Russia - threadbanned users in OP

I'm curious, do you view all satellites as space junk?

About those meetings you have been having discussing and threatening the use of nuclear weapons - here's a little reminder what's at stake, as you seem to have forgotten you aren't the only ones who have them. And ours actually work.

This is adding to the aircraft Carrier George Bush currently just off Split, Croatia and the 101 airborne in Romania.

I haven't been on in a while and I see some new arrivals are enjoying the thread.

Some interesting air asset movements currently airborne:

A USAF Beech King Air is operating its usual SIGNIT track over Lithuania, keeping a close eye on Russias enclave, Kaliningrad. Sweden was operating It's Gulfstreams over the Baltic until the Amphibious Task Force arrived. It's currently sitting about 100 km off the Kaliningrad Coast, its presence intermittently betrayed by the appearance of a Seahawk now and again

One of the USAF's older intelligence-gathering and submarine warfare aircraft, a Lockheed EP-3 Orion is currently over Romania, on the way back from monitoring the Odessa/Black Sea arena. Like the KC-135, it's airframe is based on a passenger aircraft from the 60's and is still in service today. They sometimes, very rarely, cross Irish airspace and have a very distinctive engine note, similar to the older C-130E, as they use the same power plant.

Finally, an RC-135, registered to Luxembourg, but operating from a Turkish base, is currently on it's extensive AWACS and SIGNIT mission. Based on the older Boeing 707 airframe, this type has been re-engined and has made a huge positive impact on recent successful Ukranian air-defence taskings.

Since 2014, NATO has been integrating Western Datalink systems into Ukranian C and C centres, now providing an almost instant downlink from SIGNIT assets to Ukranian commanders. Note the "racetrack" patterns of its recent flightpath.

New arrivals? - they just respawn it seems. Maybe Roundup would work.

That's the Polish Airfield where presents for ukraine mostly arrive.

Rzeszow air traffic controller: 'This used to be such a quiet job, perhaps I could get a job at Heathrow for a rest.'

I suspect that is it's orbital speed when it's turned into terminal speed. If you take space as being 100km up, I make it about 15.7 seconds from orbit to ground, though slightly less because it would detonate well above ground. They must have a ceramic heat shield which I'd imagine gets white hot before boom. Nasty business.

Trident seems to have a minimum range of 2000 km so not such a weird positioning as I first thought, as I was wondering if it would be too close.

Their ICBMs and SLBMs are solid fuel rockets, like their western counterparts. You'd have to disassemble them to get the fuel. And to be honest, it would be foolhardy not to assume that the Russian missile forces are at a similar level of readiness and maintenance to the US Minuteman or Trident missiles. These missiles form the last and ultimate form of leverage that a Russian head of state has at their disposal, these birds will be maintained properly even if everything crumbles around them.

Given what has happened in Ukraine, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have the 1000s of missiles/warheads all ready to launch etc., maintaining a kind of parity with the US.

However there's (unfortunately) a big "megadeath" sized difference between Russia having a "lesser" nuclear power arsenal (say UK/France or China-sized) that is in good working order and could still be depended on to destroy 100s of targets if launched, and them having nothing at all.

Agree. Yeah I can't see it either (that they have anything like what is claimed on paper) but would be sure they have some, far more modest, working arsenal.

I think Putin's nuclear threats concerning support of Ukraine are a bluff and should be (kind of have to be) treated as such anyway, but not because Russia has no nukes.

Big fire in Crimea-

refurbs on the way to Ukraine from the US

Clever way to economize on our junk.

Anyone who watched the TV series "Ice Pilots" will have seen plenty of the the Lockheed Electra, "ancestor" of the Orion, which was Buffalo Airways' biggest cargo-aircraft. They got that thing into some rough places.

From what (little!) I've read they (the "small" ones) would also go bad (!). It's not a case of sticking nuclear weapons forgotten in a silo somewhere and pulling them out of a stockpile like they are chemical explosives or bullets. There's parts of them that need upkeep, monitoring, regular checking, replacement, so would say real/guaranteed to work size of their tactical arsenal would be affected too if you speculate the maintainence is shoddy and money for it was being robbed by corrpution!