September 12th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
September 13th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
September 14th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
No updates on Thursdays.
September 16th's mini-update is here, because western journalists are bad at their jobs. Here's the in-thread comment.
Today and tomorrow I'm gonna be doing some prep as I'm moving in a few weeks. The updates will continue as planned on Monday.
:Care-Comrade: to you all.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the “buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!” people.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
A thing that struck me as weird about that narrative (russia only has 50 hypersonic missiles because of chip shortages)is that you don't need that advanced chip technology on the hypersonic missile. The calculations are pretty simple in flight, the complicated part is the engineering of the missile. Working around the skin of the missile getting super hot, making sure the materials can handle buffeting and heat etc. But even then, I'm sure Russia has more than 50 computers that can run autocad.
idk. brain things.
deleted by creator
From the teardowns I saw on NYT , a lot of their communications stuff is uniform across a wide variety of platforms (which is a good thing for them from a material shortage standpoint), and the hardware required to make millisecond-level flight controls based on that is not going to be ITAR controlled at all. From this it looks like you can expect the same satnav hardware in hypersonic missiles, their HIMARS equivalents, and their attack helicopters, and from the components I saw it's largely consumer/automotive grade stuff too. Even if the chips on those boards are coming from western sources/companies right now, it's not unthinkable that direct replacements for that sort of stuff could be coming from China.
*one caveat to this is that I'm talking about making course corrections based on a pre-configured trajectory vs satnav. Hitting a moving target based on a radar signature is a much different animal, and hasn't been what the russians demonstrated so far.
(after writing this, I feel like the tone may look hostile? I don't mean to be, I just enjoy talking about this stuff. You're all good)
Not to claim any sort of expertise here, and we're also talking about military stuff that's under wraps. No posting of blueprints of kalibr missiles to win online arguments haha.
I remember online discussions of the dongfeng and the kalibr missiles. and people making this point. Friction from the air heats up the skin of the missile, causing problems with comms and detection, as well as limiting the materials used on the surface. Which, yes, is definitely a real thing that happens. However, I always felt that western observer's assumption that this was insurmountable was wrong. Bafflingly so.
Not that it's trivial to work around, but I always felt like it could be worked around in a number of ways.
Based on what early reporting was saying about these design issues, I think western observers assumed a combination of gyros and accelerometers with detailed terrain maps for striking stationary targets. idk what they assumed for moving targets (the armchair generals just kind of assumed that a dongfeng couldn't hit a moving target like an aircraft carrier).
We know now that kalibrs are indeed functional weapons that can hit things, and also go very fast. So there is clearly some sort of solution at play. Given the cheapness and accuracy of modern consumer grade GPS tech (especially since kalibr missiles aren't riding in elevators), and that the solutions I've listed don't rely on particularly precise technology or dense computing, and that a hypersonic cruise missile is about as fast as the fastest air defence missiles (uh, I can expound on this point if you want), I think that kalibr isn't reliant on particularly fast computing in the missile.
I also think that "the west" has neglected both cruise missile and strategic AA technology, which tbf is fine for the wars they fight.
Westoids don't know that China has a solid chip manufacturing industry which has reached 7nm recently. So, only one gen behind it's peers and still fast enough for modern computing.
For real. A Raspberry Pi 4B would be overkill for the task. In most cases, the computers applied in aerospace are pretty low tech. You don't want the latest bleeding edge 7 nanometer chips in these things. You want simple, dumb, resilient microcontrollers which have been cranked out on the same process for 20 years, who's physical limitations and failure modes are well understood. PID controllers work like fucking magic, but they are relatively simple computer programs which can be implemented in less than a kilobyte of instructions if necessary.
reminds me of that one anecdote from raytheon or somewhere where their missile avionics guys had a memory leak and instead of debugging it they just figured out how much was gonna be leaked over the flight time of the missile, doubled it, and stuck approximately that much more ram in
hehe yeah, I've coded my own PID controllers for flight stabilisers before. Good fun. I get bored tuning them though.