danfrodo
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Posts posted by danfrodo
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4 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Heh, I've missed this show %)
Scott Ritter makes a speech in front of "legions of Kadyrov's sardukars"
Well, I guess it beats working at an actual job. Especially when you are f-ing insane and no one will hire you.
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5 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:
Meanwhile, in America
In an age of uber-industrialized addiction, lack of affordable & indigent housing, lack of any real systems of drug treatment, lack of adequate mental health support, WTF do we expect? I see & hear lots of people s--ing on the homeless (not you, Bulletpoint), but this is not all just due to being lazy & immoral like many folks seem to think. This is a symptom of our society's unaddressed problems, not the underlying disease.
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4 hours ago, photon said:
That's fair. I suppose what I've seen in this thread is that tactical assaults (mechanized or otherwise) get shredded by precision fires (either indirect, direct, or drone). So you can have a smallish node of defenders "controlling" a few kilometer deep (in all three dimensions) battle space. I suppose it's something porous like mutual denial. In every war you've had a pretty sharp demarcation between controlled area -> no man's land <- controlled area. In an ancient battle the denied area might be measured in single digit meters. In the American Civil War maybe a hundred meters. Now it seems like it has a weird shape that's kilometers deep (and wide), doesn't exist under 2,000 feet, and then starts again above 2,000 feet in a conical shape stretching back from the line of contact.
What would it look like to move from denial primacy to defensive primacy in your view?
When I see Photon & TheCapt discussing things I say to myself "hush, grownups are talking"
Meanwhile, a few tidbits here today:
Explosion in Donetsk area, looks like ammo? Woman from Bashkorastan puts out video asking fighters from from the region to return home from UKR war to fight against the RU oppressors in their homeland. I'd love there to be lots more of this, though I suspect she will be in a jail cell, or worse, rather quickly. As TheCapt said earlier, arab spring started w one angry guy -- killed himself over govt corruption ruining his business, that's what I recall but not sure if correct.
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25 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
I am sceptical for example of taking attitude that McNamarra did in Vietnam: bodycounting. Because after another thosuand dead youngsters Vietnamese surely back down, right?
for sure. Killing russians matters but, while that is a tactical imperative, until it makes an operational/strategic difference it doesn't tell us that much. It could make an operational difference if there were some local mutiny by men not wanting to be slaughtered that gained momentum and led to UKR making some valuable gain. Strategically the only way I see it mattering is if it leads to some popular unrest where the guys w guns decide they are sick of their countrymen being sent to slaughter.
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12 minutes ago, billbindc said:
The 1905 Revolution went hot with the Bloody Sunday shootings of demonstrators at the Winter Palace. The 1917 Revolution began in earnest when soldiers revolted at the violent suppression of demonstrators also.
Watch the demonstrations.
Indeed, popular revolutions succeed when the soldiers & police decide to not shoot. That's one thing often overlooked. When the police also have no heat or are angry for whatever reasons or are just not wanting to kill people they identify with, things can rapidly change.
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Thanks all for your insightful posts on the infrastructure question I raised. The question was expanded to the bigger picture by Steve et al, where the bigger question of "what does this mean" is addressed. It does seem that a long hard winter with failing power & plumbing could push people into a "nothing to lose" kind of mindframe. Like was mentioned above, folks are fine with the war & regime while they are not really affected by it. But when they are freezing & have no running water and the regime has no answers.... well, that's a whole different kind of thing.
Hopefully this will be a very long & hard winter with lots more infrastructure disasters in the big urban areas and folks will start to come out in the streets in droves. Like was mentioned, everything can seem fine & then blow up. A lot of folks will be angry that all the countries resources are tied up in a pointless war while their own quality of life is heading toward zero.
As Steve said, a quick war with big wins is one thing. But a looooong war with big losses is another.
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some good bits here today. RU city steam system pipe breaks, flooding streams w scalding water. Never seen that before.
So we see all these RU cities w infrastructure breakdowns -- is this just due to the heavy cold snap hitting RU along w bad infrastructure? Or is there sabotage going on also? Anyone have any info on this? Is it just that this cold snap so bad that it brought to the surface failures waiting to happen?
