chrisl

And Borg spotting is only going to get more extreme and more asymmetric.  I was seeing job ads more than a decade ago to develop hardware/software for AR systems that were essentially Borg wearables.  So not only do you get the space and drone based ISR that has been used so effectively, but it's just mixed into your goggles and follows your field of regard.  Look at that hill over there and the display accurately shows the location of the guy behind it who was spotted by a drone or another team member 3 km away, enabling you to aim the precision guided grenade launcher into his coffee cup without you ever spotting him directly.  And it's going to be a very, very asymmetric capability.  
It's going to be all about who's got precision sensors and bandwidth and how fast they can move.  The problem everybody seems to be having in Ukraine is moving long distances quickly, but a few freight containers full of those robodogs from Alibaba might fix that if the people riding them are all kitted up with integrated sensors.

And Borg spotting is only going to get more extreme and more asymmetric.  I was seeing job ads more than a decade ago to develop hardware/software for AR systems that were essentially Borg wearables.  So not only do you get the space and drone based ISR that has been used so effectively, but it's just mixed into your goggles and follows your field of regard.  Look at that hill over there and the display accurately shows the location of the guy behind it who was spotted by a drone or another team member 3 km away, enabling you to aim the precision guided grenade launcher into his coffee cup without you ever spotting him directly.  And it's going to be a very, very asymmetric capability.  
It's going to be all about who's got precision sensors and bandwidth and how fast they can move.  The problem everybody seems to be having in Ukraine is moving long distances quickly, but a few freight containers full of those robodogs from Alibaba might fix that if the people riding them are all kitted up with integrated sensors.

And Borg spotting is only going to get more extreme and more asymmetric.  I was seeing job ads more than a decade ago to develop hardware/software for AR systems that were essentially Borg wearables.  So not only do you get the space and drone based ISR that has been used so effectively, but it's just mixed into your goggles and follows your field of regard.  Look at that hill over there and the display accurately shows the location of the guy behind it who was spotted by a drone or another team member 3 km away, enabling you to aim the precision guided grenade launcher into his coffee cup without you ever spotting him directly.  And it's going to be a very, very asymmetric capability.  
It's going to be all about who's got precision sensors and bandwidth and how fast they can move.  The problem everybody seems to be having in Ukraine is moving long distances quickly, but a few freight containers full of those robodogs from Alibaba might fix that if the people riding them are all kitted up with integrated sensors.

I have the feeling that reality came closer to CM. The all seeing eye (in CM) created a lot of unrealistic tactics. But now with the ever present drones this has become the new reality. So the tactics in real life have become more similar to the ones we already had in CM.

I would exercise a lot of caution here:
-Someone says they are SOF - it is the internet buyer beware
-A SOF operator has expertise but does not have all the expertise.  In the west we have elevated these guys well beyond their actual jobs and skill sets.  The internet is filled with “bros” with SF tabs spewing a lot of garbage but because they have “SOF Combat Veteran” in the splash title page so they “must know all about logistics”.  
-BDA is a multidisciplinary activity, the US military has an actual trade occupation of “targeting”.  I would put far more stock in a targeteer assessment than a door-kicker.
- The fact that this was not a Direct Action (DA) mission was obvious from the start.  The idea that the UA sent in a 30 pers ground team that deep behind enemy lines, well out of range of support, in broad daylight is nonsense.  Further, the idea that they humped 1000-1500 lbs of HE is insane.  However, none of this eliminates the use of SOF in this, or any other attack.
- If this was SOF (and I say if, I do not know one way or the other, but I have a suspicion), it was likely a black bag sabotage job, or a complex attack.  If it were sabotage then they would have infiltrated the airfield, could have been local workers or even RA.  They would have placed and wired the charges onto large warheads - this is technical btw- and then either had a timer or an LOS controlled detonator.  The initial warheads hit very likely had enough NEQ to do the craters, and then set off the secondaries.  Again, IF, very hard to tell from Sat photos posted on twitter.
-This could have very well been ATACMS, a SOF/partisan loitering munition or combination of all that, without detailed assessment of the crater this is impossible to rule out.
- The lack of missile or drones on video streams for any of these weird “cigarette missions” is telling;however, also not definitive.  All we really know is that some very high value targets are being prosecuted beyond what we - and more importantly the Russians - thought was the maximum range of UA capability…and that is all good no matter how it happened.
 

Damn, had to go pull the crystal ball out of the attic.  my bet is no.  Russia after this war will be in no shape to fight anyone for a while and I think we'll find as time goes by Russia will become progressively weaker.  In fact the only way I see Russia emerging from this downward spiral is to actually embrace reforms for real.  The country desperately needs it.

What is just amazing is that anyone who has played the game, any version, twice, can do quite this badly. I mean you really can work thru some the obvious and even some of the not so obvious what not to do with pixeltruppen. There is ZERO evidence the Russians learned ANYTHING. 

