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Trenches are easy to dig with an excavator, even easier with an entrenching machine. Looks like a "reserve" position that can be improved quickly if/when they decide to man it with mobiks

You mean like this? https://community.battlefront.com/topic/142139-new-armoured-vehicle-concept-lessons-from-ukraine/#comment-1973330

Interesting documentary about the Ukrainians getting trained on challenger 2 with a look into the simulators and other activities. The Ukrainians seem to be a mix of veterans and mobilised personnel. https://youtu.be/S9-Eghtai3s

Maybe there is a lag in the signal of a few frames so that the "hit" happens before the signal is actually sent?

The thing that struck me is that a drone makes fighting along a trenchline much less dangerous. You don't need to expose yourself since you can throw grenades blind into the correct section of trench.

While I agree with the above, I will also point out that rates of fire for mortars can be extremely high so maybe they genuinely blew through all available ammo? Does anyone know the relative cost of a mortar bomb Vs an artillery shell? Mortars are very crude so they must be a lot cheaper?

While every death is a tragedy, Ukraine has a population size similar to the UK in WW2 and is also supported by external powers (the US). We are a long way away from WW2 levels of casualties so it is probably reasonable to suggest Ukraine has a lot in the tank in terms of deaths, for better or for worse.

I believe their government wants to join the EU for the sweet, sweet free money (and I guess they see the writing on the wall re: Russia) but there is still a lot of pro Russia/anti NATO history to get over first...

I'm not saying you are wrong necessarily but I am personally struggling to put together a realistic plan to "do a Kherson" in my head. Because of the narrow choke points, Russia will not have to expend supplies at the same rate as the larger Kherson front. On top of that, even if the whole land bridge is captured to the shores of Azov does that mean that Ukraine fires a harpoon at anything moving in the black sea? How do they stop civilian ferries sneaking across the Kerch straits or even further south? And if they do they have to deal with the bad press of a lot of dead civilians on a civilian vessel which Russia will claim was transporting children and puppies. In my mind the long ranges, long shoreline and easier to defend positions make the problem harder, and it was already very hard due to the Russian habit of using human shields in Kherson.

Russia supplied Kherson by loading civilian vehicles with military supplies and also mixing them with civilian traffic. I am sure they will do the same to supply Crimea so unless Ukraine wants to starve the whole place out while bombing civilians I am concerned that "choking them out" will be a difficult process.

Note the added stabilizer legs and the fact they are firing quite slowly. Definitely going to be more accurate than earlier in the war when they would just spray off rockets from the back of an unmodified pickup.

I will add that there are likely to be some local "national guard" type units to support the 1500-2000 Russian soldiers but the territory is so narrow they have zero way to manoeuvre and the best they can hope for is a bloody siege of tiraspol and blowing up the arms dump if the Ukrainians intervene. Edit: the cobasna arms dump appears to be 2km from the Ukrainian border so a coup de main type attack is definitely a possibility

Agreed, those Russian troops in transnistria are utterly isolated from Moscow and can't be resupplied or reinforced. I seem to remember they have to use an airport in Moldova proper to rotate troops! There is a military airport in tiraspol but it is 7km of flat fields from the Ukrainian border...

There are also forces in China which are for cooperation. They have not yet commited to helping Russia (see the post above about the Chinese visit to Moscow) or invading Taiwan. I agree we should be prepared but keeping our powder dry also means not pressuring China into a confrontation ourselves. Just like in the cold war, direct conflict is not inevitable.

While I think this has some merit, it just seems too much of a coincidence that NS2 had an accident at that exact moment when it wasn't even operational at the time. I can believe that Russia wanted to blow up NS1 to force the Germans to accept NS2 but the "accident" is a step too far for me.

Nice summary, although I wouldn't be surprised if the BMP crew simply didn't notice that a RPG round flew over their vehicle - I think the first shot went high and given their poor sights and the fact they are deafening themselves with their own shooting I guess the situational awareness of the BMP was very poor.

Melitopol is a shorter drive and would achieve the same effect. Even if you didn't capture the city outright, you would still cut the Russians in two with fire control. Then you just need to reduce the pocket.

