I mean, training is required to raise a stormtrooper up to an invisible sniper, even with technology to lower the bar. Not to mention the cost of the technology, as well. Odds are your individual invisible dude may easily cost more overall than any number of raw storm troopers. Not to mention the unreclaimable time cost, You can literally hand anyone a blaster and be roughly equal to your 1%er. They won't have the storm troopers indoctrination, but they just gonna die anyway, that's what the commissar is for.
Costs don't scale linearically with the results of training. There is a technology to training methods themselves and then there is the application and implementation side of training and the amount of corruption present in the whole system such as whether there are any forms of favoritism as opposed to meritocracy. Thus it's even possible to have superior results with lesser resources when the training is more spot on. It's also a tendency that as a country does not fight wars it's training becomes less meaningful and loses some of the aspects that are necessary due to some societies being inducive to hearing any and all complaints. That said it's also possible to wage countless wars and have a ton of war experience and still have low skill levels and bad training systems. It boils down to social structures and dynamics and value systems etc. and is frankly difficult for any individual to fully grasp and get it exactly right. But a good thing to remember and to take into account. In the above we specified that the superior trooper cost as much as 4 Stormtroopers. Going by that if he kills 100 stormtroopers before he is killed the demographic or manpool cost is 100:1 and the resource cost is 100:4 or 25:1. Thus the Stormtrooper economy needed to be at least around 25:1 to the superior trooper's economy in order to not lose economically assuming both are able to fully mobilize their economies. Yet on the order of population the Stormtroopers needed a population in excess of 100:1 to the superior trooper to not be defeated in demographics. The training time applies to superior Just In Time throughput for the side that has significantly lower training time but this mostly reflects to rapid shifts in the rate of reinforcement versus training capacity. If you're losing a lot less people you are likely to be able to actually retire people after their tours into reserves and you are building up a pool of experienced veterans in reserves also able to further boost your training efforts.
I can assure you without significant chance of misrepresentation, that there is very little chance you would ever see equivalencies at that scale. -IF- it only cost 4 troopers worth of resources to field an invisible supertroop no military in the universe would even consider fielding the worthless 1%ers. More likely it's going to cost closer to 50:1. Still technically more efficient, but that is only the base cost because you also have to send that trooper to training for however long it takes to turn them into the invisible supertroop. Now this is not actually taking into consideration the odds of a trooper failing to acquire the necessary skills, which is of course one of a number of reasons the cost to create him is so high. Indeed you may actually end up having to send 50 troopers to training to successfully end up with a single invisible supertroop. Though it may be possible to reclassify those who fail as some lesser troop but still better than the untrained stormtroopers. Maybe.
Yea, 50:1 selection actually does exist and if I remember correctly the FAF has something in the order of 400:1 ratio of applicants and the number of those that make it to pilot training and be trained as pilots. Some places like combat divers also have a very high ratio of not being accepted and failing. And these don't account for all the people who self disqualify themselves before tests in a system where you're going to have to serve in some capacity anyway and then who wouldn't want both the prestige and salary of a pilot? Who'd rather choose to walk on feet and pull a coil of comm wire across the forest? So safe to assume that most people who think they've got any shot and some who don't are applying. What are the special forces or pilots like? They're not compatible that's for sure, a pilot would not easily make it to special forces unit and vice versa. Pilots embody things like a psychological profile that is beneficial to being a pilot, spatial thinking, ability to understand systems and some do so intuitively. What the two share is this psych profile that they are not easily phased or startled. High resistance to psychological shock and so. Especially the special forces also tend to stress pain threshold and pain tolerance which are two different things. Both also embody high focus. Pilots need to be able to merge with the craft, special forces need to be able to act with precision even under heavy strain and stress, pilots benefit from high G tolerance. Would the first person below the cut also make it? What about the 10 next? What about 100 or 1000? Hard to know, many would still likely be able to pass the training and so but in general if the criteria are appropriate and testing is good then in general the further you go below the cut the lesser the performance would be from raw physical attributes that cannot really be changed. As for experience and training, those stack and multiply the physical properties and they go for the outlier types or the end of the range. This doesn't add to the cost of training, it's more of a manpool and human resources question. It takes some resources to set up the screening and to develop it but it's not like you'll need a massive bureaucratic apparatus to handle it that now ends up 100 people being needed to produce 1 recruit. Instead it means that if you need 50 or 500 people a year you'll just make sure that they're tested as opposed to not tested - say, you'd get a position by belonging to the right tribe, being a son to a former pilot and thus forming sort of a pilot caste or pilots' guild or even just bribing the officials or having an aristocratic title which means that you have to serve as a pilot and no one without the title can. Yet that has little to do with the scope and resource cost of the training itself. Those apply more to the technicalities and type of trooper in question. It takes years or closer to a decade to master a jet fighter. It takes a few years to provide the initial training for special forces operator. It takes a month to teach someone how to maintain a rifle, put on boots and sort of follow most orders.
@SheepHugger I imagine Finland doesn't have much need for large naval vessels (especially aircraft carriers). But if Finland were to build or contract an aircraft carrier would you prefer if they went ski jump or CATOBAR (the catapult assisted that the U.S. and the lone carrier for France use. Yes France's Charles de Gaulle is the lone CATOBAR and nuclear powered carrier that is not a U.S. carrier. Any other carrier out there is a ski jump and not nuclear powered.) I think the main advantage of CATOBAR is the ability to launch heavier aircraft and thus heavier payloads. Well and more types of aircraft. ski jump is lower payloads and basically anything with STOVL. I mean a carrier meant for 30ish aircraft. Not anything the size of the nimitz or new ford class carriers. this article talks about the de Gaulle and that France is looking to build a new carrier to replace it. But in they mention a joint frnch-german-spanish project to make a new fighter that is supposed to replace both the Rafale and the Eurofighter. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a33238285/france-new-aircraft-carrier/#:~:text=Charles de Gaulle is France's,carry up to 30 aircraft.
