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womble

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Posts posted by womble

  1. There are, IIRC, projectile-armour interactions where a large projectile making *any* contact with thin enough armour will penetrate. It's one of the things that the nose shape of the AP slug affects. See "APC" and "APCBC" in the following:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing,_capped,_ballistic_capped_shell

    I don't know whether the internal damage model of CMx2 takes into account that the penetrator is only likely to plough through "marginal" systems, or whether that matters... Or even whether it's the case; I could see that a glancing shot like that could dive inside, then ricochet around off the inside of armour designed to keep it out, as it's lost enough energy getting through the top armour and changing its vector, but still has enough oomph (or a bursting charge) to do horrible things to the crew and other gear.

  2. Storm Shadow has a two stage warhead designed to bust bunkers. If it's accurate enough to hit an actual bridge pillar or the junction of a pillar and the cross member, the HE charge will go off buried in the concrete. Whether that would be enough to drop the thing, I couldn't say for sure, but "bunker buster" seems like a smaller, or at least comparable job to "bridge pillar breaker", so I'd guess it should be. If that string of assumptions is true, it's entirely possible that the aspect that would require multiple birds would be the saturation of the AD around the bridge. UKR has decoy missiles, and Storm Shadow has penaids built in, AIUI, but it's a subsonic, not particularly evasive target over flat water, so potentially a turkey shoot.

    My guess is that UKR are waiting for a psychologically significant moment. Or maybe the target (or at least the critical bit that SS would have to hit) is just a bit too small for the accuracy capability of the system. You don't want to miss, or even hit but cause trivial damage; that would just be handing RUS propaganda ammo.

  3. The Russians claim that their artillery was in a Counterbattery duel, at the beginning of the "minefield crossing debacle". This could well be a true claim, in that UKR CB is, apparently, significantly more capable than RUS. So the duel could largely have involved displacing 10km away from their initial positions, having fired a couple of sticks at the initial crossing attempts and drawn the attention of some GMLRS. Just keeping most of the battery from getting scrapped by displacing in time might count as "performing well" in the current RUS lexicon of excellence.

    It was mentioned that the UKR could have done better in the aftermath by maintaining overwatch positions in the treeline, and countered that such "stay-behinds" would rapidly be spotted by RUS drones and chopped up by arty. Surely, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and the UKR overwatch could have been maintained by drones backed up by mortars or artillery or AGL (or some other indirect fire)?

  4. 4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

    I am talking about bottom attacking UGVs that simply wait for the bridgehead, or even follow on and then 12 hours later shift to close the safe lane.  [snip] You could have 1000 simple smart systems that can assess its own gaps and then fill them.

    The ones that are waiting get rollered. Mine plows would be obsolete, cos displacing the mobile mine isn't very effective :)

    After that, it's an EWAR problem. In order to self-heal, the mines outside the cleared lane need to know both that they need to move, and where to move to. So you need to jam or spoof whatever system the moving mines use for positioning, coordination and control. If it's a coherent single-blob minefield where every element starts out 'live', every element has to be "checking in" so that the minefield knows it's lost members (to a putative breach) that need covering. Even if you have silent reserves, at least a largish proportion have to be detectable via RF to some degree and at some point in time. Certainly doesn't have to be a continuous "I'm still alive" broadcast, but the suggestion of a 12 hour tick might suit a lot of operational situations. Could be adjusted by the minefield controller as their other ISR assets update them on the tactical situation. But they will be detectable. Any minefield that you breach will have to have some sort of EWAR element, just in case it's a hybrid "dumb" and "mobile" field, even if you've no evidence that there are mobile mines present.

    Or you need some sort of sentry system to guard the flanks of the cleared lane from the sneaky li'l buggers closing it again.

