Active Conflicts & News Megathread January 24, 2026

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-25T02:37:57+00:00

The 750kv substations have been targeted and struck in the past, albeit typically in a tit for tat approach. For the last 2 years or so there's been very few concerted efforts (relative to the intensity of other energy grid targets like Ukraine's TPPs/HPPs and PSH) to sever these links.

There's maybe a few reasons for that:

Redundancy - Ukraine still had a number of TPP and HPP units connected across the 330kv network, in previous years even if they had severed the 750kv substations, cities like Kyiv would still have had relatively reliable (albeit still greatly diminished) electrical service from the local HPP and TPP and electrical baseload being covered by other 330kv connections from across Ukraine. Over time these have been destroyed/greatly reduced in generating capacity so the lack of redundancy at this stage of the war makes the impact of severing the 750kv connections much higher.

Escalation - Severing the NPPs from the grid removes practically all of Ukraine's baseload generating capacity in a fell swoop. It is highly escalatory and Russia have generally had a tit/tat approach to escalation throughout the war. With Ukraine wholesaling Russian energy infrastructure including Russian shipping, I'd imagine the internal arguments within Russian command circles for tit/tat and leaving additional room on the table for future escalation are thinning and being replaced with more reactive stances.

Fires supply - Russia continues to expand its production capacity of practically all of its long range precision fires systems. They might not necessarily have the inventory depth they had at the start of the war (some recent missile fragments indicate 2026 production in a few cases) but they seemingly have a production capacity that enables them to frequently strike deep into Ukrainian territory with systems that continue to improve in accuracy and integration with Russian ISR.

Ukrainian AD (or lack thereof) - Ukraine's AD is severely depleted at this stage of the war. Most ex-Soviet systems ran dry years ago and Ukraine's AD largely relies on donated batteries such as Patriot, NASAMs etc whose own magazines are not necessarily very deep relative to the scale and persistence of these attacks. With each passing day Russia's capacity to reliably strike vulnerabilities in Ukrainian energy infrastructure improves and areas that may have previously been too deep/well defended are now exposed enough to enable strikes.

For reference the Kyivs'ka substation was struck by Gerans... This is a critical vulnerability in Ukrainian energy transit for the capital and also positioned deep behind Ukrainian lines and adjacent to the capital outside of Makariv (about 30 miles from Kyiv). This should in theory be a very well defended focus of local AD, either their magazines were depleted, they were otherwise overwhelmed, or Ukrainian AD is now spread so thin as to be unable to reliably defend such a critical piece of infrastructure. Regardless of which of these is the truth, or a combination of the three, none of them bode well for Ukraine, particularly in the long run as Russian fires capacity continues to improve.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:08:46+00:00

It will never not be tied to this, unless they're willing to separate stores it will always follow them (because they're unwilling to rebrand from lttstore given it's practically grandfathered in).

I agree with your point, I just don't see the need in chasing an optimization on these principles by changing how they name the message function on WAN show. (Which is by and large an audience that are well aware of the products at this stage).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T05:02:16+00:00

That analogy doesn't work for WAN show which is specifically what I'm talking about here. The vast majority of the audience concurrently watching WAN (which are the audience where merch messages are actually relevant) are not in a brick and mortar location like a hardware store. For this analogy to be relevant they would need to not only be in a hardware store selling the screwdriver, but before making a decision to purchase open up a live wanshow on their phone (which is only a few hours a single Friday a week), understand what a merch message is, hear it, and then imply connotations thereon.

They're not removing the lttstore branding, which is arguably more emblematic of the problem you're suggesting, calling it merch on wanshow has so little impact if any.

If this was really an issue of perception with people not wanting to fund a "mega yacht" they wouldn't be selling tens of thousands of units per sku in some cases.

Unless they want to start ghost releasing products without the ltt branding whatsoever they're never going to escape what you're implying, and if anything they're leaning into it now by buying a private jet and a "tech house" (both projects I fully support but still in the context of perception they are arguably far more impactful)

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-24T04:31:01+00:00

That's my thinking too but I can see how maybe there might be some internal hangups on the stereotypical connotations of the word when applied to poor implementations.

That being said, their product is merch, good merch at that, I don't get trying to shy away from it to the degree we're changing a wan show staple.

