/k/ - Weapons

Post more trains.

>>526789

You mean the train of kebab removings.

>>526795

The one and only

Original Germautist who started the discussion in >>525519

First: Thanks hungarybro for this thread.

Second:

Defending a section of train tracks against maipulation isn't nearly as easy as >>526712 makes it out to be, the reason is that you can do a whole lot of things to the rails that don't break conductivity.

Just drill large holes into it from the side. This will have a similar effect as taking out a section of rail while not being nearly as easy to spot unless you focus on the rail from the side. You can also patch the holes with a simple piece of paper that is coloured to look like the rail, and nobody will be able to spot it from just walking along hundreds of kilometers of rail.

Also you can't prevent anyone from simply placing some explosives inside the gravel and remote detonating it (via radio, wire, pullstring or timer) shortly before the train goes over it. No matter how hard you try, you can't stop a train that goes 100km/h and weighs many kilotons in less than 200 meters.

Bends in the track are particularly vulnerable. As you can see in >>526789

the train wheels just continue straight on, and while they may suffer some damage, which will slow down the train and make it a slightly more bumpy ride, the wheels will just jump back onto the tracks and continue on their merry way. After a simple repair or replacement of the train whels it is good to go once more. If something like this were to happen on a curved piece of rail however, a derailment would be absolutely unavoidable. The train wheels would leave the rails and go straight ahead, where there is no rail to catch them anymore. This means that trains are particularly vulnerable in curves, and leaves you with two options: have increased guarding activity there, or have your train go in a straight line.

Since the latter isn't an option for most of Europe, you will need to guard and check bends every once in a while.

Another easy way to cause havok would be to dig away the rocks below the tracks. The tracks themselves distribute the weight of the train to the wooden/concrete bars, which transfer the weight to the gravel/stone beneath. This setup aims to reduce the weight put on a centimeter of ground beneath the tracks and prevent the tracks from sinking in over time, however if you were to dig away the stones beanth the tracks for a meter or two, the weight of the train would cause the tracks to bend downwards and break, which would lead the front of the train to push itself into the ground and basically not only fuck up the train, but also up to a hundred meters of tracks until the train is finally stopped by the steel and stone in front of it.

(cont.)

>>527168

Another option would be to simply hide near the tracks, wait until the first car of the train goes past you, and simply magnetic/sticky charge (possibly filled with thermite or just some explosive) at the conncetion points between the train cars. Blow em via timer or remote, and see the train separate itself. This will be noticed almost immediately, since the train won't have to pull nearly as much weight as before, but it gives you an opportunity to strike. The rail cars will slow down slowly unless the train engine breaks and causes them to push into it's back. This will cause either the entire train to stop or the back cars to slowly come to a halt, which allows you to get in and throw around charges/molotovs at whatever is inside. Wounded soldiers, material, other stuff…

Honestly, molotovs and sticky charges are very underestimated. Throw a sticky charge at a fuel cart (or anything that contains ammo), blow it, then have another dude a couple hundred meters further throw a molotov to ensure ignition. The cart will lose fuel quickly and cause fire to spread, which will damage the train and possibly the tracks too. Imagine this in summer and in some Belarussian backwater forests. No way of putting out a forestfire that starts out 500 meters wide without having either troops come in, or to draft all local firefighters. You don't want a forestfire to damage all tracks in the area, do you?

Hell, most modern trains use thin metal plating on the outside to shield the engine, and while this could easily be increased to proper tank armour, it will still take a lot of time to either produce new engines, or to convert old ones. This means that you can either hose down the engine with a machine gun, or throw a grenade at it to take out the engine or damage it. You can do this to multiple trains at once if you coordinate it right and basically block all supply routes with damaged or destroyed train engines. It won't take long for a new train to come along and push the damaged one out of the way, but the flow of supplies will come to a complete standstill for a couple of hours just because some guys used a couple of machine guns and radios.

And this is just talking about guerillas, not proper nation states with access to ICBMs, cruise missiles or bombers. Hell, you don't even need to attack the train tracks or the trains directly, you can simply destroy the un-/loading infrastructure. Do you want to unload an entire train by hand? Do you want to employ an entire company or even batallion to do so? No!

Trains are absolutely necessary to a continuous war effort over long distances (and even short distances, see WWI western front) as every war since the invention of the train has shown. But I feel like most nations simply take the technology for granted now, and don't do anything to protect their train networks.

