Nineteen months after the full-scale invasion, Vladimir Putin’s war strategy is starkly visible. The concept – if you can call it that – is to bomb Ukraine into submission.
Well, if that is actually the plan, I’m dubious that it’s likely to work.
Russia can produce more missiles, like the Iskanders mentioned in the article, but a campaign using missiles is prohibitively expensive.
Russia still does not have the ability to operate aircraft over Ukrainian-controlled territory; Ukrainian air defenses make this impractical. I am sure that Russia tries to destroy these where possible, but as far as I can see, Ukraine’s likely to be able to maintain air defenses for the foreseeable future.
Russia does have inexpensive loitering munitions in the form of the Shahed-131 and Shahed-136, but on the flip side, (expensive) counters exist now and more-sustainable counters have been coming out. I doubt that Russia is betting the farm on the ability to get these past air defenses.
Even if the Shaheds do make it past Ukrainian air defenses, the presently-believed scale of production just isn’t that large. Russia is, as best we know, aiming to produce about 6,000 over the next two years. 6,000, even ignoring the air defenses involved, might help a war effort, but are probably not going to win a war.
This was Russia’s billion-dollar weapons deal with Iran coming to life in November, 500 miles east of Moscow in the Tatarstan region. Its aim is to domestically build 6,000 drones by summer 2025…
Researchers at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, who reviewed the documents pertaining to the production process at the request of The Post, estimated that work at the facility in the Republic of Tatarstan’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone is at least a month behind schedule. The facility has reassembled drones provided by Iran but has itself manufactured only drone bodies, and probably for not more than 300 of the UAVs, the researchers concluded. Alabuga is unlikely to meet its target date for the 6,000 drones, they said.
I’d add that even if Russia had the ability to conduct a bombing campaign without running into air defenses, I’m skeptical that this alone would be sufficient. We’ve done much-larger conventional bombing campaigns than Russia would have the ability to do even if Ukraine didn’t have air defenses. They still didn’t win wars on their own.
If all 6,000 Shaheds actually got past air defenses – which they sure haven’t generally been doing so far – and impacted, that’d be the equivalent of maybe at most 300,000 kg of munitions dropped.
In WW2, the UK and US dropped something like 2,700,000,000 kg in Europe, or 9,000 times that, and the issue still wasn’t simply decided via strategic bombing. In Vietnam, the US dropped something like 7,662,000,000 kg, or about 25,000 times that.
Also, a shift to fighting wars from the air would be a major shift mid-war from what has historically been Russia’s focus, and on geography that is not particularly favorable to that relative to land warfare.
If their main concern is layoffs – which it sounds like, at least from the article text, though I don’t know if that’s just the author’s take or not – I doubt that the union is going to have much leverage. CDPR isn’t laying people off for fun; the whole industry is seeing a major decline in investment at the moment.
Video Game VC Funding Slumps as Publishers Battle Covid Hangover
Funding opportunities dry up with game companies cutting jobs
Total peaked when people were still indoors because of Covid
VC groups invested $700.3 million in gaming in the third quarter, the lowest total since the second quarter of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. The industry attracted more than $2 billion in every quarter for two years ending in mid-2022.
The past few weeks have been marked by layoffs and studio closures by game companies. Epic cut 830 jobs, while Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog and Worms maker Team17 have also let go dozens of workers.
The Swedish video-game holding company Embracer Group AB, which bought up dozens of gaming companies starting in 2020, is now canceling games, eliminating jobs and closing studios. The company is looking to sell Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend.
There’s that game with untextured polygonal graphics about naval combat that’s aimed towards having several players running a carrier. Dammit, what’s the name of that?
This post argues that housing costs are a factor, though also not the main one (rather, they find that the main factor is declining marriage rates, which is probably harder for policymakers to change).
Not quite the same thing, but one thing I have seen is players that stream slower-paced games chatting with remote viewers.
On Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Vormithrax, is well-known for this, and watching his videos has often been recommended on Reddit as a way to learn the (quite complicated) game, as he tends to walk people through what he’s thinking about while playing.
Obviously, that doesn’t work with every game genre; they have to be able to field suggestions and questions from viewers while concurrently playing. But for turn-based games, I think that it can work well.
Ehhh…if you have little player-player interaction and the engine is running local copies of all the enemy AI code and such and doing prediction, it might be okay.
In general, it’s generally technically difficult to convert latency-critical single-player games to multiplayer. I dunno, maybe the BoI developers thought about this from the beginning and designed it with this in mind, but even so…
Sycamore Gap tree: Site plans are complicated, says MP (www.bbc.com)
As Ukraine reels from attacks on land, conflict at sea signals hope (www.theguardian.com)
Drones and missiles keep Russian fleet at bay and supplies and trade flowing at ports
"Kids Military Camp "North Korean Ruś" - billboard in occupied Melitopol
Kremlin exploits Hamas attack on Israel in information operation to drive down assistance for Ukraine — ISW (euromaidanpress.com)
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net)
Staff at CD Projekt Red are uniting with others in the Polish video game industry to unionise. The union was formed aft…
Warfare MMO Foxhole is adding naval combat complete with huge multi-person ships (www.pcgamer.com)
Ageing Europe tries to boost birth rates | Financial Times (www.ft.com)
archive.ph/ZdFdR
Can anyone recommend let's play channels or streamers wherein a group of multiple people play single player games together?
Examples include: Scary Game Squad, Gamegrumps, Team Double Dragon, and the like....
Older games with female protagonists?
What games of older generations would you put up? i dont mind the genre really, id would just love to hear yalls suggestions.
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