Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
5 (possibly 6) Destroyers being built in the same drydock in Dalian https://twitter.com/HenriKenhmann/status/1524705693231890432?cxt=HHwWgIDSgf7v66gqAAAA
China's shipbuilding is something else
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On those ships (Freedom class): the engines don't work. The entire point of the ships was they had diesels for efficiency and turbines for high speed, both driving the same pumpjets. But the transmissions just don't work, they can't run the pumpjets from the turbines, and they're permanently stuck in low-speed cruise mode.
They can't fix them, so they'd have to replace the transmissions. But in order to do that they'd have to cut the whole ship in half and rebuild it, since it's too highly integrated. So they're scrapping them instead.
The absolute stupidest part about all of this is that they're still building more of them. So even though they're withdrawing all the current 3 year old ships from service, they're replacing them with the same ship. At least the new ones should have working transmissions, though.
(I think this only applies to surface combatant variants, though. The anti-sub package just doesn't work at all, and none of the new ships are anti-sub.)
Zumwalt is still the funniest. It was supposed to be this crazy futuristic stealth ship with railguns driven from an insanely high-power gas turbine system. The railguns didn't work. The laser weapons didn't work. The power pack that was supposed to power everything didn't work. The anti-radar coating didn't work. They put smart guns with guided projectiles on the ship instead of the railguns. They didn't work, and so they never made any ammo. So the Navy still operates two stealth gun destroyers with no gun and no stealth.
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To be fair, the USSR did the same shit.
My current favorite ship concept is the Bora- (nee Sivuch-) class missile hover-corvette. Just a mad ship, it's a catamaran with retractable hovercraft skirts between the hulls. It can cruise at low speed on diesels, or it can lower the skirts, raise itself out the of water with blowers, and deploy auxiliary turbine-powered propellers into the water to motor at 100 km/h.
Or at least it could if it worked. They built two of them, 10 years apart, and they've been sitting basically derelict in Sevastopol since. There is a total of THREE SECONDS of video, and no photos, of Sivuch running at full steam. Which it apparently did once, during trials, in the 80s.
It's a cool three seconds, though: https://youtu.be/6i-dx8uD7FU?t=16
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They never did the crazy thing the US did with the F-35 where they started up a whole production line of prototype fighters, true. Mostly they just built one or two and kept them in paper service for decades (Sivuch hover corvette, Sokol and Uragan hydroplane boats, the Ekranoplanes, etc.)
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My Favourite is their giant anti-sub Erkanoplans (basically a hovercraft that uses wings rather than propellers to form ground effect) which apparently had an internal vibration so intense it disintergrated the tiny bones in the crew's ears.
There was also the awkward thing where they replaced every heavy weapon in their army in every service with a recoiless rifle, from battleship guns to mortars to anti-tank aircraft, but in their defence the people responsible (Tukachevsky mostly) got purged hard for their failure.)
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I know, right? I heard it was some sort of wear/maintenance issue, though. They worked in trials, but just continuously broke down in operation. The modular weapons packages might have been another "finish it later" type of thing like the F-35, though.
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Anyone else think the US is rapidly becoming a paper tiger?
The increasing frequency of overpriced wunderwaffen to try and replace their aging hardware would seem to indicate, but really who knows.