Hi All,
Sorry for yet another thread sidetrack but to update re @Haiduk's laptop etc:
It's arrived here in Canada at long last. I'll post photos when my phone recharges.
The funds raised came to about $1700 so we've gotten a Laptop for Haiduk's wife and major pc part upgrades for his own PC. Those I will be buying today/tomorrow.
I'll be sending everything to Przemsyl in Poland, with a reliable family member who lives there, on this Monday coming, Aug 22nd.
They'll hand off to someone Haiduk sends to pick up during that week.
If the UKR Law is relaxed a bit then maybe he can pick it up in person, we'll see.
 
POSTSCRIPT
This process has been badly delayed on my end, due to a heavy couple of months for me, personally and work-wise. Especially the personal side. It's been...difficult...to focus outside the household for a while. But things have finally stabilised, the laptop is here beside me and the pc parts are a short walk away to buy, once Haiduk confirms his choices. Everything is moving forward again.
 

Presumably the always-on global earthquake monitoring network would have caught this. Bombs are orders of magnitude less powerful than earthquakes, but the sensors are pretty sensitive. It wouldn't reveal which particular plane spontaneously deconstructed first, second, etc, but would reveal where 'the twins' were in the overall sequence, how many total impacts there were, and something about secondaries.
Filtering out background noise might require some sophisticated filters.
Actually, that same network could perhaps be coupled with the forest fire sat imagery to get a sense of which sectors are getting jiggy with it, and for how long.

It's hard to tell the order because there are always edits or enough choppiness that it could hide edits.  The twitter link Steve posted on p 1164 has one video that shows the twin explosions and then a single later.  There's a second clip that also shows the twin explosions. When the two go, there's already well dispersed smoke so there's no mushroom cloud from the previous one.  But for the single fireball there's also already well dispersed smoke.
So I'm starting to think it was 1...pause...2...pause....1.  And we never see the first one because nobody pointed their cameras that way until the first one went off that we don't see.  They were just recording the post-fireball smoke and got three bonus fireballs.  It's not a particularly interesting direction to be taking video at the beach if there aren't fireballs going into the sky, so nobody recorded the first one.  That would be consistent with the four similar sized craters.

The did it under a contract Мило Миндербиндерович had from the UA.  
Everybody has a share.

There are definitely some interesting flights.  There's a pair of King Airs that tend to cruise the Kaliningrad border together.  One's a Guardrail series that looks like the aircraft version of Pinhead from Hellraiser, but the other one just comes up as a vanilla King Air.  And they're always together.

heheh  Moskva anyone?  Sorry just a fun memory.

Multiple flaws with the analysis on that site.
1 - this wasn't a 500 ton explosion, let alone three of them. The town's still standing.
2 - the craters do not have a 20m radius. 4-6m tops
3 - the craters are not 10m deep. I'd guess from the photographs 1-3m but that's just a guess
4 - craters that size can be made by 250kg bombs (see below)
5 - craters bigger than that can be made by car bombs (see below)
6 - the site itself admits it's terrible at sub-1000 ton calculations
So this could've been anything from high velocity 100kg bomb to at most around 500kg, assuming the larger and deeper range for the crater width and depth.
Small bomb, big crater: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48746557
Car bomb, big crater: https://globalnews.ca/video/3492322/afghanistan-car-bomb-leaves-massive-crater-in-road
 
 

So when this is over, Ukraine TV will do a remake of The Americans called The Russians.
But it will be a documentary series.

The did it under a contract Мило Миндербиндерович had from the UA.  
Everybody has a share.

You have to get really lucky on a bright day. The auto-exposure will set the exposure time to be short, and the frame rate on any normal camera is going to be low, so there will be a lot of dead time between frame captures.  If want to get really high speed you need to use a line-scan camera like is used for finish line photos.  Those aren't cheap, but not outrageous for a 1 kline/s camera.  They're not in the price range of anybody's security camera.  Array capture high frame rate cameras are very expensive and spew out too much data to store reasonably unless you really, really need it.

Allow me to repeat my theory that there is a very anonymous industrial park somewhere in Poland that was set up to produce these missiles by the middle of March, maybe with some final bit of the guidance system from a Western defence contractor, and we are now seeing the effects of five months of 24/7 flat out effort by the production team. 
Next question, how much range does this new toy actually have? Because it is only ~700 km from Kharkiv to Moscow. If I was in charge of building a brand new Ukrainian missile system that is the number I would be aiming for. 

And submarine support facilities.

And submarine support facilities.

And submarine support facilities.

And submarine support facilities.

Things engineers do when they're bored #247.
But I can imagine that once a bunch of former Warsaw Pact countries started joining NATO, there would probably have been some support for adapting NATO weapons to Warsaw Pact a/c.

I've pissed off birds before.
They not only bear a grudge, but manage to communicate it to all other members of the same species.  
Don't piss off birds.

Try convincing them of that when they're clamped onto your leg.