Notices by Infoseepage (infoseepage@mastodon.social)

@Geri Am aware. Speaking very loosely/figuratively about this all. I have endless anger and contempt towards those who have fed this widening gyre, abandoning decency and law and creating the conditions for large scale conflicts of the sort that know no theater. The UK should not have involved itself in Trump/Israel's folly.

@Geri Like, some guys cutting a fence and rolling up to a couple planes on scooters and spraying them with paint is "terrorism" but if a bunch of IRGC undercover operatives cut the same fence-line and went around blowing up military planes with satchel charges or something it wouldn't be.

@Geri What's especially funny is the UK goes around arresting grannies sitting on the ground with signs and people throwing paint and turns them into political prisoners of conscience through trials processes which are gross injustices but if Iran were to attack RAF Fairford, it legitimately wouldn't be "terrorism" because it would be one nation state launching an attack on a military target of another state engaged in acts of aggression against it.

I'm in the 5th largest city in Greece and I have at best 1-2 bars of 4G and the otherwise perfectly modern 6 story apartment building I'm staying at has a Zyxel DSL connection that isn't working. Contrast that with Serbia where a lot of the places I was staying at in completely random ass places in the country had fiber internet.

@Lydie Nope, and the handful of them in Ukrainian hands haven't done very well against Russia.

@Lydie For a tank to be effective in the future, I think it's going to need to be closely supported by some sort of anti drone outrider vehicles capable of shooting the things out of the sky. Alternatively, some close-in fly swatter of a system with an auto-turret shotgun to address fpv drones specifically. The later doesn't really address attacks from high up or the usefulness of spotter drones in zeroing in artillery.

@Lydie They were never designed for man portable top attack systems and the increasing use of IEDs and mines also presented challenges to legacy designs. No tank in the world today was designed to meet the challenge of drones which can fly up and bite them in the ass repeatedly.

@Lydie As the cold war progressed, you had the addition of of additional protective measures, including multiple generations of composite and explosive reactive armor, all bolted atop a basic framework that was never designed from the ground up with these things in mind. No tank in the world today was designed imagining that the munition could come at them from any direction.

@Lydie Thing about any tank is that they're all an exercise in compromise and you've got to decide on armor thicknesses and angles against a whole host of competing facts relating to weight, engine performance, etc.

Most tanks front load their armor to try and resist hits from other tanks, recoilless rifles, rocket repelled grenades, etc.

@Lydie The one in the video has the back right plate almost fully detached and dangling, so the video released is probably of a follow-up drone attack after the tank was already damaged at least once.

@Lydie Oh, I think the number you quoted is the number that they struck in a day. Sounds like Russia tried a big motorized push with as many as 10 vehicles in individual convoys and several dozen of them suffered repeat drone strikes. I noticed in the video that the tank being shown has extensive hedgehog spike as well as plates to try and shield its tracks. A tank that suffers track damage in such an environment is going to get slammed over and over again by drones and zeroed in by artillery.

@Lydie I think the story here isn't that. Ukraine is doing anything new, it's that a Russian tank equipped with an active protection system that is supposed to shoot down drones failed to do so. Frankly, I think if tanks as a class are going to have any future, they're going to need to have highly effective anti-drone systems, probably fully automated shotgun turrets and extensive sensor systems to find, track and shoot the things out of the air.

@hkz Those Rifa caps are infamous.

This was my train. You can see the tunnel through the hill in the far background.

@Lydie They've had shells attached to overcranked fpv drones for a long time too. How are they managing to find targets, though? Those things have limited range and Russia hasn't been throwing many tanks right to the front. You hear things about them being used more like mobile artillery than to support infantry pushes.

Is there video? Are they getting them in under the turret armor such that the detonation doesn't so much as penetrate the armor as cause a turret toss?

Had lunch in Platamon and then walked the whole way to the train station. Would have taken a taxi, but none were available. Passed an old WW2 pillbox guarding the rails. Now at the modern station with 5 minutes to spare.

@Lydie I don't know how that's a significant change. Some of the earliest uses of drones in the conflict was to take consumer level drones and add a release mechanism to drop ood anti tank grenades and mortar shells, usually triggered by something already built into the drones like the indicator light. I've pretty much lost count of how many trucks and apcs and tanks I've seen described this way. One of the more effective ways to destroy tanks was to find one with an open top hatch and bullseye!

Walking into town on the old railway line, which is a nice level grade which makes for easier walking than the road. The newer one goes through a tunnel right through the hill Platamon castle is built upon. The geography is very constrained in this area (with the mountain range of Mount Olympus forcing everything close to the coast), with the main route from Macedonian into Thessaly and southern Greece passing right by the hill.

@rikefranke Problem is Russia has started using jet powered drones precisely to make interception by such cheap interceptors unfeasible. The speed boost probably helps a bit, but I think I was hearing the jet drones move about twice as fast as this class of interceptor. Limited numbers for now, but jet-based drones might be a big part of Russia's plans to defeat Ukraine's interception strategies.

Still waiting to download pics from my phone of Platamon castle. I think I'm going to do a bit of a write-up on this one, as it has some interesting design aspects not typically seen in castles in the domains of former Ottoman empire. I'm heading on to Larissa, capital of Thessaly, tomorrow. It has connecting trains to Athens - one too early and one too late. I'm not up for either at the moment, so going to try for a midday train to Larissa, stay the weekend and head on to Athens maybe Monday.