Mopologist William Schryver Continues His Descent Into Madness

[Gadianton]

incredibly lethal version that employs ~180,000 tungsten carbide balls, detonated above target

that's allowed but not cluster bombs? I don't care, Russia deserves what they get, just curious.

[Kishkumen]

I wonder how quickly that bridge will be repaired. Russia is already spread so thin.

[Bond]

I wonder how quickly that bridge will be repaired. Russia is already spread so thin.

I imagine they'll try to get it fixed pretty quick but "try" is doing some heaving lifting in this sentence.

[Physics Guy]

There are no conventions banning the use of weapons for being deadly per se. It would be pointless because anyone who tries to kill other people has already crossed that line. Weapons that people try to ban are ones that seem likely to cause casualties to civilians out of proportion to any military effectiveness. One can reasonably hope to get states to stop using them because there are other weapons that would be just as effective in winning wars, anyway.

Cluster munitions are bad first of all because the individual bomblets that get released from the main weapon are not aimed in any way. They just fly out in all directions over a wide area. I'm not sure how different they really are in this respect from the fragments from ordinary artillery shells, but cluster bombs are definitely in the opposite direction from precision-guided munitions.

The other problem with cluster bombs seems to be that a significant proportion of them usually fail to detonate. This is probably an inherent problem. The bomblets in the cluster are launched from the main weapon in an initial explosion that has to be pretty powerful to spread them over a wide radius. Detonation mechanisms can be damaged by explosions. Anyway the result is that cluster bombs tend to leave a lot of live bombs spread around the landscape for years after the conflict. Those unexploded bomblets didn't help to win the war at all, but they can keep on killing civilians years later.

Filling missiles or artillery shells full of a lot of heavy little balls is an old idea. The oldest version was grapeshot, which was just the concept of a shotgun scaled up. Henry Shrapnel came up with the idea of replacing solid cannon balls with hollow steel shells full of lead balls, plus an explosive charge that would burst the shell and spray out the little balls.

The lead balls part turned out mostly to be a waste of time. Just a hollow shell filled with explosive will break up into lots of small fragments that fly a long way and kill people. So actual shrapnel hasn't been used much in war, but Shrapnel's name has become attached in common speech to high-velocity shell fragments. The idea of filling projectiles with lots of extra little projectiles does keep coming back, though.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Himars w/tungsten balls:

https://youtu.be/NMPscap0_us

I can’t even. It fills me with dread just watching the video.

- Doc

[DrW]

Himars w/tungsten balls:

https://youtu.be/NMPscap0_us
- Doc

While Ukraine gets HIMARS ammunition with tungsten carbide shot from their allies, the Russians have purchased Shahed-136 drones from theirs (the Iranians). The Iranian defense manufacturer HESA has delivered dozens of these suicide drones to the Russian Army in Ukraine. However, things have not gone as planned.

Half of Russia's Iranian-made drones have been destroyed by Ukrainian military forces, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said Thursday. "From September 30 to October 6, the Defense Forces of Ukraine destroyed 24 Shahed-136 kamikaze drones," the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a Telegram post.

When used in actual combat, the Ukrainian air defense forces shot down half of the Shahed’s and the remaining drones mostly missed their targets.

When the Russian military called Iran to complain about the failure of most of the weapons, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani responded “It was the will of Allah - you cannot expect the same performance when the drone is used by infidels”.

Apparently, Russian Orthodox inanimate object blessing rituals and incantations don't work on Islamic equipment.

In any case, further purchases of the Shahed-136 have been suspended indefinitely.

In other religious news, the Russian Orthodox Church has arranged it so that those Russians killed in Ukraine will have their sins forgiven. This development will no doubt be an extra incentive aiding in the severely lagging mobilization effort.
_______________________

While was widely believed early on that the American anti-radiation HARM missiles could not be mated with the Russian MiG 29 jet hard points and fire control, the Ukrainians have found a way. There are several videos of Ukrainian MiG pilots targeting Russian AA radars with HARM missiles. This is an important first step to the Ukrainian forces eventually gaining air supremacy in the Ukraine war battlespace.

The search string < MiG 29 HARM missile video> should bring up several for anyone interested.

