Lethaface
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Posts posted by Lethaface
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40 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Article about a Russian FSO officer who defected to the West back in October. He worked for Putin since 2009 and had fairly extensive contact with him over the whole period of time. The main takeaway from this is that he also views Putin 2022 as being very different than Putin 2009. The current Putin is paranoid and isolated, getting his information 2nd hand at best.
https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-security-officer-karakulov-war-criminal-ukraine/32349423.html
Steve
That's interesting. I remember wondering whether Putin had gone mad because of the pandemic isolation and started getting high on his own supply.
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1 minute ago, dan/california said:
Yes, but they seem to use all of it to produce artillery, and IFVs that are shipped from the factory straight to the Ukrainian army, so it is ok. They don't whine about it either, They just keep adding shifts and whole assembly lines and SHIP the bleeping stuff with greetings for Ivan already neatly inked on the shells.
No they use the LPG to gas cars. I call hypocrisy.
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I don't know this source but is at least interesting given the usual bashing against some other country.
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1 hour ago, The_MonkeyKing said:
I shall present you with the original version of the song:
Finns are very glad to join NATO. Many NATO beers and liqueurs have been and will be popped today! ("OTAN" translates "to drink alcohol" in Finnish)
I hope this will materialize in much more support for Ukraine from us. At least all the three biggest parties have stated UKR support has been too little and too late, including from us fins. With the limited packages, the government has always added that the fact we are outside NATO is limiting our support.
Welcome!
I think whole of NATO and especially in Europe we are quite a bit more stronger and united because of this. Hope Sweden can finish the process as well sooner rather than later.
Cheers! -
32 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
Don't know where you got the demoncratic idea from, but it's not cognitive congruent.
It was a typo.
Ah, ok my bad I thought you saw some demonic form in a democracy lol.
32 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:The U.S. originally specified that only white men, age 21 or older, who owned property, were allowed to vote for their Representatives. Senators were selected/elected by the State Legislatures. The “Voters” didn’t get to directly elect Senators to represent their States in the Senate until the 20th Century. Benjamin Franklin supported a vote to remove the requirement of owning property and penned a very succinct reply to a five-page statement by his supporters in favor of removing ownership of property. He said “A man owns an A**, the man can vote. The A** dies, the man can no longer vote. Therefore the vote lies not with the man, but with the A**.” I used to use it when I was teaching Executive Branch Regulatory Writers how to write in plain language (required in the 1990s by a Presidential Executive Order).
I know some about the US history, but the US wasn't the first republic to exist and the architecture of it's democracy doesn't define what is a democracy or republic. Anyway in NL woman were only allowed to vote from ~1922; most democratic countries weren't fully representative democracies until later in the 20th century. -
5 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:
I watched a “Master Course” one time on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Presenter said that the Framers of the Constitution envisioned the U.S. as a Republic, and would be horrified to see it now as a two-party Democracy. He said tha one off the signers actually said “I am an Aristocrat! I love Liberty, but I hate equality!”
We began as a Republic and evolved (or devolved) into a Demoncracy. Perhaps why our two major parties are Republicans and Democrats.
A republic is generally considered to be democratic / a democracy. Aristocracy is something very different, a voting system in which only the aristocracy gets to vote is nowadays not considered democratic.
Don't know where you got the demoncratic idea from, but it's not cognitive congruent.
As an example; our country is a representational democracy disguised as a constitutional monarchy. But we could easily transform into a republic by replacing our ceremonial King with a ceremonial President.How much powers a president has, how many parties there are, the common law/constitution etc, all of those things ARE NOT defined by whether the form of democracy installed in a governing body of a nation state is a republic or not.
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40 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:
Yeah. And earlier, the OP of previous OP, or was it the OP before that
was asking how long before every day non-state terrorists or heck: disgruntled domestic extremists pick up on proven techniques for the repurposed small commercial drones in Ukraine, and try them out instead of AR-15s and trucks driven into crowds? It’s off topic, but I have a bad feeling…
Yeah I decided not to reply to that one but now we are here lol.
I wouldn't be too worried, but then we don't have much AR-15 shootings here. I guess it doesn't really matter whether you go by AR-15 or a kamikaze drone. Such things (drone attacks) will surely happen one day.
But given that each year much more killings are done by and among ordinary citizens, instead of terrorist / extremist attacks, I wouldn't worry much more than one does now.
Unless you work in security for infrastructure or similar; a gate with a guard and camera isn't of much help against a drone flying over the fence somewhere out of sight.Good business opportunity I guess: 'drone hunters' which you can hire as a service on a subscription plan.
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8 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:
Or Soleimani. The west has been assassinating people using drones for quite a while lol.
