chrisl

That would be the cesspool. Technically this may be bigger, since the original cesspool thread broke the forum when it hit around 130 pages and was then restarted every 100 pages for around 15 years. The link above goes to the first child thread - the original doesn’t seem to come up in searches but I’m pretty sure it’s still in there somewhere.

Maybe they can't get paper to print on, either...

I did see something a week or so ago about Ukrainian pilots in the UK finishing training on Eurofighters. I'll have to see if I can find it again.

Starting to sound an awful lot like CM, but with the unit locations and movement fed back from real world sensors displaying what’s actually happening instead of virtual world models… (Edit: and with modern sensors making borg spotting realistic)

And stick a grenade in the new stack with the pin pulled and lever held down by a shell? I’m starting to wonder if Russia went into this with their forces on the wrong side of a 2:3 or even 1:2 without realizing it. And now they’ve suffered documented 20-25% casualties against the paper TOE, but much higher (35-40%?) against the actual manpower they had. The understrength BTGs may have started with even less than suspected, or be more widespread. That may not be true across the board, but could be in many BTGs. So they’re taking weakened understrength BTGs and adding poorly supervised (because if they had enough troops to supervise effectively they probably wouldn’t be doing it in the first place) saboteurs to the support crews.

Medium duration commercial drones + switchblades as CB could really change the artillery equation from the UA side.

You can watch them at adsbexchange.com. Click on the "U" icon to display only "interesting" (read: military) aircraft, "T" to show their tracks, "L" to show labels on each, and "o" a few times til it shows what you want. You can mouse over or click on any aircraft to get more details. They fly large enough swaths that I bet they can triangulate on anybody who transmits more than very intermittently. I don't watch all the time, but do keep a window open most of the time. They're mostly over Poland, Romania, and Latvia & Lithuania, but the Global Hawks also loiter over the Black Sea. I don't think I've seen any crewed aircraft over the Black Sea, but that doesn't mean they can't be there, just that they're not transmitting ADS-B. Even here in my SoCal neighborhood the military overflights sometimes transmit ADS-B and sometimes don't.

There's some indication from reported ADS-B error signals that GNSS is being degraded over Ukraine, but I'm not convinced that it's Russia doing it. When the US launched GPS, it was the only global satellite system available and "selective availability" was built in to give the US a military advantage. A lot of the military turned out to be using consumer GPS in GW 1 and SA got turned off in 2000 partly as a result of that, partly at the request of FAA, and partly because other systems were coming online. There are now 4 GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou). Anybody who's capable of launching such systems is also capable of launching systems that will degrade their performance from space by spoofing signals. The Soviet Union had a bad relationship with maps, in which virtually all maps were seeded with significant errors to cause confusion in case of invasion. This bad relationship went on for many decades and was only publicly acknowldged in the late 80s, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR. According to a friend who spent a bunch fo time there, inaccurate maps predate the USSR for similar reasons. So it's likely that Russia was going into Ukraine with Soviet era maps, at least for some levels/regions, and they may or may not have recognized the problem with that. Ukrainians followed what appears to be standard eastern European practice of removing and/or rearranging street signs to aid their attackers. As defenders, Ukraine doesn't really need high quality GNSS - they have people who know the area and their own maps. So if some space-capable nation with EW satellites decided to inject a few hundred meters of error into the GNSS signals over the region, it would likely make a mess for out of town visitors without completely wrecking aircraft nav safety. I've been on backroads in the mountains in the US where there might be two fire roads that parallel each other for a while before going to very different places, and even with undegraded GPS it's not hard to get yourself onto the one that climbs an extra 1000 m of elevation before descending into the town with no restaurants instead of the one that descends into your planned lunch stop. As far as NATO aircraft along the Ukraine border- Rooks and Kings is probably right that they're not doing active EW from the Growlers, but if you watch ADS-B exchange, there are a lot of NATO aircraft loitering in the neighborhood along the Ukraine and Kaliningrad borders. There are a few types that usually are transmitting who they are: several types of SIGINT plane (various RC-135 versions, E-3, RC-12, Global Hawk drones, others, ), lots of transports going mostly to Poland, and a large number of aerial refueling planes. Who we don't see at all is who's being refueled, but there are probably a lot of them, given the number of tankers. To see who's getting refueled you probably have to be in Poland or Romania with a pair of binoculars.

