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FlemFire

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Everything posted by FlemFire

  1. So they're uncivilized barbarians but nuclear warfare is off the table? Right. We already have the Cold War to study. The fact it didn't happen already is in some parts accountable to luck. Every time the West and Russia interact in a military sense, there is a presage of nuclear annihilation. That is a flat out FACT. People are way too certain that the thousands of operational nuclear warheads and the multitude of live delivery systems carrying them will just never, ever be used when, last I checked, it was still a bunch of humans with human impulses and human vices and human minds standing at those buttons. Our countries' leaders and powerbrokers and wealthy fat cats all have vast bunker systems they can all go scurry off to in these events. You and me get the fire. It isn't for ****s and giggles and I'm terrified at how few people seem to understand this. And nevermind there are third parties who would probably love nothing more than to watch it happen. I've already brought up the rest of the planet, but apparently not a single other person thinks the world exists outside of the battlefields of Ukraine and the military industrial complexes of those involved.
  2. Let's get a one thing clear about Russia's end here insofar as the West is concerned. It is very much within the West's interests to basically kill as many Russians as physically possible and make the war as costly as possible for two obvious purposes: one is to ensure that Russia doesn't have incentive to do it again, and the other is to show China what's up if it keeps eyeballing Taiwan. Believe it or not, this is actually diplomacy of another kind in action. However, this objective eventually has to meet with reality and that reality is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons (on both sides). At some point you talk. Push comes to shove, I doubt any person in this thread would actually allow their families to be incinerated by nuclear war on account of Ukraine and Russia. That's the West's starting point. Russia's starting point is they want those territories. You meet somewhere in between. Or you take the casino option and roll the dice on continuing the war. That's obviously Ukraine's option. I split those up because if Ukraine dives in the deep end, I don't think the West will follow. If they can get OPEC, India, and China to play ball? Yes. But right now... no.
  3. The abstract # of bodies is not meaningless when we start looking at war exhaustion. As for the war's purpose, it has one. Russia wants those territories. You can go back 15+ years and see Putin saying that. He's been saying it right to the West's face, right at the NATO-Russian councils. Just saying it out loud. Over and over and over again. You tempt Ukraine with NATO, I take those territories. He really could not have been more clear about it. And I actually disagree that it is an axiom that both sides have guns to their heads. The point of sound diplomacy is to always leave compromise on the table. Again, this is why the West is failing, because they have not done that. I understand the need to defend your sovereign territory. 100% understandable. And it's understandable to make morale a significant cog of your war effort and back that up with tough talk. But you should never take compromise off the table, especially when a situation is unfolding and could go any number of ways. Now, currently, we are in a situation where Zelensky and Putin both have guns to their heads. No doubt about it. Except Russia's ability to escalate, and the lengths at which they could escalate, are so insanely precarious that I'm a little taken aback by everyone just assuming Putin is going to quietly shuffle away to his coffin, or even the assumption that the next guy up would be any better for that matter.
  4. I'm quite aware Russians abandoned Kherson. As you said, the position became untenable. I don't think you need to be too much of a tactical genius to see the precariousness of holding that position at that time. I'm of the opinion that Russia intended for Kiev's government to collapse when the 40,000 northern Russians carved their way to the capital at the drop of a hat. When Kiev didn't collapse, the invasion faltered. This is, in fact, the usual Russian incompetence in play. I have to imagine the sacked generals sold Putin a pipedream about Kiev's weaknesses being similar to Georgia in '08. That's just my assumption, though. I know some people think this was a "feint" maneuver, but frankly I don't think the Russian generalship is that clever, nor do I think it's plausible after the commander gets demoted afterward. I saw tanks gunning it down roads without recon or infantry cover, getting shot in the rear by RPGs while I sipped tea going, "Seems about right." None of this surprised me in the slightest. But it's not the first months of the war anymore. Things change. Since then, the Russians have dug in and mobilized hundreds of thousands of more men. This mobilization goes in hand with the already standing army, mind, of which significant amounts of it have not even been sent to Ukraine. If NATO were fighting this war, it wouldn't be much of a problem, but ultimately it falls upon Ukraine's hands. Do you honestly think there is potential for Russia to give up on these territories as they gave up on the northside of the Dnipro? If you do, I can see why you'd be positive. I just don't see it that way at all. Kreminna is a good example of this steadfastness, as is this meatgrinder in and around Bakhut. We also know, as I said, that Putin has a gun to the back of his head on this. Losing Kherson is a little different than trivializing the entire purpose of the war. It's apples and oranges, unfortunately. We don't have any idea of the casualties on either side and presumably will not for years. But I'm impressed by your certainty that Russia is eating something like 15,000 KIA a month, accounting for almost 165,000+ dead already which would constitute virtually the entire starting invasion force.
