womble
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Posts
8,872 -
Joined
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Days Won
12
Posts posted by womble
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1 hour ago, RandomCommenter said:
He is the one Tory I have time for.
Word. It'd be nice if Starmer would keep him as Defence, when the Tories cave at the next election (to leave Labour or a Coalition holding the nasty, badly-cared-for crack baby that the economy will be by then) but that simply isn't going to happen.
Stupid party politics.
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Aren't the early ATACMS cluster munitions? Perhaps UKR value the range for hitting area targets that are currently out of range. What would the M39 do to a helo base?
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Welcome aboard, and happy learning!
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1 minute ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
I know, but in practice it is the same thing as regards the missile. The available Western mobile systems are based on MANPADS put on some chassis with a set of thermals slapped on them.
Nonsense (the bolded bit). Because the available western mobile systems are not candidates for this job, since they aren't capable of prosecuting an attack on an aircraft at tree-top level at A-t-G-ATGM engagement ranges. So we're not even considering "available Western systems". So that paragraph is a circular argument against a point that's not being made.
4 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:But the mobile SAM missile is not going to be developed specifically for attack at treetop height. It has to be designed with a view to reaching higher up and cannot be optimised just for range.
Who said it has to be optimised "just for range"? If it can reach out to 10km at treetop height (and it'll probably have to climb a few hundred metre for visibility anyway), it can probably reach as high as an Igla or a Stinger, even if it has to leave the really high stuff to Starstreak. And since it's probably going to be vehicle-mounted, it can be larger than any of those (though keeping it trim will help with ammo count, obviously), so maybe it can do both anyway.
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24 minutes ago, Splinty said:
The Redeye, Stingers predecessor was developed in 1961. The Stinger didn't enter service until the early '80s.
Shame on me for taking headline dates. Sorry.
So Stinger is "only" 40 (Forty; four-zero) years old. I think the assertion that seekers have improved still stands...
1 minute ago, BamaMatt said:Why not the Switchblade 600. I bet it can lock on to a helicopter as easily as a tank.
Maybe so. Would the helo be able to evade it, or even threat-detect it? I think maybe the problem might be that the helo won't sit still long enough for the Switchblade to complete its attack run (even if it's entirely unaware of the presence of loitering munitions), unless the Switchblade gets very lucky, or can arrange some sort of trap/surprise. Certainly you'd have to have put the Switchblade up and out well before the helo showed its face. The density of the picket line of loiterers you'd have to establish would likely be prohibitive, especially if no AH came to the party. They could be used on other targets of opportunity (like they're designed, after all), but they amn't comin' home...
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Somebody put a video of an octocopter-type drone firing a missile up "a thousand pages" ago... It was a prototype, but prototype to service seems to be fairly quick in Ukrainian hands... A drone firing an existing MANPAD system sounds like a combination of systems that could fit the bill if conditions on the battlefield allow the drone to loiter ahead of the AH's target.
There have been plenty of air-to-ground missiles fired by Predators and other "heavy fixed-wing" drones, over the years; would such a class of things make suitable forward platforms for air-to-near-ground missiles with passive seeker heads?
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1 hour ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
It is a much bigger missile (about twice the dimensions of a Stinger, which has to fit a man's shoulder), it is not being shot from the ground upwards but from the air downwards, and it has a much easier time targeting a tank, than an AA missile would have targeting a helicopter. It must have been a much easier thing to design than an AA missile of similar range.
I never said MANPAD. I said "Mobile".
Over 10km, the treetop height from which AH are launching is pretty much irrelevant in terms of fuel/flight characteristics.
Stinger was designed originally in 1961. It's sixty years old, even if upgrades have been made. Seekers have improved "quite a lot" since then. It's entirely possible for a visual lock that doesn't need to be maintained so the missile sees the target before launch and can seek it out again, if it breaks visual contact. Missiles are a lot faster than choppers. Maybe it has to be a salvo of three to cope with lateral ducking, or maybe the missile just has to climb high enough to have a decent field of view behind whatever defilade the chopper is using. Conceptually, it's a piece of the proverbial, and well within current, even recent image processing.
The asset probably needs to be vehicle mounted, just to pack a large enough motor, but Startstreak can fight gravity one-on-one for 10000m of climb; even a modicum of aerodynamic lift should be able to let that same engine drive a payload ten clicks horizontally.
