Downed Russian Fighters Said to Be Found With Basic GPS 'Taped To the Dashboards...

Downed Russian Fighters Said to Be Found With Basic GPS 'Taped To the Dashboards'

›

• The fact they haven't won is already despite their ovwheliing numbers advantage in every sense is already seeming like a victory.

  More western propaganda! Russia won the war in under two weeks! They have arrested all the Nazi's, rebuilt the country, and brought peace to Ukraine. It's western propaganda that says otherwise!

  • • Re: Uhh huh, sure they are...

      Tell that to the TV stations and journalists that were not pro zelinsky that he shut down

• despite their ovwheliing numbers advantage

  They don't have numbers advantage let alone overwhelming. Ukraine has mobilized half a million. Russian troops in Ukraine are 2 or 3 times less

  • That all adds to the mystery of how Russia has acted this entire time though. "On paper" Russia has close to 1 million active personnel and 2 million in reserve with huge numbers advantage in every aircraft, ground support system, artillery, tanks, helicopters, missile systems, almost everything.

    If they really have "2 to 3 times less" troops being the offensive attacker in this conflict are you actually trying to win? Let's not act like in February if you asked just about anyone who would win in a conflict between Ukraine and Russia most everyone would have easily said Russia, it would just be a disagreement of how and when. That Russia has failed and/or Ukraine succeeded this far will be studied in miltary academies for decades to come.

    • What i think had happened is everyone includong russian leadership has been gaslighted by the oligarchs who updated a few pieces to prove to inspectors and then left everything else rust. But then still counted. Combine with generals who paid their way onto their places. The whole army is a fraxtion of what it is on paper.

      Just not taking control of airspace is a massive failure on russia's part.

      I dont know how this will shake out. The fact that russia is losing territory they already gained is tough to belive.

      The ukrianins are fighting intrenched gorilla tactics. If they can keep it up theyight just pull a hat trick.

      Killing russian military leadership is a great start.

    • This is something that's pretty typical in modern wars. Modern armies can move fast so the aggressor mobilizes as many troops as they think are necessary and makes an attempt to quickly seize critical infrastructure and people. If you get bogged down then defender gets a chance to mobilize and they've got the huge advantage of being desperate.

      The Germans did it to France and the Japanese partially succeeded in doing it to the US in WWII.

      Russia may or may not be able to call up their reserves without sparking a revolution but it's pretty unlikely they can implement widespread conscription. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have more volunteers than they can train because everybody knows what happens if they lose.

      Russia *should* have made a push towards Kiev then, when it failed to meet its timeline, backed off, consolidated their gains in the Donbas, and said "jokes, that Kiev thing was just a diversion so we could rescue good Russians from evil Ukrainian nazis!"

      • Re:

        Russia may or may not be able to call up their reserves without sparking a revolution but it's pretty unlikely they can implement widespread conscription

        Russia can't call up reserves without declaring a war, which Putin has studiously avoided, so far.

        This also means that Russian soldiers can refuse to fight with little consequences.

        • Re:

          I'm glad you mentioned that. There were all these articles speculating on Russia formally declaring war on their victory day. Then it didn't happen and - crickets.

    • That all adds to the mystery of how Russia has acted this entire time though. "On paper" Russia has close to 1 million active personnel and 2 million in reserve with huge numbers advantage in every aircraft, ground support system, artillery, tanks, helicopters, missile systems, almost everything.

      There's no mystery there. Russia is not at work with the Ukraine. Officially anyway. They are conducting a "special military operation" and chose this definition carefully. This leads to all sorts of strange situations, such as the military telling their soldiers they need to deploy and the soldiers turning around and saying, "nah, don't think I will". https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

  • Re:

    > Russian troops in Ukraine are 2 or 3 times less

    Wouldn't "1 times less" be... 0?

• Re:

  No, but you can put enough noise in the spectrum that GPS uses so that the signal can't get through.

• Re:

  Actually, to some degree, you can, by using Selective availability [wikipedia.org] to introduce a considerable degree of error that makes GPS much less useful for precision navigation. It was deactivated in 2000, but if it were turned back on, consumer-grade GPS receivers such as that in your smartphone would be unable to calculate a position to within less than about 100 meters.
  
  In any case, I'm actually more surprised that Russian equipment isn't using GLONASS, since they themselves designed it as an alternative to GPS.

