Stryker/C-130 Pics

"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
snip
Funnily enough, after all the "it's useless and it won't work" stories,
this one never made much headway in the news.

Can't let facts get in the way of a good rant, can we?

I wonder if you have ever seen the reports of the NATO Arctic Small Arms
Trial held at Shilo in 1980. They had the early Diemaco or an M16A1,
proto-SA 80, several others and, for comparison's sake, a Steyr AUG.
According to the range officer, the AUG shot rings round all the rest.
(We bought the Canadian-made Diemaco, of course. Oh, well.)
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)

In message , Greg Hennessy
writes
On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:12:21 +0100, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:
Since this was a demonstration rather than a formal like-for-like trial,
the MoD refused to specify the other weapons or their performances.

One wonders why.

To avoid being sued?

However, IDR's own sources indicate that among those taken were the
Diemaco C7 version of the M16A2 (as used by the UK SAS and SBS), the
Heckler & Koch G36, and the Steyr AUG.

Strange that, one must assume there was an 'improved' version of the SA80
available for spanish army trials last year, one wonders how if it faired
there if at all.

Was it even entered? (I don't think the line is still open)

It is understood whichever
alternative weapon they used, none of the participants was able to match
the SA80 A2 in either accuracy or reliability during this demonstration.

Until there is independently verified proof of such assertions one is
inclined to take them with a large shovel of NaCL.

Talk to the troops. They're the ones using the weapon.

THe MOD has now wasted the price of 4 alternatives on each and every weapon
so far.

What basis was that calculated on, pray tell? Alternatives usually end
up priced lowball per rifle... but then you find the cost for
(proprietory) magazines, cleaning kits, spares, armourer training etc.
(all of which you need for changeover) is not included.

It wouldn't be the 1st time one has heard the usual 'its working
now honest' honest from them.

So, where's the "it's useless and it won't work" stories now?

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

In message , Greg Hennessy
writes
On 25 Sep 2003 23:53:17 -0700, (Tony
Williams) wrote:
Quite a contrast with the various news items about the jamming of
M16s, M249s and even the .50 M2...

FWIH, specifically in the case of the minimi and M16 that was more to do
with the age of the weapons to the region combined with wholly unsuitable
lubrication for desert conditions.

Oddly, nobody was willing to accept "unsuitable lubrication" when
discussing L85 problems - it had to be a rifle fault.



--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

In message , Andrew Chaplin
writes
"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
snip
Funnily enough, after all the "it's useless and it won't work" stories,
this one never made much headway in the news.

Can't let facts get in the way of a good rant, can we?

I wonder if you have ever seen the reports of the NATO Arctic Small Arms
Trial held at Shilo in 1980.

In 1980 the proto-SA80 would still have been firing 4.85mm...

They had the early Diemaco or an M16A1,
proto-SA 80, several others and, for comparison's sake, a Steyr AUG.
According to the range officer, the AUG shot rings round all the rest.
(We bought the Canadian-made Diemaco, of course. Oh, well.)

Has the Diemaco proved to be a disaster?

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

On 25 Sep 2003 06:23:38 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote in message ...
On 23 Sep 2003 20:00:32 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:

No. Paul is correct, DF'ing a "frequency agile" (or "hopping")
transmitter is no easy task. For example, the standard US SINCGARS
radio changes frequencies about one hundred times per *second*,

Bear in mind that I'm talking about automated electronic gear here,
not manual intervention. Electronics works in time spans a lot
quicker than 10 ms.

So what? Unless you know the frequency hopping plan ahead of time
(something that is rather closely guarded), you can't capture enough
of the transmission to do you any good--they use a rather broad
spectrum.

OK, I now understand that DF generally relies on knowing the
frequency in advance.

BTW, when you say a rather broad spectrum, how broad? And divided
into how many bands, roughly?

It uses the entire normal military VHF FM spectrum, 30-88 MHz. ISTR
that the steps in between are measured in 1 KHz increments, as opposed
to the old 10 KHz increments found in older FM radios like the
AN/VRC-12 family, so the number of different frequencies SINGCARS can
use is 58,000.

More than one 1 kHz slot is likely to be in use at anyone time,
since you need enough bandwidth for voice. Say 20, then about
1/3000th of the frequency space is in use at any one time.

Modern crypto is good enough to withstand all cryptanalytic
attacks.