Meanwhile, RU taking very heavy losses, day after day after day. Putin must be feeling very confident to do this. It may be really stupid, I don't know, but it does show a lot of confidence.
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8 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:
Supposedly most later L85A1s weren't as bad as the ones from the initial Enfield production run. But still, I wonder if Battlefront might have to break from their usual practice of not modeling misfires in order to accurately represent it.
Professional humor there, well done
I know some folks would say that by 1985 & 1989 the NATO side would be overpowered relative to warsaw pact. What is wrong with that? Recent events make me very much want to kick the living daylights out of some RU forces.
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21 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:
Only someone on the development team would know for sure what the current plans are. And I expect they might be a bit hesitant to share those plans, lest they be interpreted as promises (reality has a way of interfering with plans). But earlier in this thread I suggested that they might try to alternate which direction the timeline extensions go in which each new module. The first module is extending the timeline back a bit, so it would make all the sense in the world for the next module to extend the timeline forward a bit, perhaps up to 1985.
Certainly when CMCW was first released I had a strong interest in seeing the timeline extended all the way out to 1989. Yes, that would start to look a lot like CMSF. But I think part of that is because a lot of scenarios, particularly a lot of community made scenarios, in CMSF were trying to approximate late Cold War combat in the only title at the time that had roughly the right equipment. But they didn't quite have the right assets to do it right. There are no T-80Us in CMSF, and even the M1A1 Abrams are slightly later models (generally M1A1SAs IIRC, though I'm not at my home computer where I could check at the moment) with later ammunition. By 2008 the ammunition that the Abrams is firing can defeat Kontakt-5 ERA, while I believe the ammunition it was firing in 1989 could not. So seeing proper late 80s M1A1s against T-80Us would be interesting. The Abrams will still have a huge advantage, since it has a thermal sight while the T-80U doesn't. But they both have excellent fire-control systems, and they are both unable to penetrate each other's frontal armor (except for weak points). So NATO vs the Soviet Union in 1989 should still be less one-sided than NATO vs Syria in 2008, even when you stack the Syrian side with T-90s. But that's one of the things I'd be curious to find out.
All that said, I have to admit that the biggest reason I wanted 1989 is because that's when World in Conflict is set. Basically I wanted to play World in Conflict, but realistic. But now that the game has been out for a few years, I think I've been won over to the 1979-1982 setting that they went with. It might actually be the more interesting time period overall. The modern titles, CMSF2 and CMBS*, provide plenty of opportunities for 3rd gen MBTs to shine. The earlier 1979 timeframe gives the 2nd gen MBTs a real opportunity to take the spotlight for a change. And it gives you a chance to really fear and respect the mighty beasts that T-64s and T-72s once were, before you go on to slaughter them in CMSF2. Also I'm pretty sure the 1979 Soviet economy would have been much more capable of sustaining a major war effort than the 1989 Soviet economy. So the earlier setting probably makes more narrative sense anyway.
I'm still curious to see 1989. Seeing the T-80U vs M1A1 and Leo2A4 (firing 80s ammunition) is still on the bucket list. But it's not as urgent for me as it used to be.
*While CMCW is often counted among the modern titles, I think it is rightfully categorized in its own era, distinct from either the modern or WW2 titles.
Hear hear! Btw, what would the Brits look like in 1985? In 1989? Wiki says challenger 1 came out in 1983.
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2 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
come from Africa to fight for "Russian world"
'russian world' being oppression, ignorance, and poverty? Can't see what else it offers.
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52 minutes ago, Phantom Captain said:
Haha! Yes, indeed!
I just loaded up and finished A Muddy Affair, against the AI with me as the Americans. I remember you mentioning it before. Apparently I had never finished it. Well, in getting completely excited for the new CMFB module I went back and fought to...a draw. Basically the historical result as well. That one is like chewing on a handful of nails. So tough. Those German defenders fought like devils.
oh yeah, that was a fun one. Maybe I should re-play it. Been a long time.
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25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
The air war is seemingly entering a new phase now. Ukraine has been chipping away at Russia's air defenses since this war started, racking up an impressive amount of (effectively) irreplaceable defense systems. While Russia is still apparently able to cover the Ukraine theater, I would wager it isn't as effective as it once was. And with specific Ukrainian attention in a specific area it can be effectively neutralized long enough to strike something at greater odds of success.
