Interesting post, however, I dont remember hearing any comments like these when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan or was suppressing Eastern Europe. Didnt the Soviet Union do things like this so often “yet they are showing their muscles so freaquently that its considered as their normal behaiviour.”

Yeas they did, back in when they were in full steam. Soviets did act like any other superpower and was no way better/worse than USA. Nowadays Russia is merely in depression but I’m sure we will see their own “war on terror” in future as well.

You have a short memory…the “war on terror” you easily dismiss began 6 years ago. Go to youtube and you’ll see nicly dressed business people jumping to their deaths.

“War on terror” ss just suggar-frosting over plain old imperialism and superpower powerpolitics. Ofcourse it had it’s launchers, but so did almoust every other larger scale imperialistic operations. To belive that world is exactly what your favorite politicans pour word by word is just naive…

Yeah, the U.S. is just paranoid.

No, its just being arrogant, self-rightneous and plain mean as did USSR, Third Reich, Pre-WWII era Japan, British Empire, Napoleon’s France, Rome and any other superpower ever existing in human history…

Is some country threating US now?…And yet they are showing their muscles so freaquently that its considered as their normal behaiviour.
Superpowers have this nasty habbit to try and control at least their local areas. Wheter its labeled as bufferzone thinking, securing national interest or even “fighting against terrorism” doesen’t matter in the end its just normal behaiviour of countries which sees themselves too important than they actually may be.

So ofcourse Russia has now started to make rather bold acts to show its recovering strenght, how else you would send the message? At this stage the actions are merely symbolics and more directed to the people of russia to show that the new leadership is tough and don’t crawl underneath the western powers. When recovering is in further stage, only then we will start to see really important acts were Russians will really start pushing their own interest in international matters. For example in the Kosovo case Russians are merely making noise but I doupt that at this point they would go all the way with the support for Serbia and eventually they will seddle for western-favour solution. But ten years from today and things will get bit more interesting:dev2:

Dishimising the power of Russia, like Lawrence is doing is just self-deception and will hit your own angle eventually.

Am I sensing that the westerlingers are bit scare of the bear??:rolleyes:

I live only few hundred kilometers away from Russia and sofar I have no fear what so ever of these quite obvious actions of superpower rising back to its pedestal. Its more like “back to normal” as strong russia nearby has been the physical fact for us such a long time now.

Russia is so extreme and different nation compared to all others that its simply childish to assume that some western hypocratial and idealistic standarts could be applied to it just like that. The western idea for future russia is when stripped from all rethorical BS a huge resource warehouse of natural gas, oil and cheap labour. This type of thinking may work in practice to areas with no past history of modern civilizations but to try and attempt that in former superpower which is having a depression is just plain stubid.

So now when the natural circle of life have made moved slightly forwards and Russia has started to see some light at the end of the tunnel, all the westerlingers are yelling at one mouth “look out the big bad bear”…

And before I’m labeled some sort of demon that eats Chechens for breakfast and steals money from oligarks for lunch, let me remind you that I’m not here to justify all the actions made by Russian govenrment. I’m just trying to wake up you guys to reality. To shout out Russian wrong doings and waving the “bad com..örh…russians” banner is as usefull and fruitfull as to wave the “bad imperialistic america” banner. Superpowers have their ways and despite what most of you guys wants to belive Russia is one, perhaps not the one that it use to be but it will rise again. Personally I think that in long term its a good thing, singlepolar world is never desirable and its good to have some counterpower for US hegemony…may save some poor nations from mindless occupations if there is someone with weight behind its words to say something else.

Well after around 20 years or so that I’ve known the idea of meassuring units, I have had no proplems with the practicality of the metric system nor I’ve ever heard anyone else here complaining it. After introducing myself to the engineering scenes and to the wonderfull world of AutoCad, I praise the Gods that we have 10-centric meassure systems were you can convert units by simply changing the dot…

Guess its just about how difficoult you wish to make your life :rolleyes: 😉

Just went to See Jethro Tull in Helsinki…rather nice show compared to expectations, but what on earth had happened to Martin Barre?? The guitarist was some young git who Anderson descriped as some nerly 12 years old:confused: :confused:
Anyway, after I have survived the next morning (bit too many Long Island ice teas after the gig) I wandered into this retro-orientated music shop, still bit mixed up and I bougth Roy Harpers Valentine (17 €!!!!!)…wich is quite nice album, remainds me of my few occasional experiences with the Incredible string band…exept ofcourse the Male Chauvinist Big Blues, wich has turned over the weekend into my next favorite song:D

In the heat of your depate its always good to remember that Soviets didn’t choosed the skijump as alternative to catabult but after political decision not to use the catabult the skijump was choosen pretty much following the western pattern: to give better take-off ability to Yak-41 which at the cruisal part of the lengthly arms wrestling mach was “the” plane that was about to form the airwing of the Kuznetsov. As the VSTOL plane was choosen as the main (and sole at one moment) combat plane, it was decided to fit the new carrier which was orginally designed to operate normal take-off carrierplanes with ski-jump.
It was afterwards desicovered that the Su-27 and MiG-29 which had lost the postion to Yak-41 could also take-off from the carrier by using the Ski-jump. It wasen’t so difficoult to add the arrestor wires and other associated stuff needed to land the conventional planes as the carrier itself was actually designed to be a conventional.
So soviets gained almoust by accident limited conventional plane carrier capability. There were no intentional decision to prefer ski-jump over catabult as a tool to launch other than VSTOL planes and there were no soviet incapability to produce catabults, just idiotic decisions made in base of anti-carrier emotions and high hopes of the future “super-VSTOL” plane.

STOBAR methods is nothing more than poormans (or fool’s) method of getting aeroplanes airbrone from ships. It offers some theoretical benefits to the carrier such as easy building process and low maintenance and space need but those are rather lame gains if the main idea which is to get combat capable aircrafts flying suffers great deal. IMO its simply isen’t wise decision. Its only rationale solution in very extreme cases, basicly if you are planning to get an aircraft carrier and only have russians to supply material, eg. a poorman…but it raises the question, does a poor man need an aircraft carrier??;)

Well how good it is?
During my army time, we used the finnish Rk62, wich is basicly a AK, with fancier stock and has its sigths little bit different position.
I always made over 90 point scores when firing 10 round captions and suprisingly many managed to reach these levels, wich are almoust competion shooting level. So the claims about accuracy are IMHO BS, if you cannot shoot something with AK, the proplem is not in the weapon, but in the shooter. During our training, the instructors told us that the weapon we were firing is the seccond most accurate in the world (Russian Ak-74 was the number one), so all complains about the weapon were to be treaded as excuses. And this wasent talk of some armschair generals, like us here in the internet, but words from ones that actually work with these things.
Also what comes to the ruggerness, during our long artillery fireposition camps, we rarely even bothered to remember that we carried the rifles and they usually just layed somewhere in the mud. As the camps were supposed to simulate combat situations, we always carried them loaded with blank ammunition. I never even heard a rumor that someone’s weapon would have jammed when suddenly a neighbouring battery made a little “visit” to our positions, and after one of the camps, while I finaly cleaned the weapon, I found a half of a pinecone inside my rifle…and I had shoot almoust full fire portion (90 rounds) with it.
I also heard that in my brother’s battery, some brainhead dropped his rifle before a army truck that drove across the rifle’s barrel. The guy got awfull lot of **** from the instructors and officers and were doomed to pay thousands of euroes to compensate the weapon. Still when they went back to the garrisons and to the firing range, the rifle made perfect score and no one could tell any changes to its accuracy.

So how good AK-47 really is…well I wouldnt go to the war if i would know that they’re giving me something else:cool: