A recent report disclosed that Ukraine's Logistics Command is pulling parts from up to 8 donor guns to repair an M777. I know little about this, beyond the basics of TIG welding. Is this normal in/efficiency? Can we extrapolate a similar ratio for non-titanium guns?
i smell curry
Frick off
Man, I am studying to b an electrician and every trades person including welders make me so jealous of how pretty their work looks.
I smell poo
>a recent report
can you post it? if you can't this is a bait thread and you need to gtfo
Obviously. I didn't link it because it was framed annoyingly, like hysterical clickbait. Doesn't say anything useful.
Ukraine began restoring M777's without spare parts in late Jan / early Feb. https://mil.in.ua/uk/news/syly-logistyky-nalagodyly-vidnovlennya-155-mm-buksovanyh-gaubyts-m777/
Article about the cannibalization
https://defence-ua.com/army_and_war/na_remont_odnijeji_m777_dovelos_brati_chastini_iz_8_poshkodzhenih_tse_hronichna_problema-14734.html
Yeah, that's normal when you don't have spare parts. This is a shill thread. Please have a nice day.
Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD. Those are guns which might have been able to be repaired and made use of, instead of being hacked up to keep other guns going.
So, questions — WHY do they not have parts? Yes I get it that aid has been super slow to arrive. HOWEVER, Ukraine has full unfettered access to MICs of the West, why can’t they BUY the parts they need to keep critical weapons running? Ukraine is poor, but they’ve allocated $40b — that’s half of their national budget — to military spending plus tons of loans and monetary aid of course. A new M777 costs like $3m, so parts should just be a fraction of that…they can’t find a few hundred million to buy all the parts and tools they need? They’re claiming to be making over a MILLION drones in 2024, so they have the budget to buy the components for THAT. So why are they cannibalizing guns? Can the MICs not fulfill orders? WTF is going on?
>HOWEVER, Ukraine has full unfettered access to MICs of the West
No they don't.
>Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD
actually you'd be surprised how often it happens, even in rich militaries like the US. I've heard many tales from Iraq where Humvees had to get pulled apart to get other ones working because they needed that Humvee working yesterday and the replacement parts aren't due for another week
>actually you'd be surprised how often it happens, even in rich militaries like the US.
It is called just in time logistics which also means just in time production which means no warehouses full of spare parts. It is a logistic strategy borrowed from private business such as Amazon that depends on a clockwork society working without hiccups. You can imagine what happens when this supply chain meets a peer enemy that uses old fashioned produce it before we need it and warehouse it logistics.
>Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD.
Except it's literally a thing you stupid frick.
>Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD. Those are guns which might have been able to be repaired and made use of, instead of being hacked up to keep other guns going.
Every military cannibalize their shit to repair current usable equipment. Its cheaper and also an efficient way to recycle equipment thats been damaged beyond repairs. The U.S. did this in iraq with the abrams when the tank was damaged beyond what they can repair.
you are a moronic shill
>Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD. Those are guns which might have been able to be repaired and made use of, instead of being hacked up to keep other guns going.
Every gun is made of 100 working parts. If you take apart 4 damaged ones into spare parts, number of working parts doesn't change
>Cannibalizing guns to keep the best ones running isn’t “normal” it’s SUPER FRICKING BAD.
What is your personal complex weapons system or other relevant maintenance experience? Why do you presume cannibalization by any competent mechanic is "hacking" you nupid stucking figger?
Canning was common even in WWII, when damaged aircraft were towed aside and salvaged by maintainer. Not even peak US logistics can instantly supply parts for everything.
Best practice is the way the USAF canns (most of the time when not chasing stats or sucking Supply's collective wiener) which is to cann down a bird for X number of days, then reassemble it from Supply parts and from the next cann bird. This is counterintuitive but prevents otherwise inevitable clustefricks from one jet being so far torn down it takes excessive work to return to service.
I have many years canning experience like any current or former maintainer. Shit works done right.
All you need to do is google it.
Isn't that a good thing? Recycling parts from damaged equipment, regardless if there are replacement parts or not, is better in a long war with finite supplies.
My concern is whether the engineers are skilled enough to make the repairs with whatever is at hand and not botch it up.
I guess it would have to depend on the condition of the donors. I've only really messed with cannibalizing cars and computers to get 1 up and running but typically its either you pick the one that would take the least effort to bring back or the one that would be the most useful/ valuable. There's no clear ratio, sometimes you have a thing which needs 5 replacement parts and the alternative is something that only 1 new component but that component is so expensive/ difficult to replace that its easier to fix the one with 5 broken parts
What I'm mostly wondering is whether we can reasonably assume a certain ratio when tallying up russia's losses. I know that titanium is a special beast thoughever. On the other hand, russia is russia so their towed guns are probably more difficult to repair purely because of the absolute state they were already in before they were hit.
