Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine - Mark IV: The Partitioning of Discussion

[Corn Syrup Connoisseur]

The germans are already building new tanks

Slight correction here, Germans haven't build new tank hulls in decades. They have just been upgrading older variant Leopard 2s. I couldn't find it, but there exists a nice chart to show where and which variant all the ~3000 ever produced hulls ended up as. Of course Russians have also been doing the same thing with giant stockpile of tank hulls Soviet Union left behind, but they never fully abandoned new production so they still have the facilities, and more importantly, the skills left.

I'm quite sceptical of the Panther KF51 project. After Rheinmetall not producing brand new shit for decades, they now suddenly have claimed to be able to cheaply set up a new factory in Ukraine that will shit out 400 tanks annually. I await to see if it ever ends up in production. Hungary put only €300 million into the project, which is pocket change for this sort of endeavor.

Actually, after looking up more on Hungarian deal, I noticed something interesting.

The hull is "based on" an existing Leopard 2 recovery chassis. Will these even be new production or yet another conversion?

Even the gun will be same old 120mm caliber.

If the chassis end up not being new production, isn't this practically just yet another Leopard 2 variant?
In the case they are existing recovery vehicles, bravo for western military industry for getting rid of already critically low amount of engineering vehicles.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

If I had to bet, I'd rather put my money on some kind of portable, low power radar / ESM to reliably - and in time - detect small drones. Targeting and killing them with a small caliber machine gun should be no problem once you know exactly where they are.
(But I also saw a vid about some kind of auto-shotgun on a mount that was proposed for exactly this purpose)

My favorite is that one experimental Soviet weapon 1K17 Szhatie made for disabling the electronics and optics on missiles and aircraft. 30 kg of rubies makes a badass laser that fucks shit up. Problem is you need 30 kg of rubies. Didn't make sense back then, but a laser now would fuck up a drone like nothing else. Maybe could even amplify it to fry sensitive bits and make it crash/uncontrollable.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

My favorite is that one experimental Soviet weapon 1K17 Szhatie made for disabling the electronics and optics on missiles and aircraft. 30 kg of rubies makes a badass laser that fucks shit up. Problem is you need 30 kg of rubies. Didn't make sense back then, but a laser now would fuck up a drone like nothing else. Maybe could even amplify it to fry sensitive bits and make it crash/uncontrollable.

It's not easy to hit a drone in the sky with a laser.

 

[OutInTheRain]

With tanks, they have to used in a certain way. Say 3 per 100m front with a company of infantry (100+ soldiers) pepper-potting up. At the same time, you need artillery superiority and air superiority.

Tanks are really good at putting a "Fuck you and the guy next to you" round through a window, a kilometer away. That's why they saw a resurgence in Afghanistan.

"Sure you can shoot through a mud hut window. But my tank can shoot back...and not destroy a grid square like the artillery we paid too much for."

A lone tank trundling through an open field is a massive target. Even a half dozen without the skies opening up with hellfire is still an open target. It takes a lot of firepower to punch a hole through a defensive line, and frankly the hohols just haven't brought it bare. Instead they seem to enjoy vaporizing troops and equipment with the aid of Russian artillery.

 

[The Ugly One]

As a crude analogy, combat equipment is rock-paper-scissors. Paper doesn't make rock obsolete, because if you just stop making rock, I just play scissors every time and will win. There are lots of things that can defeat tanks, and always have been. But think about what happens if you don't have tanks.

If you don't have tanks, then you don't have anything that can effectively support infantry attacks, because you need something that can punch holes in concrete walls from 1000+m, is fast enough to keep up with everything else, and can't be taken out by small arms fire. That something is a tank. If you don't have tanks, you basically cannot go on attack. You might be able to win a defensive war where you just have to wait out the invader, but you'll never go on offense.

 

[Betonhaus]

It's not easy to hit a drone in the sky with a laser.

A laser operates at the speed of light. If we have the technology to pinpoint a planet in a part of the night sky the size of a postage stamp we have the technology to track and focus on a drone

 

[Ashkenazi Porn Actress]

the breaking of the wall was one of the first large gathering of the reddit soyboy types.

No suprise, residents of West Berlin were exempt from the draft so every leftoid draft dodger moved there. The other half were probably glowies working for some sort of intel agency.

"An illegitimate Soviet puppet state that had to use lethal force to keep people from leaving was the real Germany" was not something I expected from this thread.

Itt's still an incontrovertible fact that what would become West Germany was subject to a program of radical political transformation ("reeducation") and had every single piece of it's society, from churches to unions to all of it's media, rebuilt in the image of the New Dealers often with the direct involvement of radical emigrees and American organisations (i.e. German unions being remade with the help of the AFL-CIO).
There is a reason why the American foreign policy establishment is obsessed with "remaking" countries they subjugate in the same manner (cf. Iraq or the fantasies involving a conquered Russia) and avoid repeating the "mistakes" of Japan (where MacArthur, to his eternal credit told the reeducators to pound sand).

 

[Gremperor]

I don't really get the whole setting yourself on fire to protest someone/something you don't like. I mean, if you hate me, chances are I don't like you too much either. If you proceed to set yourself on fire, I'm not really going to have have any reaction beyond "well, I guess that solves that problem."