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3 minutes ago, kevinkin said:
But how many will be young men of child bearing age?
NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo
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The art of destabilization through 'alternative news' and useful idiots (including (subtle) kompromat) is one which Russia did master quite aptly (on this subject they did successfully pull of concentrated/coordinated multi domain operations, unlike in their military 'special' operation), but like Steve and others mentioned the invasion in Ukraine undid a lot of their achievements.
In the UK Nigel Farage is a good example. The man had quite some vocabulary gifts and at times I liked to listen to him trashing other politicians for a good laugh, but in my court he'd been tried for treason / given a public speaking ban for being a liability to national security.
The difficulty on this subject is the fact we (West) are democracies and unfortunately in most of our democracies there are no hard laws or countermeasures against lobbying for funding from non-disclosed (or consciously vague) sources. Be they an industrial consortium/kartel or another nation state. The same goes for misinformation through 'news' websites/media.
Russia isn't alone in that regard. China is very active as well, as is Israel; although each with their own interests in mind, not necessarily destabilization. At the same time 'we' are also lobbying inside other countries for our interests (or what we think is good for others), through NGO's and other mediums.
Nation states with less democratic tendencies tend to have more strict controls to do something about those efforts, while in our democracies it's usually protected free speech / freedom of mind unless it can be proven with a smoking gun that someone is being paid by an external source to provide misinformation to the public.In our country we had an example of this problem during the covid pandemic. Some samba dance teacher turned into a 'virus expert' and his misinformed ideas (or cognitive dissonance) gained massive traction because he said what some people wanted to hear. I was all for locking the man up until after the pandemic, but our own checks and balances made that difficult. Probably for the better, when looked at what happened in the '30s of the previous century not that far from here.
This (our 'freedom' being used against us by less free nation states) is a weakness of all democratic countries and probably needs to be addressed in this century if we hold democracy dear. -
52 minutes ago, cyrano01 said:
Right. No suppressive MG fire, no supporting infantry. Tanks pushing up close to occupied enemy infantry positions. Even if they were confident that the target position was well suppressed that's a high degree of reliance on there not being any wild-card bad guys out there in unidentified positions. That sort of thing has pretty much never ended well for me in CMBS but the Ukrainians seem to go in for it and get away with it. Haiduk makes a good point about getting inside the ATGM's min-range though.
Is it just my eyesight or was the commander operating with his head out of the hatch at least some of the time?
I guess the TC was in comms with the drone camera operator.
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2 hours ago, JonS said:
But despite all that, despite all the rework and despite never quite being able to deliver the dream, one of the most frustrating and wasteful components of the whole programme was the extraordinary amount of time and effort we spent proving that we weren't wasting either time or effort. And that was necessary primarily because of all the people out there who think that "the bureaucracy" is the problem.
Aren't those people the actual bureaucrats?
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Although I had already congratulated @Free Whisky on discord, I thought to do it another time here. It was a close game, although not my favorite for a mirror tournament but after the TOW and Abrams came into play it became more interesting / dynamic.
I see the top 5 of the tournament was very close, that's usually a good sign.
Although we're always critical most of it is constructively intended ;-), my thanks to @BFCElvis for organizing the tournament and the rest of the team for providing the scenario's ( @The_Capt @George MC @slysniper ).
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On 3/24/2023 at 3:36 PM, IanL said:
100 percent. Exceptions are when I have only a few soldiers left or no one left at all
Yeah If get trashed (obviously never happens
) and it's obvious my opponent can remove my forces from the map without me being able to do much about it, I'll gladly surrender.
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19 hours ago, AstroCat said:
CBMN on Steam to check it out.
FPS: 20 !!!!
Look at my perfectly tuned system in the specs. 10700k, 32GB, 4090... lol. Come on this is insane even for old CM.
So laggy it was insane, as soon as I zoomed up to a higher view I was seeing literally at times 1fps!!!! AHAHahahahaha Seriously?!
Medium map with a Tiny battle.if 20 FPS is your high and 1 your low on a small map / tiny battle, you should probably try tweaking some settings. My I7 7700K + 3080 does better, but obviously no wonders it's still CMx2.
Although my graphical petpeeve would be draw distance, FPS is usually good enough for me with a range of 15-40 during normal usage (large maps and med-large battles). Engine 5 will probably focus on performance but it's not known yet how much impact it can have.
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On 3/25/2023 at 7:40 PM, Chibot Mk IX said:
So we have seen a bunch of burning T-80B/M1 wreck. How often do you see these beasts be killed by shot in front arc?
