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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33767 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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I talked with an Ukrainian and he was unaware that Ukraine is still a net exporter of electricity.

Did we discuss here why Russian missiles target transformer stations but not turbine halls?

Substations are practically naked, rows upon rows of high-voltage transformers standing literally in an open field. A single drone or a piece of shrapnel can trigger a chain reaction. A turbine hall has a hardy shell of reinforced concrete.

Did we discuss here why Russian missiles target transformer stations but not turbine halls?

The simplest answer would seem to be that turbine halls are a lot harder to kill and the Russian Air Force just don't have the juice/JDAMs.

If they did, they wouldn't be needing to buy bomb drones from Iran.

Imagine being down so bad you have to buy your stuff from Iran - you can't be a serious country and need stuff from Iran

80 years ago, UK and USSR just occupied Iran, just because they could. Now UAE mediates peace talks. Times have changed.

Iran is a major regional power with a large population and generally decent military hardware.

I think your prejudices are out of date. Iran (and Turkey) have shown themselves to be serious countries at least in the production of some military hardware, and Russia has shown itself to be rather less serious.

As I recall, part of the theorizing was that it was because turbine halls were harder to knock out (easier to protect with static / overlapping defenses), and partly because of the theory that it was a deliberate attempt to make Ukraine deplete it's anti-air missile stocks on the missiles.

The Russian missile campaign was really a pretty rapid turn to a one-way UAV campaign, and some of those could get stopped with literal nets. Those would damage a building without knocking out what was inside.

Yeah, a small missile/UAV can't strike turbine hall but Russians have needed missiles, and turbine halls are low in count and so number of missiles isn't big too.

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