It's basically just a cheap and easy way to create a self made martyr to rally people around.
Bonus points for the sympathy your cause gets from nosy foreigners.

 

[PrimeRadiant]

A laser operates at the speed of light. If we have the technology to pinpoint a planet in a part of the night sky the size of a postage stamp we have the technology to track and focus on a drone

the planet isnt moving fast relative to the observer. a drone is

 

[Male Idiot]

The smaller cannon was likely made to keep the Hungarian Leopard 2s guns and it on the same shell type for logistics.

I guess in 20 years when the Leopards are relegated to training duty they can gwt the bigger gun. I hope they aren't throwing the old T-70s out.

 

[The Ugly One]

the planet isnt moving fast relative to the observer. a drone is

The technology to accurately point at things that are going fast has been around for decades. The USAF successfully tested a laser to shoot down ballistic missiles, which go at around Mach 20, around 15 years ago.

 

[Susanna]

the planet isnt moving fast relative to the observer. a drone is

The impressive thing in astronomy is the precision, not the speed.

In this case, I don't think precision is necessary. Quadcopters don't have the lift capacity to be properly radiation hardened, especially not if you also want them to carry a shaped charge explosive, so your anti-drone laser could probably operate on a "shotgun" principle. If you can hit a cone encompassing the drone, I imagine it'll go down. And that should be pretty easy, a laser is very heavy but it will be an easily centered load, so your turret should be able to move much more rapidly than remote gun platform turrets normally do. No recoil etc.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

the planet isnt moving fast relative to the observer. a drone is

Sigh, I started another dumb mass debate didn't I.

Oh what the hell, war news is slow.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

It's not easy to hit a drone in the sky with a laser.

Tank Encyclopedia reports this could disable a helicopter at 5 miles, probably by warping the rotors. At 6 miles it knocks out the sensors. Lasers, especially within an atmosphere, grow more diffuse at a distance so there's going to be a sweet spot between laser capability and range so the cone is probably fairly spread out at 6 miles and anything beyond that is a crapshoot/luck. Since it fires as a strobe, you sweep the direction you need and a bunch of drones start malfunctioning. You probably won't take them out unless they're super close but fucking up the sensors is good enough and hitting it with a laser tells your guys where it is.

Problem is I got one figure wrong--the 30 kg of rubies seems to be per laser tube so 360 kg of rubies per tank. It also can lay down a smokescreen so this could make the most badass mobile light show on the planet.

 

[PrimeRadiant]

The technology to accurately point at things that are going fast has been around for decades. The USAF successfully tested a laser to shoot down ballistic missiles, which go at around Mach 20, around 15 years ago.

the issue isnt whether or not its possible, the issue is whether the technology is reliable and economical enough to deploy on an industrial scale.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

360 kg of rubies per tank

Man, you just KNOW this shit is going to be mobility-killed and then dragged back to enemy lines to be cracked open like a treasure chest full of pirate booty. A third of a ton of rubies! Gemstones lad, precious gemstones! Yarrrr!

 

[Corn Syrup Connoisseur]

Long past are the days laughing about muh "Russian cope cages"

https://archive.is/uZdVI

It’s not impossible to defend an M-1 from FPV drones. The Ukrainians have up-armored most of their tanks, adding cages, slats and reactive armor as necessary to mitigate the particular weaknesses of particular tank types.

The quickest fix for the M-1s are cages that, bolted to the side and turret top, would detonate FPVs centimeters from the tanks’ hulls. Silveira wrote that he doesn’t expect the Ukrainians to add reactive armor the M-1s until the weather is drier. A full application of reactive armor can add tons of weight to a tank and risk miring on muddy winter terrain.

 

[The Ugly One]

the issue isnt whether or not its possible, the issue is whether the technology is reliable and economical enough to deploy on an industrial scale.

Yes, this technology has been around since the 1980s. Pointing at things that aren't going supersonic speeds is trivial.

 

[IamnottheNSA]

Long past are the days laughing about muh "Russian cope cages"

I believe the laughs died down when people saw how effective they are against drone attacks. Hell, other armies (IDF for example) are now using them, so they've gotta be at least somewhat effective, right?

 

[Meh123]

A laser operates at the speed of light. If we have the technology to pinpoint a planet in a part of the night sky the size of a postage stamp we have the technology to track and focus on a drone

the planet isnt moving fast relative to the observer. a drone is

The technology to accurately point at things that are going fast has been around for decades. The USAF successfully tested a laser to shoot down ballistic missiles, which go at around Mach 20, around 15 years ago.

The problem with lasers is not aiming it, the problem is supplying it with enough power to be destructive at appreciable range.
There are ship/plane borne experimental variants, but a mobile one like on a tracked or wheeled vehicle is problem. I won't even mention man portable...
And since drones are everywhere, the counter have to be light and cheap enough to be everywhere too.

At this point, EW is cheaper and easier than directed energy weapons.
That's why I think - at least short term - EW and simple projectile based anti-drone guns would be more practical.

The current problem is still reliably detecting the fuckers without having to carry around a smaller radar station.
They emit very specific sound that could be tracked for approximate bearing, and they also emit RF signals that could be used. For pinpoint accuracy.. idk, visual or thermal + machine vision.