Questions that arise over the past few days:
- Has Russia been obligated to move it's usually rearward systems closer to the front to compensate for losses?
- Are Russian aircraft far behind the front at increased risk of being hit by something that Russian air defenses aren't able to defeat, or is it because air defenses are under stress that such attacks are now possible?
- Is whatever Ukraine just used against 2-3 aircraft something that can be done on a regular basis, or was this like the possible Hrim-2 attack in that we won't see another one like it for some time?
- Has anybody seen ANYTHING discussing Zelensky's seemingly new claim last week of a large number of Russian helicopters destroyed, or was it some sort of misquote of him talking about helicopters downed since the beginning of the war?
All kinds of things to wonder about
Steve
I've been wondering just how Putin sees things. He seems quite confident he can hold the territory. He's just fine burning up whatever poor saps he can conscript trying to grab relatively insignificant land. Perhaps he's just trying to wear down UKR units and doesn't care the cost, as he's got more coming and is confident his mines & FBVs & artillery are more than enough to hold UKR at bay. Seems he feels time is on his side? We may not agree, but it sure seems he feels that way as he runs a war of attrition, slowly trying to wear down UKR will. And of course buying off as many foreign politicians as possible through third party cut outs -- yes, I am looking at you, Mike Johnson, MTG, et al.
But the degradation of RU AD, survelliance & airpower makes me wonder if there's something that could help UKR on the ground? Will UKR start having the ability to deliver huge glide bombs on RU assets unscathed through depleted RU AD?
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50 minutes ago, chrisl said:
Many years ago I worked on a space mission concept that was doing super high precision astrometry, that is, measurement of precisely where all the stars in the sky are and where they're going (because they're moving and we can measure sensitively enough to care). It was science driven, but the Navy was working on a competing concept and I had to think for a while about why. But it was a little after Gulf War 1, with all the precision bombing, and when I did the math on mapping the precision back to a sphere the size of the earth, it amounted to being able to aim not at a door (as they did in GW1, mostly with laser target painting), but at the doorknob using mapping and nav without needing a SOF guy with a laser. And that was decades ago.
ISR+massed precision == just don't even try it
All of this is within the capability of existing technology. Aircraft systems have been doing essentially this for kind of a long time (see above) with less compact equipment. You can put a little LIDAR rangefinder on a rifle or a drone and couple it to precision GPS and compass. The thing that makes your phone big is the need for you to see it and manipulate things on it with your fat fingers. The size limiter on your proposal is probably the GPS antenna (small) and the laser optics (small). It probably all exists in prototype somewhere, maybe linked to a VR goggle set that's linked to a local server so a whole squad or platoon can spread out and have borg spotting that's delivered to each other and the rear echelon with the action-at-a-long-distance stuff.
(ETA: you're not just coupling the GPS+compass to other hardware, but also to a detailed GIS model of the area that's enabled by the massive ISR cloud watching the whole thing)
ChrisL is kind of a badass. He actually knows things.
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3 hours ago, JonS said:
I like to imagine that people who get their panties in a bunch over stuff like this must have separate, clearly marked, and strictly enforced toilets in their homes.
Thank goodness we live in world so free of strife & suffering& real problems that this kind of stuff is all that people have to get upset about. What a wonderful world.
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1 hour ago, dan/california said:
Until bad food kills half an elementary school, and puts the other half in intensive care. Then the security services do a completely bleeped job of trying to claim it was intentional poisoning, and all of a sudden you have a real opposition movement on your hands
That would be exactly what I had in mind. Seems like somebody ought to order several thousand, or several tens of thousands, of them for Ukraine. Yes that would require a whole new factory, but whole new factories are the point if we want to win this war.
Or one just makes it disappear. BLocks mention on RU social media, news doesn't cover it. Or they do cover it and say it was UKR terrorist scheme, poisoning the eggs in transit.
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nice aggregation of war status here:
Very cold currently, snow on the ground. Not a lot of good news, nothing alarming either, just more stuff that points to stalemate and attrition it seems.
