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TheVulture

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  1. That could be a reasonable thing to do though. The point of that kind of wargame isn't like playing through a Combat Mission scenario to see who wins and by how much,. It is to practice co-ordination in the real world and to test doctine. If you've gone to the trouble and expense of getting a significant US fleet there for the exercise, and they've all been sunk on the first day, then you could a) play on to the bitter end in a losing scenario, and have all the USN people sit on their hands for two weeks b) note that their is a fatally exploitable deficiency in your fleet defense doctrine, make a note to start looking at solutions, and restart the exercise with that avenue banned so that you can meaningfully test how other things behave. b is valid, as long as they don't sweep the whole fatal vulnerability under the carpet and forget about it, but treat it as a problem that needs to be solved and quickly.
  2. If the fire had caused enough damage that the engine fell off, then their might well be significant damage and weakening in the wing above as well (and e.g. in the electrics and mechanisms for the flaps for landing).
  3. And simultaneously cutting down on their reliance on Chinese imports to bring critical manufacturing capability back to domestic/ allied locations.
  4. Don't waste the weight on the seababy and draw the extra attention. Instead have separate support surface drones with MGs or AGLs and a good supply of ammo that put down the suppressive fire while the seababies head in
  5. Modern hull thicknesses are probably in the 10-50mm range depending on the ship, as opposed to the 200-300mm (or more) of WW2 era battleships, so not exactly armoured, but probably still enough that there's a substantial difference for an explosion outside it vs inside (depending on the explosion size obviously. The Tsar Bomba' blast isn't going to be noticeably attenuated by 10mm of steel)
  6. Hard to be entirely clear from the drone footage, but it looks like certainly 2, possibly 3 drones hit against the armoured hull, and one managed to hit a breach in the side from a previous hit where the interior of the ship was visible. There are at least 2 distinct explosions shown, one of which has a large secondary explosion a few seconds later. 4 explosions are shown in total, but it's not clear whether any of them are shown repeatedly / from other angles. But as with the previous two drone sinking, it looks like they once again managed to get a drone to hit an already damaged point and detonate behind the armour, which proved fatal to the ship the last two times (although the Segei Kotov is three times the displacement of tyre previous corvette sunk, the Ivanovets).
  7. Ukraine seem to be getting very good at this "asymmetrical conventional war" approach. The Black Sea Fleet, which vastly overmatched the Ukrainian navy, has been pretty much neutralised. In the early says they were launching cruise missile strikes from near Odessa. Now they won't even go as far as Sevastopol, and operationally seem to be limited to ferrying supplies with their decreasing supply of landing ships. The Russian air force also has massive superiority in numbers and modern equipment, and yet are losing aircraft at an impressive rate and have lost two of their A-50 planes (and no-one seems to know really how many airworthy ones they actually have now). Of course the air force is still a problem and not neutralised (hello, glide bombs and cruise missile salvos), but it's obvious that Ukraine are forcing the Russians to be more cautious and conservative with their air power than they'd ideally like.
  8. Mostly off-topic mini-documentary on the prototype soviet Su-47 that never entered production (courtesy of Growling Sidewinder, who is a combat flight sim guy (DCS)). It's only 9 minutes long, so not a big time investment. I mention it though because there is a short bit at the end about the Russians having restarted some testing with it as part of research in to forward-swept wings on drones to give much better manoeuvrability with a view to drone vs drone combat. More of a curious titbit than anything substantial.
  9. The flares have been used for some time before that launch, and the launch is from the other side of the aircraft line of flight to the video that shows the hit. So in one video we have A-50 moving right to left, and an explosion behind the aircraft where presumably an IR seeker hit a flare. Then the plane explodes. In the other video from the Russian base we have the A-50 moving left to right (on approach to land at the base), and after a fair bit of flaring, a SAM launch which appears to be about the right timing to be the missile that hit the A-50 Possible scenario: UKR SF got to a few miles from the base where they could hit the A-50 coming to land. Man portable IR seeking SAM launched (e.g. Starstreak) but hits flare. Base air defence launches and hits A-50. Either they were trying to intercept the UKR missile, confused about the situation (fog of war) or just panic. A-50 trying to avoid IR missile behind is hit by radar guided missile from the front. EDIT: Not starstreak - I don't think that is IR guided from what I've read.
  10. If you draw a line after the big Ukrainian gains of Kherson and Karkhiv, and look at what has changed purely in terms of territory since then, Russia gained Bakhmut last winter, then there was the Ukraininan summer offensive which didn't achieve strategic objectives in terms reaching Tokmak, and now we've had Avdiivka. I think if you add all that up, Ukraine comes out comfortably ahead, although neither side has changed the size of the Russian controlled territory by even 1%. If someone is seeing this as Russia having the upper hand, they're seeing what they want to see.
  11. Well, Navalny's died in jail in Siberia. Surprised he lived this long. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-68316979
  12. Like most Russian propaganda, it's probably not really meant to be believed or disbelieved. It's meant to cause arguments and distrust, widen divisions and increase mutual suspicion between those who chose to believe it and those who chose not to. Whether Putin would actually prefer Biden or not is a completely unrelated Issue. It's meant to generate heat, not shed light.
  13. Yes, both videos clearly have at least a second drone hitting precisely on the area badly damaged by the first hit, and causing big explosions (the second drone is pretty much going to be inside the armour when it triggers). That they've done it successfully two attacks in a row implies that it's something that can be pulled off now with a reasonable degree of confidence with the people and equipment they have. That really does seem like a game changer for naval warfare in near-coastal regions (might be harder to pull off in the mid pacific). The race is on to find an effective counter.
  14. Today's Perun has a good high-level overview of the Chinese military that is worth a listen for anyone interested in the China / Taiwan / US situation. Also has the wry observation that China is modernising its navy partly to be able to protect its international trade, which it is very dependent on economically. Particularly with the US, Japan and Korea. But the main geopolitcal threats it sees to its international trade are from the US, Japan and Korea. So it is trying to build a navy to compete with those countries in order to be able to protect its trade with the same countries....
  15. She, not he. President Katalin Novak resigned. Prime minister Viktor Orban is still prime minister. No idea how much political power the president has in Hungary's system.
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