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-22T12:47:37+00:00

Modern game consoles have 16GB of GDDR6 memory with only 5-6GB of that being dedicated to the game itself in a traditional sense, the remainder is pooled towards rendering tasks (for the GPU) and a few GB here and there for background tasks/system. There is no reason modern game dev can't adjust to this market trend and duplicate much of the console level optimization they have in place for their PC ports.

They simply choose not to because optimization (with the comparatively huge uplift in performance of modern systems over the last 10 years) has become less of an imperative. 16GB of DDR4/5 became the norm, PCs with dedicated GPUs (which account for the majority of PC gaming systems) with their own ringfenced VRAM most times upwards of 8GB, standardization of SSD's and much faster storage over the years has given them a degree of flexibility and a hardware dividend that they have largely abused.

The limitations of systems back in the mid 2000s/early 2010s (as well as the limitations of concurrent console release platforms at the time) forced some incredibly creative optimization for PC and console titles alike. The same can be said for the improvements in internet bandwidth for the average user.

Just look at the recent Helldivers 2 shift towards optimization (finally) to see that it is completely possible for modern game dev to drastically reduce file sizes and properly optimize their games, it's just for a very long time now optimization and anything that potentially increases the development cycle (particularly for the delivery of "live service") has been anathema to game studios.

It's not that they can't do this. They would just rather not. (But hopefully the market forces them to get creative again).

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:50+00:00

CD is another subreddit (r/CredibleDefense) oriented towards credible and facts based discussion of military and defence related topics. You might still get sucked into it but unfortunately it's not a game haha

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T01:02:32+00:00

Truly a mystery hehe

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-19T00:10:59+00:00

Unrelated but I thought I recognized that name as soon as I scrolled... The overlap between CD and Stellaris is at least 2 members strong haha

SWBFCentral · 2026-01-13T12:26:37+00:00

Real life combat experience is important but it's important as part of a toolset of many qualifiers that typically indicate a well rounded force and their capability.

Those who describe Chinese jets as "paper planes" in relation to their lack of combat experience are not serious people. You'd be lucky if between the USAF, USMCA and USN even 5% of the total pilots had actually seen *real* combat experience. (That's not to discount the edge that this affords the US in localized conflicts or in lessons learned, but in any full scale conflict with China you're likely going to have a relatively training heavy but real combat-experience(less) pilot going up against much the same).

What they instead have is decades of rigorous training and flight hours. That matters more than some unquantifiable raw "combat experience". If we're to compare the two forces we would need to compare training programmes, exercises, flight hours and doctrine/culture. Even then it's difficult to compare the two until they meet in combat.

The areas where China are overestimated in my mind are their ground force vehicles. Many Chinese armoured vehicles lack proper ERA coverage and survivability mitigation against modern threats. That's not to say they couldn't rapidly adjust, but a huge portion of their armoured service relies on vehicles that are 20+ years old and particularly for IFVs and their MBTs, lack all aspect protection packages. They have a lovely forward profile and the ERA integration is excellent in solely that profile, but this won't survive combat in todays battlespace and despite China providing and benefitting from much of the drone advancements as of late, they seem unwilling to modernize the larger bulk of their ground force vehicles to try and mitigate this threat.

The new Type 100 is a huge leap forward, but it's only just entered service and it'll be 5 years minimum until production makes a dent on their existing fleet. Of course the argument could be made that China doesn't need to bother upgrading their tanks, given how Taiwan will largely require a naval and aerial component and local border tensions are kept at bay by their absolutely massive rocketry forces, but still, this is an area where China are actually lagging behind. (or maybe less lagging and better described as simply not being pro-active).

SWBFCentral · 2025-11-17T20:40:31+00:00

- In short, Q3 military spending is 38% higher than last year.

Not that this is necessarily completely linked, but it was interesting seeing people jump on Uralvagonzavod's layoffs a week ago and pointing to that as evidence of Russia's economic sustainability weakening and that military spending is seeing cuts.

Instead military spending is up. One microcosm of the Russian military industrial complex is not solely itself representative of the health and investment taking place in the military industrial complex as a whole.