My thinking was sparked by a (not so) recent attack on German train lines (http://archive.is/vu5eO) by leftist anarchists, which caused massive delays and extreme butthurt. Some politicians talked and some people even suggested employing the military to protect all train lines in the future, but nothing ever came of it. The guys behind it are still out there IIRC. These aren't even war time considerations, but actual things that you would need to worry about as a normal citizen. What if some terrorist group were to derail a high speed train full of commuters? How many people fit into an ICE at max capacity?(430) Past railway accidents have shown that even small misfunctions can cause extreme hazards and loss of many lives if the necessary precautions aren't taken. What prevents some ISIS bloke from chopping up a little railway and laughin his ass off as all the unbelievers die in a massive accident and he just walks away like nothing happened, doing the same thing at many different sites? A single guy in a car with some thermite and dedication can probably stay undetected for a long ass time, since railways aren't controlled nowaways. It would be even easier than acquireing a truck and blowing through a horde of civvies, since the police is where the civvies are. But nobody ever put up CCTV cameras to protect tracks. After a couple of attacks like this it would be likely for the entire rail network to be shut down until the fag is caught, which would not only disrupt normal life as we know it, but cause massive economical problems. A single guy can fuck your infrastructure. A couple blokes can get your country to a total standstill within hours of work.

This may not be as big of a problem in the US, where most goods are either transported via truck and people take the plane to go from one side of the country to the other. But in Europe some citizens commute distances of up to 200 kilometers by train ever day, or every weekend. The security of train lines is not only a military afterthought when invading a foreign country, this is a problem of national security!

Hello Alphabet gang!

>>527179

While diagnostics is a lot easier (since every piece of rail must be supplied with it's own current to keep the train afloat and propell it), the costs involed in building long tracks of it is very high. You only ever do that when you absoolutely want high speed trains. This also means that older trains and traditional cargo train cars are barred from using those tracks and you would need a completely new infrastructure setup. The electro magnetic fields would go some way to jam remote triggers though, but that would also allow guided bombs to find the train on the tracks by following the EM field it uses to propell itself forward.

Mag levs are a good idea for fast and short routes (such as in big cities where a lot of people need to get from A to B quickly), but a bad idea for cargo over long distances. The greater speeds achieved with magleg also make every accident even more violent.

The EM fields of the tracks can probably cause problems with any transported electrical equipment too. If anything, maglevs are even more vulnerable,

The coils of maglev however are embedded deep inside of conrete or other materials, which makes it difficult to actually manipulate them and allows far easier protection. You would need quite a lot of explosvies to blow up what is essentially a block of ferro-concrete. On top of that, the fact that you supply each coil individualy means that you can instantly spot any manipulation of the tracks, or even metal objects moving near the maglev coils. This could be used for further protection, since all you need to do would be checking on the currents going through the coils to determine if something is fishy somewhere along the track, then send someone to investigate.

It could be done, but the costs and problems involved with supplying thousands of kilomters of tracks with very fine tuned electrical devices it probably too much to ask for. I would consider using it on main supply routes for very few very well protected long distance routes, and using normal rails in dangerous areas.

>>527210

>Now that I think about it, how does that work with trains nowadays? Cranes and shipping containers, just like on ships?

Not quite.

Mobile cranes, ramps and some trucks come with systems that allow direct on off loading systems, which allow the truck to push a container onto the train directly. Most military trucks dont have this. They rely on cranes lifting their load onto their beds, which is fine, because there are lots of military cranes around (MAN KfzKRANL/M), but what do you do once your cranes fail/get bombed?

You need to ship in more cranes, which delays the process once more.

However, you must consider that most modern military cranes are not in production anymore. Sure, the companies exist and can produce replacement parts, but the assembly lines for the vehicles themseves don't exist anymore. They would need to hurry up getting them back into production once your cranes get taken out. Until then: heavy hand work of many hundred soldiers loading and offloading trains.

Also: the cranes are often needed for getting vehicles out of ditches in non combat situations, so there will be a shortage of cranes anyways.