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1 hour ago, holoween said:
But thats the point. Autocracies can make decisions and allocate resources faster than democracies can.
And autocracies can do really stupid things much faster than democracies. No checks on power, no diversity in thought while making decisions, and no internal accountability. The external accountability can be a tad painful.
It certainly cuts both ways.
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On 1/5/2024 at 1:16 PM, BFCElvis said:
The UK campaign will be a sub-unit of the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division, with supporting units ("Funnies"/armor) from XXX Corps present centered around Kleve/Cleve.
The German campaign is titled The Bridge. The campaign centers around the defenders at Remagen Bridge, and the counter-attacks in the vicinity.
The US campaign is titled Spearhead. Eight battles, spanning the fighting leading up to and including Cologne. It focuses on Task Force Lovelady/D Company, and attached infantry/engineers, artillery.
@benpark is working at a deadline pace at this moment. Perhaps in a couple of days he'll have a moment to add sumfink. He's the lead on them.
Go @benpark go!
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24 minutes ago, sburke said:
Hell we could be seeing another speakership vote in a few weeks so Trump may not be the primary concern so much as continued dysfunction in congress.
Hopefully we'll get another person of reason and sound judgement who also thinks earth is 6000 years, amongst the many wise beliefs of mike johnston. But maybe we'll get an improvement as the current speaker is somewhat flawed as he thinks the earth is round and goes around the sun.
American taliban.
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11 minutes ago, Butschi said:
"Get along" doesn't mean BFFs and it doesn't mean rolling over and giving up. It means, in case Mr. Trump gets elected and restarts his "deal making" (aka economic warfare) we can't fight on all fronts at once. Not USA, Russia and China at the same time. It doesn't have to mean appeasing Putin, either. Instead it may mean making shady deals with China, which IMHO is way more probable.
Anyway, last attempt at having a meaningful discussion from my side.
If Trump gets back in power he will be full-on pro-Putin. I am saying this based on nothing more concrete than all of Trump's actions and words to this point. Oh, and the fact that he knows how much RU-funded propaganda helps him. I am always confused when people think Trump would do otherwise, when the evidence for him helping Putin is so overwhelming.
Note: this not at all directed at you Butschi. Your post just reminded me of this rather odd thing where folks think somehow Trump would keep supporting UKR.
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my dog sometimes pees on the floor when excited. I just did the same. Embarrassing but an authentic emotional moment at least
UTAH BEACH BATTLES!!!!! F YES! And new FB & CW & FI!
Heading over to pre-order land right now aaaaand..... ordered
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6 hours ago, Kinophile said:
OK, I'll just admit I don't get it. This indicates UKR makes new BTR4 w some kind of new turret on top?
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14 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
I have read that during WW II, the prime requirement for tank driver was having been a heavy construction vehicle operator (bulldozers) or driving a tractor on a farm. Also, with many soldiers having grown up maintaining and fixing their own vehicles and farm equipment, a “field repair” by almost anyone was much easier to accomplish it because of the lack of complexity. Today, manufacturers put pushbuttons in vehicles because everything is controlled by computers and most people can’t tune or time a reciprocating engine by ear as many in my generation could. I lament that I can’t maintain, tune, and fix my vehicle without all sorts of computerized equipment.
This is all true, but I look at it a little more glass half full: new cars are harder to work on, but they don't break nearly as much so not as big of a deal. When I was young a car hitting 100k miles was on its last legs, having required a lot of repairs along the way. Today one expects nothing except routine maintenence before 100k miles. I greatly prefer the latter. Of course, one could do the german tank design method in WW2 where you had both complexity and unreliability.
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I wonder who is funding this guy? Maybe he just found a niche where he could get followers in conspiracy land by pretending to be a serious, objective, fact based person while just putting out propaganda. It's a great gig if you can pull it off, just ask Tucker, et al. Just need to have no morals and absolutely no concern about how much you damage the world -- plenty of those folks around.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted · Edited by danfrodo
Super cool, thanks for sharing. I would love to fight Ukraine war 2022. I would vote to make that product, but I also respect the opinion that it's rather unseemly. Of course, I am probably rather unseemly and that's what I think it's OK.
edit: same guy has battle for kyiv scenario video also: