DDE

Rogozin: continued hostility against Russia will lead to the new orbital station having an 'applied military mission', thus barring any possibility of international cooperation https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5258307 Predicting @kerbiloid's reaction: "Ah, so we're back to where Mir began from"

Edit: yep, I think this one's a confirmed. https://t.me/boris_rozhin/32531 'File image' for comparison:

Meanwhile a Romanian has just found an Orlan-10 in bis backyard. Not much arguing where this one could come from. https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/14/romania-probes-drone-sighting-days-after-crash-in-croatia Note that the image in the article is that a of Forpost (IMI Searcher), not an Orlan. Not trying to imply the Orlan was armed, are you, Euronews? Tsk-tsk.

OK, so according to TASS quoting HRT, it was a 120 kg bomb with a 40 kg shaped-charge payload... weird. This means it's a xAB-100-class bomb, but I'm not familiar with any shaped-charge warhead in that class. Only Soviet anti-ship missiles carry shaped charges this big. https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/14060367

More photos: https://www.morh.hr/ministar-obrane-o-padu-letjelice-u-zagrebu-istraga-je-u-zavrsnoj-fazi-pronadena-je-crna-kutija/ Found here, also linking in case the page doesn't open like it hasn't for me: https://t.me/wingsofwar/12423?single The jist of the associated article: "The investigation will take time" ;|

I think they're estimating based on blast effects, which means 120 kg of brand-new TNT/C4. This old graphic says a 2.62 m deep, 2.4 m wide crater for a 100 kg bomb and 5/3.7 m for 250 kg. Another random table says you're describing something in between a 122 mm and a 152 mm shell. And both of these are significantly less than 100 kg - single kilos of explosive in case of the 122 mm. Also, here's a crater from what almost certainly was a 450 kg delay-fused warhead: Based on Wiki's table for FABs, FAB-250-M62 is the closest match at an exact 100 kg of explosive filling. It's also the most recent series of generic FABs and should be fairly common. There's a heavier FAB-250ShL (137 kg of filling) with a ballute and an altitude detonator, and everything else is in the 500 kg class.

JEEEEEB!

A working UCAV conversion is highly unlikely, so... cruise missile? Combined with a shootdown over Crimea (Krasnoperekopsk, specifically), this does sound like an attempt at attacks deep within the Russian rear. There was one successful Tochka-U ballistic strike against the airfield in Millerovo, and a failed one at the airport in Taganrog; Tu-141s would have several times that range. Heck, if 1000 km is their operational range, they'd have slightly more range 'one-way range' than a conventionally-armed Kalibr.

Word is the Bayraktars keep rolling in, although they had to switch the delivery channel.

Ironmount? Of course it does. Now add in the city's flag...

A quickie. The Zababakhin All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics is the innocent name for the secondary nuclear weapons office. Its notable leader was Evgeny Zababakhin. The onomatopoeic equivalent of "kaboom" in Russian is "babakh". Step aside, Dr. Doom, here comes the Kaboomski A-bomb design office. You couldn't make this stuff up even if you tried.

Add another Tu-141 to the mix. This one fell out of the sky in pieces over Crimea. Note the red star with something rectangular and blue seemingly painted over it: As in, perhaps? I mean, it's not exactly a flight-critical element... Here's an unrelated operational Tu-143 where the lack of care for sandblasting is particularly apparent:

This forum does like to walk a fine line, does it not? Basically, I wouldn't immediately discount old Russian stocks being used as SAM bait. After all, there seems to be an emulation of Azerbaijani expendable drones going on:

The development never actually stopped. The US and Russia both (at the very least) quietly do "zero-yield" hydrodynamic criticality tests. The US did dismantle a huge part of its infrastructure, which is why the planned start of production of W93 is somewhat difficult. With Russia, it's a lot harder to tell because a lot of the industry has been creatively repurposed into adjacent fields - it's a lot harder to verify that the production of MOX fuel from excess plutonium is all that goes on in Moria-sized dungeons of Zheleznogorsk.

Dumb history question: in terms of shape rather than materials, when was this invented? Surely this isn't isn't high-tech, but Google is being uncooperative regarding ancient protective garmets.

Oneweb launch stack is being slowly dis-integrated over the course of several days, and the satellites will be left at Baikonur under figurative lock-and-key. There's a whole bunch of various... grabby proposals regarding the property of companies exiting the Russian market being floated around. Those OneWeb satellites may well end up flying on the Soyuz after a forceful change of ownership. Edit: looked up "OOO Uanveb" (no, really, this is their listed English variant of company name). Reshetnev's SS Gonets has a controlling interest since February 2019, and the Ru Wiki notes they were on the cusp of build another 12.5% from the British to acquire full access to technival documentation. This could be an interesting divorse.

Yeah, the Nuclear Warfare Simulator on Steam doesn't look nearly as 1990s Hollywood interface.

"Do not stick a fork into the Gauss rifle"

Yakov Zel'dovich was notorious for, among other things, managing to pursue a meteoric career without ever formally graduating from uni, being a one-man physics discoveries machine, and the number of marriages and extramarital dalliances. For whatever reason, when he reached the status of academician, his colleagues in Arzamas-16 greeted him with the gift of a mortarboard stencilled with "USSR Academy of Sciences", and swimming trunks that read "Active member".

You may have heard that the Soviets built a dozen titanium-hulled submarines. You may have also heard that the result was annoyingly expensive, hence it remains an unmatched feat. This is mostly because welding absolutely anything made of titanium requires a vacuum or an argon atmosphere, which is very much akin to an EVA. And given how metals interact in seawater, on a titanium submarine, nearly everything has to be made of titanium. These days, titanium seems mostky confined to reactor machinery.

It's 2022, and there's an armored train in a live warzone.

A rookie nuclear engineer departs for Object 817 (Mayak plutonium factory). His instructions are as follows: "Go to Kyshtym, find a covered truck by the church, it'll take you to the facility." He hops off the train in Kyshtym and approaches the first babushka he spots. "Grandma, where's the local church?" "Go that way until you spot the covered truck that takes people to the nukular, the church will be nearby." In a similar manner, due to indiscretion of the architect Michail Levin's aunt, Atomproject in Leningrad was openly referred to by everyone and their dog as the Secret Institute.

2.5% per day is 900% per annum, without compound interest. We're in overdraft / payday lender territory!

Which is still cheaper than transporting an oversized pressure vessel halfway across Eurasia. RMBKs were 2-4 times cheaper than VVERs, whatever the reason.