The idea that it might have had nukes on board is interesting. What are the politics/risks of a US submarine recovery team (as in the whole team, vessel and all stay submerged) retrieving things from the wreck? It would provide some pretty valuable intel on maintenance.

The most likely failure mode probably amounts to a moderately dirty bomb that would mess up the area it landed in, plus some downwind, but not blow much up. Ukraine is probably better equipped than most countries, at least as far as expertise, to quarantine an area and clean or seal things up. So even if they're all duds, it's not zero risk. It could certainly be awkward if it happened in flight. I searched a little, and FAS thought years ago that all the Russian Army controlled (e.g. artillery) tactical nukes were dismantled under Yeltsin, but there are still missile based low yield bombs. That's sort of convenient, because various satellites are likely to pick up the launch and trajectory of missile-based tactical nukes, giving them a clear return address. That's the kind of thing where presidents declassify things that risk revealing methods and capability.

The main concern is that a few of them might actually work, even if a lot of them don't. Nuclear weapons take maintenance - the radiation damages various components over time, including affecting the conventional explosives that initiate things. The radioactive materials have half lives, tritium is about 11 years, and have to be replaced/reprocessed. The US spends many billions of dollars per year to make sure that they'll make a big bang, but Russia hasn't been spending that kind of money. And if you're one of the guys who has to go handle radioactive stuff (or are the guy whose company got the lucrative contract), and you really don't expect them ever to be used, are you going get irradiated doing the maintenance? Or spend the money on doing that when it could go to a yacht? Who's ever going to know the nukes don't work? There's been a test ban agreement for decades, so you're covered there. And that's just the explody part - the rockets may or may not have been getting maintenance, and may or may not work. And may have had parts taken off to be used on rockets for profitable civil space programs (Eurockot sold about 30 space launches on converted SS-19s). Russia does at least have current capability in launch, so the rockets may be reasonably well maintained, but it may also not have been worth it for someone to actually spend the money to do it.

I’ve had pet ducks. That’s normal behavior for migratory waterfowl.

Kerch would be existential for Crimea. Given how much Russia seems to care about its soldiers, they could very well be indifferent to leaving a few BTGs hung out to dry on the wrong side of the Dnipro in Kherson.

It looks like two bridges - the big one for motor vehicles and a smaller one to the east for trains. But a lot easier than the Kerch bridge- probably within reach of what they can do.

Finding a way to destroy the Kerch bridge, or at least damage it badly enough that it's useless for a few months, would force Russia to attack early to solidify the land bridge. Without the bridge, Crimea has to be supplied by sea and air and would be less able to support the southern forces out of Crimea. I don't see a way to do it though - they don't have enough freedom in the air and don't have PGMs that are big enough with long enough range to take out four decks. Given Russia's truck problems, maybe hitting the rail lanes would be enough to hurt. edit: more realistic is to make sure every Russian is in constant fear of mortar rounds while they're bringing in supplies and setting up the attack. Between local observations, radio intercepts from both their own capabilities and the fleet of NATO SIGINT aircraft cruising the area every night, and the western satellite imaging capability that probably lets them track every vehicle hourly, they can bring down a lot of accurate pain at relatively low risk.

I did some digging on the stinger claim and only found a few things - a 1984 NYTimes article (may be paywalled, I have a sub) that refers to recommendations that a night sight be developed to make them more effective at night, but without explanation. The best documentation I found was an FAS document (probably old-ish) describing them and also describing the NV add-on sight. So it sounds like it's just the lack of a night-vision system for initial acquisition by the operator, which is/was done optically in the visible spectrum (which is obviously more difficult at night), and that it's been corrected in the ~38 years since it was introduced. I doubt there are any stingers that old being shipped to Ukraine.

Ukraine could offer Russian soldiers double that, and offer to pay in western currency. It would both be a bargain for Ukraine and get rid of a lot of Russian materiel very quickly, since the Russian troops have better access.