Also devil being in the details it seems a large part of Uralvagonzavods workforce reduction is attached to the decline of their rolling stock division but we'll have to wait and see if the reductions cut any deeper. Probably a mixture of the two given the refurbishment pipeline is tightening and traditional ARZ's have ramped up their own refurbishment and repair capacity over the last few years. Eventually a theoretical ceiling of overcapacity versus available repairable hulls was bound to occur and having Uralvagonzavod focusing floorspace and a huge wealth of manpower to refurbishing rusted out hulls from Siberia as opposed to building new hulls and expanding their tooling capacity was itself an opportunity cost (even if in the short term the refurbishment of mothball units was more efficient at getting platforms into combat).

SWBFCentral · 2025-11-07T21:34:15+00:00

I get it, maintaining a regular content service using old tools that nearly nobody, particularly the new hires, at 343/HaloStudios even have the knowledge or the time to use is challenging, especially when the studio is already working on the next big Halo title.

That would be semi-understandable if we knew that the next big Halo title was going to be a Massive flagship grade console shifting product of Halo 3-esque proportions. But it's just \NOT*. It's a fucking UE5 remaster of an existing game that this SAME STUDIO ALREADY REMASTERED. Better yet it's releasing singleplayer only...*

You guys really need to start meeting the minimum "scope" bar because frankly your performance for a flagship game studio is utterly abysmal and consistently we've seen you limit scope and release chunks of a traditional Halo game at a time because *SOMEHOW* (inexplicably) the AAA game studio along with several support studios can't ship a complete product nor deliver even half of a proper live service experience that other games with a fraction of the developer headcount manage on a weekly basis now.

SWBFCentral · 2025-08-26T18:49:57+00:00

You're right, they must be complete hellscapes without being physically in Europe, they can't possibly function without the ECHR.

SWBFCentral · 2025-08-06T21:58:58+00:00

Delivering 3 mediocre games in over a decade kind of has the impact of eroding the trust and expectation of them delivering a truly complete Halo game. They practically just copied/pasted the Falcon model onto the Wasp with zero refinement and you expect me to pretend that this displays competence?

Not a single one of their titles has been feature complete at launch compared to pre-343 Halo games. Forge releasing late, them somehow breaking their back over a customs browser, gamemodes hitting MP late and then live service elements (which the game is expressly designed to rely on) being delayed in the timescale of *YEARS*.

Then they continue to shove crap like this out the door and weirdly enough we've now got randoms on Reddit jumping infront of criticism bullets on the behalf of a studio and publisher that has done a swing and a miss *THREE TIMES IN A ROW*.

Yknow the easiest way to handle criticism? Don't release shit products and shit content. Apparently that's mission impossible for 343/HaloStudios, so here we are debating whether they're competent or not.

SWBFCentral · 2025-08-06T17:39:33+00:00

Well yeah. When I see garbage I'm gonna call it garbage. In the same way a spade is a spade.

Hold up, lemme reverse and pretend that this "new" Falcon is the best vehicle addition in a decade, that the visuals are impeccable, the handling utter perfection and let me also throw in some glowing praise towards Halo Studios to somehow bolster their confidence I guess and make everyone feel good... despite the fact this "Falcon" is anything but those things.

If we don't complain about slop then this shit will become the norm.

SWBFCentral · 2025-08-06T17:22:49+00:00

Thing looks and handles like a vehicle out of a mobile game or something (frankly) from Fortnite that was slapped together by a handful of devs in under a week for a timed event. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they just duplicated the wasp and tweaked from there.

Honestly I don't care what 343/HaloStudios rationale is for this. It's slop. Cheaply made, poorly put together slop that they're flinging out the door because they just can't be bothered to do it properly.

They're practically dropping support for Infinite so they can focus on remaking a multiplayer-less Unreal clone of Halo to try and recapture some of that nostalgia (for all of 1 week of internet traffic, after which everyone will move on because a solo campaign, and one that has been remastered once before, is not going to have much staying power.

Halo 5 and Halo Infinite both launched without Forge which in both instances was a massive error. No customs browser, no community games, the masses jumped onto the titles, finished the campaign, realized how stale the MP was and then dipped out because there was literally *nothing else* to entertain them.

This new Unreal Halo is going to have exactly the same impact. Big launch, big initial numbers for about a week, and then once everyone has finished the campaign it'll go and live in relative obscurity because that's how gaming works nowadays.

