I was a counter battery radar operator. The systems I used 20 years ago had these neat things called electronic counter measures. I guess russia never got the message that it's not a smart idea to radiate in a zone with anti-radiation missiles.
This wasn't a seeker missile, it was GPS guided. If the Russian machine had been fully set up then they probably would have blocked it, however Ukraine got to it before they were ready.
Drone scouts found it and they called in a fire mission from a HIMARS, since this was considered a HVT. I saw the raw footage of it yesterday - it was pretty neat.
Yeah, I was going to comment on this, but you were faster. This is the first time that I've noticed a major media outlet connecting Republicans with Russia. So it's an open secret now?
Ah, ok, 27% -> 19%, an 8% YoY drop, and the numbers were obtained using identical methodologies across multiple years. Yeah, I agree, seems to check out.
Still, there are definitely a shitload more bots than there were before.
When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”
To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I don't know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn't enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.
They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.
Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.
Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.
SU-35s are legemdarily good like their older SU-27 brothers. They're arguably the best Gen 4 aircraft in the world now. In general,.Soviet and Russian aircraft have been very formidable.
What you're confusing "shittier" with is after Sukhoi hand the aircraft over to the Russian military. At which point poor selection and training hop in, strapped with janky or old weaponry, given orders by notoriously bad tacticians. And suddenly your fancy "Gen 4.5" aircraft is getting downed by anything with a half modern missile in the tube.
Toe-to-toe it'll be Israel's F-16s—which will need modern configs—that will present a challenge. Certainly not the F-15s. But the real contender will be SAMs which I imagine are the latest fancy American ones.
Well… yes and no. Anything made in Russia over the last 2 years likely has electronics that are rather suspect. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that some of those new flankers Iran is getting have some repurposed Whirlpool dishwasher chips squirreled away in there somewhere.
The Iranians have been churning out literal thousands of Shahed drones for Russia to shoot into Ukraine. I’m pretty sure this was the other half of the deal they made.
Intentionally misleading headline, but not technically incorrect.
These are designed to carry troops through an irradiated battle space and keep them safe from the fallout. At least while they're inside and the filtration systems are functioning properly.
That doesn't mean they were magically enhanced to be impervious to antimaterial weapons, or other types of kinetic damage that happen in combat.
Thanks for this, I didn't know people thought that nuclear-proof meant that it could literally take a nuke. I certainly hope people haven't been thinking that a MOPP suit will make one a super soldier impervious to nukes or anything considered a chemical (which could be interpreted as all matter).
I know I was assuming that the Russians claimed that they were nuclear bomb proof, at least for the 30 seconds that I knew about them before I read this thread. Seeing the picture I didn't believe that they were in in actuality.
Plus, even if it was that kind of nuclear-proof, all that really means is that it can take the pressure of nuclear explosion over its body. Devices based on point pressure, like the kind used in anti-armor rounds or bunker buster bombs, can and do punch through nuclear-hardened targets.
As an example, RPGs use shaped charges to send a jet a molten copper through armor steel. Even though the devices may seem antiquated, they are extremely effective at burning holes through tanks. If that molten jet happens to come in contact with ammunition, it's generally game over.
I have heard a few things, TBH. Everything in the range from simply vaporized and hot to the vaporized metal being in a near plasma state. Shrug.
Wikipedia gives a few numbers ranging from 660K to almost 1200K (copper melt temp is 1358K) from testing it quotes. It seems to be dependent on the cone alloy and the explosive type.
In practice, it's probably is all over the place in regards to temperature. If you can round up a few RPGs, I would totally be down for some testing...
Ladoga –a Russian armoured personnel carrier. Initially called Debut, this APC is designed for evacuation of Soviet government from Kremlin to airport under nuclear/chemical/biological attack. Ladoga uses tracks from the T-80U as well as suspension system and gas-turbine powerplant. The crew is 2 soldiers. It also has a four-seat cab equipped with a crew life-support facilities to protect the passengers against the radiological, chemical and bacteriological contamination of the environment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladoga_APC
with life support facilities to protect the passengers against the radiological, chemical, and bacteriological contamination of the environment, but not a $1,000 USD drone fitted with an explosive device.