If you have ever read Guy Sajer's book "the forgotten Soldier", you will stumble upon some passages, where he describes loading and offloading trains for days, especially in Minsk as part of the Rollbahntrupppen (specialized resuply troops). Generally trains occur so often in his work, that I am impressed at how overlooked this simple fact is:

Russia and Germany had different track gauges. That means that the Germans had to use captured Russian train cars and engines to get their shit from A to B, which the Russians knew and destroyed their own cars and engines, or the Germans would have had to bring their own cars along on dedicated train transport trains, which is such a retarded problem that I would advise any remotely big country to use it's own unique standard of rail sizes just to make sure that no other nation can invade using their own trains. This was probably one of the main reasons why the soviets won in the end. Trains gauges. Fucking bullshit.

>So, if I understand correctly, then it's not a bad thing if you can afford it in peace time, but wasteful during a war.

Correct. My wording is very confusing indeed. This shit has been keeping me restless for far too long.

Maglevs are less suspicable to external damage, but repair take far longer, building costs are higher and if the tracks get damaged/destroyed it takes more than a week to rebuild a few hundred meters, since you will need to remove the old concrete covered coils, place new ones, and wait for the concrete to harden once mor, vs normal trains where you can just grab a couple of rails, a few thick wooden boards, some gravel and get to work. No calibration or standardized parts required.

I would only use them in areas that are:

A: safe from air attacks/artillery

B: have constant patrolls

So basically on your home turf with tonns of AA around. Then you can use it for long distance high priority tracks, since chances are it will never be damaged and you can use it during peace time too. Using anything but normal rails on "liberated" turf is retarded.

I question the usefullness of cargo maglev through. Theere is a reason it has never been used before for cargo, IIRC. And that reason is that normal rails offer the same speed, while not requireing stupidly high voltages and a working power network literally all the time to keep a couple ten thousand tons of material afloat. Yes, maglev is 100% silent, but why would you care about silent cargo trains? Maglev is used in public transport through lareg cities, wher noise is a real issue.

Speed for cargo trains isn't an issue either. Modern trains aren't limited by their engine power, they are limited by the materials that need to move at stupidly high speeds and are under extreme stress (the tires and axles mostly), which are already a limiting factor, because you can only distribute so much weight onto four wheels. Creating a maglev system for fuckhuge cargo trains bears no significant advantage, since it will be limited by the materials in it's coils, which would need to create such a strong magnetic field to keep many thousand tons of cargo in the air.

If you want to build a superfast underground train network to get your civillians out of the cities or into some nuclear bunker, sure maglev would be fine, but maglev cargo is retarded.

>>527219

Hm… What if you put your maglevs where there are no resistance movements?

The chinese Govs trying to building one in Qinghai to Tibet I dont think it will work due to issues geologically but thats off topic

>>527254

I was stuck behind the ramp in my car watching a train full of something labeled 95-99% in huge white letters drive through the center of the city near my house. Chemical was something toxic because of the symbols on the cars, I know them from health and safety training. Each car had 14 tons of the stuff on it, and was labeled slightly differently. Like one car was 14.01t and another was 13.9t and yet another was 14.5t…. It was driving slow and it took half an hour for me to be able to go through, as I was boxed in from behind. Stopped counting at 100 cars, it kept going for ages. I always wondered what it was and why a nuclear power company they needed so much of it.

Isn't the US rail infrastructure better than Europe's and Japan's because of our heavy gauge?

>>527222

>How would a modern, brand new steam locomotive compare to the diesel-electric wonders of today?

The elevator pitch for modern steam goes something like this:

Coal is cheap, coal is domestic. Diesel is expensive, diesel has to be imported and refined.

Steam locomotive development basically halted in the 1940's. The pinnacle of U.S. steam power gave about 7% thermal efficiency. At the same time, the French were building locomotives that gave 14%. A steam locomotive built today, with the advantages of modern design tools and thermodynamic understanding would get closer to %20. And that's with a conventional design, not even getting into the weird shit like closed loop condensers, multiple expansion, "steam motor" design, high pressure water tube boilers, and so forth.

Now consider the fact that a brand new state of the art diesel electric locomotive gives about ~%30 thermal efficiency, and that, BTU for BTU, diesel fuel costs seven times that of coal.

As an anecdote, at the peak of the Oil Crisis, Ross Rowland ran a demonstration using C&O 614 pulling coal trains on the Chessie & Seaboard. Despite the fact that 614 was a thoroughly worn out forty year old museum piece, it cost LESS in fuel per horsepower mile to operate than the diesels.

One of the big, less stupid reasons that steam was replaced in the first place is that they require intensive and skilled labor to maintain and operate. Diesels are comparatively more idiot resistant, you push a button, you pull a lever, it goes.

