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Seeing the videos of destroyed Russian equipment I am a bit surprised how familiar it looks to what it was when I was forcefully drafted into soviet military so
by aivisol 5y ago
Seeing the videos of destroyed Russian equipment I am a bit surprised how familiar it looks to what it was when I was forcefully drafted into soviet military some 30+ years ago. There are maybe few new types of personnel carrier vehicles which I do not recognize but everything else is decades old, and even back then in 80s it was not any high tech (except for T-80 maybe). As an example, to coordinate artillery fire we used paper maps and mechanical rulers to convert target coordinates into azimuth and elevation angles. Officers would carry secret reference table books with them which were used to apply a ton of corrections: ambient temperature, wind direction, mass of the charge and the projectile and drift due to rotation of the projectile etc. All that was manual, calculated on paper, slow and error prone. I remember myself back then wondering why we couldn't use simple calculators to do this math quickly. The dead reckoning equipment (which was based on mechanical gyroscope) had such high error that after few tries we decided to never turn it on again - after few kilometers of drive it would place us some 500m off the actual position.
Sure, maybe some electronics are upgraded nowadays, it is hard to tell from those videos. But the stories of Russians being lost on their way, it rather looks that nothing much has changed.
- Krasnol 5y agoMaybe they're prepared for post-EMP warfare? ;)
- TMWNN 5y agoYou are more right than you know. Western observers mocked Soviet fighters using vacuum tubes, until it was pointed out that they are immune to EMP.
- rixed 5y agoTo be fair, I believe being able to compute ballistic parameters with pen and paper give you an advantage in a total war where every communication is jammed, network is hacked and energy supply is sparse.
- franga2000 5y agoThere's an anecdote I've heard from at least 2 people now about an international military exercise here in Europe where they were working with some kind of big artillery and lost either comms or power so their computers were offline. Everyone just shrugged and pulled out their maps and rulers while the Americans sat there completely lost and didn't shoot even once for the rest of the day. It seems insane to me to not have at least two people on each team who can do the math on paper if necessary!