Look what the Russian army found in the back of the cupboard: a Maxim machine gun (first in service in 1886).
That could be the “independent militia” in the areas Russia wants to contest which I’ve heard are armed with the stuff too old for the Russians.
Maybe.
To be fair, I saw a video of the Ukrainians test-firing a Maxim too.
I would jokingly call that a Donbass technical, but really it’s not very technical at all.
Probably not. There’s just so much more energy stored in nuclear bonds than there are in chemical bonds that you can’t get anywhere near the same energy density. For reference, the energy density of enriched uranium is 76 000 000 Megajoules per kilo, whereas TNT is about 4.6 (figures seem to vary, but you get the idea). I doubt that there’s a practical way around this. As always, there is a relevant xkcd:
Edit: That’ll teach me to read the thread before I post. Basically, what Dr.Strangelove said.
In Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar: In the Balance aliens attack Earth in the middle of WWII. Early on the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine manages to place an 800mm railroad gun within range of an alien enclave and fire a shell. Not having gun artillery for over 10,000 years the alien defense officer cooly launches anti-missiles at it – then watches in dismay as the round keeps right on coming to destroy one of their space ships.
The Germans get another shell off and destroy a second ship but before the third, counter battery missiles destroy the gun and its crew.
One of my favorite parts of the books
Already done. See “mother of all bombs” (US) and “father of all bombs”(USSR/Russia). The MOAB is supposed to be around 11 tons TNT and the FOAB 44 tons TNT. Compare that to the Davy Crockett tactical nuke with a yield of either 10 tons or 20 tons depending on the exact warhead used.
In the end there’s only so much chemical energy a solid substance can contain before reaching the point where it would completely vaporize into individual atoms. That was what was so astonishing about radium when it was first discovered: a simple measurement showed that each week it released an amount of energy sufficient to vaporize an equal mass of any known substance. It didn’t seem possible for that much energy to be contained in the radium, to the point where energy being created out of nothing was no less fantastic than any other hypothesis.
The Soviets should have left Shore Batteries. I can’t imagine a undefended costal city in that region.
It’s old artillery but a shell could still heavily damage a ship. Electronic defenses would be useless.
Yesss.
But what does it matter if Ukraine wins militarily if its civilians are all dead?
Winning or losing isn’t determined by how many people are killed, it’s determined by who ends up in control of the country once the killing ends.
The US killed a hell of a lot more Vietnamese than North Vietnam killed Americans, but that didn’t matter; in the end, North Vietnam won.
Good question. It’s like the saying about how the operation was a success but the patient died.
If Ukraine is decimated, but wins militarily, there will be plane loads of western cash to help them rebuild.
If Ukraine is decimated, but loses militarily and is absorbed by Russia, they’re never getting significantly rebuilt. Russia is broke, and what money it has, certainly won’t be going to those ungrateful Ukrainian bastards.
One other question about a small-yield nuke, even in the 10 ton range. I assume that it would still have most of the characteristics of a larger one (like the double flash, depending on the time between emissions) and that it could be spotted if the line of sight was right with our current surveillance tech. Which of course means we’d know right away that it not being a nuke is a lie. Or am I wrong about that?
Because they’re not all dead. Not even remotely close.
The number of Ukrainian civilians killed thus far is a tiny percentage of the overall population. This is like saying that al-Qaeda defeated America on 9/11 because “all American civilians died.”
Davy Crockett’s blast yield was insignificant, as it was built to be a neutron bomb. It was designed to do troops in with a high flux of very hard to block neutron radiation. Pretty horrific, really.
Yes this. This would be the worst-case scenario for Ukraine. Russia would keep them broken and destitute to serve as a lesson for others.
oops