There's no certainty that even a full-on NATO effort could achieve total air superiority vs the latest Russian AD complexes; they've better SEAD than the Russians, but I don't think anyone was expecting Ukraine's Soviet-era AD to be able to deny even the Russians the freedom of the air, and it did, largely unsupported by Western systems. So even if ground-based AD is "second best", it may well be all that's available.
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25 minutes ago, pintere said:
Those Ka-52s need a tactical solution, and the most promising one seems to be F-16s coupled with western AA missiles.
This is a problem, aye. And promising though they seem, from what simulations can tell us, the F-16/AMRAAM combo isn't quite up to it.
What sortof puzzles me is that an ATGM (with a massive warhead to punch through MBT armour) can be effectively launched at 10km range, but "mobile" SAMs struggle to manage that sort of engagement envelope. Starstreak has a ceiling, AIUI of 10km, but won't reach out that far (I don't know the dynamics of why) laterally. Or perhaps Startstreak is rare or fills a more important niche in the AD complex than "Keeping the AHs off our spearpoint formations".
But it seems like it should be a fairly important programme to develop a relatively portable missile that at least matches the range of the threats that the tip of the spear is going to face, and mount it on a chassis that can keep up and survive in the general environment the tip of the spear is expected to exist in. And then send them all to Ukraine.
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26 minutes ago, Carolus said:
The oligarchs have the amount of money that they will feel no personal lack of anything.
And large chunks of that money are kept outside Russia. The international community needs to decide that that should all be turned over to Ukraine. London, aka Moscow-on-Thames is one of the greatest concentrations of illicitly-gotten wealth, and the UK government should be leading the way in recovering that money for Ukraine. The oligarchs might feel differently about Putin when his antics have chopped a zero off the end of their fortune.
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1 minute ago, FancyCat said:
Globalized economy. The withdrawal of Russian exports, oil or otherwise, will damage the poorest and weakest economies around the world, causing rising food and energy prices, that will hit the west, both its citizens and thru increasing global instability.
There's going to have to be some surgery done on the globalised economy. The richer nations have largely managed to amputate Russia from their energy supply chains. Currently, Russian petro is really cheap because the market for it is small. And China is the largest beneficiary. If "we" got serious, we could buy Saudi oil and gas at market prices and resell it at a loss to the nations that are still dependent on Russian oil. Or we could "persuade" the rest of the extraction industry to increase output to compensate for the loss of Russian hydrocarbons. The bonanza of low priced oil would end, but it wouldn't have started if it wasn't for the war.
None of what needs to be done is without cost. None of it is easy. But letting Russia keep lobbing missiles at a liberated Ukraine is costly, and difficult. At the very least, it maintains the "excuse" that "there's a war on" that people keep using to justify ****ty economic and environmental decisions, and throws Ukraine under a bus.
Maybe Russia will "come to its senses" in some manner (change of regime) once UKR achieve the humiliation of the invading armies, but it's going to need pressure in that direction, if it's even at all possiblbe.
9 minutes ago, FancyCat said:Not to mention collapse of the Black Sea Grain initiative, and loss of Ukrainian grain exports worldwide. Russia would undoubtedly stop that if sanctions increase.
They might try, and if the political will is there to impose radical sanctions, they might find it costly to their ability to interdict it, since it's an obvious consequence which the sanction-imposing nations would have to have a plan to deal with, in order to avoid embarrassing climbdowns. Said ability to interdict would be limited anyway if the BSF can't use Sevastopol as their base any more. We are talking about a scenario where RUS has been completely thrown out of Ukraine, after all.
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Given the RUS understandable aversion to being cut off, surrounded and wiped out, I'm not sure why UKR would even start poking around in actual Bakhmut "proper" rather than continuing to push back the flanks and make the place a salient that can be bypassed and reduced/ignored later. It's not like there are any civilians there whose suffering needs to be taken into account. Let the invaders starve, if they don't just give up, assuming they don't withdraw once in danger of envelopment.
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7 minutes ago, dan/california said:
At the moment I agree with you, but it will be a very different circumstance if Russia has been run completely out of Ukraine. It would be even more obvious they are launching missiles out of pure spite. And the production really is a solvable problem. I mean the Iranians did it, and they are under massive sanctions.