This is not a shill thread. I have killed more russians than you ever will. Shush.
>I have killed more russians than you ever will
Shut up moron.
>I have killed more russians than you ever will.
So, FSB, Kadyrovite or air defense?
none of the above, he's in procurement
liquor store salesman
>I know that titanium is a special beast thoughever
There's literally nothing special about titanium. The "special" thing about it is that to weld it "properly", it needs to be done in a fully argon-purged environment, but no one actually does that and you just have to make allowances for slightly weaker welds. If you see any pretty colors in the weld that means it wasn't done in a passive environment. If it was done "right," the raw weld will be the same color as the substrate without any grinding to pretty it up. You might see a little bit of light brown discoloration if you let it get hot, but it won't turn silver or purple or blue.
^This too.
Backpurging is common for pressure tubing and pipe tho but that's nearly effortless.
Picrel BTW is repair not cannibalization. Old boy makes quite decent welds.
>no gloves or eyepro
why?
What are you a pussy?
That's certainly something to pontificate. In a similar vein, does a loss get removed if the knocked out item is later restored or can a certain piece of materiel "die" a bunch of times according to the operating country's count? Like say a country has 5 tanks that each get knocked out 3 times but later returned to service, did they lose 15 tanks?
Just close your eyes anon. The stinger makes a good cigarette lighter, too.
Be grateful you've never had to work somewhere with budget constraints. One of my previous jobs, we had a back room full of various types of broken equipment. We had very little money to buy new equipment, so the only way to get stuff back in service was to salvage enough parts from broken pieces to cobble together one working model. Of course, most of the gear had similar points of failure, so you'd have two dozen of the same item with one or two parts busted while the rest of it was in good shape. I'd imagine they may be doing something similar here.
I work with ukraine's drones and all things EW, so scavenging def isn't alien for me. I just know too little about the M777 to know the extent to which its maintenance differs from other towed guns. D30s here, for instance, are unkillable zombies that seem to require total vaporization or they end up back in the field in a few weeks time. They can't hit targets for shit, but that's a secondary consideration for arty units.
You don't know much of anything and you aren't convincing anyone.
>They can't hit targets for shit, but that's a secondary consideration for arty units.
No it isn't...
>I know little about this, beyond the basics of TIG welding. Is this normal in/efficiency?
Is what normal? You're talking about a cannon that said country doesn't manufacture. From a source that explicitly gives no details except to say "damaged".
I am fishing for stats or work experience from someone who knows about these guns.
Hold on, let me call my buddy who's an expert on Soviet artillery.
Oh wait, he's at fricking war right now.
>he doesn't find a minute in his day to shitpost on /k/
poor time management. ngmi. enjoy this fawn:
Wut? We have some fairly autistic data on artillery, like rd/kill ratios for different ordnance from vietnam onward. Something similar might exist for howitzer repair info. I know for certain that it does exist for armored vehicles.
No, actually, nobody has info on how a country that doesn't manufacture a gun makes use of that gun in a field stripping sense. Including the sources you've posted.
You are being pedantic because you doubt the intentions of the thread. This is rhetorically dishonest and replying further is not a good use of my time.
Yes literally everyone who just reads what you posted doubts why you posted it as you posted it. This is for good reason, as already explained.
You critters are never in any of my threads showcasing Ukrainian innovations in the war, nor are you even in any of the board's other threads if you can't find a reason to bicker about/with shills in them. So I don't have to give a damn about the views you believe to be representative of the audience here, anon. It's as simple as that. What you're doing itt is background noise. "Literally everyone" tunes it out.
I specifically posted this question separate from the ukro-arty #aesthetics gallery I've been gathering because this whole melodrama from your kind is inevitable and I didn't want that to trash the other thread.
Anyway:
Ukraine Logistics Command promo clip
Webm
>A fricking leaf
Guess they finally found something other than drinking, trucking and farming for the boys from Lethbridge to do.
At least logi command has women to offset the leafery.
No you aren't, asking if "this is normal" in what is clearly obtuse information for which there are at best short answers to your very lengthy questions is at best dumb but at worst literally any other explanation for why you're asking that.
Why would that be exotic? You already see pics of rather ordinary weld repairs on lightly dinged components. Do you imagine howitzers to be complex or exotic?
If you knew anything about repairs you'd know the work isn't rocket surgery. What needs metal can be welded. What needs metal and subsequent machining can be welded then machined. What need circuit board repair can be done by a shop with the right equipment but ordering spares via the US supply system (funded by whatever account has money and permission to place orders) would generally be faster. US bases even do their own board repairs and some have testers which can read multiple known good sample boards then test others for function. (USAF Gold Flag had that in the early 2000s so it should be commercial and common by now.)
