Calamine Waffles

Uh yeah? Sounds very much compos mentis to me? But hey, maybe the entire White House and political administration is in a conspiracy to hide that he has full-blown dementia and he's not really doing anything. Sure. And probably aliens are involved too.

The thing about Biden compared to both Trump and Obama, as Peter Zeihan puts it, is that he's a lot more receptive to advice from his staff. Obama throughout most of his presidency just flat out did not like listening to people unless he really had to, while Trump would listen but not accept anything unless what they said agreed with what he already thought.

Ukraine is known to have captured at least 282 tanks presently, so they've given Ukraine more tanks in 6 months than they've exported in the last 5 years.

I don't understand this at all. It seems impossibly cheap unless they are buying only small numbers of each. The Su-34 has a flyaway cost of about $50 million, so 20 of those would already cost $1 billion.

It's all the work of Nazi card-carrying Ukrainian SOF that keep framed pictures of Stepan Bandera and books on Nazi German soldiers in their hideouts

The main thing about Ukraine is their logistics are very decentralised, which makes it exceptionally difficult for the Russians to target their supplies with the notoriously poor Russian ISR capabilities, as shown in Syria.

The official spec is ~Mach 2.5, so you're pretty close. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m31.htm

Ah, my favourite towed artillery piece.

Well, it's more complicated than that...for political reasons the Soviets ended up designing 3 different tanks with more or less the same capabilities. The only thing they really have in common is the gun.

Brings back memories:

Yeah, so when he did a video about the Ukrainian T-64BV obr. 2017 he was complaining about things like "oh, it doesn't shoot any APFSDS better than 3BM42 Cold War era ammunition, its engine is still the same so it's underpowered" He briefly acknowledges that it has satnav, but he doesn't mention that the satnav has BMS (battlefield management system) integration AND it has a far superior encrypted radio to the Russian tanks. He also doesn't mention that to upgrade a T-64BV to the 2017 level it can be done in army repair workshops (rembat or remrot; repair battalions or repair regiments), whereas to upgrade a T-72B to T-72B3 standard it's back to Uralvagonzavod the tank goes.

The thing is that he has a very "top trumps" approach to comparing tanks, where it's like, "oh, this tank has a better gun, better armour etc." mostly comparing hard stats without looking at the overall context in which the vehicles operate.

Oh, it's RedEffect, he was posting in the lead-up to the war things like how Ukrainian tanks are much inferior to Russian ones based on a direct tank vs. tank fight etc. I don't think he's a Russian propagandist, though, because he has put up videos like this. The problem is he mostly takes the Russian statements etc. at face value.

I don't know, in the event of a Ukrainian invasion of Transnistria you'd probably get a lot of bad faith accusations of "oh look, Ukrainians are attacking another country, see, they're not so innocent, they're just like the Russians" etc., etc. Not worth the bad PR at this time, I think

Well, no, no ERA will save you from a direct hit by a Javelin to the turret, it has enough penetration to get through the thin turret roof even with Kontakt-5 on top (usually rated as at least 800 mm of RHA). The thing is that you have to remember that the autoloader carousel on the T-72 is on the bottom of the hull, so in order to detonate it with a Javelin the penetrator formed by the shaped charge has to actually strike the ammunition. Hitting a tank from the top center mass usually means you're more likely to hit the gun breech, and if it misses, there's also the crew next to the gun. So it's not so much the ERA working as there just being a lot of stuff in the way of the autoloader carousel.

Impossible, the super brains on Twitter have been telling me it's the new ingenious Russian NERA.

Reminds me, about 20 minutes after the attack, this US Army Beechcraft C-12 left Constanta for Wiesbaden

Yeah, I know they won't have the transponder on a lot of the time for this kind of mission. I just found the flight pattern interesting.

I was looking at Flightradar24 around the time of the strike, and the only NATO aircraft near the area around the time of the strike were a KC-135 (HOBO20), USMC F/A-18 (AE22L, I assume flying CAP for the other aircraft), and a P-3C Orion (AA33), as well as a US Army HH-60M (appears to have landed sometime before the attack) The Global Hawk FORTE10 was there in the Black Sea earlier, but it bugged out about 6 hours before the strike (3:20 pm Sevastopol time (UTC+3)) At around 5 minutes before the strike, the F/A-18 and KC-135 pulled back a bit, while the P-3C stayed in its patrol. Probably just a coincidence, but it seems like the strike, whatever was used to do it, occurred at around the time the P-3C was on the part of its circuit taking it closest to Sevastopol, while the KC-135 and F/A-18 had retreated a bit (possible they are refueling?).

Do they think Russian radars are only pointing in one direction?

That's interesting. I'm more familiar with Russian where words that begin with "h" in English (e.g. Hitler, Herman, howitzer, etc.) become "g" in Russian (Gitler, German, gaubitsa, etc.). They almost never use "х". Defense Express in their 2021 article refers to the whole thing as "OTRK Sapsan" as do the people in their video, but in others they cal it "OTRK Hrim-2". There are also pictures with "GROM" on the prospective missile itself.

The thing is that Switchblade 300 doesn't use an explosive bomb payload. It's more like a flying shotgun that shoots pellets. It's optimised for antipersonnel use.