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hcrof

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Everything posted by hcrof

  1. relevant to the discussion about bunkers. These are probably a good tradeoff between cost and effectiveness - no wonder they are the ones getting shown off on camera! You can always dig deeper or use stronger designs (like those bunkers on the beaches of Normandy, or the Maginot line), but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Note that I am not a military engineer so my opinion on where that point is means nothing!
  2. Haiduk, do you have information on how bad the recent strike on the power grid was? Apparently the whole of Kharkiv was without power, and some cities too? Is this worse than before?
  3. What about one of these: https://www.oxfordplastics.com/en-gb/products/road-plates-and-trench-covers?creative=691002070264&keyword=road plate&matchtype=p&network=g&device=m&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwte-vBhBFEiwAQSv_xe3vbGdg50Rqi9Uihv0Sm1aYi4058J_7THowlj6MwRzeDoB-LTA_YxoCUbUQAvD_BwE It certainly won't stop a bullet (bullets are really good at penetrating stuff!) but will support enough soil to do so and is super quick to install. But it would remain a niche use case since wood is cheaper and less flammable...
  4. Tbh a plastic curtain like they use in industrial fridges would stop an FPV better than EW! Combine that with a right angled corner like you said and you will be pretty safe.
  5. Ok so if we are trying to build bunkers under active fire from the enemy that does change the equation somewhat. But how bad is it? If you can't even bring in an excavator then it really limits your options and while throwing money at engineering problems often solves them (Kevlar sandbags?) I am not sure Ukraine has that kind of budget! If I was in that situation I would be looking to pack something like this, or this on my truck and use it to support a lot of soil as overhead cover in a hand-dug trench. But it won't be nearly as strong as a concrete bunker since a near miss will collapse the walls more easily and a direct hit is game over even for a smaller round.
  6. I've seen a lot of different designs tbh. The panalised system looks better from my armchair thousands of miles away but local supply chain issues may make other designs better in some cases. On the other hand, I have read reports that in many cases local commanders are just doing what they think is best, with limited engineering expertise to draw on so some designs may be wasteful of resources or just not very good.
  7. Remember plastic is very flammable so not good in combat - you would need a different material. Buildings are BIG and use a lot of material, so 3d printing is not going to beat mass production economically except for some quite specialised use cases. (This is a big subject that I have studied but I don't want to go OT) I am no expert on Kevlar but in construction carbon fibre is sometimes used - the downsides are that 1) steel offers most of the performance and a fraction of the price and 2) it burns. It ends up used in very specialised cases only. The other reason why steel is almost always going to be best in "dynamic situations" is that it fails very gracefully by bending rather than snapping. Modern steels (even low grade construction steel) are really good and really cheap so very difficult to beat, especially if they are surrounded by concrete for fire protection and extra mass. Basically the "best" bunker for mass production is likely what we have already seen - factory made reinforced concrete panels, welded together on site then covered in soil. Cheap, quick to assemble and robust (at least for a few years before they start to rust due to sloppy construction)
  8. The links are broken for me but I am very skeptical about building bunkers with 3d printing - and I say this as someone who designs structures, sometimes against explosions. If plastics are involved multiply that by 10.
  9. Just to add to that, encryption adds latency (lag) to the signal. I understand FPV video signals are typically unencrypted analogue signals to minimise the latency, otherwise they get harder to control due to the delay from video input, processing, sending, display, human reaction time, input, sending, processing, motor reaction time etc. it all adds up.
  10. Not sure about that - they say the government is illegitimate. They say that all russian speaking areas of Ukraine should be part of Russia. But I don't think they have ever claimed the whole country - all their maps of a future Ukraine show a small rump state centred on Kiev.
  11. Relevent video for the previous sea drone conversation. Defending against them seems like a hard problem to solve, especially when you are in a peer conflict and you can't just be pumping out radiation all the time to try and spot drones. Having watched the video, I tried to think of solutions to the problem he described. A tethered observation drone might help, but quite easy to spot if it is emitting radar and less effective if it relies on passive measures. Sonar may be the solution but it limits your speed and is only really usable by high-end ships with quiet propulsion. Finally the defensive sea/air drone swarm may work but also limits your speed and is resource-intensive.