[dantana]

What seems settling in all of this is that we now see that Russia's vaunted military isn't as fearsome as listed.

What is settling is DrW's and other's arguments for why Russia won't use nukes.

What is also settling is that pundits say Russia has many safeguards in place to prevent a rogue dictator from being the only one with a firing button.

What is unsettling is that Putin is cornered.

What is unsettling is that Putin has been in power long enough to replace those safeguards with cronies. Kinda like what Trump attempted to do in recent history.

[DrW]

Yes! Number 17 is indeed labeled 'military dolphins'.

The Russians seem dead serious about this. The BBC and other media have reported on the militarized cetaceans of the Black and Baltic Seas. The passage below from a 2019 article in Quartz indicates that dolphin operatives may have a sense of morality superior to that of the Russian invaders in Ukraine.

https://qz.com/1609635/the-beluga-whale ... y-animals/

Soviet Russia reportedly trained dolphins in a similar manner at a facility in Crimea on the Black Sea. In 2000, the BBC reported that many of these dolphins were sold to Iran, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The facility was re-opened by the Ukrainian Navy in 2012, but since the Russian annexation in 2014 has been back in the hands of the Russian Navy (although Ukrainian sources claim that the dolphins have since starved, having refused to accept food from Russian handlers.)

Below: Russian-trained Beluga whale spy breaks cover to Norwegian fishermen. Could this be an attempt to defect?

Norwegian fishermen were reportedly approached recently by a beluga whale wearing a Russian harness, complete with GoPro camera holder, sparking speculation that the animal had been trained to gather intelligence by the Russian Navy. While this theory has not been confirmed, it is entirely plausible: armed forces around the world have a long and disturbing history of exploiting marine mammals.

[Moksha]

Russia has fired missiles at Kyiv.




Potentially, this could be a rallying event for pro-Putin forces in Cedar City.

[DrW]

Earlier this week Putin wasted a significant portion of his dwindling supply of Russia's 'sorta smart' missiles on an indiscriminate and ineffectual revenge attack on civilian targets in several cities in Ukraine. Russians wasted more than 80 missiles just to make themselves feel better as their Army continues to lose ground and Putin's bridge gets blown up as a birthday present.

Putin, whose stated goal in attacking was the de-Nazification of Ukraine, is himself acting more and more like a Nazi as the war progresses. Yesterday's rage attack against Ukrainian cities was Hitleresque, to say the least.

In 1940, Britain had the capacity to outpace Germany in aircraft production. However, the near-nightly German bombing of military targets in the south and west of England was effective and a growing problem in that it severely hampered RAF air operations. British pilots whose aircraft were shot down over Engeland were often able to parachute to safety so the problem eventually became a lack of airplanes for the recovered pilots to fly.

Keenly aware of this, Churchill took clever advantage of a German Air Force mistake on August 24 of 1940 in which 4 lost and disoriented night bombers unloaded their weapons on what turned out to be a church and residential area on the outskirts of London. That was all Churchill needed. He now had a "good reason" to send British bombers to Berlin in response, and did so. That first air raid surprised and shocked the good citizens of Berlin who apparently felt that the Luftwaffe would protect them. Hitler was advised of the outcry in the heart of Germany and was not happy.

In his anger, Hitler decided to divert his bombers from concentrating on military (RAF) targets (airplane factories, airfields, and even coastal radar stations) in the south of England. Instead, he ordered a sustained revenge bombing of London.

Churchill had outplayed Hitler, and the rest is history. The respite from the German constant bombing took the pressure off, allowing the RAF to regroup, build more aircraft, save its early warning coastal radars, redeploy its assets, and eventually win the Battle of Britain.

Think what the Russian Army could have accomplished in the field with 80 properly targeted cruise missiles against Ukrainian Army military targets.

Some observers have taken this latest hissy-fit as a strong indication that Putin knows he has lost the ground war in the four provinces he annexed and is becoming more irrational as a consequence. Why else would he waste some 83 missiles on militarily inconsequential civilian targets?

If Putin felt that a terror bombing might help his cause, he was mistaken. Reports back from Ukraine today indicate that the population there is more resolute than ever that the "Orcs" must be defeated at all costs.