Iran is not producing "hundreds per day" of the Shaheeds. Maybe I'm getting hung up on what was meant to be hyperbole.
Russia doesn't care much what the rest of the world thinks, but if so-called "Ukronazis at the gates of the Motherland" start doing to Russia what Russia has been doing to Ukraine (even if the targets are all legitimate military installations/formations), every accidental civilian casualty (there will be some) will be all over the Internet and "balanced" Western media, eroding future support for the Ukrainian cause. Ukraine won't have the international investment that would make its rebuilding less painful and slow, and it seems to me that in such a situation, it's not impossible for the Ukrainian attitude to the rest of the world to change from gratitude to resentment. And I wouldn't blame them one bit.
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On 6/30/2023 at 11:59 PM, kevinkin said:
I am not sure how much further traditional sanctions can go. The west has to slowly take apart the behind the scenes networks that supply Russia even with formal sanctions in place. This involves nations we want to be friends with. But those nations have their short term interests and people to provide for. In the end, the war is like a bad tooth. Fillings will not solve the underlying issue and the tooth has to be painfully pulled out on the battlefield.
I'm sure diplomatic efforts are under way to persuade those putative "friends" that it's actually in their better interests to remain on good terms with the West, and incidentally help maintain the rules-based world order from which they have benefitted from since about 1945. If Russia survives being kicked out of Ukraine in any form which retains the will and means to cause Ukraine grief in a material (rather than simply political) sense, that tooth is, to torture your metaphor some, rotted below the gum line, out of reach of the pliers, and no one wants to go in with the drill because the patient has a knife to the dentist's belly that they will definitely use if you hurt them that much.
Sanctions have a way to go. Shell are still shipping Russian LNG because "honouring contracts". I'm sure they aren't alone. Those profiteering SOBs need to be told they're allowed to drop Russian product like hot cakes. Sanctions need to be made transitive, so that nations which ignore them get sanctioned too. Dirty money should be seized (and sent to Ukraine). There are so many ways sanctions can be extended, all the way to full, active blockade. Each has a cost, for sure, but the cost of leaving Ukraine to wither once their heroes have defeated the invaders would be similar to not having helped out in the first place.
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On 6/30/2023 at 11:48 PM, dan/california said:
Ukraine is already building kamikaze drones that can reach Moscow. It is simply necessary to explain to the Russians that they can start showing up by the several hundred per day, instead of a couple per week.
Because improving production of that sort of ordnance by three orders of magnitude is going to happen. Ukraine's ability to strike into Russia becomes magnified once they hold their entire border again, but they are already adjacent for quite a long stretch and it's not dissuading the Russians one iota. In fact, the Kremlin would welcome an aerial drone assault campaign from Ukraine, since it would allow them to intensify the "defense of the Rodina" narrative for both internal and international consumption.
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9 minutes ago, kevinkin said:
I wonder who will invest in Ukraine when their investment is under fire from cruise missile strikes from a spiteful Russia?
A real worry, if Russia somehow survives as a going concern after having been evicted from UKR. Remember in 1984 that the various powers who Airstrip One had always at war with didn't engage in any intense actual "warfighting", there was just the occasional rocket bomb hitting London and killing a few Proles. In that book, it served The Party's purposes of maintaining the eternal external enemy; an unrepentant RUS wouldn't need to do much more to ruin UKR chances of renaissance.
The fact that RUS continually bombs civilian locations without the supporters of UKR tightening the screws of sanctions and tit-for-tat increasing their military aid packages makes me somewhat fearful that if RUS survives with missile production lines and political will intact, that even evicting them won't be enough. Maybe "The West" will get proper shirty with a RUS that has no military business in UKR any more lobbing HE at Kyiv, and wind up the sanctions til the Russians stop. Or maybe the forces of relations-normalisation will be in full swing as soon as the armies are out of AK range of each other across the pre-'14 borders. I hope for the former but fear the latter will be the case.
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I wonder whether the FSB told Putin that Prig was going to Putsch, but Putin couldn't believe he'd go that far, so told them to leave him be.
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28 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
If camp is indeed for [Wagnerites], it is unlikely they will simply sit there doing nothing.
Depends how high the wire is, and how bright the searchlights and how alert the guards... Only 80% joking.
