Robbery

Brinks Armored Car - AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Armored Car robberies seem to be on the rise, at least in Philadelphia. Looking at what Google tells me, it looks like there are, on average, there are roughly 35 armored car robberies each year in the USA. Now look at this story:

Two Armed Robbers Steal $1.8 Million From Brinks Armored Truck in Philadelphia by Bryan S. Jung

It lists at least six armored car robberies in Philadelphia in 2025. Can't say as I am surprised. Squeeze the proles enough, the pressure will get high enough that some of the them are going get squeezed out at high velocity and start bouncing off the walls.

Problem is nobody knows what to do. What we need is some kind big enterprise that will soak up a huge number of man hours. War has traditionally been the project of choice. Our military uses good number of people, but there are bunch who the military won't accept, for one reason or another. Doesn't mean they aren't capable of violence, does mean their vector is not under the control of the government.

Towing a Tank With Tractor

Towing a Tank With Tractor
Satunnaista sotilashistoriaa

Video is three years old. Has the situation changed? Not as far as I can tell.

Ukraine War

The 80th Air Assault Brigade captured a T-90M Proryv tank in the Kursk region

The Geopolitics has a summary:

Four years after Russian troops crossed into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the war has settled into something more troubling – a grinding conflict that continues to destroy lives and livelihood, and test the limits of international law. The early drama of invasion has given way to sufferings and anxieties, and there is hardly any substantive move toward peace.

The front line stretches for roughly 1,200 kilometres. Russia today controls about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, but its gains since 2022 have been slow and costly. Estimates suggest that up to 1.8 million soldiers on both sides have been killed, wounded or gone missing. Civilian losses remain severe. The UN has documented nearly 15,000 civilian deaths and more than 40,000 injuries, while warning the true number is higher.

Thanks, Obama.

Cute Machinery

Myford Super 7 Lathe

I'm watching James May (one of the three stars of Top Gear) reviewing a fancy new Ford Bronco.

He's introducing the video and he says "I think I might have to add it to my encyclopedia of cute machinery along with the Renault FT tank and the Myford Super 7 lathe."

Renault FT Tank

I didn't watch the rest of video. He starts talking about all the cute little control buttons and I lost interest.

Hercules in Lithuania

M88 Hercules

Three days ago four US soldiers went missing in Lithuania. They were operating an M88 Hercules  recovery vehicle (i.e. a tow truck). The vehicle was found sunk in a swamp, but no sign of the soldiers. 

In this image provided by the U.S. Army, Lithuanian Army and emergency services personnel during recovery efforts for a U.S. Army M88 Hercules submerged in a swamp near a training area near Pabadre, Lithuania, Thursday, March 27, 2025. (Christopher Saunders/U.S. Army via AP)

Also from CT :

The soldiers' armored vehicle was discovered submerged in 15 feet of water and so far teams have been unable to get inside or pull it out.

Recovery of the recovery vehicle is underway, but it looks to be a long, hard slog to pull it out of the swamp. Hopefully the soldiers will soon be found alive and well. Right now it's anybody's guess as to where they have got to.

Pabadre, Lithuania

Pabadre is about three miles from the border with Belarus.

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.

Poking versus Cutting

    I don't recall exactly where I heard this, maybe talking to Jack, but there are basically two kinds of swords. There are cutting swords, like the Viking broadswords and Japanese Samurai Swords, and then there poking swords, like the ones used in fencing. The part that was new to me was that poking swords were developed to counter chain mail. Cutting through chain mail with the edge of a blade can be tough going. You have a much better chance with a thin, sharp point. If you can get the point into the gap between links, it will not take as much force to drive a narrow wedge between then and so open them up, which allows the point to sink farther in and do some damage.
    I found the picture on a blog from a person who was taking a course on medieval sword fighting.


Medieval sword fighting techniques
B RYTHARIUS

Update November 2025 replaced link with one that goes to actual post instead of just to the blog. Replaced the missing video with something sword related as I have no idea what the original video was.