… is exactly the same text as the complete article:
The Russian military says the damaged Moskva missile cruiser sank while being towed to a port.
So… there ya go, I suppose.
Second: more than a day later and not a single verified image of the thing. How can *nobody* have taken photos pf video of it? Surely there were at least a few commercial satellites passing roughly int he area that took a look. No doubt more than a few recon planes were in the area. The Russians must have had ships in the area, taking pictures to prove it was still on the surface; and doubtless Ukrainians with drones or navalized farm tractors video’ed it to prove that it wasn’t doing so great. But so far as I’ve seen… squadoo. A number or mis-attributed photos and videos of other ships, one craptacular “night vision” video showing… *something.*
A recent ebay acquisition, this is a lithograph with a photo and color cutaway of the Vought ALVRJ demonstrator vehicle. The Advanced Low-Volume Ramjet was a program that ran from the late 1960s into the 1980’s with the goal of producing a ramjet engine for missile applications, such as air-to-air missiles and the like.
The artwork was scanned at 600 dpi and made available to above-$10 Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Bonus video: this one claims to be a strike on a Russian convoy in the Donbas region. But… none of the vehicles are moving. I don’t see troops running away. It looks almost like someone is tearing up a road full of abandoned hardware, which seems maybe wasteful. Surely there are *some* farmers around to tow away some of the untrashed vehicles?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought guided missiles to the fore, to a very great cost of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and basically anything that moves. Anti-tank guided missiles have proven to be perfectly capable of turning kinda-modern armor into scrap metal. Swatting aircraft is a somewhat more difficult task, but it’s being done. The video below seems to show a Ukrainian-made “Stugna-P” anti-tank missile (a manually-controlled laser guided missile that can be set on a tripod and fired remotely) promptly deleting a Kamov KA-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter. The Stugna-P would seem a *terrible* missile for going after a moving aircraft, but this one was hovering… and I don’t care how armored your chopper is, if it gets hit with a missile meant to take out a modern main battle tank, your chopper will do like what this one did, and immediately fall from the sky as flaming wreckage.
For as long as there have been projectile weapons there has been armor. And since then there has been a constant competition between the two for supremacy. And right now, it’s pretty clear that arms (in this case ATGMs) have the advantage over armor. We don’t know how well a truly modern MBT such as the Abrams would hold up against missiles like these, but it’s safe to assume the answer would be “not well.” The traditional response of adding even more armor to the tank is likely not tenable; the M-1 is already so massive that merely transporting it is a problem. So the future of defending vehicles will have to be active: not just the reactive armor that Russian tanks are covered with and that doesn’t seem to be doing them much good, but point defense systems that use guns, lasers, missiles, jets of explosively generated molten metal, blast waves, hell, maybe even force fields. None of these will be “cheap.” This will put effectively-armored vehicles outside the reach of many militaries in the face of relatively inexpensive missiles. Perhaps for a time war will simply be cost ineffective. Won’t that be a hell of a thing.
There are multiple videos from the scene, though none I’ve seen show the actual gunfire… just a lot of people acting like fricken’ morons, then gunfire is clearly audible. You hear a *lot* of semiautomatic fire, doubtless pistols… and some high rate of fire fully automatic shooting as well, likely a modified Glock with a “switch.” I would bet a dollar that not a one of the firearms involved was legally owned and registered with the wise government of California, thus they were already illegal… yet we can be assured of hearing some idiot yammerings about how *new* laws are needed.
Note in the video below that there seem to be quite a number of guns being fired, only one of which seems to be full auto. Sounds like it magdumps, and that’s the last you hear of it. Full auto in a pistol is great if you’re looking to mow down a crowd, but actual combat? Nah. But it’s about what I’d expect from the level of intellect that tends to be involved in incidents like this… unable to think further than two seconds into the future, or more strategically than “this is cool.”
A month ago I mentioned (I think… that was a lifetime ago) that I thought it odd how tolerant the Russian soldiers were of Ukrainian civilian protestors. That has clearly come to an end. With Russian military defeats, failures and frustrations, the soldiers are falling back on old school barbarism… rape and murder on a virtually industrial scale. Once again, reality teaches us that people who screech about Nazis are not to be trusted… they stared into the abyss and the abyss didn’t just stare back, it moved in and set up shop.
So a security guard sees two suspicious characters head into a convenience store, decides to follow them in. As he approaches the door, he sees them climbing over the counter, sticking a gun in the clerks face. So the guard mosey’s on in, *promptly* shoots the bad guy with the gun, then plugs the other bad guy for good measure. And then he drops the sort of one liners Hollywood *wishes* they could write:
Bad Guy 1: “It’s fake! It’s fake!” (they used a fake pistol for the robbery)
Now Putin can bleat and whine about those awful, awful Ukrainians attacking Russia. Putin will be forced to respond/escalate.
That said, alternate take: this was done to *make* Russia retaliate, to throw more bodies into the war effort. Why might this be a good idea for the Ukrainians? The war so far has been so monstrously incompetent that it’s a safe bet that the retaliation for this will be even more filled with unthinkery and dumbassery, leaping into the fire without making the least bit of a plan. If the Ukrainians planned this far ahead, the Russians might dump a buttload of troops and equipment directly into a big woodchipper made of RPGs, Javelins, Stingers, NLAW and snipers.
More likely, thought, some Ukrainians just got pissed off and took their shot.
One where the sort of toys you can buy at WalMart or Best Buy can help you dial in your mortar gunnery:
Mortars aren’t my field of specialization, so I’m curious about the little cloth bags they’re tying to the mortar rounds. My *guess* is that these are smoke charges of some kind to help the drone spot where they’re landing?
Bonus: Now it can be told… the reason why Putin is in such a foul mood.
