This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war. It's still going on now, still killing probably 200-300 men a day, every day. Neither party wants to end it so, it's expected -by war nerds who follow it in detail- to go on until 2027..
Not that much has changed, it's still largely a war of attrition, though most killing is now done by FPV drone and artillery is now less than half of casualties. (at least for Russians it's true. Last I checked, <5% were by small arms).
There's a few new things, but one development itself is noteworthy. Both for what it says about the West, and for the prospects for the West. Geran-2 (Shahed-136, 'Dorito') is an originally Iranian drone, a very cheap
$50k marginal cost two-stroke piston engine powered kamikaze drone(or a particularly shitty cruise missile). Russians have modified it and are now producing it wholly indigenously, except for the engines that are imported from China. As you can see in this video, in which an infantry ammunition dump, probably near the front, gets hit by one.Russia is now producing and using up to 200 a day, with Zelensky saying it might go up to 500 a day. Why is this a big problem? It's been upgraded to fly high, so you can't take them down with machineguns, but need guided munitions of really big flak guns - 35mm, 40mm, 57mm- or use planes. When they flew at a low altitude, Ukraine used to shoot them down with .50 machineguns from trucks.
Now it's diving on targets from 3km, so unless there's a very brave gunner on the spot, a .50 won't help you. There are variants with a datalink that can have a target assigned while they're flying. Here's Ukrainians talking about a drone that has been 'circling the town for 90 minutes'. (endurance is 5 hours).
Despite Russians having telegraphed this move (increased production) since the very start, West doesn't seem to have prepared in the slightest. There's no new cheap missile to take them down, nobody is building cheap pulsejet drones that can catch up & blow them up. Nobody was far-sighted enough to modify a 100 high-performance trainers with gun pods and fire control to allow shooting these down. Even the thoroughly obsolete A-10 Warthogs would serve great as drone interceptors, hundreds of kilometers from the front, finally putting that cannon in use somewhere. Even though right now they depend on GPS systems for accuracy, no one's figured out a way to jam them either. I thought the West was supposed to be innovative? Russia engages in a series of dead simple moves, doesn't even keep it secret, and the West does.. nothing?
Ukraine kept shooting expensive, high-performance missiles like Piorun or Stinger ($300k) at these till it ran out. Total production of Piorun missile is only 1000 a year, Stingers.. are in very limited production. So.. what now?
As total Russian cruise/ballistic missile production of all types is only 20 a day (contrast with the 80 a year Tomahawk production), an additional 200 strikes with 90 kg of HE to a range of 1000 km matter quite a lot. Between informers, long-range recon drones and so on, this could make front-line logistics situation of Ukraine even worse and even complicate frontline drone supply, as with 200 a day, drone workshops that get snitched on can get bombed. And while a 90 kilogram bomb is pretty bad, it's not going to take down an entire block of buildings like the half-ton cruise missiles, so even workshops in apartments blocks could end up on the target list.
The prospects are ..bad . We know from WW2 that jet engines can be cheaper to produce than piston engines. In the eventuality that Chinese develop a copy of a cheap drone jet engine (2 kN should push it to ~600 kph), one that currently sells for $70k, or make something like this at a lower cost, Russians could end up having a huge stocks of fairly cheap and capable cruise missiles. Unless Europeans wake up and develop an affordable counter- that'd be enough to deter European response to a Baltic occupations, as the drones themselves would exhaust stocks of European air-air missiles in a week and the air war would be unwinnable as dismantling Russian air defences would take far longer than it'd take for Russia to blow up all military objects within 800 km of the border.
I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.
That's why they fly them high up now
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link