  12. I don't think your argument really addresses the point here. Russia does not have to be as effective pound for pound as Ukraine, they can use more resources sustainably. So in a static situation they can use more shells than Ukraine so even if they are more wasteful the number of casualties may end up being the same. That is obviously not ideal for Ukraine - if both sides are just sitting in trenches taking 500 casualties a day then the war is not going to end any time soon.
  13. Agreed that NATO can choose not to export, but that would badly damage their reputation and I would be surprised to see many countries following France's example. I guess the point is that NATO is not at war but Russia is, so NATO might have more potential but not use it. Also both sides are importing shells from 3rd countries (often under the table), and both sides use various calibres. In other words it is really complicated and I don't think counting production numbers alone is a very good proxy for how many shells will be fired by both sides this year. Thankfully the NATO numbers are finally going up at a faster rate than Russia's so hopefully Ukraine will be at least stable soon with regard to the artillery balance.
  14. On the other hand NATO countries have internal needs beyond Ukraine and also export ammunition to other countries, so Ukraine will not see even half of that production.
  15. Alternatively, the interest on any russian money in banks etc can be handed to Ukraine, even if they don't get the money itself.
  16. and a video from the Sergei Kotov attack. Looks like the ship spotted them at least a few hundred meters out but they may have approached from behind a civilian ship. The Sergei Kotov is retreating from the drones while shooting (with a deck gun?) but the drones are faster. I wonder how stabilised the deck gun is? Edit: rewatched with sound and that doesn't sound like a deck gun - maybe another RPK over the rail which explains why they can't hit anything!
  17. Or a salvo of cheap(?) vampire missiles with a drone mounted laser guiding them onto all the squishy bits like radars and aiming systems for ciws. If the ship pops smoke to protect from that then it has just blinded itself to the real threat of the kamikaze boats.
  18. video of the attack on the landing ship Caesar Kunikov from the deck. Lots of MGs, not a lot of night vision by the looks of things. And it seems that maybe the seababy can take a few small calibre hits (modern inert explosive warhead?)
  19. To be fair I thought the Ukrainians said that it was 12, but I lost the original quote and can't seem to find it again. Also it doesn't say much about the condition of the rest of the "evacuated crew"...
  20. One thing that struck me is that a relatively small ship got hit by multiple massive (900kg) warheads and yet only 12 deaths? Was the ship operating with it's full compliment? If not then no wonder they can't have multiple people manning deck guns 24/7
  21. My concern is that you need crew to operate these things and the USN (or RN for that matter) do not have bodies to spare, thus the decision is postponed for another day...
  22. I wonder if the issue is money - if the fleet budget is being plundered to pay for the land campaign they can't adapt ships and training easily, let alone develop a new drone force. On the other hand they need to demonstrate they are trying to do something to keep Putin happy so they put assets at risk (Russian attitude being you are not fighting if you don't take casualties anyway.) This is all compounded by remarkably poor leadership. This situation can't be stable though, surely the Russians will have to think of something eventually... Edit: I imagine (with no evidence at all really) that the BSF can barely pay for fuel right now due to cut budgets, let alone more crew to man machine guns and searchlights. But they can't have the hard conversations with Putin to say the fleet needs to be mothballing ships to save money right now, not charging off to fight Ukrainians.
  23. I seem to remember from peruns last video he focussed more on artillery. Russian artillery quality is degrading from mostly SPG to older towed guns and they are beginning to run low on barrels. There are still loads of towed guns in store but many of them are very old indeed and can't take modern ammunition or are limited to 12km max range (dangerously close to the front line for a relatively immobile system and very vulnerable to drones).
  24. So I don't want to dogpile this, and to be honest what you said sounds good in theory. Having said that, US threats would have little credibility right now, large deliveries would have to be made. On top of that, those deliveries would likely not include large numbers of 155 shells since the whole world is running short of those at the moment. So that puts us in the position that the US government has finally mobilised to help Ukraine, so expectations are going to rise again - why not take another shot at victory? Maybe because they don't have the shells - well at that point the threat is not looking so bad for Russia after all so they continue, at least to get a better negotiating position. The sorts of coercive diplomacy that works on small, isolated countries does not work on a conflict of this scale and commitment. Both side are in too deep to back off now.
  25. I heard there have been no further deliveries, but I would be surprised if all those shells are already spent, unless the rumours about ever second shell being a dud are actually true. For now I will not be optimistic on this front for another few months yet, but what do I know...
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