I feel better knowing that Chinese military partners get to feel the joy as well. (Curbs can be a bitch sometimes…)

Regardless of the side, if the convicts have proper training, supplies and aren’t used as pure cannon fodder I don’t have any issues with it personally.

Honestly, I am surprised that Ukraine wasn’t doing it sooner. Unfortunately, the front has been somewhat slow for the last year or so (with an exception or two) and that means both sides are dug in fairly deep.

If Ukraine decides to push back harder and start retaking large portions of land, their losses are going to skyrocket. Regardless is you agree or not, using convicts to push the lines makes sense and doesn’t risk better trained troops.

That is just how wars of this type work and the offensive side will need to absorb more damage.

Personally, if I had the option of fighting or rotting in prison, I would fight and would probably volunteer for some of the hardest work. The thing is, it would need to be my choice and I hope that any convicts, Russian or Ukrainian, get a choice in that.

Ukrainian convicts are probably going to get decent training first. It’s also likely they are going to go into some of the worst spots. Ukraine is outnumbered and they can’t afford to lose anyone, criminal or not, but it doesn’t mean they are going to have it easy.

Russia/Wagner hardly gave their convicts any training, maybe gave them guns and supplies and sent them to the front blind to find artillery locations. They were cannon fodder, pure and simple. Bakhmut was a slaughter.

There are some major differences here.

I have heard a few things, TBH. Everything in the range from simply vaporized and hot to the vaporized metal being in a near plasma state. Shrug.

Wikipedia gives a few numbers ranging from 660K to almost 1200K (copper melt temp is 1358K) from testing it quotes. It seems to be dependent on the cone alloy and the explosive type.

In practice, it’s probably is all over the place in regards to temperature. If you can round up a few RPGs, I would totally be down for some testing…

you’ll be doing the QA and will in fact be working on the parts / product to get it to where you need it to be.

Absolutely. Unless a person wants to spend thousands of dollars on push button solutions that cover every imaginable use case, customization is the way to go.

For solid machines, the customer should already have an idea about what parts need to be modified. If a machine was advertised to mill a widget at +/-20% tolerance, cool. If you want to spend $500 more on a custom pully to get withing 5%, awesome. Precision is expensive and customization is niche.

For cheap machines, everything is generally ravaged by bean counters at every level of design and manufacturing. As long as people understand this and can make repairs, that is sometimes OK.

While I feel OPs pain of finding a 2¢ part that was 0.3mm off center, I can only just shrug it off. A pseudo-premium 5¢ part or building a jig for a worker to test each gear would have been quite expensive and it would probably tack on $2-$5 to the end product price. ($2-$5 actually matters on sites like Amazon or Temu and could potentially cost thousands in lost sales due to product placement.)

I am going to need your 50 point summary of those obvious points in the longest form possible by this afternoon so I can be completely convinced that I have already made up my mind in the correct way. Thanks.

Why not? Those CPUs got perfect scores on Red Star OS.

As an example, RPGs use shaped charges to send a jet a molten copper through armor steel. Even though the devices may seem antiquated, they are extremely effective at burning holes through tanks. If that molten jet happens to come in contact with ammunition, it’s generally game over.

That sounds about right. QA is expensive and time consuming, so it’s left up to the customer. This applies to every single part in the supply chain.

If you want a set of mitsumi linear rails for real precision applications, it’s going to cost just as much or more than that printer.

This is not a “buyer beware” rant, but the buyer should know they aren’t paying for consistency or precision. I am basically saying that for these printers to work reliably and with proper precision, you need to tear them down yourself and inspect each bolt.

I buy cheap Chinese stuff all the time, but my process is to tear the product down and find where costs were cut and look for any serious dangers.

Svol is well known enough that you should be able to get replacement bits for free. Or not. It’s a crap shoot, TBH.

Really? I thought they would be sitting back drinking mojitos while watching the show.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.

Wut?

I just let it run without the resin vat and the RERF default print (with the characters) does actually trigger different exposures.

But yeah, the filename is super important as it triggers a test mode where the plate is exposed at 8 different spots at 8 different times per layer.

I’ll need to create my own test file and test it with and without the characters. It’s something I can test, but was hoping someone knew off the top of their head. (I was in the middle of my first ever resin print when I banged out this post, actually.)

Quick addendum: Cheap digital hygrometers from Amazon can be off by as much as 10% or more and are kinda pointless, poorly designed and a waste of batteries.

Simply using some color changing desiccant will save you a few bucks. (It’s something I use here in Colorado for my jars of… “entertainment products”… that is legal here, in addition to my filaments.)

There is desiccant available that is formulated to hold specific humidity levels but filament is better served by pure silica gel.

To be fair, some of their contests are not thought out very well and usually don’t have enough constraints defined. (It’s kinda pissed me off before too.)

I started to design one myself but realized it was a bad idea. For starters, and effective design wouldn’t use much plastic: Bamboo or other kinds of material used for the tubes already stack together really well and it is much easier to stack them in a box glued together or use thin wire to bind them. Any additional design components translates to waste, IMHO.

And like you said, the plastic is bad to keep outside. If it wasn’t for the moisture, direct sunlight would deform most common materials.