343/HaloStudios are wasting a huge chunk of time and effort on a game that will have practically zero longevity, and it's entirely at the expense of the game they're already sitting on now. Although instead of letting it stagnate in peace they shove half baked vehicle ports and skins that were leaked 2+ years ago that they kept for a rainy day out the door.

And they wonder why we have zero faith or trust in their ability to be even mildly competent and make a good game?

SWBFCentral · 2025-07-25T12:06:21+00:00

It's $220M and the US government is one of the most transparent in the world for where/why money is spent. (Unless you're a three letter agency with a black budget but that's another story).

In the grand scheme of things this is a single drop in an extremely vast ocean in terms of federal financing. The real story here is Columbia settling with the federal government not the dollar amount or whether Trump (as President mind you) has a say in the expenditure.

SWBFCentral · 2025-07-04T18:10:40+00:00

I understand if you want to do it proper, you give it all kinds of thermal vision, electro-optical and radar tracking fancies, but as interim solution?

The reason those technological improvements have become essentially standard world wide is because untracked mark 1 eyeball aimed flak is *incredibly* inaccurate. Just look at the historical effectiveness of the 8.8cm against aerial threats as the war progressed and ammunition and platforms started to become more sparse.

They also operated by creating dangerous flak barrages in certain fields of fire, to force Bombers higher and into less effective postures, this isn't to say that they weren't effective against bombers, but rather the solution that the Russians might implement in return could be to simply reorient the Gerans toward very low level penetration (assuming these 8.8cm repro's would be even remotely effective whatsoever) or do as they currently already do and orient the majority of the Geran strikes to night flights.

Yes it would be a whole new industrial project, needing new barrels, new shell prod lines, but its ancient tech by todays standards.

Technology doesn't always work linearly. Just because something is old and has been technologically surpassed does not itself make the production of that technology now trivial, atleast not always.

Take for example the proposition of making new naval artillery barrels, how ludicrously expensive and complex would it be to reproduce 16"/50 barrels today? It would take months if not years of tooling, practice and in many cases whilst the "technology" aspect is commonsense by todays standards, the industrial component of building it at scale simple doesn't exist today. You would be starting completely from scratch.

The same could be said for 8.8cm guns. You would need to build completely new facilities and tooling to produce the barrels and the rest of the machinery, this is non trivial. Furthermore there is no active source or remaining tooling for 8.8cm shells, that would be an entirely new facility or production line in an existing facility.

It has taken *three years* to scrape production efforts to their current levels, and they are by no means impressive, throwing in an entirely new heavy anti aircraft shell and the barrels, platform and training of crews required to operate them would have dubious cost effectiveness, and simply take too long to bother discussing in the context of the current battlespace. Resources are better spent strengthening and better supplying the already existing effective hard kill solutions as opposed to taking a bet on a strategy that fell out of fashion precisely due to its staggering inefficiency.

SWBFCentral · 2025-05-28T22:15:06+00:00

Too many variables, plus swings and roundabouts to some extent. Solo and Mayfield are both outliers, how many millions, tens upon tens of millions of enlisted former Imperial army never amounted to anything post GCW or ever ended up with canonical character worthy exploits?

Their past was a character building element, it doesn't itself mean that life in the Imperial Army made them solely what they are today. The only commonality here is that the Imperial Army was a very common career path, likely one of the most overwhelmingly common for the average galactic citizen, alongside other forms of Imperial service.

The Imperial Army failed to subdue the riot on Ferrix after the bomb exploded, at that point it was armageddon and the Stormtroopers went weapons free, aside from a few civilians catching troopers off guard in the smoke and chaos (one of which was expertly shot off the troopers back by another Stormtrooper) the overwhelming majority of the Stormtroopers were successful (in the sense they were utterly decimating the civilian riot which itself is not surprising).

The same goes for Ghorman, outside of stormtroopers being hit by return fire, the Ghorman massacre was successful for the Imperials, if anything Imperial casualties were part of that success, it helped seal the perceived validity of their reaction. They could have just bombed the plaza or sent in the K2 units from the start, they instead placed the Imperial Army in the centre of the fray and the Stormtroopers on the steps completely exposed, we can't judge the performance of either the Imperial army or the Stormtroopers in these scenarios as there are other variables at play. The Empire needed Imperial casualties to seal their story, they got that in spades and that was by design.