Have you checked with ADSBExchange.com? FR24 and Flightaware both allow operators to pay to stay off the display or not be identified in lookup. ADSBExchange doesn't have the fancy features or data history, but does show everything that has a transponder on and often identifies the aircraft type, even if it doesn't show a callsign. They even have a mode (the "U" button) that only shows "interesting" aircraft. If the chips are made using US export controlled technology, then the machines would likely be disabled remotely, and probably very quickly. It would certainly cause some consumer electronics pain here at home for as long as a few years, but the pandemic also already started a big rush to break ground on new fabs in the US. Intel bought real estate that would let them set up a campus in Ohio about 20x larger than their current largest campus (Hillsboro). It won't go instantly from nothing to that big, but they're hedging in case they need to make all production domestic. They've also started a construction on a couple new plants in AZ.

Russia has essentially no semiconductor industry of its own. Virtually every semiconductor they use comes from somewhere else. The US still produces something like half the semiconductors used in the world, and we suffered during the chip shortage - largely because US production tends to be the more expensive, higher profit chips and many of the lower margin chips get produced overseas. And many of the machines used for semiconductor production depend on export-restricted US technologies, so even if Russia had the money to build a few semiconductor fabs, they can't get the lithography machines needed to make anything remotely modern. And aside from being necessary for computation, you have to have fab capabilities to make image sensing chips (both visible and IR). Russia is so far behind in image sensors that they were still using satellites that dropped film capsules until around 2015. They're capable of putting spy satellites into space, but they don't have the technology to make modern spy satellites.

It's nothing like a dalem

WTF? You're all still here. How long has it been since this place was pumped out? I'm just here for a quick drive-by to drop something off in the pool. Not like that. Well, maybe like that, but something else, too. I recently came into possession of a nice box set of books that follow a guy through the pacific theater and his family at home, and will never have time to really go through them. I just posted a giveaway in the general forum, but I know they don't normally let you lot out of here so I thought I'd drop by with a pointer to it: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/120101-free-books-on-pacific-theater/ Try not to spend too much time over their so you don't smell it up and scare off the regular people.

I recently found myself in possession of a pre-release copy of a boxed set of three books following one guy who was in the pacific theater and his family. It was written by his son and based on a huge number of letters, plus family history and a bunch of additional research he did. It was a display copy at a booth next to mine at a trade show, and because it's a quite large set (9 lbs!) and they were having trouble packing things into the available space for the return trip, I offered to find it a nice home. I was briefly tempted to keep it, but I'll never really have time to read through it, and I know there are a lot of people here who will appreciate it more than me, and might even like to use it as research material for other things they're doing. The website for the book is here: http://wilberswar.com/ it's a little incomplete, but probably the best description I found is the prologue in the "inside the books" section. It's quite a sad beginning to what appears to be a very interesting set of books. Rather than give it to the first or nth person to pm me. I'm going to ask people who want it to pm me something short (not more than a hundred words or so) on how they'll give it a good home. The only condition is that you can't resell it, at least not until it's well worn and dog eared and your kids are having your estate sale. Or you need to sell the books to live in the box it comes in. I'll pick the best one and pm you back for shipping info. I'll pay for shipping to anywhere in the US (it's 9 lbs, foreign shipping gets to be $$$) -- if I can get it in a flat rate box you'll get it fast, otherwise it goes media mail. All decisions are arbitrary and capricious, and once it goes into the mail, final. Unless you gave me a bum address and it comes back. Right now it's new and pristine, but it may arrive slightly thumbed through if I have time. All entries should be PM'd to me or posted in this thread by end of July 12 pacific daylight, though I reserve the right to accept later entries if they're really good.

I'm in the "not enjoying it" group because I'm 10 years older and have way more things going on in my life than when CMBO/BB came out so I don't get to play as much as I like. When I do get a chance to play, I've enjoyed it quite a lot. It's definitely a different game- I have to advance a lot slower than I remember, and be more thorough with prep fire and covering fire, but it has a lot of the same feel. I mostly play wego so I can play a bit at a time, but was surprised by how fun RT was when I tried it, too.

armored clown car

Is there one of a durian-headed Shaw exploding?