chrisl

To drop fuel on someone you have to be above and in front of them, so if it were matching speed it would have had to be above and in front of the MQ-9, in essentially the same relative positions as a refueling tanker and its recipient. What the SU pilot did was fly an intercept course from the side where he could probably see the upper bits of the "vertical" stabilizers of the MQ-9 up until the very last second. You have to extrapolate a bit from the video (and someone with CAD models of both aircraft could do it accurately very easily) because the camera on the MQ-9 is mounted under the nose on a swivel, so it's rotated to about the 135° position and probably as far up as it tilts (roughly horizontal), while the SU pilot is on top of his aircraft but can lean over and look to the left and down as he does his sweep. What you have to visualize is how much of the top of the MQ-9 is visible to someone stretching up and leaning left in the cockpit. He would have had a better view if he'd done it from above, banked slightly left, but then would have had to do a quick rotation to avoid slicing the MQ with his left wing. Instead he risked the belly of the plane (with a higher chance of a hit because of visibility) rather than his flight surfaces. Where he screwed up on the second pass is intercepting a couple feet aft of where he probably intended to (and of where he did on the first pass).

If we know even the approximate dimensions of both aircraft (and we do) then the camera can give us a very accurate sense of the distance between the two. And given the bent propeller blade, we have more indication that the distance between the two was zero.

It's the modern version of how the La Brea Tar Pits filled up with animals.

Which is why I don't think it's likely they'll target the bigger aircraft cruising over NATO air space.

The AWACS and JSTARS seem to reliably fly over NATO countries, unless they're flying with their ADS-B turned off over the BS. So an attack on one of them by Russia would be a much more overt act of aggression and likely leave them with an undeclared no-fly zone.

Twitter thread from RAND corp person who did a report on similar Russian signaling, with link to the full report in the thread:

So sorry that it landed on your bridge...

Short of shooting them down, what's an aircraft response team going to do? An MQ-9 costs about $30M - not worth getting into a direct shooting match over. Better to have something Russian quietly disappear.

The Bosporus and Dardanelles are closed to warships weren't already based in the BS before the war, so essentially no naval vessels in or out. In principle the US could send an unarmed civilian contractor vessel to recover it.

A little aside on the future of tactical equipment. The print version of IEEE Spectrum that just came has an article about giving people extra arms that are controlled by neural signals. This kind of thing has already been done for prosthetics, but they're proposing adding a couple arms on a backpack so you can have them work independently of your meat arms. That, in itself, would be useful for the super ghillie suit when the tank is fully dead - you could have the extra arms reach up over the cover to fire so your meat arms aren't put at risk. https://spectrum.ieee.org/human-augmentation But the same type of control and feedback could also be applied to personal drones. Individual soldiers could have drones that function like familiars (traditionally magic users have used things like cats/rats/bats/etc for this purpose) to act as their spotters. With neural feedback practice it would just go to where you want it while it follows you around. And re the downing of the MQ-9: That could potentially end poorly for Russian aerospace assets, but it may not be something we hear about for a few years.

Yeah - cover is a very different thing when there are quiet drones with cameras and grenades cruising around in the area. A shell crater that might give a little protection from direct fire is the same as sitting out in the open. Vehicles become very difficult to protect when they're behind the lines - park the IFV for dinner or while you eat and you might come back to find it's had a grenade or two dropped inside. Trenches don't protect you from drones unless you have a lid on them, and even then in some cases you can get a grenade dropped inside or a guided drone through the door. And it's only going to get worse. Ukraine needs to send out a protocol to the Russians for surrendering to drones - it might make things better for everybody.

Looks like maybe 5 Russians. Probably nobody on station cares. They can’t see the borders from space, and it’s more likely that both crews unite against the ground people than fight with each other.

If this is representative, does it imply that the Russians aren’t even handing out rpgs in any kind of quantity, let alone atgms? With dispersed troops in a long trench that was a pretty exposed vehicle side.

