chrisl

Another view says road span and apparently shows it buckled and in the water, but also the rail bridge on fire. (ninjaed by seconds because I was staring at the picture too long trying to sort out what's going on with the road)

Rail bridge or road? Ideally they hit the rail first and leave one road lane open for a while.

Large wool socks can do double duty as caps in the winter.

There's a blast from the past. About 10% of those 400 years ago I did a report on False Dmitry in a high school Russian History class.

Is it me or does the ERA on that part of the turret look like it's oriented the wrong way for frontal shots? There's what looks like a very damaged ERA mount point just above the entry hole, and the neighboring ERA looks like it's better oriented for a top attack, like from a Javelin or air-launched attack. The way those blocks are oriented, it looks like the round could have come in nearly parallel to the plates and just hit the explosive.

In some places that means your socks will be wet 8 months out of the year.

Not to mention the importance of bloody socks in Russian literature and übermensch culture.

Which is kind of silly because if it's monochromatic all you have to do is ignore that wavelength or band that includes that wavelength. If they're pointed statically and shining up, they're entirely for show and not doing anything besides send a message that says "blow me up next" This seems to be the most likely answer: It's entirely plausible that the system never actually worked. They may have built something that lased with a high output, and they may even have done a demo where they set something on fire at some moderate distance. But there are some relevant technologies that I suspect RU doesn't do very well, if at all, that are necessary to keep the both keep from toasting your own optics and get the beam through the atmosphere without scattering all the energy away.

The alleged range is up to 1500 km, but the claims of capability sound a little unrealistic. And if they’re just on steady state they sound more like self illuminating targets than death rays. edit- looks like I grabbed the wrong quote. This was supposed to quote @Haiduk and the death rays. I’m too inept with editing posts on the phone to fix it.

Especially if the winter follows a mud season where the UA can prevent RU from supplying by rail. Trains are relatively immune to rain and mud unless there’s a slide onto or out from under the tracks. So if Ukraine can keep taking rail hubs like Lyman and also keep hitting rail routes, they can make supply much harder for RU. Russian truck based supply still seems really deficient, and if they have to drive through mud it will get much worse.

It's a way for all the educated men, and maybe some women, to get a free trip to somewhere they can find a better job. There's certainly some risk involved - you could get shelled on your way to the collection point, or lose your white flag and have trouble surrendering, but it's arguably not that different risk-wise from what a lot of other migrants go through. Anybody who goes from skilled job to POW inside of a week is probably not intending to go back to Russia, at least not until there's regime change in a direction that won't punish POWs. And at this point what can the Russian military do? The right thing is complete withdrawal - their army is getting weaker and less organized while Ukraine's gets better trained and equipped every day. Probably no amount of operational pause will let Russia catch up at this point - they arguably lost the war in the operational pause from 2014 to 2022. Both armies were in constant contact with their current opponent. Ukraine used the time to cycle everybody who spent time in the army through the front for at least a short period, so that at the start all their reserves had at least been in a combat zone before. And they got training and equipment from the west and developed international relationships that looked away from the former USSR. Russia had exactly the same opportunity to improve training and equipment against an opponent they had already attacked and planned to pursue, but apparently chose corrupt business as usual, if not worse. So even if they know it's hopeless, all anybody at the middle and above can do is follow orders and stay away from windows until something happens to Vlad. All anybody at the bottom can do is hope they can get across a border before they're drafted, or get their hands into the air and surrender before they get shot or blown up.

40K more and they'll have gotten their 300K mobilization. Just all pointed in the wrong direction.

Wouldn't it make more sense for them to negotiate this in advance rather than getting themselves indiscriminately obliterated? This is the kind of thing that's very negotiable and can probably be worked so that Russia loses badly to NATO but there's minimal injury all around. Maybe we ship boxes of various NATO flags to the UAF and they learn some phrases in multiple languages, they ramp up the offensive (with lots of flags!), RU withdraws completely and both Ukraine and Russia avoid further losses.

Post-war, I'm not sure that Sevastopol will ever actually be helpful to Russia. If Ukraine has access to modern ISR and anti-ship missiles, the only threat is missiles from subs. There will be no invasion threat. Throw in some ASW and the sub threat likely goes away, too. It will probably go away anyway - postwar Russia isn't going to have the resources to maintain a Black Sea fleet, and it will only be a matter of time before you just have to keep an eye on the tugs to know where the subs are. Given the way the Russian military has self-destructed, Russia is going to need to come to terms with the fact that the only thing providing the facade of it being a world power is the nuclear weapons, and it no longer has the economy, or likely the technical capability, to maintain those indefinitely. Russia can try to maintain a BSF, but it really won't be able to project power and if it tries to project piracy or destruction after some kind of peace agreement is reached, it likely won't take much for other Black Sea powers to erase the remnants of the fleet.

