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chrisl

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  1. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from Ultradave in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    It does look like it was used more for evacuation than getting BTGs across - the mud tracks on the UKR side indicate vehicles were going from that bank to the RUS side.  If vehicles were coming out of the water more than off the bank, they'd probably be dripping enough to rinse those better.  Also, that bank on the RUS side looks like the steepest of the three attempted points.  The had to put that pair of ramps there to keep from chewing up the bank too much and may have needed to do some winching to get up it anyway if it was really muddy.
  2. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from acrashb in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    If they keep trying, eventually they’ll just be able to drive across on the wrecks.
  3. Like
    chrisl reacted to BlackMoria in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    My suspicion is the detractors are Russian trolls or people with jealousy issues.  
  4. Upvote
    chrisl got a reaction from Sandokan in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Unless you're Oryx and have to try to ID them all.
  5. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to Offshoot in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Sorry, my post wasn't clear. I agree that there were three crossings. I don't, however, think that they swam vehicles from the Russian side of blue as there is no real sign of traffic there at a point when yellow and red have already been destroyed.
  6. Upvote
    chrisl got a reaction from dan/california in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Unless you're Oryx and have to try to ID them all.
  7. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from AlsatianFelix in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Unless you're Oryx and have to try to ID them all.
  8. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to Kinophile in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    My friend, this is page 715 of amateur/professional uber-uber-nerding on the technical, strategic, operational, tactical, economic, political, cultural, geographic, naval, financial, geopolitical, manufacturing, infrastructural, demographic, psychological and comedic aspects of this terrible, stupid needless war. I assume you didn't get the memo yet >:)
    YES we would like you to!
  9. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to The_Capt in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    You have heard of urban planning for traffic, of course?  Yes, you can use math to describe human behaviour, or grocery stores would have too much or too little produce, buses would have no idea what routes to run and how often and the multi-trillion dollar industry if marketing would be in serious trouble.
    "Oh but these aren't war", I hear those of you who are climbing on Clausewitz's grave to die upon.
    You have heard of military logistics?  They do all sorts of math based on "human behaviour" in warfare, lots of margins and "spoilage".  If humanity was an impossible puzzle that only artistic genius could figure out, we could never keep them gassed up, fed and bombed up.  Hell we have developed some pretty simple methods to transform those mysterious humans into whatever we want...we call it Basic Training.  And this is without even looking at the hard physics frames around humanity, like we all need sleep, O2, food and water, a hug now and again, and we can't breath underwater for very long and cannot fly unassisted. 
    So what?  Oh we are a complex, bordering on chaotic system at times but most people are NPC in this game of life, going around their individual loops day in and day out.  What about "crisis", they can plot fire escape planning based on how fast we will cram an exit, so there is that.
    So what to war?  Not sure to be honest.  I don't know how far more complex modeling of human system in warfare will take us.  We applied some pretty simple ones here and were proven more right than wrong and we even used "simple math" like how many tanks Russian's had abandoned.  We basically had a data stream showing all this and the calculus that the Russians were screwed was not that hard to come up with.  
    I think it is important to understand that math will likely remain indicative and not definitive, like weather forecasting.  We can say with high accuracy what a series of observed phenomenon are telling us, and shockingly we will us math. However, the context and human-meaning of those phenomenon likely will need human interpretation for some time.  I do not believe we will have models that say definitively "and by Tues you will have won the war", this is like saying "on Tues, at 10:03 am, the wind on your deck will be 12 kph, from this exact direction". 
    What I do want to some math behind those indicators.  So you know that when the Afghans all start doing something, not normal, we can pick it up and have a good idea why.  Quantitative assessment that links back to qualitative.
    It is the 21st century, I do not buy this "war is all art...let me listen for god's voice and we will know what to do".  Humans are very predictable in many ways and their behaviour follows patterns.  We would do better understanding them and using that to inform us in warfare, as opposed to this weird "finger painting towards victory".  The use of modeling has been part of war since the beginning, the question is how much we trust machines to do and how much we leave to the human minds, the answer is likely somewhere in the middle, at least for now. 
    So as to math, one can oversimplify, and one can under-value, which we have seen both on this thread alone.
  10. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from Kinophile in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    So do those 11,000 troops get loaded on trains at the end of the day and sent to Ukraine?
  11. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to dan/california in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    I am getting this vision of the Russians getting every truck they still own together in one  big unmissable target for for a GMLRS strike that eliminates several thousand conscripts, and literally ALL the transport the Russians have left.
     
