One of the excuses given for the invasion and appropriation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea was that there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Sure, there are. It’s bizarre, but there are. But “you’ve got Nazis” is an odd excuse from Russia, given this…
The Nazis wanted to exterminate the bulk of the Russians, and turn a few survivors into serfs and “museum Fremen.” Why Russians would want to join the Hitler fan club… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s a novel way to destroy a main battle tank. Apparently filmed in Putin-occupied Crimea.
Color us all stunned…
AIS employees create fake accounts on social media and news websites, and then use those accounts to post thousands of comments and posts in accordance with the daily pro-Kremlin talking points, creating the illusion of widespread support for Vladimir Putin’s government.
In her suit, the 34-year-old Savchuk called the AIS a “troll factory,” a reference to the 30,000 comments produced daily by AIS employees.
Saw this diagram online a while back, thought it might be of interest to some.
I’ve never been a big fan of the Soviet Buran space shuttle. The Energia? Awesome heavy lifter. But the Buran itself… dumb, dumb, dumb. All it was was a terribly heavy, terribly expensive payload shroud. It would greatly reduce the payload potential of the Energia without adding anything meaningful. With the US Shuttle, at least you’re getting back the liquid rocket engines. With Buran? Meh.
Still, the Buran and its stablemates were an important part of space history. Thus, the way they have been allowed to rot is shocking.
Gentlemen… behold:
A sizable photo essay showing the status, as of a few days ago, of two Burans remaining in a Baikonur Cosmodrome hangar. Just… wow. And Gah.
Another tard who thinks that the way to making Russia prosperous is to threaten all his neighbors.
Putin’s saber-rattling seems to be paying off in spades.
If you’ve got a hankering to find out what the super-secret Lacrosse radar satellites look like, the Russians got you covered. A Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia used telescopes to take photos of several of these satellites, and then, rather unconventionally, released the images. The images were collected and analyzed, and posted in a PDF album:
An Album of Images of LACROSSE Radar Reconnaissance Satellites
Made by a 60 cm Adaptive Optics System
at the
G.S. Titov Altai Optical-Laser Center
The images are not spectacular… nobody will be making details models based off them. But you can get a sense of the overall configurations(s), as well as the size of the antennae; from that, an analyst could give you a good idea what the capabilities of the sensor systems are.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
Appears to be an S-300 (NATO: SA-10 “Grumble”) surface-to-air missile demonstrating what happens when the pneumatic launch system poots the rocket out of the launch tube, but the main rocket motor fails to ignite.
This is not exactly an unprecedented event:
If only *all* the Russian anti-aircraft missiles worked this way, maybe there’d be one more Malaysian 777 in the world…
Of course, it’s difficult to beat *THIS* classic:
You know, I can understand having an 80’s nostalgia. But come on, there are better aspects of that time to focus on. If Putin were to hang up some Debbie Gibson and Tiffany posters and listen to some Flock of Seagulls, maybe he’d get over his Soviet-style nuclear aggression.
In seriousness: there seems to be a whole lot of crazy over yonder.