Only if it were so...but thank goodness it is not.

Oh? So who can break AES/Rijndael?

Otherwise we would
have lost the value of one of our largest and most valuable intel
programs, and NSA would no longer exist. Even the cypher keys used by
our modern tactical radios (said keys being generated by NSA at the
top end, though we now have computers in the field capable of "key
generation" using input from that source) are not
unbreakable--instead, they are tough enough to break that we can be
reasonably assured that the bad guys will not be able to gain any kind
of *timely* tactical intel; enough computing power in the hands of the
crypto-geeks and they can indeed break them,

True, but "enough" happens to be more than all the computers in
existance right now, or likely to exist.

Assume: there are 1 billion computers, each of which can check 1
billion keys/second.

Then a brute-force search on a 128-bit keyspace would take about
10^60 years.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 13:51:14 +0000 (UTC), Mike Andrews wrote:
In (rec.radio.amateur.homebrew), phil hunt wrote:

Modern crypto is good enough to withstand all cryptanalytic
attacks.

That's a great idea, and I suspect tthat you're right in the general
case. But a modern cryptosystem, badly implemented, will have all
manner of vulnerabilities -- most of which are not particularly
obvious.

Absolutely.

Remember the competition for the successor to DES as the standard
crypto algorithm? That was *quite* interesting.

What was interesting about it?

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:08:36 -0400, John Hairell wrote:
On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 13:51:14 +0000 (UTC), (Mike
Andrews) wrote:

In (rec.radio.amateur.homebrew), phil hunt wrote:

Modern crypto is good enough to withstand all cryptanalytic
attacks.

[stuff snipped]

I love it when people make blanket statements.

There's a big building full of computer equipment over at Ft. Meade
that's not sitting there just generating heat.

Yes, it is processing non-encrypted signals traffic, mostly.

I would be very surprised if modern symmetric and assymetric ciphers
are prone to cryptanalitic attack.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia

On 25 Sep 2003 10:03:00 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote in message ...
On 24 Sep 2003 20:00:46 -0700, Kevin Brooks wrote:

I still can't see this being very useful against KE rounds, or for
that matter the lower caliber IFV killers like the 20, 25, and 30mm.

I think there are a lot of lightweight armour schemes that are more
effective against shaped charge warheads than KE rounds. Which
implies to me that the best anti-tank weapon is a KE round, in other
words the best anti-tank weapon is another tank.

Or is it? How about a tank-destoyer armed with a forward-facing
large caliber gun, in other words a modernised version of WW2
weapons like the Jagdpanther or ISU-122? For the same weight of
vehicle, it could carry a heavier gun than a tank, and probably have
a lower profile and be better armoured too. It would be cheaper (no
complex turret machinery) and more reliable (less to go wrong). Its
main disadvantage would be in the tactical limitations of a gun with
a limited traverse.

If you are going to develop a vehicle sthan can go head-to-head with a
tank, such as your TD, you are better off just developing a tank,
because that in the end is what it is going to be used as,

That's a good point. No reason you can't have both, of course.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 01:55:53 GMT, Thomas Schoene wrote:
"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message


Nothing CAN magically guess extraordinarily long primes. That will
never just magically become possible. This intrinsic truth resides
in the very mathematics itself, a fact outside of time and progress,
and not in any technology of any kind.

That's true now, but only to a point. That point is the advent of quantum
computing, which allows you to effectively solve for all the possible
factors in very little time (say 10^500 times faster than conventional
computing for this sort of problem). If QC happens, large prime number
encryption is crackable in a matter of seconds.

Maybe. And maybe QC will make possible other encryption techniques.

OTOH, the real danger in the near- to mid-term is not crypto-system attack,
but physical compromise of the crypto-system (the adversary getting hold of
the both the mechanism and the keys themselves).

All good cryptosystems are still effective if the adversary knows
the algorithm.

The most effective attacks aren't usually on the systems, but on the
people -- e.g. getting an insider to divulge secrets.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:42:59 +0100, Greg Hennessy wrote:
On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:12:21 +0100, "Paul J. Adam"
wrote:

In message , Greg Hennessy

Since this was a demonstration rather than a formal like-for-like trial,
the MoD refused to specify the other weapons or their performances.

One wonders why.

Indeed.

Until there is independently verified proof of such assertions one is
inclined to take them with a large shovel of NaCL.

I agree.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia