fireship4

I look at that kind of thing as a co-ordination problem. Sure there is plenty of toilet paper, but if everyone else panics, we better stock up as there really will be a shortage. Perhaps that applies in this situation - there is a real reason to panic if everyone is panicking, if the panic itself has some direct effect. Loss of belief in a leader, loss of confidence that the flank is secured, etc. Great meme. Galeev's recent call for memes against Rheinmetal missed the mark for me, and I think it's quite interesting why it wasn't successful. It was a top down call for memes, to a certain specification, not in line with the cultural context of memes of this type. Like saying to the country - 'Oi, give me some plans for new energy sources'. Creativity doesn't work best that way. Neither does the selection effect: this meme spread because it's bloody clever.

A final solution if you will? You guys don't know what you are saving. Everything you and @kraze are saying about the Russian ex-pat population could be right in general, and similar things can be said about other populations - 'Muslims' for example. They can be said about the Ukrainians - infected with the Western ideology, they cannot see how it harms the Slav. Harsh measures are necessary. So you've imported a large number of people and they have their own culture, and they largely stick together and don't atomise into the larger culture. They don't seem make themselves available to the ideas and mechanisms our culture has which influence behaviour. Ideas like human rights, freedom of choice, open criticism, advocating the truth over the interests of your tribe - changing ideas which can always be improved. So you made a mistake and think you have damaged this Western culture by importing too many who act upon different principles. Bad luck. You do more damage to it by throwing them out. Fix the problem another way - if they have citizenship they are now part of you, and how you treat them is how you can be treated. [And as far as I can see it McCarthy was not a hero and did damage which echoes until the present day, even if he was right in some cases about Soviet agents. A committee to scrutinise the political beliefs of workers which then bans them from work if they fail? It is against the very notion of discussion and criticism toward better ideas. It sounds more Soviet than anything else. And you guys sometimes sound like the other ones.]

You have summoned me once again, this thread is no place for the bearer of the jeweled crown of Aquilonia!

Cool piece of history, though it sounds less like Lenin and more like a figure with a social function protected by the position. It makes me think of the traditional clown, or a court jester. Hmm, so you have in your head to criticise the social order, OK, instead of how they did it in the past, really make people think you are mad, you will be seen as such, and it will do the more good for it. In the end. In heaven maybe. Just not now. Like the figure of the self-hating Jew perhaps, used so criticism can be ignored when it comes from within, tainted by it's source - the internalisation of the outer world's persecution.

They suppress well because they kill well. Doctrines refer to suppression a lot: it's the next best thing to an enemy incapacitated. Surrendered is even better, with 'not there' at number one. You suppress an enemy when forcing their decisions away from action you dislike: looking in your direction, shooting at you, fleeing, etc. They may move to achieve this: as long as you continue to force the decision, they are suppressed. They become less dangerous and harder to kill. A machine gun firing at sufficiently trained infantry in the open will not suppress them. They will lie down and engage it, or die trying. With available cover, they will use it to the detriment of their abilities to the extent they are forced. Artillery and machine guns are about killing as effectively as possible.

I would like to clarify for those that don't know, which was me until about half an hour ago (though I had suspected), that this means the eastern bank of the river, since it flows south. There is also some history to using the terms 'left bank' and 'right bank' in the context of the Dnieper in particular.

New York has to be high on there...

If some guy in the past came up with the idea of having a lot of villages with the same name to confuse invaders, it worked too well.

Here it is below for those interested. Without understanding the apparently Russian presenter, it looks to me like a piece on a battle they won (not surprising really). No notable footage of the fighting itself seems to be missing. https://nitter.net/200_zoka/status/1564229847580286976#m

An understandable mistake, the correct contact name is in fact 'Catpain Blackudder' if I remember correctly. One reason the leadership is so bad perhaps: do too well and you die! So they kill Girkin, nationalist leaning FSB guys on the front-line get super jumpy and declare allegiance to the nats, who don't trust them because they are FSB... I would just go and have a lie down. Give me Generation Kill any day. As a holy book may be seen as dangerous knowledge by some, and a symbol of freedom by others, some have read it, some have not. Some words and histories are more easily bent than others, a scaffold of interpretation is built, the intent of the writer lost or irrelevant.

I don't want to derail the Black Sea thread, but IIRC there was mention of some kind of bone to celebrate 1000 posts... did I miss it or is it still in the pipeline?

Without the full context of the interview/session, I would just point out that this statement restricts itself to noting things they have done, and states a means by which they are achieved. It does not deny they have done the same thing with other means. They could be using US supplied ATACMS and this statement would not be false, only misleading. I prefer a simple 'no comment on these kind of matters' response.

Pipe ash. Stuff is wicked dangerous.

Scan Eagles... they look like something the 'War in Ukraine' channel mentioned as a missing component of the AFU, Russia has the Orlan-10 and this seems to fulfill the same role, with a long loiter time. Cost, numbers and flight ceiling however... quick Wikipedia sourced ballparks, Orlan-10 / Scan Eagle: $160,000 / $3.2 million, a good proportion of the over 1,500 built / 16 to the AFU in this package, 5,000m / ???.

I don't think that all follows, to me it seems plausible that det cord or somesuch was used to wire up a bunch of the piles of ammo, explosives were placed on a number of planes, timers were set, and they went home. Blast cover doesn't protect from falling debris yes but I don't know how likely that is to destroy (not simply damage) so many planes without leaving the place a wasteland. Unless they had bombs on their racks, making it a bit more likely.

Doesn't mention the ammunition/stores at the locations of the craters... assumes SOF raid must have been during the day as opposed to the night before... doesn't explain multiple planes in revetments with some blast cover being destroyed... doesn't show his working on judging the craters to be 'consistent with 500lb warhead', apart from saying one has a 'diameter in excess of 10m'... Not a thorough assessment I feel. EDIT: Still up in the air for me, SOF was my guess, I don't know enough about explosives to say whether detonating ammunition would create the focused craters we see. The blasts were powerful enough to knock over a bunch of stuff I would have assumed had protection from a ground-level blast judging from some of the images, so I don't know.

You can see a launch from just to the right of the tank in the trees, which misses the BMP. I don't know what hit the tank. EDIT: There are a couple of flashes in the video whose source isn't immediately obvious, the first between the camera and the trees at the location of the miss, I would guess is a lense-flare due to the explosion, the other is in the bottom right and seems co-located with a third vehicle.

I find on map US tracked 120mm mortar carriers to be more or less useless for point targets due to this, unless using precision rounds. Not to mention they don't seem to work as a pair on multi-unit fire missions.

Apologies for posting a meme, but when they are this good... EDIT: As far as the cause of the strike, SOF night mission with delayed charges (infiltration or drone-dropped) makes sense to me, as well as Hrim, eventually we may have more to go on.

Something occurs to me about the longer logistical routes - I have little knowledge on the subject and would be happy to be corrected. I get the impression that this should affect the ability of the logistics system to respond to changes, but not necessarily affect throughput except where transport vehicles are a limiting factor. If there are plenty of vehicles and demand stays the same, then the supply will arrive at the same rate: the rate at which they are sent out (allowing for mistakes along the way which will increase with more distance). The journey time will be longer but this will have more effect if units use their own (likely more limited) number of vehicles to go and collect what they need from supply points, as they will be able to make fewer trips in the same amount of time. Am I on the right track and does anyone know how resupply is handled in the Russian system?

I think the green cursor is the operator clicking to specify a target which is then tracked (it apparently tracks a moving person at one point after they are selected). I'm not sure what the white cursor is. There is a longer video out there (perhaps earlier in the thread) that includes some of the same footage.

I ask your forbearance as I summarise some of the discussion over the last few pages. I don't have much to add. [EDIT: It turned out longer than my arm so I have put it all in a quote box.] I appreciate Steve's sentiment in the first quote and think they are striking the correct balance. CMBS is an old game, and was in development before Russia invaded in 2014. I don't have a problem with it being sold, nor even going on sale - if people want to game out scenarios etc. that are inspired by this, once again, old game, showcasing the modern RU army at war, good for them (and they is me). I also agree another module for such, even if set in the same parallel universe, might be a step to far, and a new game set in the modern situation would definately be so. I don't think I need to go into why. I will admit a certain hankering to see CMBS in an updated guise where certain behavioural and tactical and technological assumtions/decisions are corrected - these are well documented in the thread on what users would like out of an engine update. How this could be achieved considering the above I don't know. As for as this thread being a distraction... I don't really understand @Rice and @Grey Fox's positions - no-one is forced to post in this thread, users are welcome to start discussions more focused on the games elsewhere, the developers' time is theirs to do with as they wish - and I am saying this as someone who has made my position clear on the speed and direction of such toward my favoured option of a new engine. Secondly the discussion on out-of-control RU nationalist militias etc.: I think the subject is covered well over the course of the posts i've included here. I will simply ruminate as an amateur: It is clear to me that the Russian state security services want to maintain control, and value the deniability, disposability and economy of non-state assets. At the same time it is not clear to me how much control they actually have in general terms, nor how centralised the state actually is, as opposed to a constantly vying mass of interests. The Wagner group was establised by Dmitri Utkin I believe, as a private venture, before being arrested en masse and converted into a deniable subsidiary under Prigozhin. Another example would be various leaders in the Donbass dying until only one state-controlled asset remained. I do think it would be hard to use forces such as these to attack NATO without responsibility being placed on the state, short of civil-war level turmoil where deniability may give way to plausible loss of control, but I think in that scenario they wouldn't be going abroad to achieve their goals. I do not discount however the possibility they could play a role in a conversion of the conflict into a forever-war complete with full mobilisation and drawing NATO into small enough border clashes to maintain a plausible war without all the trouble of getting invaded, to ensure the position of the tsar and the integrity of the federation. Meh. Jeremy Corbyn was a welcome departure at the time, politics had been crying out for some sort of principled actor on the left, one with consistent views that didn't chase the electorate, nor simply manage the status quo, but had a vision for a better future. The current lot have not been able to inspire the populace even against what could be the three worst prime ministers in British history. I even appreciated his questioning of the nuclear deterrant and how he would use it - it is at least worth questioning whether it is in fact rational or moral to glass a population center in retaliation after a first strike, considering MAD had therefore plausibly been disproven. Indeed the subject is complex, MAD is no longer the strategy, and giving a definitive answer is perhaps giving away some of your leverage (IIRC I don't believe he did in the end). Never the less he explored the issue when a minister more concerned with defensive play, even with the end goal of enacting progressive policy, would have kept their mouths shut. I was a little dismayed to hear he had been rather naive on Russia more recently, however you never know what to believe re. media reporting where he is concerned. His removal as Labour leader was widely seen as a coup (with media assistance) by new-labour members some of whom would be better placed in the liberal democrats, being a somewhat 'conservatives-lite' party. I would contend there may be no greater danger to Russia than true believers in various left causes, inside or outside. I may not be in favour of wide-scale nationalisation, but there is a lot of potentially good policy that would benefit the UK which could only really claim to be decended from discussion on the left. Or the UK could continue to leave a large stratum of society to rot. Watch the latest 'Bald and Bankrupt' if you want to know what kind of grey post soviet hellscape many of it's subjects call home. No answers please to the last few paragraphs, I just wanted to present an alternative impression of Mr. Corbyn, despite my status as an amateur on UK politics.

I'm sure the dead who were given the option of fighting or being killed will appreciate this sentiment.

I didn't mean by @Grigb. He started posting last month, after joining in 2011. Let's not waste any more of the thread with this you guys, it is not worth it.