dan/california

It is brute force simulation, but just open any CMBS scenario and play it on basic training. Go the extra mile and give yourself 10 or twenty excalibur rounds. It is so easy its boring after that. I have a fairly strong impression that when the full ISR stack is focused on your piece of dirt, and there precision rounds available it really is something close to that. Those are both big ifs that don't apply most places most of the time, but the capability exists in meaningful quantities. The Russian response seems to be to throw in more bodies that Ukraine has ammo, but their results are unimpressive to put it mildly. Edit: Cross posted with Chrissl, he said it better.

I can't pull the formula out my back pocket like Chris but you can also calculate the cost of literally every operation in a microprocessor. Every time it takes to strings of ones and zeros and does something to them. Friends that can just casually recite the formula say most of the cost is the electricity, and the mark up someone like Amazon charges if you buy a lot of capacity is entirely reasonable. Capitalism at its finest.

This is a great example of how long it takes to clear a a couple of square kilometers. And this is against virtually no opposition.

Seen it several times. It seems to be something they do when nothing else is working. One heck of a bang, but I wonder to what extent the probably very large CEP makes it a crapshoot at best. I also wonder if it is a sign of giving up in a particular direction. It seems like you would want to use it as line charge if you were trying to advance. It always possible they have a bleep load of old soviet one laying around they don't even trust as line charges. Post war evaluation will be interesting if we ever get one.

Another future game question. Will we be able to buy mobik/convict units that are intended for recon by death, and only count for a tenth of their actual casualty count or something?

Pondering two somewhat obvious things you could do with a drone bomber if you started with a clean sheet of paper. First would be to hold the bombs /grenades vertically in the in the center mass. This would mostly eliminate flopping back and forth before the fins stabilize it nose down. I don't have data on much that would help accuracy, but i would bet quite a bit of money it doesn't hurt. it also seems a test rig wouldn't be impossibly difficult if you were already working with these drones. The second much higher cost, but also higher pay off thing would be to use a hydrogen fuel cell instead of a battery, yes it would probably double the price. But the gains in available range/watt hours would also be large. Since we just watched one of them take out AT LEAST five or ten million dollars worth of armored vehicle, the improved ability to reach further, or launch from more survivable locations seems like it would be worth it. One drone killing one tank is a very good deal even at three or five times the price, as a long term average performance. Operators living to get good at it is not irrelevant either. And yes if they could just go hunt in assigned kill box by themselves that would be great. per google... Hydrogen holds 125-330 times as much energy as lithium-ion batteries per kilogram .Oct 4, 2022

The side without the drone is playing on iron difficulty. The side with the drone is not.

This should be preemptively included in the intro to the next game, to reduce the endless complaints about " My wunderwaffen hit a tree, &^%%^*(&, this can't be right." . Glad the SBU guys sent two. I also anticipate endless arguments on the point value of chain link screens...

We are going to be learning to read a lot of things in Chinese, even if we come good in the end...

If you can't keep even big drones off your mech forces it is time to go home. I mean even if that video was actually three drones working for week the effectiveness is just nuts. And some smart people somewhere have to working on a munition whose aerodynamics are not referred to as the flop, so that is merely one way the next version will be better... Dumb mass is dead is The_Capt's phrase, yes?

They always sound shocked by this....

Zaluzhnyi explicitly stated what his plan was months ago. I have seen nothing that makes me think he isn't following it. And the only question is are we sending enough help to make it work. As the Capitan has eloquently stated the West has adopted a set of self imposed rules that make anything resembling a large scale military intervention impossible and/or un-winnable. I would only add that we have done that in large part because of an info op that goes all the way back to whoever convinced Jane Fonda to go to Hanoi. At least Amnesty International's ham fisted idiocy in this war has discredited some the organs of said operation, at least for a little while. The geopolitical mistakes we made ten and twenty years before that were discussed however many pages ago... The West is winning in Ukraine because Putin's so called SMO violated all of the long established rules of that information operation, and was then executed with both incompetence and barbarity that have made a recovery from that mistake impossible. Unless Xi really has lost his marbles we won't so lucky the next time.

I am sure the fuses timing is very consistent. Even if they didn't kill it, there is no guarantee the radar still works. Pretty sure crew morale is that much worse, too. This is an excellent example one side's ISR cloud attacking the other sides cloud. We have been discussing this for thousands of pages, but it is tarting to actually happen. Hopefully things are even less upbeat in the Kremlin.

The thing I keep coming back too is the extent to which the entire Russian force is becoming almost completely composed of Mobiks with no training to speak of. If Ukraine can get a break through somewhere on the land bridge and force this utterly untrained mass to maneuver, there is real chance to make good things happen.

Pre war "trained" infantry might even be more important than the electronic warfare, the heavy MLRS, and the bleep ton of artillery they both actually losing and wearing out.

HR would ever believe you...

Another view of what I am 99 % is the same strike. Edit:posted the same one twice, sorry

I love it when that happens! AFU this is the fourth or fifth one the Ukrainian's have gotten recently. I so want to see one go boom in a Russian base.

You don't need to many spots like this to move an offensive right along.

China trying to be heavy handed about Ukraine would have 98% of the U.S. Congress voting for F-16s, ATACMS, 500 Bradleys and Abrams, and, and...

funny, and boggy...

This, exactly this!

In case no one noticed, the Ukrainians and the relevant parts of the U.S. Government can run an info op when they set heir minds to it. That is why Kharkiv was being held by the Russian equivalent of "Dad's Army" When Ukraine kicked the door down.

It makes my drone drop video habit feel entirely justified, and then some.

It will buff out.