Jimmy Carter seems like an all-round great guy. He also has balls of steel.

I once met Rowling and she was lovely. Admittedly I’m not a hotel manager. But she’s let the Elephant Cafe in Edinburgh milk being “the place where Potter began” all these years, even though I know for a fact that they actually hated her when she camped down there to write.

To be fair to her, she must get that all the time.

Technically speaking the age for alcohol consumption in the UK is 5, but it is illegal to buy alcohol for anyone under 18. Hugh’s in a bit of a grey area.

Jimmy Carter also took part in the repair of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor at Chalk River Laboratories, a task which involved putting on protective gear and being lowered into the reactor itself to take it apart minutes at a time.

That’s not really a problem when T-34 was easy to repair and could be produced in such vast numbers. For instance: to replace the transmission - a noted design weakness - on T-34, you had to open a bunch of hatches at the back of the tank and unscrew some bolts. Pretty complicated, as replacing a transmission will…

Well, I now know who has the cheapest rides in Cardiff, which was probably their plan all along.

Which isn’t actually true! And even if it was, a space pen is actually worth developing because pencils = graphite dust = fire risk.

Actually, nope: It’s two solidly sourced statements, and another, also from a solid source. You’re the one going “I know better than all the people who actually study armor for a living, all the people who’ve spent time in the Russian and American archives, all the people who for years studied these matters - I know…

If it can plug into GLONASS, it works, and its cheap, why bother developing something else?

Precisely. I’m reminded of how the Russians solved the problem of track link pins working themselves free on tank tracks on the T-34: they just welded a chunk of metal to the side of the hull to knock any wobbling pins back in.

If it’s common knowlege, surely it won’t be any difficulty to find and cite sources?

Call it what you want, I’m sure Armata has some function to stop it rolling away when parked on a slope.

Personally, I find arguing with people who don’t cite their sources is exhausting. In fact: Cite your sources or don’t bother. I went to the effort, you can give me the same courtesy.

“Incapacitated” as in actually broken, not stalled because the driver fucked up - or do NATO tankers never make mistakes? “Inexperienced soldier stalls Armata, therefore Russian equipment is junk” isn’t much of an argument.

I thank you for your valuable contribution, and wish you good luck with the operation.

It’s an 8-speed automatic. However, you can stall automatics if you try hard enough - and it seems that Armata has a stalling problem at some speeds.

It wasn’t incapacitated. It drove off under its own power around 15 minutes later once UVZ representatives were able to inspect it and fix the problem. Russian blogpost about it. It seems the crewman was an inexperienced driver from the Russian military rather than a rep from UVZ, and he panicked when the machine…

If you only know nasty people, perhaps this says something about your circle?

To be fair, the Armata’s “breakdown” was caused by an inexperienced driver stalling the tank then putting the handbrake on. This looks like a genuine screw-up.