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3 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
Or incompetence or malice.
Look at the persistent anti-nuclear power efforts supported by the Soviet Union. They don’t care which group they use, just the ends that matter.
An example covered by "...more directed", for me. Malice of a hostile state actor directing (via subtle or not-so-subtle means) a mouthpiece.
Incompetence though, that's another possible reason for people to espouse such unrealistic aspirations, and an even better reason to ignore that author...
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7 minutes ago, strac_sap said:
...authors state that the war should be ended immediately in discussions and a treaty,... Their ignorance of history is astounding...
Not just history: current events and the future prospects for lasting peace... Naivete perhaps, or something more... directed? Or just a narcissistic unwillingness to accept that their world view is pretty divorced from reality.
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2 minutes ago, Jr Buck Private said:
I have to give credit to the Brits for supplying the Storm Shadows. Those could be used to attack inside Russia but they weren't afraid of escalation. Seems like they made it easier for the USA to supply ATACMS. I'm a bit of a hot head of course, but if Ukraine uses ATACMS to fire at targets inside Russia, then so what. It seems fair to me.
While I'm sure most of the folk here would, in isolation, agree that UKR firing SS and ATACMS at "legit military and logistical targets" inside Russia-proper should be allowed, it might be too-swift a temperature jump for that frog we're trying to boil without it feeling like it needs to leap out of the pot.
What I'd do is set up a lot of target solutions for inside-Russia nodes, and hit them all with as many launchers simultaneously as could be brought into range, just once right at the point of smashing through Russian lines in Ukraine. "Oops, sorry. Won't do it again." But the damage will be done, the disruption maximised, and we can all live with the bluster that will dribble out of the Kremlin. Lots of preconditions to set, like better missile defense across UKR (there would definitely be a Kindjahl tantrum) and alternative arrangements for any HIMARS targets that would be left un-serviced by the alteration in engagement range for those systems...
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5 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:
Europe contains multiple thousands of Strom Shadows with no other meaning for existence than fighting Russia. I believe the US has less than 1000 ATACMS and they have lots of "prior commitments" with the US being global military power and all.
Wikipedia says there are 3700 ATACMS manufactured in total. A lot of those are "awaiting upgrade" though, and I can't offer a guess how useful the unupgraded ones would be to UKR at this point.
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16 minutes ago, TheVulture said:
The main difference is that the US has a lot more ATACMS that it can afford to deliver to Ukraine than the UK can deliver Storm Shadows.
Storm Shadow's tandem HEAT/HE warhead probably works better against hardened targets than ATACMS's "Penetrating hight explosive blast fragmentation warhead". They also have, AIUI, different flight profiles, so will challenge AD in different ways. It's another long ranged tool in Ukraine's box.
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There isn't different code for the AI. What you're seeing is your very own confirmation bias off a small sample. Until you can provide data rather than anecdote, it's not even worth considering the possibility.
So set up some fire missions and do some stats on a few hundred teams, and maybe someone will buy what you're selling. Publish the scenario so other people can validate your results. It's how science works, ya know?
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To administer buddy aid, a pTruppe needs to be in the same AS as the casualty for "a while" without being bothered by too much incoming fire. Doesn't have to be the Schreck's original ammo carrier/loader, but it's probably a good idea to leave that fellow there, since he's probably the one with the ammo, and if you don't have an element with which the carrier can share ammo pick up the tube, you'll only have the ammo that the actual TubeGuy was carrying.
If the Shreck-remnant is "a bit rubbish", but you have a "better" (greater experience, better motivation and leadership) small team from the same formation that can share with the remnant, it might be worth having that element grab the Tube.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Hah. Which Tory is "first division" if Wallace is second?
In case you hadn't noticed, last time, it was Argentina who did the invading. Britain has some pretty far-flung interests which it is prudent to retain the capacity to defend at need. Defend. You know, like Ukrainians do. Not invade, like Russians.
We should (and are) give Ukraine what we can. Most of the NLAWs that helped stop Russia's first attacks came from the UK. They got 800 Storm Shadows.. I don't think we have that many left on the RAF's establishment. We've promised them the entirety of the annual production of the cruise missiles. If we want to replace the ones we've given over already, we have to ramp up production (and I believe the statment implied that we were).