We could easily build an aircraft carrier if we wanted to, we make some of the biggest ships in the world in Turku. It wouldn't be great however, building aircraft carriers is a techtree on it's own and there are a lot of experiences and lessons that needed to be incorporated for it to be truly a good carrier. Our region in itself is not horrible for carriers in the sense that it's very difficult to operate submarines here as the waters are so shallow. In shallow waters it's easier to ping the subs and also they have less opportunity to evade depth charges and mines. Heck during WW2 we merely put up a submarine net from Porkkala to Naissaari across the whole of Gulf of Finland blocking the entire Soviet Baltic Fleet. The Mursu submarine net is still probably the largest one ever built. That said the only advantage we would have for a carrier is that it's mobile but it would be very vulnerable even if we were able to provide a whole task force fleet for it's protection. The archipelago is ideal for special forces strikes and so and the small sea regions make it easy to locate and attack with swarming saturation attacks with ground attack craft and so. We don't have any uses for them and we couldn't really afford one without scrapping much of the army which is overwhelmingly the most important arm with one of the world's strongest artilleries and highly mobile infantry with lots of AA and AT firepower. Assuming we had a nutty dictator to build one he'd probably be constricted to building just a small one with the ski jump.
Though what I really wanted was a short gif of a popsicle AC and launching a popsicle plane off it to splash in the ocean. My needs may have been too specific for the internets to comply.
I just wish I could actually once visit one of those massive luxurious "largest in the world" party boats that we build. All for distant foreign customers in the Caribbean and so...
Oh you mean in the place where it they get tons of hurricanes? Because it is now peak hurricane season and so far 42 systems (19 depressions, 17 tropical storms, 5 hurricanes and 1 major hurricane). If they get bad enough they can sink a cruise ship. U.S. Navy (especially the third fleet in world war II) has not had much luck with typhoons (hurricane just a different name). Just 1 typhoon (storm not the plane) sank 3 destroyers, damaged other ships, washed 146 planes off carrier decks, 790 officers and enlisted. I think a carrier had a massive fire outbreak caused by the storm.
Afrika Korps lost much of their equipment in Saharan desert due to a massive flood caused by massive rain. Including massive material losses to their Luftwaffe units. One of the driest and hottest places on earth but they have this freak massive storm every 50 years and it happened just during a campaign. Some of this stuff is literally like the GM just going "oh heck, you know fire descends from the sky and everyone loses 3 item cards and receives two wounds. (just die already) " I don't know if those Oasis-class cruise ships can even be sunk by a storm. I mean cruise ship is such a broad concept, ranging from tiny shitty rustbuckets that wouldn't be fit for freight duty to the Oasis-class beasts: Sure as heck it would get damaged by the peak gusts, what wouldn't? Indeed, we could in theory have a whole fleet of carriers - and we could afford them too if we just decided to pour much of our GDP to it and all. But we wouldn't be able to afford the escorts and the fighters without turning ourselves to North Korea...
By itself I don't know if one of the big storms can though they can generate 60 foot waves (almost 20 meters). More likely it'd cause a fire or some other catastrophic damage then direct sinking. Still a result from the storm.
I suppose a complete abysmal mishandling of the ship could in theory cause you to have the ship sideways against 20m waves and this would cause the ship to list and could in some ships cause the balancing systems to overcompensate and possibly cause a reverse listing that could then cause the ship to take some water from the waves and if the compartment doors would all be open it could cause a further listing. In all seriousness all the compartment doors are closed at all times especially on military vessels and for many ships weather alone would not suffice to sink them. With some smaller ships there is a possibility of them listing too much when not facing the waves or so... I don't know I'm no sailor, I'd have to ask my sis, she's crossed a few seas in smaller vessels in some very rough weather.
I would say in a fairly modern ship that is following what's standard (the big doors closed and sealed and such and all that) probably not a high chance of a storm sinking a ship. Now if those compartments are not sealed there might be a good chance of a storm sinking them (I know those ships hightail it out of the area if those storms are headed that way. Cruises are pretty cheap this time of year normally because of peak hurricane season. Which officially is June to November. Peak is like now. I think two depressions have formed in 24 hours today one is already a named storm).
Make sure you're not the type to easily get seasick first. Big boats are better, but big boats on bigger waves and you still gonna suffer. No point getting on a cruise if you gonna be worshiping the porcelain god for much of the journey.
I spent a lot of time on cruises as my aunt worked on cruise ships and we got a lot of free tickets. I recall a few autumn storms with the mighty ship really plowing up and down in considerable amount, so much so that when going up the stairs you would have to time your steps right. I'm blessed with quite good tolerances on ships and recently I've managed to get rid of my photosensitivity and other sensory sensitivities as well, another blessing. Yet few people can have it all. I have no sense, style or class!
The F-35A is the only version of the jet with an internal gun. The Marine Corps F-35B and Navy F-35C carry a gun in a pod mounted to the outside of the aircraft and the guns have “acceptable” levels of accuracy Shouldn't the 35b (the marine version with vertical take off VTOL/STOVL) be the one that has an internal gun? I mean close in ground support is the whole point of that version.
