Field Oggy

In lighter news, Microsoft has announced a new version of Windows for the Russian market:


Seriously, this thread is well inside my OODA loop.  By the time I have absorbed and considered, someone has already either a) said what I had in mind or b) answered the question in my head.

 

I am sure Putin would be more reasonable if he spent a little time in a Dutch coffeeshop.

I agree that the Pacific Theater is not really suited to this game engine. The Korean War 1950-51, however, would be interesting.

I'm sure most people get that I'm not talking about US politics.

Here you go.  https://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/

Usually I don't care for this sort of thing, but these are getting ridiculous 😂😂😂😂😂😂

Aye. The other thing about mines (especially AP mines) is that they are completely indiscriminate and would need picking up again once UKR wins. That's a slow, expensive and dangerous job that they've seen far too many other countries have to undertake, so AP minefields on their own territory would, I agree, be a sign of giving up the objective of retaking (or even the aspiration to hold on to) terrain.
To some extent, the same applies to RUS. While the maximalist goal of taking and holding whatever fraction of Ukraine the propagandists can get away with claiming this week remains, belts of AP mines are something of an own goal.

[MURZ] However,... I'm ****ing tired of arguing.... Now I just don't have time for these arguments anymore. You'll see for yourself.
Yeah, well you're not the only one, boychik.
Harking back to one of the very early comments from our esteemed host: 
....Ukrainians merely have to keep killing Russians.
If the UA can't solve for a combined arms offensive and encirclement, the next best option for them is to *sharply* step up the pace of killing and maiming of Russians. Until the invaders simply run out of bodies.
And if the 'volunteers' are indeed the SS formations keeping Russia in this war, they need to be brought to their Cherkassy and Elsenborn Ridge, asap. Screw the vehicles, target men. Bleed them white.
Don't depend on human wave attacks in the fall making it easy. Ukraine and its allies should begin prepping large purpose designed kill zones.  Select places (to quote that old Chinese guy) the enemy is obliged to attack.  I believe brother @Grigblately listed a few in Donbas. 
...The Geneva Convention left this highway several exits ago. Keep the bunkers formidable looking but thinly manned. Fill them, along with every road, track, bush and  house with millions of tiny mines and CBUs. Bombardment won't clear them. Let the Bayraktars and SoF teams prioritise killing their demining vehicles. Snipe and drone their pioneer troops, whatever renders them ineffective.  Keep blowing the legs off their infantry in the hundreds, day after day. They will eventually go home.
None of this gives me any pleasure or satisfaction personally. But it looks to me like the surest path to victory at present.

Hmm, yes and no.  The primary advantage of the pontoon is crossing speed and weight - it is pretty slow driving but still faster than a ferry, and you can traffic more vehicles continuously as opposed to discrete crossings.  As to survivability, the ferry is likely better as it is moving and can traffic from multiple sites, the pontoon bridge is fixed.  They both use the same sections, which are not really designed to take too many hits before bad things start to happen.
This whole effort by the RA shows that the strikes on the existing bridge infrastructure have been effective - in case anyone was wondering.  They have sighted the pontoon bridge very well, butted up against the existing concrete bridge superstructure gives it a lot of anchors against current (which is pretty slow) and some indirect fires.
They have also set it up correctly, on the downstream side of the bridge, so if a section gets hit too badly they can disconnect and let it simply float downstream, and replace.
If I were the UA I would wait until it had some decent traffic it on it - knowing the Russians they will be sloppy in crossing management - and then hit it with DPICM.  You will likely bag some vehicles, which will have to be cleared and do damage all along the length of the bridge.  This significantly raises the repair and maint bill while also stressing the entire structure.  Alternately the UA have already demonstrated what they can do with PGM artillery so simply hit the thing along its length - the RA will run out of pontoons before the UA runs out of ammo.

The P-51 (Air Force designation F-51)Mustang was never a very effective ground attack platform because of it’s liquid-cooled engine and radiator on the bottom of the airplane that made it very vulnerable to ground fire. That’s one of the primary reasons the “Jug” (P-47) was developed by the USAAF for ground attack duties. Unfortunately, Air Force conception was “shining knights of the air in their powerful metal steeds clearing the skies of opposition!” That’s one of the reasons why, along with costs to maintain the P-47, the newly created Air Force scrapped all the P-47s and used F-51s for ground attack in the Korean Conflict, where they sucked because of their vulnerability to ground fire. Inter-service rivalries exist to this day.

They are 'Crack Troops' in every sense of the word. 

Yeah but to be fair, the US secret services have a history of screaming about nonsense to justify wars, they shouldn't be to shocked that nobody believes them anymore.

Personally I would love to see another RT module covering the same time frame, with the minor Axis nations: Hungary, Romania, Finland, maybe throw Bulgaria in as well.

The new weapon...

Speaking of funny picture (just this one and I'll stop, sorry).
 

Apologies for posting a meme, but when they are this good...
EDIT: As far as the cause of the strike, SOF night mission with delayed charges (infiltration or drone-dropped) makes sense to me, as well as Hrim, eventually we may have more to go on.

So having spent a fair amount of time around high explosives in my youth, these look like dead zones.  Hollywood has led most to believe explosives are a big uniform ball of fire.  The reality is that they are a bunch of waves of energy that bounce around like mad.  They create dead zones, which make no sense unless you have seen them before.  I have seen explosions where people basically next to them have survived, not seriously hurt, while people 100m away are cut in half.
Considering that we have multiple explosions that seem to happened simultaneously, that makes a dead zone even more probable.

Russian mine clearance tactics grow ever more sophisticated:
 

Gentlemen, I have a really hard time keeping this post civil. Imagine me posting this in all seriousness: The Mujahideen were aided and partly financed by the CIA. Since Al Qaida has a lot of members with Mujahideen background we can safely assume they were still connected to their old masters back in September 2001. This is no less plausible than your theory but we could all imagine the ****storm (and I'd probably be on forum hiatus for a while...).
Btw: War is alwas bad. Period. Believe or not, some people back in the day just preferred being red to being dead. You can have a different opinion, weigh your freedom higher than your life (and that of your children, etc.). Others don't and that's a valid opinion, too.

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 must say, on the entire nuclear issue:
One good thing this war has shown is that nukes don't help. Sure, they can prevent the West from directly intervening, but they don't help you win a war by themselves. You can be the strongest nuclear power on earth but in the end, it's all just useless holes in the ground with missiles and warheads in them, a huge waste of money and resources with no military application whatsoever, even in the greatest war your country has ever fought.

For some reason this revived some  really old cold war era   comic book memories
The Russians are reminding me and more of the  Stereotyped Bad guys form the 2000AD series 'Invasion"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion!_(2000_AD)