chrisl

Right above an article that says that Russian forces destroyed 1500 Ukrainian troops, 8 leopard tanks, and 10^9 other armored vehicles.  There are satellite assets that can give the water levels of all the reservoirs pretty accurately - there will probably be some geospatial hydrology grogs posting on twitter in a few days.

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

There's similar around here in the San Gabriel River.  They hold the water in a series of dams in the mountains and have major releases when they need to make space for winter rains or spring melt.  There's a section that turns into an off highway vehicle rec area when it's drained.  This is likely a temporary help to Russia at best, and potentially makes things worse for them when the water settles.

And that's why this thread is so great, the scope of available expertise is off the charts!
Given the scale of destruction and the timing alone, I'm firmly in the "Russians did it!" camp. It will obviously stop any Ukrainian attack across the Dnipro, for now... But summer is only about to start, I wonder if in a few months it won't open a whole new section of the front? There's a quite big artificial reservoir near where I live, which is being completely drained every few years and apart from the old riverbed itself, it is perfectly possible to walk on it's bottom after it dries up a bit, which I did personally multiple times. It is even more true in winter when the mud just freezes over. 
Edit:
A map of the Kakhovsky Reservoir area before the dam was build:

Wow - Scholz finally has some strong public words supporting Ukraine.  Germany has been quietly ramping up the actual materiel support, but Olaf must finally be feeling like he's his coalition behind him on this.
 

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

seems like an excessively bad idea.  If you were going to do this to disrupt a Ukrainian offensive, you'd think they'd wait till there was a verifiable offensive.  Now they just suffer all the bad effects and the UA doesn't have to guess if they'd blow the dam.
 

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

Wait til the do a big blue police box and it's everywhere at once.

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov.  That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort.  One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones?  At least one of which is expected to explode anyway?  Launch 'em.  They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

Does the "remote controlled armored personnel carrier" concept seem a little oxymoronic to anybody else?
I suppose if uber can be headed that way for regular taxis, the same can be done with battle taxis and free up a couple more people.

It's certainly a lot easier to figure out what's going on in daytime videos.  
CMOS and CCD sensors have some sensitivity in the very near IR (700 nm out to 1 micron wavelength) - basically what you get with consumer security cameras in the <$100 range.  For most applications there's a filter in front of the sensor to take that out, but cameras intended for security cams often are unfiltered.  They're not super sensitive, so most security cameras also have a bunch of IR LEDs to light up the scene - for battery operated cameras with a motion sensor they'll use whatever background light there is for sensing, then turn on the LEDs when there's motion.  The catch with that is that the illumination is very short range - effectively tens of feet.  You can work without the illuminators, but the sensitivity of the cameras is pretty low, so you won't get nearly as many targets as in the daytime.  If the targets have bad IR discipline (which the Russians very well might), you might get a reasonable number of targets, but it will be relatively hard to navigate the drone without it showing GPS on a map.
Longer wave IR gets more expensive fast - the sensors are more expensive (and more export restricted), and generally have to be cooled.  Thermoelectric coolers are very low efficiency and will suck a lot of battery.  There are some very small cryocoolers that are more efficient, but still likely to suck quite a bit of power, and use up a lot of the payload mass. So that kind of thing is probably more limited to the bigger and less expendable drones (and things like GlobalHawk)
 

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov.  That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort.  One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones?  At least one of which is expected to explode anyway?  Launch 'em.  They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov.  That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort.  One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones?  At least one of which is expected to explode anyway?  Launch 'em.  They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

As always, I've no idea what's going on in Scholz' head. His coalition, however, pretty much exists only on paper at the moment. Greens and FDP have publicly torn each other to pieces. Scholz tried, again, to be Merkel 2.0 here and did nothing. For reasons unfathomable to me when Merkel didn't intervene in such a case it was somehow interpreted as strong leadership, as her being aloof of such petty bickering. In Scholz' case everyone was wondering where the hell the chancellor was. So that totally backfired. People seem to expect a more active leadership here.
What's probably more important is the fact the far right populists, the AfD are suddenly the second strongest party in polls. And they are pretty openly against Germany supporting Ukraine and (a little less openly) pro Putin. On the other hand a very popular left wing figure, Sahra Wagenknecht is also against German support for Ukraine, albeit from an (officially) more left and pacifistic point of view (note that I seriously think the horseshoe theory is BS but in this instance far left and far right are indeed pretty close).
So, the support-sceptical positions (and note, they are not openly pro Putin but demand negotiations) are pretty much taken and burned for a mid-left party. On the other hand the mood in Germany appears to be swinging against Ukrainian refugees, given that energy prices and inflation are still high and there is officially a recession now, meaning paying for them indefinitely while especially poorer Germans are suffering from the situation is also something Scholz has to avoid. So while I don't think the SPD likes it all that much, they have pretty much no choice but to support Ukraine (plus serious democratic politician right now pretends it is even possible to negotiate with Putin).
Also, with Pistorius appearing not nearly as incompetent as his predecessor, weapon deliveries look less like the SPD had been forced by their coalition partners.
So... don't know if that helped. Well, not really an explanation, more like additional context, I guess.