  5. For every KIA you can reliably tack on at least an additional 5-6 casualties. Do the math. Six months? Numbers like that that would be unsustainable in a month which is how you should intuitively know they are not correct.
  6. The body bag method and the "Russia's vast stockpile of weapons vanished overnight" belief? How about this. There's a gift on hand in that we know Russia's objectives. Putin has said for 15+ years he'll take eastern Ukraine if NATO jacks around with Ukraine. Alright. Russia currently occupies east Ukraine and has for 9+ months. He has integrated those territories so we can assume that Russia will defend them as if they are territories of Russia itself. I think it's safe to assume Putin will do this so his own people don't put a bullet in him for starting a pointless war that ended up with nothing gained. Yes? I think these are safe assumptions. We can also assume that the contingencies for defending them could include anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 Russians being deployed there, alongside the activation of the Russian airforce. I would like to know Ukraine's military path to fighting into these territories and liberating them. Please illuminate it for me beyond killing lots of Russians because Putin and his cronies can pull non-Muscovite conscripts into the army pretty much all day long and have shown the willingness to do this before. I think Ukraine needs to basically hold out as long as they can until the West's diplomats do their ****ing job. The war obviously makes for a great morality play, but there are far bigger parts moving around (nevermind the danger of nuclear war). I think Russia needs to quickly be kneecapped economically and politically and THAT is the only way this goes in Ukraine's favor. Some people actually think this has already been done and that's kind of my problem here. People see this war through the West's lens and have forgotten there is an entire rest of the planet to think about. I for one don't see Russia's allies leaving them. Hell, I still see Euros buying Russian goods and resources, which means European dollars fill Russian tanks and make Russian bombs. Not exactly helpful and those are supposed to be Russia's enemies. If you look around the world OPEC isn't playing ball. India isn't playing ball. China isn't playing ball. Iran is certainly more than happy to watch the show and aid in elongating it and OPEC in general is reaping the profits of a globally shifted oil market while they brace for recession. India is gladly buying Russian resources and Indian companies gladly picked up the insurance for Russian tankers. China has zero reason to aid the West and in fact has every incentive to make sure this war gets as wiry and nasty as possible. A lot of this never hits the West's news sources, but China and Russia are very much economically tied. It should concern you when the two most populated countries on the planet are content doing business with a nation you are trying to pigeonhole into isolation. It should concern you that Putin is free to conscript rural nobodies from the east and replace the depressed labor pool with imported Chinese temp workers. It should concern you that within China there is zero anti-Russian talk in their media. Do people here understand that this war is putting the West in a bad light for many regions in the world? What they see are prices skyrocketing and all they think is oh great it's Europe ****ing around again and now it's our problem... again. They don't care about Ukraine at all because it has nothing to do with them. Do you understand what I'm trying to illuminate here? People keep talking battles and tanks, all the while I'm looking at the West firing off all their economic and diplomatic bullets and leaving nothing in the chamber but humiliation or the military option, and the military option ends in incineration. I don't know, so few seem genuinely concerned about where this is going while people post tactical vids of guys getting blown up to Tiktok music.
  7. How does Ukraine ever win this war militarily absent of NATO putting boots on the ground and tempting WWIII?
  8. Yeah, Saving Private Ryan was legitimately shocking. I think a lot of people who grow up with today's media -- much of it being shaped by SPR in fact -- don't really understand how intense that movie was at release. There'd always been tons of war movies and many of them violent and grim, but SPR was the most physical depiction of combat ever seen. War movies to that point still had this sense of cinematic flair to them. SPR just hit you in the face with a celluloid shovel.
  9. This was my next guess because in another test they started 'blindfiring' at a building with no one in it -- they fired at the top floor of the 3rd story building closest to them (despite no one being in it). To my knowledge the enemy AI is pretty rudimentary and I don't think I have ever seen them genuinely pre-fire into stuff. Case closed lol?
  10. Well something is different. I've hundreds of hours in SF2 in both scenarios and PBEMs and have never seen spotting of that speed and accuracy ever. We're talking near instant spotting of enemies 200-300m away, in buildings, hiding, and the spotting is done by uncons in moving vehicles. Nothing about that is correct.
  11. It's a scenario. You can boot it up and play either side from Turn 1 and see what happens. The dynamics of the mission are atypical. For all I know the scenario design is that the enemy just knows to shoot the building, but it is absolutely not normal for technicals to spot Hiding soldiers inside buildings 200-300+ meters away within 15s while simultaneously driving around. That is straight up borg spotting levels not available to anyone, least of all uncons.