  12. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to TheVulture in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    I'm 90% sure that's the exact same location as in the video last week of the MLRS strike that nearly got Gerasimov and killed one of the Russian generals with a direct hit on the farmhouse. At least we can see here what the 'ground clutter' that was kind of visible in the first video is. 
  13. Upvote
    chrisl got a reaction from womble in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Based on a lot of the video I've seen it should be a first & third-person shooter where the player cruises around in a drone-view and has the option to call in various types of scenario dependent artillery, or do a first-person attack by firing on-board rockets or dropping on-board bombs.  You can also place and move ATGM teams.  In larger scenarios you get to tab around for the view from different drones and loitering munitions and ATGM teams.  The other player gets to drive along roads or, if they want cover, into mud that immobilizes their vehicles, but never sees anything to shoot, and gets to fire rockets and artillery at scenario defined targets.  
  14. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from Elmar Bijlsma in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Have to get a reasonable measure of the area, but probably comparably low for a direct hit.
    A few comments though:
    1) That barrage looked like it was entirely airbursts, and if you scroll through slowly, there's a burst at 0:05 above the unit that explodes on the ground very shortly before the big explosion.  So it wasn't likely a direct hit from a round, but from one of the fragments from that round, which spread over a much larger area than a single round.  So the chances are that most of the vehicles got hit with shrapnel, and that one got hit with a piece with enough energy in the right place to set of a secondary explosion.
    2) There's selection bias in the videos that get posted - a bunch of rounds blowing up without dramatic results is less likely to get posted (i.e. how many rounds a day are they firing and how many of those bangs get posted on twitter)
    3) I think that's the first time I've seen a barrage of airbursts from either side.
  15. Upvote
    chrisl got a reaction from JonS in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Have to get a reasonable measure of the area, but probably comparably low for a direct hit.
    A few comments though:
    1) That barrage looked like it was entirely airbursts, and if you scroll through slowly, there's a burst at 0:05 above the unit that explodes on the ground very shortly before the big explosion.  So it wasn't likely a direct hit from a round, but from one of the fragments from that round, which spread over a much larger area than a single round.  So the chances are that most of the vehicles got hit with shrapnel, and that one got hit with a piece with enough energy in the right place to set of a secondary explosion.
    2) There's selection bias in the videos that get posted - a bunch of rounds blowing up without dramatic results is less likely to get posted (i.e. how many rounds a day are they firing and how many of those bangs get posted on twitter)
    3) I think that's the first time I've seen a barrage of airbursts from either side.
  16. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to sburke in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Man, I don't even know what to say.  Sorry you had to go through that.  I expect not too dissimilar to what the allied troops experienced when coming upon the first concentration camps.  Thank you for sharing though.  It frequently helps to put the whole conversation in perspective and beyond the realm of just a theoretical discussion.
    and if it helps to talk about it here I don't think you'll find a single exception.
  17. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to BlackMoria in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Some of the conversation over the few pages have referenced the former Yugoslavia.  Which brings back... well, not so good memories.