    Still, that sort of setup needs juice. It needs to operate its "intelligence", and its comms, and it needs to power its sneaking about. Such systems have a limited lifetime. Not trivial, for sure, but endurance becomes more of a consideration than it is for a plastic box and a passive fuse. We (that is, humans) have the capability to build static mines that are much more complicated and potentially even more effective than the ones the RU armed forces have deployed. But such complexity is too expensive to deploy "on spec" in the numbers required to provide the embuggerance that a simple dense belt of conventional anti-vehicle mines can.

  5. 1 hour ago, PEB14 said:

    the same way buildings are similar whatever their look like.

    Without having an opinion on the behaviour of trees, buildings are most definitely not "similar". There are definitely different classes of buildings. I think Bulletpoint has most of them listed, but I'd add "Churches" as an even stronger building type than "modular".

  6. 1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

    Now as a thought experiment - what happens when each mine is a small kamikaze UGV and the mine field can self re-close?

    Your mine-clearance tank changes to one bristling with chainguns or some other means of nailing an onrushing UGV before it gets close enough to pop its top-attack EFP weapon*. And additional assets lurking to pick off any other moving mines that are replacing the ones chopped down or trying to change the shape of the field. All these robot-choppers would probably need to be largely self-targeting and tied to multi-spectrum sensors, in order to react quickly enough to the developing threat. Even having a human in the loop for "Shoot/no-shoot" discrimination would probably be too detrimental to the OODA loop required to reliably trim such a minefield down.

    Minefields in areas with restricted visibility would be a real bear. And they could come a-scampering out of the forests onto the road once the engineer vehicles have passed... The advent of such systems will make area security a real nightmare, as well as complicating the "static" defense picture. The only ameliorating factor is that such complex systems will cost more than a big disc of plastique with a fuse, so won't be as widespread as "conventional" mines can be.

  7. I'm wondering how the air war is going. We've not seen much of anything, released by the UKR side, and the GS report doesn't mention any downed birds, which is understandable, while the op is ongoing. The RUS side have claimed that air support is contributing to the effectiveness of the defense. I wonder whether the CAS are just exploiting gaps in the UKR general AD umbrella, and are mostly evading local MANPAD-based AD at the point of the spear(s).

    How effective is the denial over the lines of contact? I guess we'll see later how many CAS casualties there have been in these first couple of days, on both sides on the air and on the ground.

  8. 32 minutes ago, dan/california said:

    It seems pretty clear the Russians did not widely inform their own troops that this was going to happen.

    For me, this is an indicator that the total destruction of the dam as a water-retaining installation was not the intended outcome of whatever explosive tinkering they were doing in the turbine halls last night. It might be just another example of the dog's breakfast that the RU armed forces has demonstrated itself to be, but if it's a pre-emptive action to deny the Ukrainians the crossing of the Dnipro in force, they could happily have had the forces and log assets withdraw from the flood areas; either the Ukrainians would recognise what was going on and refrain from attempting to exploit the now-unguarded left bank, or they wouldn't, and would get caught or cut off by the deluge.

    Or maybe whoever ordered the breaching just wanted some plausible deniability for the crime they knew they were committing. Not that "Oh no, we didn't think that much plastique would break the dam, we just wanted to render the turbine halls unrecoverable," is much of an excuse.

  9. 20 minutes ago, PEB14 said:

    Is there any notion of "materials" as far as CM buildings are concerned?

    Not as such, no. There are a few different grades of building, which each offer different levels of cover.

    21 minutes ago, PEB14 said:

    I am under the impression that changing modular or independent buildings' appearance does just that - changing the look of the building, without any influence on the cover it offers. So wherever they are made of stone, brick or anything else, the behave the same.

    You've identified two of the classes I'm aware of, there: modular buildings are a lot safer to be in than independent buildings. I believe "Churches" are safer-still. AIUI, you're correct. Changing the appearance of a given building from "wooden" to "stone"  (or whatever) doesn't change anything about the protection to its inhabitants that it offers.