Guess what suite of technologies hasn't been stagnant for the last eighty years? Power plant control systems. It would take very little to transplant those technologies to a new production steam locomotive.

Names you should be reading into if you care about this:

>Andre Chapelon

>Livio Dante Porta

>David Wardale

>Phil Girdlestone

>Shaun McMahon

>Roger Waller

>Sir Nigel Day

>>527283

I think ours is concentrated on cargo while there's is more passenger based.

>>527293

theirs that's what i get for drunk posting

>>527169

>Imagine this in summer and in some Belarussian backwater forests. No way of putting out a forestfire that starts out 500 meters wide without having either troops come in, or to draft all local firefighters. You don't want a forestfire to damage all tracks in the area, do you?

>burning down forest you are inside of

germans cannot into partisanry

>>527222

>MAN KfzKRANL/M

Jesus Christ I need sleep. It is not from MAN, but Liebherr, and called Fahrzeugkran Leicht or Fahrzeugkran Mittel, not Kraftfahrzeugkran Leicht/Mittel. It is essentially an all terrain crane with camouflage. The larger version can even rotate it's rear wheels, which makes is so fucking manouverabe. You can turn on a dim (figuratively speaking), or drive in a diagonal line (literally).

> permanent magnets

Retarded beyond comprehension.

A: Permanent magnets are already costly to produce

B: producing them in a size that would be useable is currently beyon possible

C: producing them with the strength required to lift entire carg trains would burst every budget

D: how on earth would you compensate for empty cars, or not so heavy trains?

E: the magnets would slowly lose power over time evey time a train goes over them becaue the conflicting magnetic fields would cause problems with the magnetic alignment

>>527227

That's what I said.

>>527254

>all the brakes on the train will apply instantly,

Even better. Single strike will stop the entire train. Then jut run up to the train and cut every single connection tube with a cutter. They will either be forced to leave behind the train cars they can't fix again, or carry enough replacements to fix the entire train. Do this at night and possibly under supressive fire, so that none of the personell employed for protecting the train can do their job.

>>527293

This tbh. This is because we have a very well functioning road system, a lot of little companies that need their supplies delivered to their doorstep too, and not too large distances between cities, even major ones. Cargo trains are mainly used for transporting bulk goods or fluids. The fact that the trains go through cities and curves all the time limit their speed and length quite significantly, while in the wide open terrain that is 90% of the united states you can have fuckhuge trains that transport most of the cargo from A to B.

Recently the German Railway closed announced they will be closing many smaller cargo stations, which will further drive that trend of cargo trucks.

This is quite sad, because cargo trains not only are much more environmently friendly (let's be honest, we all want our children and children's children to be able to go innawoods some day), but also save on personell required, which would free up a lot of workforce in a total war. True, truckers are uneducated workers, but you could at least try to get them a simple job in production/road repairs instead of having them sit off their asses at work ferrying good from A to B.

>>526688

Fuck man. That song is stuck in my head.

maglevs are a complete meme that are too expensive to be used as anything else then tourist attraction.

Putting high voltage on tracks to prevent niggers from tampering with them is bad idea, since it costs too much, is easy to mitigate to the point where how not being accidently turned into puddle a first electricians learn. also anyone half inteligent will use it to steal electricity.

>>526688

is there anime about girls and trains?

>>527517

it might be a good idea but most likely its impossible since these things depend on pre-existing infrastrocture. unless you are building your whole country from scrap its hardly executable. maybe in kazahstan or something

discccliamer: i am drunk

what if we used heat from combustion engine to produce heat and power up steam engine? we could use stirling engine pump to increase speed of steam and thus increasing power output and thats only using byproducts of normal work that already exist

>>526688 (checked + heiled)

Came to post that webm; you beat me to it. Godspeed.

Pink hair looks so responsible, but blonde hair seems like she gets the job done while having fun, so she's my favorite.

>>527601

>A FUCKING LEAF

Posting from southern Commiefornia, so I suppose it isn't any worse.

