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Comment by mrtnmcc | Hacker News Reader

Maybe in a controlled setting they can detect mines, but there are plenty of other reasons for dry soil, i.e. hard to detect consistently without false positives. For tank camouflage that's all you need, something that blends in with false positives.

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No you need enough false positives that your adversary won't find it cost-effective to just commit a missile to all of them.

Wouldn't a 50cal round be more cost effective?

Yes but you can't launch it from far away...

No, that won't even tickle a tank.

It could destroy some sensors and even the tracks if lucky, but I think parent poster meant the burried mines.

Before the M2 Bradley, US APCs generally lacked meaningful armor. 50 BMG would sail right through.

IIRC, the Bradley got armour because it looked too much like a tank and that made it a more valuable target.

Isn’t targeting APCs considered a faux pas in war, a little less bad than hitting an ambulance, but still not nice?

> Isn’t targeting APCs considered a faux pas in war, a little less bad than hitting an ambulance, but still not nice?

It is not a faux pas - they are legal targets.

Not sure what you mean by "not nice". All of war is "not nice". Unless you're Pyro from TF2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I

That level of hallucination is certainly going to come in handy when creating military LLMs!

I'm already imaging the integrated helmet AR HUD, with a (remote-operated) switch that just appends "in the style of Pyro's hallucinations in Team Fortress 2" to the prompt for the transformer sitting between your eyes and the helmet cams...

> IIRC, the Bradley got armour because it looked too much like a tank and that made it a more valuable target.

They have meaningful armor because they're actually IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles), not plain APCs, they're designed so the soldiers can fight from inside them, which is hard to do from inside Swiss cheese.

> Isn’t targeting APCs considered a faux pas in war, a little less bad than hitting an ambulance, but still not nice?

No, there's no military on Earth that's going to let the enemy peacefully transport their soldiers around in APCs if they can help it.

Clearly not from practice and hard to see why since their whole point is transporting enemies where you don't want them.

Ancient APCs (the Bradley has been in service for over 40 years) ain't tanks though.

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