womble

If they've decided they need to pull the "much vaunted" 3AC out of the centre and push it North, is Crimea-Kerch-[Russian transport network]-Donbass the best displacement route? Seems an awful long way around. ISTR some suggestion that communications routes into the Donbass from the south aren't too good. Though the 3AC is symptomatic of the RU army malaise: even if it's as top-notch as the Kremlin would like it to be, they seem to be committing it haphazardly and piecemeal. Maybe the rumour is an attempt at deception to draw the notional 3rd striking force out from behind Zaporizhzhia. Or maybe it's not a deception and Berdyansk lies open.

For some reason my FB feed has had some CCP propaganda posts in it recently, tooting the horn about joint exercises with the RF armed forces. Maybe he's gotten something twisted about that: exercises=training; claims of "largest ever" mean "hordes of recruits". I somehow don't think he's that clueless, though. Edit: though if he missed the threat to US primacy that China has obviously presented since it started getting its own back on the colonial powers, maybe he is that blinkered.

I don't know the scenario, but AFAIK, you simply can't use demo charges on bridges. There's no way of targeting them. If there's something near a bridge that the demo charge can be used to breach (any linear obstacle will do, I think), the bridge will take damage from the nearby explosion, but it seems likely to me that the scenario is "pulling a fast one" on you, telling you that you're going to be able to blow the bridge, and expecting you to have to adapt your plans "on the fly" when the "surprise" failure to demolish occurs.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the bolded bit is off the mark. We talk a lot here about the ISR capabilities available to the UKR staff, and I don't think they're exaggerated one little bit. I would expect that, before they launched this offensive they knew pretty much where every pair of invading boots lived, and the location and fuel status of every lump of RUS steel larger than a Lada. I would be entirely unsurprised to discover they were anticipating the possibility of such sweeping gains before the operation got the green light. I'd be even more surprised if they were counting on such levels of success, but plans are allowed to consider more than one outcome, I believe.

It might be worth considering the scale of different countries. Public transport systems make sense for a certain population density. Outside of metropolitan districts of the US, they're never going to work. Still, shifting from a few million daily single-occupancy car journeys in every major conurbation to an integrated, efficient, clean public transport system would be a great improvement. Maybe the pressures of global meltdown will be enough to overcome societal inertia without Government intervention...

Just a double note of caution: cheat generators are favourite ways of getting malware onto your computer. Be very sure this isn't a clever way of getting you to shut off your AV while you install. Secondly, there's next to no point overrunning a game's natural end. AI plans are based on timers, so if it's a scenario, the AI won't have any orders after the "designed" finish. If it's head-to-head, you can set the game's duration for yourselves. Sure, you'll sometimes want to, for a few good reasons, but I'm dubious it's worth the risk of my first point.

Digging stuff out the ground to make electric cars isn't going to broil us. Continuing to burn oil at the rate we are will. If we priced the environmental cost of fossil fuels (y'know, lives in coastal third world areas; protecting coastal cities from rising waters; the cost of proofing the agricultural and transport systems of the world against extreme environmental occurrences on a regular basis and all the rest of the peta-dollar engineering required to "adapt" to a world noticeably warmer) into the "price at the pump", the cost-benefit balance between electro-puny and gass-guzzler would shift. Radically. Electric cars are only part of the answer; generation means have to shift as well. And petrochem is still going to be needed for some purposes anyway. The argument that "Norway has to sell oil to subsidise their e-car aspirations" holds zero relevance. They'd sell the oil anyway and spend the money on hookers and blow (or something else productive, given that Norwegians seem to be fairly sensible). And in general that whole article is a point-missing piece of misdirection and disinformation that looks like it was financed by Aramco.

It kinda doesn't matter much whether Friendly Fire (by mistaken identiy, as you seem to be suggesting) has been brought in, since small arms fire will not cause friendly casualties directly. Ricochets of small arms rounds can cause friendly casualties (as the ricochet doesn't have a "side" to call friendly), as can .50cal and higher, and all HE detonations. But I'd be surprised if there was an introduction of "mistaken identity" targeting by the TacAI. Partly because it would be very largely pointless, for the reasons above.

And still this excuse negates their previous claims of military-technical "unique weapon that only we have that no one can defend against" supremacy-fantasy. It's the first layer of their delusions that was stripped away, when the first probable Kindjahl "strike video" was against an obvious chicken farm (not the high value ordnance storage, or whatever it was they claimed it was aimed at). Along with their lack of SEAD capability with their "modern, powerful air force" and the absence of any T14-family/grade platforms (apart from half a dozen "Terminators"). It's pure narcissistic delusion. There's no logic to it, merely an ever-changing tapestry of half-baked justifications for their craziness and socio/psychopathy. And this general condition applies to Putin, too, judging from his latest attempt to "spin the narrative".

Letting it get to a forward Log base/railhead, and then HIMARSing it achieves the depletion without the friendly casualties...