>>527585

fuck and you can use a water to cool the engine, too.

disclaimer: i'm am still drunl

>>527860

>>Does coal powder burn much better than lumps of coal?

its not about a form, but about a way in which it is burned. powdered coal can be used in a cyclone. as in there are huge fans that provide air for burning process and mix the dust so it is burning everywhere. its the most efficent way we know but i dont think there would be enough space for that in a train

i dunno about turbines. its a good question

>Are Tesla turbines just a forgotten meme, or are they really a cheaper alternative to other turbine engines?

they are not aplicale on a large scale because tesla a wizard and number of people that understand how that shit works and can operate it is very small

>You just need a dictator who likes to think big

yeah call me when that happens

>>527860

>Does coal powder burn much better than lumps of coal?

Not sure. IIRC, most coal power plants burn lump coal suspended in jets of air.

The new hotness in steam design is the Gas Producer Combustion System. For want of a concise explanation, you can read about it here.

>http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/firebox.html

>Boats switched from steam expansion engines to steam turbines. Would the same switch make sense with steam trains too?

There were a couple of attempts at building both steam and gas turbine locomotives. The biggest problem is that turbines have a very narrow RPM range for peak torque, horsepower and efficiency. So you end up with locomotives that work wonderfully cruising at eighty miles an hour, but are absolute pants up to that point. All of the solutions attempting to rectify this drawback (steam-electric, auxiliary piston engines, multiple turbines tuned for different conditions) just made them mechanically unreliable.

>coal powder turbines

It sounds like you're describing a coal gasifier running a conventional gas turbine. There has been at least one proposed design like that, and I don't see why it couldn't work.

>internal combustion engine waste heat

Not enough of a temperature differential. Stirling engines maybe, steam probably not.

>>526696

>Will railway guns ever come back?

When and if supermassive artillery comes back into vogue and someone decides they need a way to transport them overland.

>>527517

>anime about girls and trains

Galaxy Express 999

Galaxy Railways

Densha de D translation never

???

>>527864

>Tesla Turbines

You really just need more discs and make sure your exhausts vent is in the center and not on the sides.

>>528504

I remember reading somewhere that Soviet Union had developed a nuclear reactor that could be mounted on a train. So, what about a train armed with a railgun and point defense lasers powered by a small nuclear power-plant?

>>528685

It's all uniformly garbage, art style has collapsed since early 2000s, dialogue is unintelligible squealing, plot is predictable and boring with some fanservice for "fans".

Your best bet is watching old 80s era anime, they had a few good ones back then.

>>528691

Finland finally realizing patria is garbage?

>>528685

Initial D, 1997 Berserk, LOTGH, and Code Geass are some good classics. Avoid any modern adaptations like the plague.

So this is the dedicated autism thread now?

>>529274

all threads are autism threads

>>528866

I think that becomes even worse when country is not a complete poorfag but borderline autistic paired with a stable government able to do and execute long term plans.

>running a container ship to ground near some important target

>you now have a self contained and decently armored fire-base that cannot be sunk

>>529284

that would be terribly cost inefective

>>529274

It is now that you're here kraut-kun

>>528866

>be poor fag country

Club missiles are cheap (compared to tomahawks but then that's what happen when buying from Lockheeb they just add a zero), but not that cheap. That's kind of the thing, if you can pay for a cargo full of those you can pay for a navy.

Speaking of the Admiral Nakhimov (Kirov-class) is supposed to get out of refit next year.

The big change is the cells is to be replaced by the 3S-14 VLS with 72 cells.

And it seems the SS-N-33 "Zircon" will be ready on time for it.

>>531789

>train simulators

There are no good ones. They all focus too much on having as many trains as possible, while failing to properly simulate a single one in depth.

>>531789

Modded OpenTTD?

>>532524

GRFs that i use and can recomend:

>ECS series. remember to get the latest one. this greatly increases number of industries and resources making game more fun

>FISH

>modern tram set

>industrial stations: this lets you make stations that look like they are made for cargo. is really well done

>all polish sets, but you probably wouldnt appraciate them. there are of course sets for hungarian trains too

also game has built in mod instaler so you can get everything running after two clicks

>>532680

You forgot IronHorse. There are also a bunch of station mods to go full autist with pretty looking train stations.

>>532685

Seems to be comfy indeed, hopefully I'll be able to actually play it during the next weeks.

Also, speaking of trains and /k/, last minute supply train from Hungary allowed us to win the war against the soviets in 1920 Shame it was all for naught and west became communist on its own.

>>532685

i hate how TTD does industry

>>528680

>I also have to wonder, how do they secure the cargo inside shipping containers?

From experience with a logistics company, you pack it tightly or use straps if you for some reason can't fill a container.

Bump.