  12. To be fair, it is very unusual to get spotted like that. I tested the scenario and it's actually considerably worse than you even described: technicals roll up and make INSTANT spots on you, regardless of hide, target arcs, hide w/o deploying, etc. Makes me wonder if it's part of the scenario design. I've played enough PBEMs and scenarios to know this isn't normal at all. The scenario itself is also listed as a 'Tutorial' so maybe it's just trying to illuminate some aspect of the gameplay instead of presenting normal aspects.
  13. I agree with OP here. It's very anomalous as 50m is actually a very long way for a pistol shot to be even remotely accurate. I've seen people at the gun range literally whiff the paper targets at 10-15m. Of course, they're not infantry in an army, but they're also not in a combat environment juiced to the gills with adrenaline and the threat of death. The slightest tilt in your wrist is an enormous shift in accuracy from barrel to target. That's why you'll get those news stories about police and/or criminals unloading 100+ rounds and hitting like twice.
  14. Germany proved itself capable of fielding larger armies year-over-year, and committing itself to massive offenses year-over-year -- and that is after losing access to the majority of their oil supply. In fact, both Axis powers proved economically flexible in ways that post-war analyses make these comments kinda moot. A greater tooth and tail would - if I may - entail more supply-committed manpower and greater capital investment in the stockpile of oil. That's pretty much the gist of it. If Germany in 1944 could field a much larger and fuel-hungry army, with more airplanes than ever, and more tanks than ever, with the factories for both being pulverized on the daily, and the synthetic factories being demolished on the daily, I do submit with confidence that they could have rubbed a couple nickels together to get the oil for an extra 1,000 tanks in the grace periods of 1940/1941. But they didn't. Not because they couldn't, but for the same reason they didn't even bother bringing proper winter gear into Russia: hubris. But it is all conjecture. Truly. The real counter-point to 1,000 more tanks isn't "they couldn't fuel them." The real counter-point is that the entire premise of Germany's war machine was to operate quickly and cheaply, so to suggest they have more tanks and more men is already out of sorts. It's like saying Germany should have maybe not been so mean to its conquered peoples. It's like yeah, that would have helped, but their meanness is what brought them there in the first place. It becomes very ahistorical nonsense. Perhaps then the true answer is... to make more Panthers. Not because of combat effectiveness or economic viability, but because the Panther ranks pretty high on the Rule of Coolâ„¢ chart. It looks sleek and it has a great nickname, both pretty strong arguments, IMO.
  15. A lot of the German tanks get analyzed in the context of an already lost war where resources/stockpiles are drying up and the German army is operating on the backfoot. In that context, all those heavy tanks and unique designs are clearly not going to work, but neither is anything else. The unsexy answer is that a 1,000 more basic PzIII's in 1941 would have had infinitely more influence than 5,000 more PzIV's in 1944, because in 1941 there was an hint of winnability still left in the war. I think that winnability evaporated the moment they invaded Russia because they did not, in fact, have those additional tanks.
  16. Agreed with the video, but I've long held the belief that decades of pop history TV shows and the like treating the T-34 as if it's some sort of unicorn of tank design really propped up crazy myths about the tank. It's really the 'soft factors' mentioned that make it such a miserable vehicle. Things that don't show up on specs sheets, like bad to nearly nonexistent communication, a cramped turret with crew sharing duties, horrific sightlines, etc. And as the war wore on, even the vehicle's hallmark traits plummeted. By 1943, when the Eastern Front became upgunned, a whopping 90% of hits on T-34s at typical combat ranges were penetrating shots. But it's hard to analyze any tank in a vacuum. Most of them are projections of the very exigencies that brought them to reality in the first place. The reality in 1941 was that the Russians were getting quite literally annihilated and suffering absolutely absurd defeats and by the end of the year had lost 40% of their population, industry, and similarly significant chunks of many raw materials. Their locomotive industry was on the verge of collapse and the civilian economy evaporated into thin air in such a way that it's hard to even conceive. People were starving to death and taxes were through the roof just to pay for a war they were clearly losing. The second the harvests are completed, you yank all those farmers out of the fields, give them a few weeks training at best, and dump them in front of the Germans. In times like that, you take a T-34 and you say "This as good as we got," you shave its costs down as much as possible, size its crew to min-max man-to-material requirements, shrink tooth-to-tail ratio by simply producing two tanks instead of one, take the saved manpower costs of "supply and logistics" guys and give them a rifle instead to go catch bullets, and roll all that crap straight to the frontlines. The Russians weren't dumb about this. They knew the combat effectiveness of a T-34 was about a dozen to fourteen hours before it broke down. But the point was to have something that at least slowed the Germans down, and then take that something and make as many of it as you can while shaving off as much manpower possible so it can be diverted to other areas of the front. The real strength of the T-34 is not the tank itself, its more like that tape of Hitler talking to Mannerheim and basically going, "So we killed Russia, and then 20,000 tanks and a bunch of new armies showed up anyway."
