War

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
At midnight (12:01am Wednesday) there is a planned Minuteman launch out of Vandenberg. They’re pretty cool to watch; the weather was good for the last one in February. That launch and this one are operational readiness tests, a pretty brisk cadence that I’m sure has nothing at all to do with sending Russia, China and NK a message.

I happen to be in the trajectory plane for a lob at Kwajalein. So the missile heads straight up from this vantage. The last one was moonlit, so I got to see the big puff of exhaust when stage 3 ended propulsion with some fuel left to burn. The stage is fitted with four shaped charges that open up the motor, since there’s no putting out a solid-fuel rocket.

They’re calling for partly cloudy, unfortunately.

well, I set the alarm for 11:50 and sat vigil from midnight to 12:44 when I said hang it. Launch window was til 6:01 am, but they tend to launch within minutes of it opening.

At 5:12 am I looked woozily out the window and thought I was looking at a star —
but I lucked onto the last seconds of stage 3 burn above a band of cloud.

The “star” gave two nice twinkles 1/2 second apart, then was gone, but there was a smudge in the sky.

Eastern horizon showed the beginnings of daybreak, which meant the sun was above -18° altitude, and the smudge, which was visibly spreading and dimming, was maybe 25° up, so in sunlight.

(At thrust termination, the vehicle is approx. 150 nm high and 270 nm downrange, so maybe 450 miles from me.)

The smudge took on a semicircular shape, suggesting a spherical expansion bounded below by atmosphere. Maybe you can see it; black out the rest of the screen. The bright star is Arcturus. Above it (and a bit right) is epsilon Boötis, eleven degrees of arc distant. Below right, on the edge of the smoky hemisphere is eta Boötis.

The cloud is no more than two minutes old and over a hundred miles (projected) across. A minute later it faded into background.

A4CCCB2E-1BED-423C-94B8-F9D780A4AC9E.jpeg

(edit) it’s daylight now and the thing is washed out. You need a dark place to view. There was no trace of a smoke trail; sometimes those persist for an hour or so.
 
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DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
Shadow them with NATO vessels and slide up to them and say, "try anything and we will sink you and we will sink you in such a way that none of you will survive, have a nice day". If we need to repair any cables, you won't live long, if Russia wants to declare war on NATO over it, fine, every Russian ship in international waters gets sunk. Don't come out into the Baltic and don't try to resupply Kaliningrad by sea, because the land route will be blocked too.

 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
This guy fails to understand that the West doesn't have a concept of unacceptable russian losses either....so were good there
https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaUkraineWar2022/comments/12pasmz
We can kill as many as they wanna send over, no problem at all! :lol: We can help with the demographic crises in Russia, soon it will be like post WW1 France where men had wives and a couple of mistresses too, it was seen as a service to many and not a sin.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
The drone pilots don't have many flight hours, but it could be the extra weight of the bomb, he should have been able to fly into that doorway, find the fucker and blow up in his lap! They are transmitting video at a watt probably, but the control transmitter is still only 25mw and they often appear to lose control just as they reach the target or go low level, as this guy appears to do. Probably when he went over the roof, he started losing the line-of-sight control signal since he was probably in a trench and a mile or two away. Transmitting at higher power might help, so would a full wave antenna and it would be better if the whole thing was up in a 10 or 20' pole driven into the ground and remote from the operator, it's not hard to do. Transmitting at higher power could draw unwanted attention though.

 
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