Sickened by the Russian onslaught in Ukraine, a tech CEO quit to redesign the 155mm shell — and upend how the West buys its weapons

9 comments

1. His open platform design idea is awesome, but I can’t get over his name: Chad Steelberg

   He’s gotta be the Chadest Chad that ever Chaded

2. Paywall. Neat. 

3. With that headline I was expecting an Elon “cave submarine” thought bubble.

   But this looks legit.

4. 155mm shell fired from a howitzer with a 95 mile range. that is huge really. just need someone to actually produce them and buy them.

5. >The company plans to license the design to governments, which will pay $5 million upfront to gain manufacturing rights, and then $2.5 million a year to stay on board and get continual updates.

   Subscription for EVERYTHING, baby!!!!

   >Autocratic regimes like Russia’s can command industry at will. Democracies can’t — and procurement systems built for peacetime tend to move at a glacial pace. In broad-brush terms: a government commissions a giant contractor, a timeline and price are agreed, and five, ten, twenty years later, a product rolls off the line. That model shuts out smaller players almost entirely.

   The US could do it in WWI and WWII, so did Great Britain. What happened?

   Shut down smaller players? This smaller player is a “we design it, tested it a bit in a very small scale, but someone else do the mass manufacturing” type of player.

   >”In terms of ammunition, Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year,” NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, warned recently.

   Because. You. Did. Not. Industrialise. The. Production!

6. Paywall?

7. Gotta play hell on the barrel life.

8. Doesn’t sound like anything new other than the business concept. Rocket assisted artillery shells have been a thing for years now.

9. Great!

   This Guy completely misunderstood the issues that the West is having with it’s MiC. Guess what, the issue is not the R&D and Design and Testing. Over the years there have been a plethora of awesome Designs that Work well.

   The issue for highly technical and specialised military goods always boils down to PRODUCTION WHILE AT PEACE!

   Producing items economically while at peace, while also retaining the ability to scale up production quickly while at war. If you run a permanently massively oversized factory, you increase costs massively. Don’t need any more? You can’t properly shut the factory down, as you then lose the know how, and it would likely take years to get production started again, if at all.

   This is a grift that completely fails to understand the challenges of military production.

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