  17. Now this fight club, I'm vaguely aware of its rules, but how do I get in?
  18. Is this the Marines campaign like around 4 or 5 where there's a bunch of Syrian tanks? Not sure why I'm asking, it's just a trench yet I get deja vu from it
  19. Balconies got at least five or six of my guys shot dead. Eventually you work them into your scouting: is an enemy here, and is there an enemy balcony here
  20. I streamed this battle awhile back for anyone interested. Took 5ish hours to complete. Elite difficulty, turn-based, and trying to play fast of course leads to mistakes as does actual mental exhaustion of streaming and talking while playing, which CM isn't really tailored for (ordinarily, I'd play a single scenario across a week or two, not one sitting). Nevermind doing this after working but hey, here it is. Highlight: Combat Mission Shock Force 2 - Breaking the Bank, Heavy Urban Environment - Twitch My own approach and of course ~ Minor? SPOILERS ~ First thing I looked at in the battle was that I did not have enough soldiers to tackle the whole town. Second thing was that the middle areas were an obvious, Cannae-shaped kill zone and should be avoided. With that in mind, I chose the left flank for attacking and held one platoon on the right. The idea was to have the advancing element swing through most of the objectives including the 'bank', and at that point I would then start moving the right flank up to complete a total pincer on the final objectives, but this ended up not being necessary. A few things caught me offguard, including the surprise counter-attacks that spawn right on top of your guys which I of course whined about. I also found the culdesac entrance was indeed a killing zone as a grenade launcher managed to easily wound or kill a few of my men the second they showed their faces. One squad died to an ATGM as well which was quite unfortunate. Tactically, the map plays by the book, and if you just be careful it can be done as you can largely use the urban environment to dictate the firefights. You're guaranteed to eat losses in places just by the nature of urban combat, though, and I certainly had my share. My main operating assumption is that there is an enemy in every building and to act according to that principle. The scenario does give you oodles of vehicles to use, but I was too scared to deploy most of them heh. That said, if a vehicle was in combat range, it was shooting: either at enemies or where I assumed enemies were. Unused ammo is of no use, so better use it. Some of my assets went unused or underutilized but that comes with the territory of approaching scenarios blind. I also tried to not demolish every structure possible to maintain some LARPing value as a prop'er British bluefor heh. I believe I got lucky in some regards and unlucky in others, so it all evened out. The luckiest factor was the map simply ending when it did, instead of requiring me to greenlight the 2nd offensive into the rightflank. There was a solid contingent of Syrians left on that flank, and in the back of the map a smattering of elite Syrian soldiers still lingering around. They were inflicting damage, too, right up until the end of the map. I personally don't think it was the 'victory' the game gave me, but hey I'll take it. ~ SPOILERS end? ~ All in all, it's a tough map. I think one of the toughest out of SF2's catalog as it punishes mistakes and over aggression with force-deleting measures.
  21. War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 by Alan Milward. Not exactly a thrilling book by any means, but an enjoyable one for those who like to look at modern warfare as more or less extensions of flexible industrial capacity. I might be a bit biased though as I'm a full believer in certain deterministic aspects of WWII tailored mostly to the economic strengths of the fighting nations. The Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Mo Basically a fictional book about the non-fictional war in East Timor. I reference it because it's exceptionally well written, yet largely unknown.
  22. That's a great picture. Really restored my constitution after seeing the sparkly T34's.
  23. I had two of these happen in the same turn in a PBEM match. Mine was from Shock Force 2, a bullet caromed off a building, crossed the street, hit a wall there, then dipped into a hidden insurgent spy who died instantly. Sometimes it just has your name on it. Elsewheres, the same thing happened to a Syrian soldier hiding behind a destroyed VIED, was less dramatic though, mostly just a quick pingpong that nailed him. I've moved countries but if I ever get around to setting up I'll fetch the videos (looks like streamable took them down). Yours is extremely dramatic cause it looks an NBA play haha. I actually think it might happen more than we realize, but the shooting is so chaotic (a given) that we probably don't even notice half the time. The craziest 'ricochet' I've seen was actually a Panther's round that skipped off a Sherman's glacis and spiraled way over the battlefield and hit a crop of trees, instantly killing an entire mortar team I had moving beneath it. They weren't even close to the action so I was initially befuddled as to how they disappeared from the map. You can imagine my unraveling the mystery in reverse like some wayward battlefield Columbo heh.
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