If they were using real time satellite observations, that interval would likely be to account for which satellites were going to be passing over and available to watch. Do we have accurate clock times of the explosions? There's enough in orbit that they could have been counting on both realtime imaging and short delay SAR (which can see through smoke) to see the after effects. As far as the Kerch bridge goes - I'd consider just hitting the rail bridge first. It would eliminate the best supply route that Russia has available, and put pressure on the trucks/motor vehicles that they need for supplying the main fronts.

Not more expensive because we can- more capable because it’s cheap. Anti sat already exists, but is much harder against the masses of satellites that we’re headed for.

Moderately fancy zoom and thermals can be cheap if you have the technology to build them in enormous quantities. See modern smartphones. You can also put the ones at "higher altitude" up at a few hundred miles altitude and fly enough of them that you have continuous coverage. Starlink and Planet Labs are really just the beginning. Both of the above depend on a depth and breadth of technological capability that's available to the west, marginally available to China (who can probably catch up), and potentially available to India eventually.

I don't think I saw this NYT link on the Kharkiv offensive posted here (may be paywalled - gift link valid for 14 days here). To the surprise of absolutely nobody here, the US provided a ton of ISR for the offensive. Slightly more interesting is that the US and Ukraine are admitting to Ukraine sharing more of their plans with the US than they had done (or admitted to) earlier in the war.

Our county fire flies various flavor of UH-1 plus UH-60 Firehawks, so I hear those a lot. I think Cal Fire flies mostly UH-1s, and we don't get much forest service stuff unless there's an actual fire, but it's fun to hear and check out the various helos. Some of the contract fire companies fly some interesting aircraft. The county contracted to get a couple Chinooks the last couple years, so those are cool to hear flying over. And when there are fires you get all sorts of old fixed wings that have been converted, too. I started watching on ADS-B Exchange so I don't have to go outside to see which helo it is unless it turns out to be something unusual that I want to see.

Every time I see a reference to the Guards Tank Army by its initials I think of GTA, the game. And it looks like the Ukrainian army had similar thoughts.

It really depends on the flow rate through the gates and how much the downstream channel can handle. We have a series of dams around here that look comparable in what they hold back. They get completely drained regularly (sometimes every year) through a 60 km long channel that is normally nearly dry. The water level comes up quite a lot when they drain the reservoirs, then settles down.

With nets to tangle propellers.

We would have had humans on mars by the late 70s... But really, it's cheaper to send a rover to Mars than to make a really bad movie about global warming. I suspect most of what the west is providing in the way of imagery is from space. The political risk of having a NATO plane go down over Ukraine is probably way beyond anybody's tolerance. And there's plenty of USG owned and contracted capability for both frequent high and medium res imagery and high res SAR. And I suspect that in most cases the US buys exclusive rights to the commercial data they're tasking. There's probably not much realtime because you're dependent on orbit passes, but the frequency of revisits is high and data can be downloaded from many systems in realtime. There are a few areas where there's a lot of airborne intel - there are a lot of ELINT and SIGINT aircraft that have been hanging around the NATO side of the Ukraine border, presumably hoovering up signals and processing them. Some of the aircraft also have sidelooking radar that goes all the way to the ground. They'll lose some resolution at long distance, but given that anything flying over Ukraine belongs to either Russia and Ukraine, and Ukraine presumably knows where their stuff is, you don't necessarily need to resolve things to know there's something that needs to be addressed. There are a couple small ones (a Guardrail RC-12 and another Beech of unknown capability) that have been on the Kaliningrad border almost daily, usually flying together. Presumably one imaging and the other SIGINT. And the Globalhawks have spent a lot of time over the Black Sea, but I think always in international or NATO airspace. And those are all just what you can see on ADS-B because they want you to. And Ukraine has the advantage that they can use Babushkanet to ground-truth all the information.

A certain large asian country likely has comparable EO capability at Mars to what Russia has over Ukraine. They're not at parity with the west, but can realistically get there. Successfully landing a functioning rover on Mars on the first time out (along with an orbiter to watch it and relay for it) is no mean feat.

Sounds like it was taken by an Improv Everywhere flash mob. Just wait til they roll out the no pants day.