Engineers design systems. Technicians may work with them to choose fixes but generally would make most choices as battle damage is a known quantity. US military tech pubs cover expedient field repairs which are often done at the techs discretion (even with aircraft, I was USAF ABDR trained which was big fun at the AMARC).
Ukraine will have experts in CONUS to contact so they will have no mystery procedures. Tech reps are an email away.
I am demoralized. This post has finally convinced me Russia is winning.
Will that be your cope meme when they’re negotiating a peace agreement in which Russia keeps all the land they took? Or will there be a new meme?
>Is this normal in/efficiency?
this is an exceptional rate, models predict that in similar circumstances you would need 10.53 donor guns to repair one gun
>Can we extrapolate a similar ratio for non-titanium guns?
oh yes, since the titanium is harder to weld, we can extrapolate the cannibalization rate factor of at least 0.76/gun
They will have a lot of damaged guns, and shot out guns. Also all sorts of grades of damage and wear. They take best available parts for current rebuild after a cursory look through the boneyard. Totally normal.
How would damage be graded in a nato maintenance pen? I know there are codified levels of repair for armored vehicles
Find an unclassified TM for that info.
Useless. TTP, almost verbatim:
>We do replace forward/repair rear. If IDIOTPROOFING DIAGNOSTIC unable to fix && IDIOT LIST complete, goto NOT MY PROBLEMVILLE. NMPV exec $INTERACTIVE_WEB_MANUAL.
M777s are fragile compared to older 155mm like M198 etc.
They were made as a Lightweight gun for airmobile ops to be carried by CH47s.
Using them as towed guns over rough terrain for prolonged distances breaks them.
So they are maintenance intensive and requires titanium welding equipment.
>US Army should have sent older but more robust M198s as Ukies were never going to do airmobile.
Even shooting them too much/too fast is going to frick them up. They're a specialist piece of kit that for some moronic reason the US decided to buy in larger than realistic or useful numbers, and now they've passed them on to ex-Soviet morons who are abusing them beyond specifications.
I think US Arty was planning that Afghan was going to be airmobile FSBs like Vietnam2.0 and over-ordered as M109s were never going to be deployed. Ofc the Fire role was taken by CAS so they could gladly dump them off onto the Ukies, but its still the wrong gun for EastEuropean conditions, tactics, and general Slav-ness.
Cannibalism is only ever a short-term remedy as you still need backup logistic supply to fix the cannibalised item of its original fault plus the extra missing bits.
^Most reasonable explanation. The parts flow can catch up later. It's not all that much in shipping space nor is truck freight from the nearest NATO airport rocket surgery.
Meh, I've consistently seen arty crews talk about the M777 as needing special handling. Seems like everyone who has it respects the fact that it's not just another beater gun. And if not ukraine, who would be the least-bad recipient of a bunch of titanium guns, unceremoniously dumped without guaranteed parts and US maintenance? They're a world center for titanium fabrication.
They're also a bunch of fricking morons. They got M777s because the US is desperate to offload them anywhere they can, the same reasoning behind literally anywhere having more than a dozen of the things on hand.
who are "they" and why are you so certain they're a buncha morans
Everyone involved including you.
>In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony DoD's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my own intelligence.
They bought a ton of them for mountain, jungle and island ops. Afghanistan was a nig contributor in wanting mobile artillery like this.
They can be flown anywhere and still have overrange over more heavy Russian and chink defensive artillery. That's the point. It's not a generic workhorse, it was specialised kit when bought.
Does the US even have M198s anymore?
>titanium welding equipment.
A TIG machine of ~350A or better, argon, filler appropriate to the alloy and whatever drag shields and purging assist items the welder feels like making.
Any decent welding shop could do the work and skilled pipe welders etc are reasonably plentiful. The same equipment is required for other repair welding on weapons systems.
M777 is a recent example of how titanium production welding improvements were developed:
https://www.thefabricator.com/thefabricator/article/arcwelding/the-facts-on-welding-titanium
Cannibalization is normal fleet maintenance for everything military including USAF aircraft.
This is done to buffer Supply and designated cann (vehicles, aircraft, weapons, generators, whatever) are used as donors with parts removed documented.
Civilian vehicle fleets also cann. If the program is well managed it doesn't get out of control and replacement parts can fix the cann donors in their turn.
"Feasible canns" are supposed to not require absurd amounts of consumables, labor and ops checks but that's mostly an aircraft thing. Nothing on ground vehicle should be a difficult cann.
t.ancient mechanic etc etc