chrisl

Or the explosion warped the deck from below so the light scatters off it differently compared to the other unwarped part. Need more closer up pics without watermarks all over.

For Japan I it might take a couple of afternoons. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if they'd already fabricated all the parts and had just never assembled them so they could claim they don't have nuclear weapons. South Korea might not be much farther from that point. Taiwan might not need them - they probably have technology for effective directed energy weapons and can just vaporize anybody who comes too close.

And easier to lift off the piers - rather than knocking a pier over, it seems that they've lifted a piece of one of the road decks up with the explosion and offset it a few feet.

Tendar has a good picture of the bent segment. The BAZA watermark is making it hard to see what's going on in the most interesting part of the pic above (also shown on Tendar):

Maybe the legacy of Soviet maps - they deliberately made them wrong for 50 years to mess with invaders. Their NATO trainers come from a world where the ISR is so good that they can get accurate maps of things behind enemy lines, but there's fear of EW and using ELINT to track them down or cut off their access, so they use paper maps. Ukrainians operating in Ukraine have access to their own national comm network, and Russia has extremely limited EW and ELINT capability, which has been apparent for a while. So the UA can use electronic maps in real time, and COTS drones that have been hacked to not transmit location back to China with minimal concern.

You're right. He comes off the BMP just before it gets to the dark spot so it looks like he's materializing out of the dark spot/hole.

Looks like maybe something fired by the guy in the hole in the middle of the road who jumps out right after the BMP goes past him. But I don't see a puff of smoke or anything.

That’s what closed loop control systems look like right up until the moment they fail catastrophically, particularly if maintaining the control loop depends on an expendable resource, like fuel or mobiks. Everything looks like it’s going to be ok, then the control propellant runs out and you pancake in the desert. As has been pointed out many times both here and elsewhere, Ukraine has only committed a small fraction of their newly raised forces and have been steadily corroding the C2 and artillery resources of RU from a distance. As Russia runs low on reserves, holes will develop and Russia will have to either let Ukraine break through or shuffle troops around, making new holes to exploit.

This is the best one: I think it translates to "Russia should avoid any concentration of any kind of forces in Ukraine for the next 6 months unless they want to be cluster bombed."

That it's a different design and not susceptible to the same kind of failure shouldn't be taken as a challenge to find a new way to make a comparable radioactive mess.

They make jackhammers with pads on them. They’re for compacting soil/sand before paving. But if you can ID the locations of all the mines, why wouldn’t you just use a drone to drop sticky primers/firecrackers with a simple delay fuse on them so the drone has time to get away from direct overhead?

I was thinking more like this

Not to mention that in order to do the things that a general does, you have to radiate signal in one form or another like a supernova. You can do it as electromagnetic signal or you can do it as mechanical signal (runners/drivers/etc), but there aren't going to be enough shielded wires/fibers going to the front to keep it all hidden in tubes. With half the world's ISR of all flavors pointed at Ukraine, that's going to show up on somebody's activity map and generate a phone call.

Those seem like two separate objects in slightly different locations. Dual warheads on a single missile has to be fractions of a second apart unless the first deploys off the front of the missile well before hitting. A few seconds for a pair of falling object is quite a separation in distance.

With HEAT, and probably especially with tandem charges, the cope cage can improve penetration. The charge needs some distance to get the optimal stream for penetration and tank rounds are too short for that. The cage triggers the round at a better distance and the tandem charge probably pokes a hole for the main charge to shoot a stream of hot metal through.

Sword to plowshares :: tanks to barns

Sawyer filters are very cheap ($20 retail) and very effective at removing microbes. You can filter a couple liters in a few minutes - in Oregon I just keep one in my camelback so I can get water anywhere. Put the factory on extra shifts and ship them to Ukraine.

Longbow can just stick the radome above the treetops and leave the rest of of chopper below LOS. Some versions can even pass target information to neighbors so the ones doing the shooting can stay low and fire based on data from the longbow. Way too much power draw to pout on a drone- it would mean sending apaches. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I also like the idea of using loitering drones- turbines and drones don’t mix, even if the drone is unarmed. A few kg of HE with some tungsten balls down the intake can make a mess of the turbine. Probably won’t take down the helicopter if it’s a twin engine (failures probably will be contained if the engine is designed well), but will be a mission kill and cost RU an expensive engine.

Hang a sidewinder from one of the big drones.

Civil aerospace, which is why most of my longer posts relate to space based ISR or photosensors and the related. And trying to spin some stuff into biomedical. There are companies that sell to both - if you go to bio conferences and space conferences it's the same people selling AO systems, but one is to look at the sky and the other into biological spaces like your eyeball.

I design and build both for a living .

You can look through both. And they actually both do the same thing - they take something that fills a small angle of your unaided view and make it fill a large angle.

They’ll be noisy burrowing about. I’ll train waterfowl to root them out like worms. And define a low “no creep zone” barrier with death ray lasers that will slice them up as they try to enter the zone. Just have to remind the guys on the ground not to cross it either if they want to keep their feet attached to their legs.

They should launch bottles with parachutes into the RU lines.

That looks like about a full platoon hoofing it out of Storozheve. And from the maps a couple pages ago, that's the second village back from what was the front line not too long ago, so it's maybe a platoon per village as the UA works south. That would leave another full company available at the main line, consistent with the earlier estimates of ~250/km. But it's nice to see video of them hiking back in a relatively disorderly withdrawal. No fighting retreat, and they don't look like they're organized by squads. And not waiting for vehicles to carry out their gear - just getting out of Dodge as fast as they can. Maybe the video will encourage other Russian units to do the same.