Quite often, but they do indeed also manage to stop 105mm / TOW regularly. Usually it does better when it's fielded by opponents
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3 hours ago, jatmi026 said:
It's not irony, it's a must for a global policeman to put its fingers everywhere.
USA has also threatened to invade The Hague if USA soldiers/* would be tried at the ICC and has implemented legal action against the prosecutors / judges for supposed corruption ;-).
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1 hour ago, kevinkin said:
A bit on weapons procurement and how just in time manufacturing is not right for items like N95 masks and things that go boom.
For example, who is left paying for the new tooling if demand does not live up to expectations?
Just-in-time manufacturing is largely about process optimization in a world where total cost of ownership and time-to-market are key in global competing industries. If we both manufacture X, but you are continuously stuck with a large stock of deprecated parts and paying for a lot of warehousing those, while I am able to deliver the required parts 'just in time' as the production facility requires them; I win.
If suddenly some stuff happens which disrupts the supply chain of parts and you still have that big warehouse of parts and can keep selling the previous year generation of products, while my 'just in time' factory is running dry because of no parts; you 'win'.
Those aren't zero sum games though, it's not like one can't come up with a way to have the means of production of 'parts' redundant or in control so that no global supply chain issue can affect it (or limit the affect). Producing large quantities of everything 'just in case' is one way to address the issue, not necessarily the brightest way imo.
The problem was more that 'we' lost track of what critical capabilities we allowed to be outsourced/offshored and thus have became dependent on complex global supply chains over which we don't have control.
It was rather ironic to read folks on twitter (and here) go all out on Germany for being so stupid having become dependent on Russian gas (which was stupid), but failed to see the big elephant in the room that isn't limited to Germany and is more critical compared to gas.
It's not necessarily about 'just in time', it's about actually doing competent risk analysis and looking at redundancy / dependency from a pov of critical thinking. Instead of (out)sourcing things on the cheap / profit maximization and not looking beyond the length of ones nose.
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1 hour ago, db_zero said:
A blockade of Taiwan in the future seems more plausible than outright invasion.
Recently elements in the US have questioned involvement in Ukraine and if it continues and gets stronger could be interpreted as weakness and unwillingness to get involved in Taiwan.
Right now the battle is over Tic Tok. I have strong feelings and beliefs of the privacy, security and influence of social media apps and the companies behind them all-US as well as foreign owned.
Ive found my life is far better once I deleted all social media apps. ymmv. Unfortunately the youth as well as others are hooked on it.
In China where all media is tightly controlled they impose very strict limits on social media usage by youths as they deem it harmful, yet are happy to spoon feed it to the rest of the world.Indeed, social media are imo one of the larger 'threats' to the 'West'. I too only use the minimally, but 'the algorithm' (or better 'a similar harmful algorithm') is also on youtube.
I have created twitter to look at some Ukraine footage and usually manage to keep it at that (never post somthing), I notice it still has it's influence and is making me think about issues/problems which don't exist outside of social media.
If I'd be the president of the world I'd end all social media as we know them now. -
Depends on the battle / opponent imo. Often there is little interest/point to continue the game when the outcome is clear. Other times the writing on the wall is clear but there are still enough options for both players to enjoy it seeing it through to the end.
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3 hours ago, BFCElvis said:
Yes, because I set them.
50 days per round. One round is 50 minutes and I think another is 45. I wanted to make sure everyone has enough time.
thanks, was wondering about the required turn rate but that sounds good
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On 3/15/2023 at 4:37 PM, BFCElvis said:
This Tournament will feature 3 rounds with 3 different scenarios.
Do you know what is the round time for these battles?
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On 3/12/2023 at 9:26 AM, Zveroboy1 said:
I thought this had been fixed by now ugh. This is a real shame. For scenarios you can find workarounds but doesn't this make them unplayable for QBs? It is one of theonly semi decent Syrian formations too. I will never understand why we can't get hot fixes for small issues like this.
Yes QBs aren't nice on them. They also lack RPG ammo
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2 hours ago, MeatEtr said:
By the way, pretty sure exiting troops gives your opponent kill points. So better off keeping them on map, even though most will die anyway.
Hehe ok didn't know that. I have already exited most of my supply convoy, the rest probably won't make it there even if I'd ordered them
. They can take the exit to the eternal pixelbattle grounds.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
I surely never thought crashing ones own economy for whatever reason is ever a good idea. A wise policy would be to implement such changes gradually to limit hard disruptions/volatile movements etc, but with a clear vision about endstate (=no soup for you Russia).
Anyway the hypocrisy caught my eye.
Of course Poland and virtually all of the Polish people are on Ukraine side, that's not in question. Nobody said anything to the contrary.