Machor

I don't want to take the thread OT either, so leaving this here without comment - as factual as it gets:
F1 driver says 'what happens in Alberta is a crime,' feels responsibility to speak about climate change
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/sebastian-vettel-oilsands-alberta-climate-change-1.6493309
"Sebastian Vettel arrived at the Montreal Grand Prix wearing his thoughts about climate change on his T-shirt.
The Formula One star from Germany arrived at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in a T-shirt with "Stop Mining Tar Sands," and "Canada's Climate Crime" under the picture of a pipeline. He's wearing a helmet with the same slogan this weekend.
"I think what happens in Alberta is a crime because you chop down a lot of trees and you basically destroy the place just to extract oil and the manner of doing it with the tarsands, oilsands mining, is horrible for nature," Vettel said, when asked about the T-shirt at a news conference Friday.
...
His team Aston Martin is sponsored by Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant Aramco."

I don't want to take the thread OT either, so leaving this here without comment - as factual as it gets:
F1 driver says 'what happens in Alberta is a crime,' feels responsibility to speak about climate change
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/sebastian-vettel-oilsands-alberta-climate-change-1.6493309
"Sebastian Vettel arrived at the Montreal Grand Prix wearing his thoughts about climate change on his T-shirt.
The Formula One star from Germany arrived at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in a T-shirt with "Stop Mining Tar Sands," and "Canada's Climate Crime" under the picture of a pipeline. He's wearing a helmet with the same slogan this weekend.
"I think what happens in Alberta is a crime because you chop down a lot of trees and you basically destroy the place just to extract oil and the manner of doing it with the tarsands, oilsands mining, is horrible for nature," Vettel said, when asked about the T-shirt at a news conference Friday.
...
His team Aston Martin is sponsored by Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant Aramco."

I get the "terror strikes" component to put pressure on the Ukrainian government - problem is, when has "terror" or "shock and awe" ever really worked as strategy?
Human beings are a funny bunch, we exist in imaginary social constructs - nations, provinces, duchies, towns, neighborhoods etc.  We invented these structures to sustain order when our populations expanded well beyond what we were originally designed for - but here is something I have suspected for a long time: we are still wired for our real social structures.  Those few dozen people we are directly linked to by blood or dependency.  
These are little social bubbles - hell in the pandemic we could map them - that comprise the real ocean of humanity.  We actually care about them.  These are the people we go to war for, we also go to work well after we want to for them.  We get dragged to church on Sunday by them and we dress like them, talk them and eat like them.  We buy the same stuff, dress the same way and consume the same information, thru the similar lenses.  We are still really tribal after all this time.
Now the energy in those bubbles is incredibly powerful - like running into a burning building, powerful.  However, it is also incredibly local.  We hunker down in our particular tree and tend to keep our heads down, even when the tree next to us gets chopped down.  It takes a lot to get us all going in the same direction.  We invent all sorts of mechanisms to create and generate power from these little bubbles - the Chinese did a massive and brutal social engineering exercise in the 60's to try and re-build those bubbles in such a way as to give the state all the power...it did not work because people. 
So what? Shock and awe, terror strikes and what not, have an effect but it is 1) very hard to line up in the direction you may want it to go, in fact it might create massive counter pressure (see The Blitz 1940) and 2) getting that effect to translate broadly across and entire macro-social system can be very hard, even impossible under some circumstances. 
Humans are highly unpredictable - I think we talked about 3rd order chaotic systems - and as such lobbing really expensive and limited missiles at them to get them to do anything in concert as a primary strategy...well it is not optimal.  Sociologist have no idea how "Springs, revolutions or movements" really happen.  We can see them easily in hindsight but predicting them ahead of time is nearly impossible right now.  So what magically triggers things like The Crusades or Hippies is really difficult - a sum of pressures and human turbulence that is highly unpredictable, and people have spent empires trying to crack that Riddle of Flesh.  
If Russian power brokers sat down and figured "we will simply hit them with missiles and they will all give up" then they are 1) complete amateurs, and 2) dangerous amateurs who do not really understand the dynamics of application of military power against human-based social structures - s'ok, they are not alone in this. 
My point is that they should have been looking at military impact if they wanted to win a war, and it is likely too late to "get smart" now if they could.   Directly impacting micro-social Will is a game for subversive warfare, not missiles and Russia clearly mis-read what war it was in, and now has to come to terms with how to lose it.

I am not pro-nuclear power.  But do we have a f--ing choice?  We are baking the planet and need something to get us from fossil fuels to something better.  But something better might take some time. 
I am aware that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by evil scientists and commie politicians.  But what I don't understand is how they convinced all the world's thermometers to start lying also.  
And so we find ourselves being held hostage by a petro-fascist who is disrupting the entire world economy, especially the EU.  Because we didn't take the evil, scheming, lying scientists seriously. 
Edited note:  my current weather:  Monday 97F, today 97F, then 96,96,94,92.  In a place where historicially almost no one even had air conditioning.  And last year we hit ~113F in the famous heat dome incident.  yeah, nothing to see here folks, all just a hoax, dang lying thermometers. 

I don't wish to sidetrack the discussion either, and I will say I respect your credentials (and you, based on your posts in general) so your stance does carry a fair bit of weight with me. However, I do feel it's worth pointing out that a fairly recent Pew survey showed that 79% of physicists (compared to 65% of scientists in general and 45% of American adults) support building more nuclear power plants.
And I will leave it at that, apologies for the slightly tangential post...

Yep, the same morons which demonstrated against Pershing II and NATO double-track policy. A lot of those have their roots in the 1968 movements.