  • In any case, I'm actually more surprised that Russian equipment isn't using GLONASS, since they themselves designed it as an alternative to GPS.

    Its entirely possible that they are. I don't think people who write these articles actually know the difference between GPS and GLONASS, and just generically use "GPS" to describe all such systems. A lot of receivers can handle multiple such systems.

    (Of course its also possible that GLONASS isn't working so well, which is why they're trying GPS as a backup. But even if that's true, I'd still bet that people writing these articles don't know the difference.)

  • Re: Uhh huh, sure they are...

    The allegation that they'd even USE "GPS" is bizarre, considering that Glonass is basically GPSv1.2 -- not a quantum leap beyond GPS, but definitely a notch or two better, just because it's ~10-20 years newer & had the benefit of learning from GPS's early mistakes that GPS itself can't fix without breaking backwards compatibility.

    Then again, do "pure" GPS or Glonass receivers even exist anymore? I know in Android-land, pretty much everything has included both GPS and Glonass since at least ~2017, and I

• Re:

  Northern Ireland has been disputed territory for a century. The conflict has certainly involved some bloody terrorist acts, but not actually bombing whole cities into piles of rubble. From what I have read of the rather complicated politics of modern Belgium, the whole country is disputed territory.

• • You can never know which side that plane was.

    Because when the jet has a red star on its tail and numbers which don't match anything Ukraine has, it's obviously not a Russian jet.

    Do you Russian morons and apologists even think before writing?

    • Re:

      Red star to signify it belongs to the Red Army?

      • Re:

        What? Just look up just about any photo of an Su-34, they have a red star on the tail and wings.

        • • Re:

            The KGB deserves kudos for tricking the West into spending trillions to counter a mostly non-existent threat.

      • The roundel (the insignia painted on the wings and tails of military aircraft) of the Soviet Air Force was a red 5-pointed star with white outline. The Russian Air Force continued to use that roundel until 2010, when it changed to a red star with a blue outline with a further white outline (the blue was added presumably to keep the roundel in line with the Russian national flag). In both cases, from any reasonable distance, it just looks like a red star.

  • You can never know which side that plane was. Because both use Russian fighter jets.

    Sure you can, if the wreckage was intact enough to find a GPD receiver you can probably find a couple serial numbers, nation specific markings, Ukraine likely has some idea of which planes it has and which have gone missing in the area or even in the photo of the article (which is likely not the plane in question) you can clearly see the Russia red star emblem on the tail.

    Even easier in this case the reported plane is an Su-34 which has not been exported to Ukraine or much in general.

    • Re:

      But they can report anything. Taping in some shitty GPS receiver doesn't make sense when there are affordable more capable alternatives.

      • Re:

        I agree it doesn't make sense from what we supposedly know about the Russian military but there have been quite a few puzzling decisions and lack of coordination and tactics on Russia's part this entire conflict. I am not fully buying into this story without some more verification but if it was true from everything else we do know it would not be all that surprising today.

        If someone had said that 6 months ago it would be incredulous, less so right now.

      • It makes sense when you realize they're using off-the-shelf walkie talkies instead of encrypted radio in many areas and other older, less useful equipment everywhere. The funding for upgrading and maintaining their forces was diverted to the oligarchy, and they're making do with whatever they can find. The drones made with off-the-shelf components are a good example as well. I mean, does it make sense for the Russian military to all be using open radio bands to discuss battle plans when the Ukrainians can listen in?!?!? Heck no. Of course they have encrypted radio - but not enough, and the ones they have are of different, incompatible types. So for the units of one type in one area to talk to units of a different type that's incoming, they use the open air radio b/c it's the only thing they can do to communicate. Better equipment exists, but they don't have it. Same is likely with this GPS. It was cheap and it worked, so they used it.

        Troops are leaving behind expired rations, expired med kits, paper maps from the 90s, and other archaic things. We're not talking expired by a few months, either - expired by decades. Much of the heavy equipment is decades old - some dating back to WWII.

        But, their biggest problem is that their supply lines are heavily debilitated. That coupled with the fact that their equipment was designed for nuclear warfare tactics and their generals have no experience with this type of warfare is crippling. They first thought Ukraine would fold under intimidation, then thought the fight would be similar to Syria. It's just been mistake after mistake & they're now lobbing cluster bombs and lots of older, terribly imprecise missiles at the region.

        Ukraine has pushed Russia back to the disputed areas, but the war will go on until Russia has had enough. The borderlands are much easier for Russia to resupply and control what land they hold. Barring a nuclear launch, I don't see Russia taking an inch of Ukraine, and quite possibly losing Crimea as well. The Ukrainians are in no mood to negotiate after what Russia has done to their people.

        • Russian army has trained to fight in places like Syria, where they're an assist mainly with air power. It's failing when going up against a stronger country that's united against them from from east to west.

          Putin screwed up but good. He was overconfident that the fight would be easy, he thought they west would stay away and let Russia do it's thing, like the west did many many times before. He also seems to have believed his own propaganda that Ukraine was weak and full of nazis and all the native Russian speakers there were being persecuted and waiting for a savior (never mind that the president of Ukraine was a native Russian speaker). But once committed, Putin really doesn't have a good means of backing down.

          As for the Nazis, Russia has a very different definition of Nazi and what makes them bad. Stalin didn't hate Nazis for being brutish thugs, because he was one too. He hated them because they attacked Russia after having agreed to split up what he considered the slave states of central europe. And Putin admires Stalin and has said so publically. So he likely has a belief that Nazis are anyone who doesn't trust Russia. Given that the president of Ukraine is also Jewish, and obviously no fan of Nazis in any form, the idiot Lavrov was well convinced that this didn't matter and that there was no incompatibility between being Jewish and Nazi at the same time. So ridiculous that even Putin had to correct his number one stooge.

          • Re:

            As fresh and relevant today as in 1938: Korets-Landau leaflet [wikipedia.org]

        • The funding for upgrading and maintaining their forces was diverted to the oligarchy, and they're making do with whatever they can find.

          The whole Russian economy is screwed up for the same reason. This means that the infrastructure to support a war is depleted. Maybe the oligarchs could send a fleet of super-yachts to the Black Sea, and terrify the Ukrainians with a display of opulence.

        • There is an additional component to that. Vladimir Putin sincerely believes that the Maidan protests in 2014, which ousted the Russian-friendly Yanukovich government, were conducted by Western infiltrators, which managed to get the unwashed masses to join their cause.

          He was thus sincerely convinced, he could pull the same stunt, infiltrate the Ukrainian society and foster some cells, which then on his signal oust the current government and make the unwashed masses to join the movement and demand re-unification with Mother Russia. At the begin of the conflict, there was even the public announcement from the Russian side to the Ukrainian Army and to civil officials to abandon the current Nazi-regime and join the rightful cause of Pan-Slavic brotherhood.

          Apparently, this totally failed. Basically none of the Armed forces defected to Russia, and except for a short period in the South Ukrainian town of Melitopol, where a pro-Russian politician tried to become the new mayor, also the civil uprising didn't materialize. So either the estimated 100 million dollars set aside for this project were lost in a large corruption scheme, or Russia experienced some kind of "Our Man in Havana", where the FSB believed they had large cells of agents working for them, but all they had was some guy, who accidentally got himself hired, had no idea how to proceed and just sent in fabricated reports to be left in peace. No wonder there purportedly was a purge of 150 FSB officers shortly after the invasion, because the expected cheering for the liberators did not happen.

      • Re:

        More affordable? Russian soldiers are literally stealing toilet seats to take back home.

  • Re: Uhh huh, sure they are...

    In general your smartphone gps isn't going to function at the altitudes or speeds a jet aircraft requires. Maybe they used shitty gps's because that's what they had that didn't comply with export/import restrictions in various countries on civilian GPS restrictions.
    Smartphones also have terrible GPS reception when they are out of range of cell towers.

    • Re:

      I guess you have never tried to use GPS in an airplane. It works just fine close to a window.

    • • • Re:

          So. Yes. Your phone GPS will work just fine at getting you a location fix without a data connection, and the "terrible GPS reception" experienced with an off-base cellphone as cited by viperidaenz is actually just how GNSS receivers operate when you are using a dedicated unit that is not being fed data by a secondary source. Slowly.

          I could regale you with personal anecdotes of motocrossing around the Australian outback where ISP/mobile coverage and function is about as useful as a 180 grit facial scrub but