In principle I agree but the Ukrainians reported 700+ Russians killed daily for the last few days (910 today!). Is this just catching up on those big hits of Russian mobiks last week or is something else going on?

Very slick, almost like a training exercise. I think having people together to discuss is useful if you have time. You could also speed up decision making by including bluforce tracking and/or some other battlefield management system to display additional context. Not just positions of units but maybe also artillery vectors and CEP with various types of ammunition I know that the US is working on image recognition for this kind of thing too - the outline of a vehicle, fresh vehicle tracks, smoke etc. That would speed up identification a lot and allow one operator to control multiple drones.

Honestly I don't know. In the art I left room for a lot of batteries (1/3 of the total volume!) but maybe a hybrid system would be better. I see this being quite heavy for its size due to the batteries (a Tesla semi truck uses 5000kg of batteries apparently) I am trying to keep the sci-fi aspect to a minimum so I see it 95% controlled by humans at first, although obviously that can change in the future. The support vehicle can tow and carry supplies for 2 Hunters so I thought it was a decent number. If you increased the numbers of Hunters per support vehicle I guess that burden would fall somewhere else on the logistics system, but of course you have fewer vehicles in the combat zone. I guess someone would have to test out what the perfect ratio is! Its a fair point - I actually posted it here for people to find the counter to this so I can improve it! Agreed; I think these could be nastily effective if they can defeat those anti-drone rifles reliably (and my guess is yes they can). You could supplement them with tiny drones the size of your hand that fire a single bullet at very close range (say 10m). Deploy them like cluster munitions and clear trenches/woodlines in seconds.

You could do both as a high/low mix? Your suggestion helps with screening but I would anticipate a peer enemy would bring a LOT of drones to the fight and a technical is not great at keeping them away from you. A truck is an unstable firing platform for AA guns and firing even cheap missiles at quadcopters not an economic first choice to defeat them. I actually expect you would need some sort of truck with a MANPADS on it to support the system above because more advanced drones can stay out of range of the 20mm cannon but layered air defence starts to move into another topic!

Following the excellent discussion about modern warfare on this thread, I have tried to condense my thoughts on what a "modern" army should look like based on the lessons from Ukraine. I would love to hear your thoughts and criticism. I not touching the whole tank thing directly though - I am not sure I am ready to go there yet!

Following the long discussions on tanks and modern warfare in the Ukraine thread, I have proposed a new vehicle concept as per these images. The idea borrows a lot from @The_Capt and others on that thread so thanks for the discussion. All of this can be done with todays technology. Some development would be required for some of the "harder" aspects such as shooting down ATGMs with a chain gun (it is similar to CWIS), but that is not central to the concept. The really radical part is the Hunter concept, but it is actually quite simple. Reduce the size/signature/expense of a vehicle by putting most of the crew in another vehicle, while optionally having one crew to pull it out of the mud/take over during heavy EW etc. This means the Hunter can be pushed aggressively towards the enemy to push back their ISR bubble and screen your own force. If you lose a few Hunters it is not a big deal since they are relatively cheap and you can use them uncrewed in more dangerous situations. The other emphasis is lots of drones (like 4 in the air per platoon, plus replacements) with operators in vehicles using big screens and reliable comms rather than squinting at a phone in a field. These drone operators can have a birds-eye view on one screen while commanding the Hunter on another for maximum situational awareness. I anticipate a lot of help from AI visual recognition to spot enemy signatures too. Given you now have borg-spotting and your enemy doesn't, the lack of heavy armour doesn't matter so much. I still see a use for modern MBTs as hyper-specialised breakthrough vehicles, but the Killer fills all the other roles of the tank on a much lower logistical/visual footprint. Let me know what you think!

The light is bad but it almost looks like they made the thing out of plywood then did a skim coat of concrete!! If that is true then just wow...

This is such a huge improvement for the vehicle - they are useless in CM because anything they can target with that short range gun (including infantry) can usually hit back harder. Indirect fire is a game changer.