     

    23 minutes ago, PEB14 said:

    It looks like the barns are made of softer materials and a lot more prone to collapse. Is it true?

    Barns are, I believe, a fourth class of building (not saying there are only four :) ), with the general protective value of a string vest, and sturdiness of a well-whisked meringue. Troops in barns are worse off than fish in barrels.

  10. 4 hours ago, Yet said:

    Leading to highly specific engineering. Which not only caused extensive foundation, but also the methods of the construction and were untypical

    Untypical, expensive, built to "lowest bid" in one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. It's amazing the thing's still standing even without explosive perturbation and hours-long petrochem fire insult.

  11. Russia's messaging appears to be a bit all over the place, on the drones:

    Quote

     

    P: They were aimed at killing civilians!

    Asks no one: How many did they kill?

    P: None, because we shot them all down.

    Asks no one: If you shot them down, how do you know what they were aimed at?

    [tumbleweed]

    P: Anyway. This was an atrocity by the terrorist regime in Kyiv. Raining ordnance on civilian targets is a war crime.

    Sez no one: Wot, like you've been doing to Kyiv continuously for a few nights and off-and-on for over a year now?

     

     

    It'd be so sweet of the Western Powers chose to take this admission of guilt as a chance to name Russia at least a State Sponsor of Terrorism. S'pose they'd have to do the same to Ukraine too, though, in that case.

    I think the actor (whoever this is) missed a trick though. If the warheads were disarmed or removed, they could have been replaced with leaflets. Or blue and yellow smoke. Or a mix of both.

     

  12. 59 minutes ago, IanL said:

    I think he will meet Putin for poison tea on the 10th floor of a hospital. As he is leaving he will loose his balance after shooting himself in the head twice and the chest six times and then fall down four flights of stairs and through a window on the 8th floor.

    I think he'll have a terrible allergic reaction, stumble down a staircase and through a window, unfortunately slashing his throat on shards of glass, then land on some bullets outside.

    Twice.

  13. 26 minutes ago, Astrophel said:

    Two out of Three Dutch immigrant Turks voted for Erdogan as a strong and reliable leader.

    I wonder whether expat Turks are keener on Erdogan because they don't have to live in his mess. He talks a great show, even croons a little, but the corrupt/shortsighted pandering to the demands of his core electorate for free/cheap stuff is going to come back and bite him in the ***, with any luck.

     

    28 minutes ago, Astrophel said:

    What is Nato to do?  My instinct is to confront Turkey immediately with a demand to allow Swedish and Ukrainian accession or leave.

    And risk him running into Putin's arms? The man's almost as delusional a narcissist as Vlad is, and has all the autocratic tendencies. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he cuts his nose off to spite his face. Then you have to do the same to Hungary, with the same, though slightly lower risk.

  14. 1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

    Strange how they keep doing these ineffective drone attacks... Surely most of those slow moving drones are being shot down by AA guns and not missiles? Which means they won't ever get exhausted.

    According to the BBC, they have launched more than 14 drone attacks in this month alone. If they had saved up the drones and launched them all in one go, then maybe they could have overwhelmed the defences, but it seems like they are just wasting their drones piecemeal.

    It's got to be something to do with C&C. They can't control/deconflict larger waves. Or they're just saving them up til "about 50 birds" and flinging them in as fast as they can make them before the Swiss lift their embargo on Gepard ammo.

  15. 7 minutes ago, sburke said:

    "That high-level bureaucrats, those very towers of the Kremlin, are trying to shut the mouths of everyone so that they don't speak about Wagner will only give another shove to the people."

    [and]

    "In the long term - long term is two or three months - they will receive a finger-slap from the people for trying to shut everyone's mouths and ears," Prigozhin said.

    Wow. As delusions go, that's a doozy. He thinks the Russian people give two hoots about him and his reputation? Or that they'll get uppity about being denied the opportunity to hear about his glorious victory (let's face it, he's RTB for a couple of months rebuilding at least, so there won't be any other "splendid" news to report about him or his murderers).