Wow - Scholz finally has some strong public words supporting Ukraine.  Germany has been quietly ramping up the actual materiel support, but Olaf must finally be feeling like he's his coalition behind him on this.
 

Wow - Scholz finally has some strong public words supporting Ukraine.  Germany has been quietly ramping up the actual materiel support, but Olaf must finally be feeling like he's his coalition behind him on this.
 

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov.  That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort.  One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones?  At least one of which is expected to explode anyway?  Launch 'em.  They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

Wow - Scholz finally has some strong public words supporting Ukraine.  Germany has been quietly ramping up the actual materiel support, but Olaf must finally be feeling like he's his coalition behind him on this.
 

It's certainly a lot easier to figure out what's going on in daytime videos.  
CMOS and CCD sensors have some sensitivity in the very near IR (700 nm out to 1 micron wavelength) - basically what you get with consumer security cameras in the <$100 range.  For most applications there's a filter in front of the sensor to take that out, but cameras intended for security cams often are unfiltered.  They're not super sensitive, so most security cameras also have a bunch of IR LEDs to light up the scene - for battery operated cameras with a motion sensor they'll use whatever background light there is for sensing, then turn on the LEDs when there's motion.  The catch with that is that the illumination is very short range - effectively tens of feet.  You can work without the illuminators, but the sensitivity of the cameras is pretty low, so you won't get nearly as many targets as in the daytime.  If the targets have bad IR discipline (which the Russians very well might), you might get a reasonable number of targets, but it will be relatively hard to navigate the drone without it showing GPS on a map.
Longer wave IR gets more expensive fast - the sensors are more expensive (and more export restricted), and generally have to be cooled.  Thermoelectric coolers are very low efficiency and will suck a lot of battery.  There are some very small cryocoolers that are more efficient, but still likely to suck quite a bit of power, and use up a lot of the payload mass. So that kind of thing is probably more limited to the bigger and less expendable drones (and things like GlobalHawk)
 

If they're truly going through tens of thousands of drones/FPV munitions every month, they probably have enough of them to destroy every single Russian vehicle all the way to the Ukraine border and Sea of Azov.  That's better than A-10s providing CAS - drones will appear to be everywhere, and loss of any one (or dozen) drone is insignificant to the Ukrainian effort.  One truck on a road is hard to justify risking a CAS aircraft for, but a couple of drones?  At least one of which is expected to explode anyway?  Launch 'em.  They can create a "no drive zone" 100 km wide all the way to the Azov (or up to and beyond the Russian border), they can severely limit resupply to any dug in defenders over a very large area, then go through and mop up in detail using all the fancy NATO ground kit after running the defenders low on supplies.

"Moscow is silent " is the most important moment in Putin's life until Yeltsin brings him to Moscow. It is some sort of grand historical joke that he has built a regime that seems to be in the process of repeating the mistake.

It's certainly a lot easier to figure out what's going on in daytime videos.  
CMOS and CCD sensors have some sensitivity in the very near IR (700 nm out to 1 micron wavelength) - basically what you get with consumer security cameras in the <$100 range.  For most applications there's a filter in front of the sensor to take that out, but cameras intended for security cams often are unfiltered.  They're not super sensitive, so most security cameras also have a bunch of IR LEDs to light up the scene - for battery operated cameras with a motion sensor they'll use whatever background light there is for sensing, then turn on the LEDs when there's motion.  The catch with that is that the illumination is very short range - effectively tens of feet.  You can work without the illuminators, but the sensitivity of the cameras is pretty low, so you won't get nearly as many targets as in the daytime.  If the targets have bad IR discipline (which the Russians very well might), you might get a reasonable number of targets, but it will be relatively hard to navigate the drone without it showing GPS on a map.
Longer wave IR gets more expensive fast - the sensors are more expensive (and more export restricted), and generally have to be cooled.  Thermoelectric coolers are very low efficiency and will suck a lot of battery.  There are some very small cryocoolers that are more efficient, but still likely to suck quite a bit of power, and use up a lot of the payload mass. So that kind of thing is probably more limited to the bigger and less expendable drones (and things like GlobalHawk)