldier that’s still a fairly significant boost in some cases. Right up until some Ukrainian high schooler drops a pipe bomb in your lap from a drone to complete his killstreak.

Oh I guess I’ll just save this then and try ag- SEGFAULT

Thaaaat’s more like it.