    I was a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia in latter half of '93.   During the Croatian offensive in the Medak in Sept of '93, I was with the 2 PPCLI when we went into the sh*tstorm to try to stop the ethnic cleansing going on.  The Croatian army attacked our unit during that operation, a thing that the Croatian government denies to this very day.  Despite us photographing the Croatian dead after the battle and collecting their ID, etc.    We had god damn evidence and to this day, the Croatian government position is that they never attacked us.
    Part of our job, beside trying to keep the warring factions apart, was to document evidence of ethnic cleansing and I was in charge (I was an officer) of a evidence collection team.  So, literally thousands of photos, videos.  Transcripts of interviews with witnesses and victims.  Six months exposed to that living hell, day after f*n day....
    So I had the evidence, because sometimes our official recording devices ran out film or tape and we used our personal recording devices to finish up at a site.
    After I got out the military, I found myself sometimes on various military forms about games, such as this one.  Arma forums, military wargame forums... that sort of thing.  And as it happened, I ran into forum members from Croatia and Bosnia Serbs and we would get into it.
    Universally, every Croatian or Bosnian Serb forum poster denied what happened there.  And I was called a liar on many occasions for telling them them the truth of that war as I was there and they weren't.  And I have evidence to back up my claims.  No one believed me and if I offered visual proof, they didn't want to see it or they disclaimed it as fake.
    I remember a particular Bosnian Serb who was not in the war but we got deep into the weeds discussing what happened during that war.  Deny, deny, deny.  It never happened.  Until videos that the Bosnian Serbs took of them killing civilians and dumping them in mass graves what was recorded by the very soldiers who committed the atrocities surfaced and made it onto their local media and they couldn't deny it any longer.  Those videos were part of the process besides sanctions that resulted in some notable Bosnia Serb / Serbian leaders being turned over to the ICC for prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  After the revelation came out, this individual on that forum who I had spent hours engaging with about the culpability of Serbs in the atrocities simply ignored me from that point onwards.  I will never know why.... was it that he discovered that I was right all a long and he was wrong and he was ashamed (as he would have been) or he simply wanted to hang onto his delusion of what narrative he wanted to believe was true and he knew that I would keep chipping away.   
    Denial is a powerful thing.   I don't understand why it has such power but it does.  People can dismiss an outright objective reality because to accept the truth is to undermine what they think reality is or should be.   I don't get it and is beyond madding to see the denials in the face of objective reality happen over and over.
    Sigh.   I don't know why the hell I rambled on with this.  Maybe it was a story I need to tell to remain sane in light of the same brutality I witnessed back in Bosnia happening in Ukraine now.  Or maybe I still am the greater fool for believing my experiences in Bosnia can be an object lesson to others about holding onto a narrative that is personally comfortable but runs counter to all the real evidence to the contrary.   DMS, I am looking at you....
    The truth will come out after all this is over.  At least, I hope it does.  The truth of this war needs to be told and codified so generations that follow can know what really happend.
    Now at the end of this and reviewing it, I feel that I should have deleted this or apologize for it.  
    I am hitting post. It is my truth.  Let people accept it and learn something from it or ignore it.  I needed to say this for a long time.   
     