Split them at start. That way, when you loot the trucks in setup, the right ordnance can be assigned to the right team...

And "tit for tat" or "in kind" here means MOAR SANCTIONS!!! . Not more weapons. Russia is banking on the uncomfortable winter to sap European will. Let's see how fast Russian will drains away once tougher, broader sanctions start biting. Including confiscation of assets.

My highlight is the first obvious problem with the prospect of a drive to Sevastopol. There won't be any bridges across the river that far south. UKR have already seen to that, largely, and once the front line is the river, any attempts to repair or replace are going to be vulnerable to Russian strikes. The Russians might not be able to play "join-the-dots" on the bridge deck, like St Himars can, but they can make using the constriction very difficult, even if they can't make the crossings themselves unusable. I think transferring their main effort to the Donbass would give them a better chance of maintaining their LOCs.

It's still defense while the ordnance is being lobbed at invading forces or their support echelons. Not sure about the kill-porn part of it, but a portion of many countries' taxes (and therefore "our" taxes) are going towards weapons of war that will be used to kill and maim invaders. If we're okay with that, it's only a small step to volunteer more personal cash for the same thing. I think I'd rather take it on trust that the money is used as intended than be keen to have a video of its terminal effects.

And if there is visual evidence, scrutinise it for how many times it's been used before...

It would make sense to hang on and wait to see where this much-heralded saviour-formation gets sent before committing to an offensive (even a probe-y one). If it goes somewhere you feel you need to react to, you might have to peel something out of your O-plan, or if it's coming to where you had planned to strike, you'd need to make adjustments or even cancel your operation. But confirmation it's going somewhere that you're pretty sure can hold it off, and will take a very long (in context) time to redeploy to interfere with your actual plans would be a great "green light" once you've got your own confirmations that it's not going to suddenly appear to your front and ruin your day.

Didn't see very much new in that. Doesn't even mention the incipient crop failures due to extreme drought. Straws are just pilin' on that camel... and the whole world is riding on it!

Hi Dave. Total amateur here, in the matter, don't mind sayin' up front. I can understand why the prospect of cutting off the Chernobyl installation from external power supply is/was a problem: they have needs for pumps and such to keep things circulating to stop thermal unpleasantness, and the on-site generation is diesel units with finite tanks. How come, though, given that Zaporizhzhia is currently still operating at least some (2?) of its piles, disconnecting that plant from external supply is a problem, since it makes "quite a lot" of power itself, and could "surely" use that to keep cooling plant operational? Sure, once shutdown on the remaining cores is complete (though that doesn't seem to be an intention, merely an option down the line), the cooling ponds etc still need their impellers turned, and you need some external juice (or the emergency generators on-site), but why is it an acute problem?

Aye. The other thing about mines (especially AP mines) is that they are completely indiscriminate and would need picking up again once UKR wins. That's a slow, expensive and dangerous job that they've seen far too many other countries have to undertake, so AP minefields on their own territory would, I agree, be a sign of giving up the objective of retaking (or even the aspiration to hold on to) terrain. To some extent, the same applies to RUS. While the maximalist goal of taking and holding whatever fraction of Ukraine the propagandists can get away with claiming this week remains, belts of AP mines are something of an own goal.

Your expectation would still be accurate. Great for browsing and a bit of cloudy-productivity-software work. Spiffy battery life (because not very powerful). Watching the Choobs, sure. Shredding Night City, or Call of Arma, not so much...

Is the bridge built in a way that they can put most of the pontoon underneath the structure? "Bomb shelter for the bridge"? Makes Saint HIMARS job a little harder, at least, if it's doable.

The setting of close-together-waypoints isn't too onerous; you just draw their path and click more often It's adding Pauses to get it closer to bounding overwatch* that's the real genital-buster. My guess is it's a design decision. They've baked some of the Advance to Contact behaviour (as I've seen it described) from CMx1 into the "Quick" command's default TacAI settings, and what we see is what BFC think is "good enough", in that tuning it so Quick stops more frequently and for longer would aggravate as many people as it pleases. * Yes, I'm aware of the Assault command, but that doesn't do what I want with parallel axes of movement more widely separated, and the support elements only coming level with where the assaulting elements have paused; it splits squads "wrong" for the way I want to fight

Whether the battery is dead or not doesn't reduce the use of household juice much... unless you can charge it on someone else's tab.

And they did "that" with at least some of the elements you mention that the CCP doesn't have available to it (to a greater or lesser degree in each case, but always more than China would have vis a vis supporting RUS in their misadventure right now). And they did it once "successfully" in Korea, too.

Perhaps it doesn't help, but in CMx2 (I barely played CMx1), my advance to contact "drill" is short (2-3AP) legs of Quick. Troops on Quick will keep advancing and exchanging fire with targets of opportunity, especially while they're "rallying" at their waypoints, but will also take self-protective action if that turns out to be necessary. More cautious advance to contact involves explicit Pauses at some or all waypoints. It is a lot of micro, though.