LLF beat you to it about three pages ago, but linked to a tweet in the middle of the thread. I recalled reading it, but had to flip back. I need to trigger the threadreader more often, it can be a lot of effort to read everything as a series of haikus.

Those guys need shotguns for when the drones show up to spot them, it's basically duck hunting.

Of the bears? Yeah, I get bears like that in my yard occasionally. I have a good video of one of them right on the other side of the sliding door from me. I mostly get them when the people across the street put smelly stuff in their trash - their yard is steep and mine is flat, so the bear tears open the bags on my front yard. Or did you mean the Terra videos? One of the first things that struck me is that Russia has so little ISR over the access to Bakhmut that drone teams can go into Bakhmut for the day, direct a bunch of fire, then go home for dinner and a bath. Ukraine may be suffering casualties on the line, but they're also not even close to being in a desperate situation there. The video with the reporter Nastya reinforces that. Those guys were leaving that mortar emplaced in one spot for a long time without a lot of concern for CB or being spotted by drones. And that mortar looked rock steady on firing - they've had some time to get it settled in. They probably are able to dial in fixed reference points over time and it helps with both their conservation of shells and their ability to avoid detection. Get coordinates and hit them with only a few rounds fired. People at the big defense contractors really ought to be watching the Terra videos. Those guys are doing an impressive job with commercial units, but you can see a bunch of spots where small enhancements in either their local hardware/software or their connectivity would make them significantly more effective. Russia has to have very little capability to track signals around Bakhmut if those guys can stand around in one spot for 15 minutes radiating and not draw artillery fire. Given the Russian positions, if they had the right equipment they could nail the location of those guys very accurately, just from their emissions.

At 12:23 he shows a HEAT round that looks like sheet metal wrapped around the explosive and welded. Is that a warhead that they stripped out of something like an RPG to save weight on the drones, or are they actually getting the cluster bombs and taking them apart for the HEAT submunitions (and also stripping off extra housing materials)?

Kind of an odd press conference. "We're going to go on the offensive on the second tuesday of may, and kill you in Bakhmut in the meantime." The subtext has to be something closer to "we have a whole bunch of long range stuff from NATO that you can't even begin to comprehend. Over the next two months we're going to destroy all your supplies and command infrastructure back to the Russian border. On the second tuesday of may, anybody who isn't taking advantage of the firm ground by getting to the border can expect to be overrun. In the meantime, die a lot now"

through the berm is a pretty narrow field of view if it's got any length. But the same 4" PVC pipe could be turned into a periscope in a couple of minutes with a straight saw, a hole saw, and a couple of plastic mirrors.

The squirrels have been caught quite by surprise, too. They all saw the broadcast and decided to get all dressed up and wait in line at posh restaurants in London, only to find out that it was like a twilight zone episode and they were on the menu.

They're cold warriors at their core, and despite the past 30 years are probably still harboring a view of Russia as the USSR (which really wasn't even the USSR that we thought they were). Or maybe it's all the secondhand smoke from all the weed on the street in Santa Monica.

I started to skim it but immediately suffered severe cognitive dissonance. I wasn't sure if it was me or them. I'll assume it was them and try not to look at the rest of it.

I think you can make more money by just updating CM:BS to be the front end for an Ender’s Game style autonomous army.

There are known and likely concentrations in the US but they are undeveloped due to environmental concerns. It would take some time and be destructive of a lot of things to exploit them. Edit to add link: https://www.voanews.com/amp/usa_california-mine-becomes-key-part-push-revive-us-rare-earths-processing/6200183.html

Similar to the article that I read a couple decades ago and still haven't been able to find again. It could have been subtitled "Cold war ends due to lack of interest from technical people" because it came down to people interested in and good at technical work had close to zero interest in going to work in nuclear weapons complex. And it's not like you can just take "nuclear weapons 101" in school and get a job there - they basically take people with a lot of related interests and backgrounds and get them into doing relevant parts of the design/development/maintenance process, and it can take many years to get people up to speed.