chrisl

Is that kind of like the "Death Scrod" of Somerville, MA?

Or spelled out “Surrender, Dorothy!”

It came up earlier in discussion of defensive positions. I thought everybody knew we had a parking garage expert.

It would also be no surprise to me if UA pilots had started training months ago and it was only announced because some indication got out that it was happening.

But you missed half the point: Ukraine has been using largely the same equipment with their mirror army and have done well with missile defense. If it’s a question of integration, it still comes back to competent Ukrainian missile defense vs. much less competent Russian defense.

My best guess is that RU just doesn't have enough people with a clue to operate the radars. They must have them, and if they're operable they should have the performance needed for air defense. Until very recently, Ukraine has been using largely the same* old Soviet stuff for air defense that Russia has, and has been using it effectively to shoot down incoming missles/drones/planes. Russia got essentially identical stuff from the USSR and has done a bit of further development, and seems to be incapable of detecting anything. (c.f. Moskva) *ignoring all the NATO remote detection aircraft that might be providing early warning of where to look, as well as possible yet-to-be-described NATO supplied systems that might be providing early warning from inside Ukraine.

That would require the overrun Russians to have enough radios to even get on the air.

Some variation of this: https://www.amazon.com/Curad-Tubular-Stretch-Bandage-Dressing/dp/B01BLQ8ANU It's an easy way to hold the absorptive or sealing bandages in place on things that can be a pain to wrap, like arms and heads. I have two different sizes of it in the medicine cabinet for road rash bandaging, since you typically get road rash on joints that make them hard to bandage and keep usable. It's way faster to hold the pad in place and pull that over his head than to do a bunch of turns with vet wrap. (eta: and I haven't actually crashed and needed to use it since I bought it, so it works really well.) (another edit: I checked on the box and the "large" size for legs stretches to 24" diameter, so it would cover just about anybody's head, except maybe putin's)

Jewish space lasers are how I get my popcorn popped.

Lamarck was the "original", and Lysenko was the Soviet proponent of it. ( @Offshoot and @G.I. Joebeat me to it but I didn't read far enough first.)

CRISPR

Like a good horror movie. You know it's coming, but if the writing and direction are good, it still catches you by surprise.

This may be one of the scariest things you’ll ever read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024815118

Antibiotic resistance to extremely high antibiotic levels in 11 days:

I think it’s time for a discussion of UGVs with tripod mounted Brens on them.

Sure, it takes more debris to be a problem, but that doesn't mean someone might not want to remove someone else's satellite from a higher orbit, or at least render it useless in some way. GPS satellites are not in GEO - that's not a very good orbit if you want to get high precision globally. They're in 55 degree orbits at about 10,000 km. GEO tends to have things like regional weather sats and big comm relays. ISR stuff tends to be in high inclination LEO, sometimes highly elliptical.

Just about everybody with substantial space access has done various levels & types of ASAT test - you don't have to break satellites into little pieces to render them inoperable. And cost-to-orbit is getting low enough that for some players it's very practical to contest earth orbit (not really restricted to LEO).

double post

That's exactly what Russia tried in Nov 2021. They took out a fairly large satellite in a quite messy way. It was before I was paying close attention to Russian space assets, and it confused a lot of people at the time because it would also threaten Russian satellites. But after Feb 24 when I started looking into Russian space based ISR, they really had nothing substantial to lose and had the potential to create blind spots in US/NATO ISR by "accidentally" taking out western sats.

The list of Ukrainian equipment losses is still up, with links to the Russian losses that go to the 404 page. I haven't been checking the losses for a while - when did he split off the RU and UK losses onto separate pages? The Russian list maybe got too long and his CMS doesn't support that much on a single page or something, so he's got to do some editing/splitting.

Forcing RU to pick alternate targets is a good thing. Kyiv is a very large urban area, so they don't need particularly good accuracy to *something* if the missiles get through. Possibly the only other large urban area in range is Kharkiv, and after that, things get smaller or less dense, or both fairly quickly. If RU has terrible accuracy (and so far their performance suggests that they do), then switching to other targets means they have a smaller chance of hitting something other than dirt, even if the missiles do get through.

I suspect it's an easier problem in many ways at sea. At least the outer picket of defense doesn't have the complication of all sorts of buildings and terrain as it approaches horizon pointing. You have to worry about friendly ships, but there will be fewer of them than stuff you have to worry about in an urban environment and you can always know where they all are.

I think Kazakhstan's "thanks, but we're good" when invited to participate in the SMO was the start of the Russian soft-collapse. Belarus adding to that would be a major enhancement, though.

I meant to comment on that yesterday in the context of Steve's post about camouflage. With the cheap drones, they don't even necessarily need fancy thermal optics, just optics that reach a little outside the visible range. Most commercial image sensors are sensitive out to to the near IR, a little outside the human visible range, and have a filter to keep from recording that part. Sensors without the filter can potentially pick up enough to notice differences in properties of things a little beyond the visible, so even if it looks green (or like trash) visually, some things can stand out as being different enough from the background environment to investigate closer.

Of course they can intercept everything. It's just that sometimes they're intercepting it on the ground using their whole AD system or other random equipment or facilities. What MoD claims is true, but incomplete.