    I guess it's just more clues about how much lead there must be in the Kremlin plumbing...

  16. 2 hours ago, sburke said:

    Ukraine definitely wins the world trolling competition.

    And has a massive lead in the infowar, getting that video promulgated by an organ of the Russian state. Unfortunately, I think that the POV of the Russian populace has been so twisted that their "dismay" will be directed at the "insidious" Ukrainians for violating their precious Patriarch's website, rather than considering the implications of firstly its presence, and secondly the message it's sending.

    Still it's a good propaganda hit on the Western side of the equation.

  17. 18 minutes ago, billbindc said:

    And in true fashion for this forum I have to chime in…I own a parking company and I am a paid expert. That technology is essentially 120 year old hydraulics and not new at all

    Indeed. My father worked on the control electronics for one in a major Canadian airport (I think it was; 'twas before my time, and the memories of his mentioning it in passing are fading now) back in the late '60s.

  18. 1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:

    there’s a realistic possibility in the next 20 years of a bioengineered plaugue that will make every other bad scernario look less bad.

    The bioplague that worries me is when some well-meaning bod creates a broad-spectrum plastic-eating bacterium (or even one that just eats some common type), and it gets out into the wider environment. So much easier to engineer a beast that doesn't need to defeat human immune systems, just float about and find substrate. Wouldn't matter whether it was intentional or not, and I've already seen news articles about research in that direction, because, "Plastic Bad!"

  19. 1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

    Well we know that we were not going to invade but I am not sure they did.

    They had some seriously high level penetration of western society and establishments. If they mistrusted the intentions of the West, since they can change, a sober assessment of actual capabilities would have told them that the conventional forces of the West could at no point pose a credible threat to the territorial integrity of the USSR. If the Politburo didn't know, it was because they didn't want to. Beyond that, who's to know what insecurities drove them to what they did?

    They would have spent too much on "defense", for whatever reasons. If the West hadn't kept up, maybe the old "drive to the atlantic" ambition would have reawoken. Maybe it wouldn't, and the USSR didn't have any aggressive territorial ambitions to the west. I'm not saying the USSR developments drove those of NATO, at least not in any one-sided way; they definitely ratcheted off each other

    2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

    I am allergic to the “Soviets sucked and would have collapsed if we did nothing” argument

    I'm not making that argument, just that the western input to the military aspects of competition weren't as important as the other economic and cultural inputs. Russia would have spent "too much" on military endeavours for whatever reasons (pride, paranoia, aggression etc), whether "we" kept pushing the technical envelope or not.

  20. 58 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

    y forcing it onto an unsustainable trajectory by creating a decades long arms race the West did successfully create pressures that led to an eventual collapse of the system.  It took a lot of pressures of which military was a central component.  If the West had tapped out and relieved the pressure the Soviet system could have also reduced spending...

    In reality, there was never, not at any point, any threat from the West against the USSR outside of the MAD assurance. Russia could have had zero tanks and infantry and been just as safe from invasion as it was with millions of men under arms. The Red Army, once WW2 had ended, was always a weapon of propaganda, mostly existing to convince her own people that there was an external threat ("There must be a threat, or why would we need such a massive army?"). The reality or otherwise of that threat was largely immaterial to how much they had to spend to "keep up" militarily.

    I think the systemic failings (structural, economic and moral) of the USSR/Russian Empire (some of which led to unsustainable military spending that might've had greater effect if spent elsewhere, but probably not, because of those failings) have much greater impact on the trajectory of that polity than the spending levels of its rivals/enemies.

  21. 5 minutes ago, sross112 said:

    If they need a playbook on running an insurgency that has bases in neighboring countries with sympathy for the cause, pretty sure the NVA and VC could help them out.

    Or the Taliban. I'm sure the Ukrainian secret services are at least as competent as the Pakistani ones.

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