Indeed. That thought isn't as far fetched as it may sound to some. The peace movement in Europe in the 1980s was highly infiltrated and partly financed by the Soviets and East Germans. Since the Greens have quite a lot of members with a communist background, we can safely assume some are still connected to their old masters.

The (not just German) Greens have hurt Europe immensly with their anti-nuclear nonsense. They have been such a great boon to both fossil fuel industry and various evil regimes like Russia and the Saudis that it is fair to wonder whether they are paid by any of those.
Honestly, I wonder which reality is more scary, whether the Greens being corrupt or them doing everything because they really think it helps.

That’s pretty cool. AFIK cops in America just auction off those kinds of cars seized from criminals. Our cops just buy tons of unneeded military equipment. Hell, when I went to Ohio State the university police department had a MRAP.

Good example how RU is mitigating HIMARS - with propaganda that RU AD learned how to deal with them (obviously bridges think otherwise). But I am posting it for several useful bits about Buk M3:
GMLRS (he called them HIMARS) is the most difficult target  It flies too high at 22 000 meters with twice the speed of Smerch (RU unguided HIMARS analogue) With the speed of GMLRS they have around 10 seconds for decision and interception The biggest difficulty is RCS = 0.1

There are other surface-launched missiles with home-on-jam/home-on-radar capability, but they are usually anti-ship missiles (Exocet and Otomat have this feature).

Interesting short clip, shows how qucikly tactics of small quadrocopters is developing. They send another one with pretty decent thermal camera; they seem to move very smoothly together, almost like wingmen.

The Czechs are learning lessons from the Ukrainians:
Czech police add Ferrari taken from criminals to fleet
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62295674
"Police in the Czech Republic have unveiled the latest addition to their fleet of cars - a Ferrari capable of speeds up to 326km/h (202mph).
Police said the car had been confiscated from criminals."

Judge for yourself - I think, yes, and that seemed to be the consensus here when I posted this, as well as with the comments on Twitter: 
There's also this unique advantage that you can fire the rockets at a very high angle, to overcome deep trenches:
 

This was precisely what Panzerkrautswerfer argued at length on this forum several years ago - and against a VDV veteran; I feel privileged to have followed their debate back then.

Ukrainians doing flying MLRS with Czech Mi-24V. When they're flying this low, I feel the need to think in terms of a medium other than 'air' and 'ground' (like 'Eskimos have 50 words for snow' blah blah); reminds me of the special 'nap-of-the-earth' rules in Avalon Hill's MBT and IDF:
And an interesting find: It turns out this 'flying MLRS' was discussed in an NVA Mi-24 manual, so it's not an exotic maneuver that Russians came up with in Syria and Ukrainians copied from them in this war - by extension, former WP Mi-24 pilots should know about it:
 

Ukrainians doing flying MLRS with Czech Mi-24V. When they're flying this low, I feel the need to think in terms of a medium other than 'air' and 'ground' (like 'Eskimos have 50 words for snow' blah blah); reminds me of the special 'nap-of-the-earth' rules in Avalon Hill's MBT and IDF:
And an interesting find: It turns out this 'flying MLRS' was discussed in an NVA Mi-24 manual, so it's not an exotic maneuver that Russians came up with in Syria and Ukrainians copied from them in this war - by extension, former WP Mi-24 pilots should know about it:
 

This was precisely what Panzerkrautswerfer argued at length on this forum several years ago - and against a VDV veteran; I feel privileged to have followed their debate back then.

Russian 2S7M Malka with teared off barrel

 

Allegidly situation around Novoluhanske and power plant. There is opinion that Russians are so desperately assaulting the power plant, because can't to breakthrough to Semyhirya from M03 road. Their attacks constantly repel near Vershyna village. The coming to Semyhirya can open to Russians minor, but useful road, leading to the road on Bakhmut
Russians are attacking this 11 km front in Novoluhanske area from the south and from the east by forces of DPR (elements of 5th MRB "Oplot", 11th MRR "Vostok", tank battalion "Dizel" and artillery brigade "Kolchuga" (former "Kalmius")). Russians represented with BTGs of 127th MRD, 57th MRB, 40th naval infantry brigade and 336th naval infantry brigades.
Also the sat photo of power plant - in blue arrow hi-voltage substation, main task of Russian attacks of last two weeks

  
 

Yeah, there's also the story of Iran equipping F-14 with SAM missiles, because they ran out of normal missiles or something.
...
With regards to Russian evil, you don't have to go to Grigb. My country was occupied by Red Army between 1968 and 1991. Between the generation of my parents (who were teenagers when it happened and lived most of their life under Russian occupation) or grandparents (who generally had the luck to compare Russian and Nazi occupation) you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have horrifying experience with the Russians.
And of course, this happened when the Czechoslovak Communist regime was trying to liberalize itself, and Russians put hardliners back in power, so they are responsible for all the evil the regime did after that. The lagrs they built were special - they were all (or almost all) Uranium mines. Our dissidents were being tortured to death making material for the Russian nukes that threaten the world to this day.

Russia unpacks 2S7 Poin stores in artillery base in Omsk. 
And here some Pions are on the way to Ukraine. I supose, Russians want to use them in counter-battery fire against western howitzers, which often have positions out of the range of Russian artillery
 

I suppose this can be Kh-58E (export model on 200 km), It can be launched from Su-24M, but it also should have container with Fantasmogoria targeting system

Just look at the French sales of Exocet and all the ungodly things they were jerry-rigged to..

doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of platforms.

burned-out T-64