Apparently Oryx will no longer continue counting. The task seems unfortunately eating deeply into his well being without proper appreciation. I wish him well in his future endeavour.
If you say so. He's said some horrific things in the past. I certainly have as well in private, but I certainly wouldn't if I had a big platform on Twitter. It's just not a good look to make fun of Russians and mock their dead.
I hope the "chickens come home to roost" quite frankly, and all those who said horrible stuff about each other, find their comments catch up to them in their professional lives. That's the only way people will have a chance to learn to stop being scumbags to each other.
Eh, the trade in opportunity cost is probably not worth it. Adding anything on the drone itself lowers the flight endurance and alters the flight characteristics. It might be fine to strap random things like an
, but that's because one can get away a lot more on the ground. It is not fine when the "automatic" shotgun (Saiga-12 is not fully automatic) one tries to strap is the same weight as the drone they are trying to fly (at least order-of-magnitude-wise) and still trying to fly it for however long.
This isn't ArmA. You can't just
attachTo
arbitrary things to a drone and still expect it to work as intended.
Well, ARMA can model things decently well if you want it to. You can certainly add a mod that makes it take an hour to add a Machine Gun to a drone, and consequently reduce the drone's loiter time and max altitude.
The summary of footage I can see is Ukrainians using quadrotors and up-close combat, like point-blank range anti-tank and grenades, while Russians use larger Lancets, attack helicopters, artillery, and so-on. In fact I haven't really even seen many sniper videos from the Ukrainians lately.
So my thinking is, the Russians are much more lethal than the Ukrainians long range, but once up close the Ukrainians hold an advantage.
This video would be further proof of that.
My though process is, if the Russians and the Ukrainians both know UKR is dangerous close up and RUS is dangerous far away, that would explain the constant pulling back from the Russians as well as the advancing despite all odds behavior of the Ukrainians, as each tries to position themselves where they're most lethal.
In this case, it could be that the Russians just lacked the training or discipline to pull back fast enough and got caught out.
I do agree though that with how this particular video was pushed, something like this probably isn't commonplace.
Ukraine has published Sniper videos in the past. There are several reasons for why available footage is the way it is.
1. Sniper footage is pretty rare because 99% of Sniper work is extremely boring. So it's hard to get footage for a rather specialized unit who's general work is even more boring than a grunt's typical day.
2. The reason for discrepancy, is because Ukraine is generally tighter on OPSEC. This is why so many of their videos have higher production value. This is also why you tend to see more videos in cases like Battle of Bakhmut. As discipline and C2 breaks down, OPSEC breaks down as well.
By contrast, Russia is much more liberal with how videos gets published. I don't know if Russian MoD simply doesn't care as much about OPSEC or whether it simply cannot control its troops as well as Ukraine does in this regard. One can only hope that the troops are all smart enough to use airplane mode when they're on the front.
3. There is a chronic case of over-interpretation of available footage. I keep saying this, but we need to be really careful about what takeaways we make from available footage. It is highly selective.
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I've seen a discussion center around how Ukraine lacks SHORAD and they shouldn't be advancing without air coverage. Anyway, so I talked to a friend of a friend who was in ADA this weekend.
He told me that there simply aren't any good answers that he can think of, that would sufficiently cover a column advancing on a road, from FPV drones and Lancets like we've seen in the past two weeks.
Air defense, believe it or not, is actually a pretty complex mission and no NATO force has ever had to operate in an environment where airspace is either extremely heavily contested or completely absent, and when they are facing a distinct fires disadvantage. Trying to provide air cover to a static position, let alone covering an offensive in such an environment is not an easy task.
I neglected to ask if US has any equivalent to Russian EW units and who I should talk to about that, perhaps for the next time.
Anyway, just thought I should add this snippet as I've seen the SHORAD discussion pop-up. Even if you had hundreds of Gepards, by no means are you guaranteed to sufficiently protect your assets from FPV drones and Lancets. So don't think it's that simple or that Ukrainians are stupid.