Yeah reading the specs its just amazing.

200 rounds per minute of air burst shells designed to target troops behind cover. Kinda terrifying really.

All 35 tonnes can travel at 100km/h.

Looks great too. Reminiscent of the troop carriers from the alien universe.

Note while this is not a dedicated air defense platform the Spike missile and 30mm cannon (with airburst ammunition) can be used as decisive defense against a mass drone attack… which I am not saying is likely to happen to Australia but there is definitely a rational argument to be made here.

While the weapons are big on this thing, ultimately its primary role is still to transport human beings through a dangerous space full of drones and other threats safely to do something which doesn’t have to be killing.

A single vehicle like this could be deployed to a port, or a sensitive area and ensure that somebody with a lot of drones and explosives couldn’t as easily and decisively threaten tragedy.

I don’t know, far be it for me to say the military industrial complex isn’t a massive problem, I live in the US lol, but also I consider Australia a fairly stable open society and I think that from an international perspective at least I am happy Australia knows how to produce a modern armored fighting vehicle like this.

The seduction of how cool military weapons look is real though, I mean it is basically the moral of The Wind Rises right?

Between this and Australia acquiring a large amount of Apaches, I think Australians can genuinely feel confident their country has taken the threat of counter drone operations and littoral security with regards to small unmanned vehicles seriously. Most nations in the world cannot, even some that are actively engaged in war as we speak…

Call me an armored vehicle fan but I would take being able to produce Boxer armored vehicles and just flipping the automotive market into cheap electric vehicles over sustaining a massive ICE car production capacity.

I guess my point is that part of the beauty of Electric Cars is that they commodify Automotive Production as a capacity because their drivetrains are an order of magnitude simpler, easier to produce and easier to maintain. Building cars with ICE engines is so much harder, it is like trying to build a space rocket with only analog and mechanical components. You can do it, we got really good at it, but once digital systems of control become possible the contrast was obvious. It is the same thing with Electric Cars compared to Gas Engine Cars.

I can explain an electric motor to you, what you do is get some magnets and then stick a coil of wire inside the magnets on a spinny thing and then set the wires up so they pass a current that switches back and forth thus projecting a magnetic field that is always “repelling” from the magnets and thus the electrical energy is converted into mechanical spinning continously. There I did it, there is no way I can explain how a gas engine car actually transfers power to its wheels as simply.

What is important with Electric Cars is a strong regulatory environment for testing highly digitized cars to make sure they aren’t bugged, prone to dangerous failure or pose a geopolitical threat in terms of surveillance to the country.

shrugs

…but I hate cars so take that as you will.

Capacity to produce heavy industrial vehicles like this can also be laterally extended into heavy peacetime machinery too, obviously it requires different production lines but there is a lot of skills transfer and knowledge/physical capacity that isn’t easy to produce out of thin air that is shared between military and civil contexts here.

Just ask the Archer about it.