• MelastSBEnglish
      16·
      5 months ago

      Maybe the Klingons will now follow suit, so as to not get outdone by honorless petaQ

  • Nobody@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    5 months ago

    Zelenskyy: At oh eight hundred hours, Kyiv time, the Romulan Empire formally declared war against Russia. Their cloaking technology is already being integrated into our drones. So I lied, I cheated, I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But most damning thing of all, I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. The CIA was right about one thing. A guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of Ukraine, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it. Computer, erase that entire personal log.

  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    5 months ago

    Sounds like over 100 million dollars worth of damage. Doesn’t seem sustainable for them

    • VoroxpeteEnglish
      39·
      5 months ago

      To be vaguely credible for a moment, it is and it isn’t. On the one hand, Russia will have a very hard time replacing high end losses like Su-57s, Ka-52s and other hardware that relies heavily on modern electronics, materials, and manufacturing techniques. On the other hand, they don’t need any of those things to grind Ukraine down by sheer weight of numbers, armour, and artillery fire. The Ukraine conflict has basically devolved into WW1 trench warfare, which suits Russia prefectly. A slow, grinding, attritional war is one that plays entirely to their strengths. It doesn’t take a lot of modern to equipment to lay minefields and pre-range howitzers, so on the defence Russia can crush any Ukrainian push, and on the offence they can pay in blood for every mile.

      Ultimately, the loss of something like a Su-57 is largely meaningless to Russia, because they only ever existed as a propaganda tool in the first place. Even if the Su-57 was the ultramodern fighter Russia claims (its not), they only ever built six of the damn things. That’s a rounding error compared to the US stock of F-35s and F-22s. It’s no different than all the noise over deploying the Armata. Whether they did or didn’t was never going to matter because they’ve got something like twenty of the things in total, and that’s not enough to affect anything in a conflict of this scale. It’s all just propaganda and posturing.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.socialEnglish
        31·
        5 months ago

        It’s also just another note in a reality everyone needs to recognize.

        Fighter jets and tanks are the last war’s technology.

        • VoroxpeteEnglish
          21·
          5 months ago

          No, on that score I fundamentally disagree. Ukraine has used its limited pool of armor extremely effectively, and even with a small, outdated airforce they’ve been able to utterly neutralize Russia’s ability to bring its naval assets to bear. The reason air and armor haven’t mattered as much in this war is simply because one side can’t risk what they have, and the other side doesn’t know how to use what they have.

          Russia has not used these assets effectively because what they have is outdated, badly designed, and being operated by poorly trained crews with terrible doctrine. The reason Russian armor keeps getting popped by ATGMs isn’t because Javelin and NLAW are wunderwaffen, it’s because they’ll park a fucking T-72 in the middle of an open fucking field with no infantry support, crew all buttoned down so they have no visibility, and then act surprised when someone pops a rocket at it.

          The single most telling piece of footage from the initial invasion was a video of a Ukrainian squad firing an RPG at a Russian tank, then reloading and firing again from the exact same fucking position! There is no world where you should ever, EVER be able to do that. Against any competent military, the moment you let off that first rocket you should be running like fucking crazy because the entire area you are in is about to become a shooting range with you as the paper. There should have been multiple machine guns lighting up their position. Instead the Ukrainians are just calmly taking their time, reloading and popping another shot because they know the Russians have no infantry support and no situational awareness.

          Same with Russian air power. They’ve been losing expensive planes and top of the line helos to MANPADs. Not high end stationary air defense systems like Patriot. Fucking MANPADs. Because their pilots are dogshit.

          In an actual war with NATO, Russian artillery would be meaningless because every single gun would get deleted from the air the moment it fired (the US literally has radar systems that can detect the trajectory of incoming rounds and calculate exactly where they came from). But Ukraine can’t do that because they barely have an airforce. Russia can’t do that because they have an incompetent air force. So we get WW1 trench warfare. What neither side has is ground attack aircraft with a radar signature the size of a bumblebee. You throw that into the mix and suddenly you’re going to see just how important air power really is.