No fault of the design. It was meant for a particular role. It is being brought out and borderline misused in a different role. I can get behind loling at Russia, but this is like laughing at an M4 Sherman for not having ECM built in. I'd laugh at the people who rolled it into a modern conventional fight, but the design seems competent for the time and role.
The article's premise is that this is a vehicle designed for a very particular role, which is now being brought out and used outside that role, illustrating how deep into reserves Russia is scraping for vehicles.
Compared to a golf-cart or dirt bike, a Ladoga is much better-suited for mechanized warfare.
I don't know. Like, yes, by definition, a dirt bike isn't what a mechanized unit uses; that's a motorized vehicle. But...I think that there's a fair question of how well the roles can match.
Specifically for nuclear war, then yeah, obviously the Ladoga is better. It's got environmental protection.
But I'm not sure that light armor will necessarily have the role it has over past decades in the future.
The point of light armor is to deal with rifle and machine gun bullets -- as in ambushes -- and near-miss artillery fragments. It will work well for that.
I don't know what portion of actual damage to Russian forces is presently coming from those, though. I mean, if the armor isn't stopping what's killing the thing, it might not buy much. It won't stop top-attack ATGMs. It won't stop drones carrying heavier munitions. It won't stop guided munitions like GMLRS or guided artillery.
If we can provide enough tube artillery and shells, that might change. But if warfare here is characterized by mostly highly-accurate, long-range weapons capable of penetrating the armor that vehicles have...that armor might not provide much protection.
For an analog, think of how it used to be common for individual soldiers to wear heavy armor up until things like crossbows and firearms, long-range weapons that could penetrate it, killed it:
As firearms became better and more common on the battlefield, the utility of full armour gradually declined, and full suits became restricted to those made for jousting which continued to develop.
It's not impossible that the same phenomenon could affect vehicle armor. Maybe not all vehicles, but it might make it a lot-less-valuable to have light armor.
And unarmored vehicles tend to be faster, which helps limit their time in a dangerous zone.
I think that a dirt bike, which might be good as a vehicle for a single person, maybe two, has some serious limitations -- it can't load up anyone if they do get hurt. It can't pull towed equipment. It has a limited ability to carry supplies.
But it can also traverse trails that four-wheel vehicles cannot. It can be easily hidden. It is inexpensive and can be easily provided in large numbers. It is light and can be delivered via air. Many people each on a dirt bike are less of a concentrated target than a group of people in an APC; against a weapon that light armor doesn't stop, the dirt bike may be more resilient than light armor.
In World War II, there were some very substantial successes that various militaries pulled off with bicycle infantry, which is pretty analogous; Japan's rapid movement in the Battle of Singapore is probably the poster child for that:
The capture of Singapore resulted in the largest British surrender in its history.
Conventional British military thinking was that the Japanese forces were inferior and characterised that the Malayan jungles as "impassable"; the Japanese were repeatedly able to use it to their advantage to outflank hastily established defensive lines.
Despite their numerical inferiority, they advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, overwhelming the defences. The Japanese forces also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, allowing swift movement through the jungle. The Commonwealth having thought the terrain made them impractical, had no tanks and only a few armoured vehicles, which put them at a severe disadvantage.[25]
E-bikes can be very quiet.
There have been a history of unarmored vehicles that we've used in combat. And I don't mean the Jeep, but in contemporary times.
Bikes or motorbikes can also bypass unexpected obstacles. If your APC is rolling down the road and there's a tree fall you most likely need to stop your vehicle and get out and clear it. Bikes or motorbikes may not even need to slow down, just bypass the obstacle entirely. Think of that scene in Children of Men with the fallen tree and the flaming car rolled down the hill, that ambush relied entirely on stopping the target, but probably wouldn't have worked as well on a group of bikers.
Probably because it rarely worked in real life! It was especially harder if your party was travelling in the spring. River currents are strong as shit and there's no way even oxen could stand strong enough to keep it from running away during strong spring snowmelt flows.
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