     
  18. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from CAZmaj in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Even if they're called up, what will they arm them with?  Do they even have enough rifles?  Did Russia secretly do a big buy-back of Mosin Nagants at Big 5 fifteen years ago and that's why you can't get them cheap anymore?
    What vehicles will they ride in?  On paper Russia has 10,000 tanks in reserve, but given that many of the tanks went into Ukraine had egg cartons for reactive armor, and the active duty trucks had bad tires, how long would it take to piece together 1000 more functioning tanks.  Probably none of which will have modernised electronics.  Same with BMPs and BTRs - how many of the reserve could be put into running order? General Motors isn't going to dump a bunch of trucks on them.  So even if Putin declares it is a war and "fully mobilizes", how much of that reserve could they actually arm and how long would it take?
  19. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to sross112 in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    @akd
    Follow up to your video of the Avian Air Assault Brigade. Here the operations staff is seen in the field conducting Battle Damage Assessments of earlier strikes:

  20. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to The_Capt in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    We can put a pin in this right there and come back to it in about a year or two.  I think China is treating Russia like a "useful idiot" and is banking on western attention spans - which is basically how we got into this mess in the first place. 
    Finally, I do not think that China sees this through a military lens, which seems to be where we automatically go.  I think they are seeing it through a much more economic and trade lens.  I also suspect it will lend to China doubling down on subversive and sideways approaches as conventional military conflict is proving itself to be very expensive and high risk.  Further, as Russia has proven very aptly, military power in the modern era is best treated like Dreadnoughts of the 19th century; a useful investment in threat, so long as they never really get used.   I think one of these videos put is best, "Russia was winning this war, right up to the point that actually started waging a real one". 
    I do not for one moment that this current conflict has somehow "solved-for-China" through proxy war with Russia, that is a dangerous assumption.  Nor that China lacks "soft power", or maybe "sharp" is a better description (https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/).
  21. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from gnarly in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Looks like a different bridge: single columns in the intact picture and double columns in the collapsed picture.  
  22. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to Der Zeitgeist in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Not so fast:
     
  23. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from LongLeftFlank in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Every time I see these videos, I think of Wrath of Khan, when Spock says "His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking".
    It's as if Russian troops (and the officers, really), have no concept that they could be observed from the air and have single munitions from drones or whole artillery barrages dropped on them. And it happens over, and over, and over.  There have been a few pics of Russians trying to camouflage their vehicles, but they still leave an awful lot of them just parked in plain view.
  24. Upvote
    chrisl reacted to TheVulture in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    Because I'm procrastinating this evening, I decided to plot the artillery impact points from the farmhouse video on to the google maps that @chrislposted above. Red dots are from the initial zoomed in view, orange dots are from after the camera conveniently zooms out just before the first rounds land outside its previous field of view. The purple circle is an area that is clear on the map, but obviously has some degree of ground 'clutter' in the video, but I can't tell what it is. Might well be some vehicles. Green line is 200m in length. 

    Random observations:
    The first round is a direct hit on the roof of the farmhouse and is possible the brightest explosion. Different kind of round, or just because it's up in the air rather than half-buried in the ground as it explodes?
    The center of mass of the red dots seems to be different to the center of mass of the orange dots, which might suggest two different batteries with different central aim points (and the camera apparently knew when to widen its view).
    Visually (and from watching the video) it seems like there are more rounds close to roads / treelines / buildings than might be expected by chance given the wide spread of impacts, but you'd have to do some kind of statistical analysis to tell really (and I'm only placing the dots approximately by eyeball, so I might be unintentionally biasing them towards roads etc.)
    Here is the purple area ground clutter, before it all starts, and conveniently illuminated by a shell. Can't tell what it is, but for scale the distance between the two tree lines is about 300m, so we are talking (very approximately) vehicle scale stuff here, rather than pebbles or buildings.
     


  25. Like
    chrisl got a reaction from DesertFox in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    I found a twitter post last night that geolocated the maybe-precision artillery attack.
     
    The image from google is the approximate area of the barrage, with the building marked with a pin.  30 rounds fired completely randomly into the area would have about a half percent chance of hitting the building.  But the right area to use is the error circle for a single gun.  I don't have a lot of artillery documentation and I'm lazy, so I just looked up the performance of a NATO 155 shell.  Wikipedia says that unguided it has a 50% error circle of 267 m.  When I scaled off the image capture, it conveniently turned out to be about 1 m/px, so the building looks to be about 6x24 m, and the chances of scoring a direct hit somewhere on the building after 30 shots are about 2%, assuming uniform distribution within the CEP.  That was first shot, dead center.  The Excalibur page gives a 4 m CEP, giving about a 55% chance of hitting the building with one round, again assuming uniform distribution of error within the CEP.  Advertised performance of the M1156 PGK is only slightly worse.  So if someone had given me a few hundred precision guided shells along with a few tens of thousands unguided and I knew where the head of EW for the Russian forces was, I'd certainly load one up and hide the fact that I had it with a nice barrage over the area.  If I had multiple varieties, I'd use the best one on the building and some slightly less good ones to make sure I hit the parking lot and maybe the end of the woods where a defensive position might be.

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