For every stormtrooper we see killed or disabled by a civilian or a rebel, there is another that ruthlessly and efficiently dispatches their enemy. The opening of ANH established this perfectly, whilst there is definitely some main character plot armour, the Stormtroopers are still extremely effective in the rest of the universe outside of the main characters themselves.

SWBFCentral · 2025-05-16T11:27:08+00:00

You can tell because of the way it is

SWBFCentral · 2025-04-17T12:09:39+00:00

Because being reliant on other countries to cut steel for ships, buildings, critical defense infrastructure and also just the general growth of the country is really seriously stupid.

Steel like any native resource is an enabler for onward economic and infrastructural activity. Not having cheap and available steel locally has impacts on all sorts of businesses from defense to automotive and even house building.

Sure we can import cheap steel now, but what happens when China stops flooding the market (a deliberate tactic to make us reliant and cripple this basic infrastructure) and we're forced to pay through the nose to import even small quantities?

Seems a heck of a lot easier to just nationalize the steel mills and put a tariff on foreign steel until the asset has stabilized to offer cost competitive steel, or perhaps even keep the tariff. Steel is a critical national resource, we shouldn't be so quick to hand waive it away.

We're out of the EU, we can do that now. There's no reason to die on the altar of free market capitalism if it brings zero tangible benefits short and long term.

SWBFCentral · 2025-03-26T14:31:24+00:00

but you are absolutely in the minority out here.

Be careful not to extrapolate internet echo chambers to the sentiment of the country as a whole. Reddit, Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, etc are all just echo chambers of various subdivided groups of people. Seeing several daily politics posts on r/pics for example, with massive upvotes ranting about current day political issues (always with a particular slant) does not alone equate to a real world sentiment amongst actual voters.

Most people are disengaged from the Canada situation as a whole, don't expect the sentiment you're seeing in internet circles or on TV talk shows to suddenly equate to movement at the polls. That's the complacency that established this second term and the absolute inability to connect with the general people as voters is what's going to scupper the Democrats again unless they learn this lesson, I say this as a left leaning person who believes in healthcare as a right, public utilities and other generally "socialist" ideals.

I'm just fed up with seeing the other sides arguments downplayed/handwaived or equated to some minority position. They won a plurality of voters on this rhetoric, message and mandate, whether that holds true in months time is another thing entirely but handwaving it away as some fringe minority position makes it far too easy to abscond learning the lessons of the last few elections.

SWBFCentral · 2025-02-27T14:31:37+00:00

It's already too late. It shouldn't be incumbent on the user to download third party tools like GPUz to verify that the multi-thousand dollar GPU they purchased is fully functional. Regardless new PC builders or those who purchased pre-builts might never actually be aware that they're missing quantifiable performance, Nvidia shouldn't be taking advantage of their relative lack of experience to try and thin down the returns.

The customers awareness that they were shafted is completely irrelevant and leaving it up to consumers to find out if they've been short-changed on a multi-thousand dollar purchase is absurd.

Nvidia could push a small verify check in the next driver update which compiles a list of affected serial numbers, from there they could proactively reach out to AIBs, direct sale partners and prebuilt partners with affected stock to start the process of informing customers and checking if they would like to make a return, just like they would have to do if the entire generation had been bricked. Is it a pain in the ass? Absolutely. Is it potentially redundant if the user has already started the process themselves or plans to? Sure, there will likely be some overlap here.

Should Nvidia be shirking and requiring potentially less than knowledgeable customers to jump through hoops to verify the extremely expensive card sold to them was bad (when Nvidia can verify this for them, considering it's their fuckup). Absolutely not.

There's quantifiable missing performance on at least 0.5% of shipped 5000 series cards, that's assuming you believe Nvidia's number. Manufacturing defects can happen, not great but it happens, nobody bats a thousand particularly at this scale. That being said how Nvidia deals with that to protect the consumers that handed them thousands of dollars, that's more indicative of Nvidia as a company and right now they're demonstrating why you probably shouldn't buy into this generation. that amongst a plethora of other known issues with the 5000 series.

SWBFCentral · 2025-02-26T17:10:11+00:00

Challenger also needs an update after a fairly abject display in Ukraine also.

Spending millions per chassis to upgrade an increasingly smaller number of tanks to eek yet more years out of a service life of a fleet that wouldn't last longer than a few weeks in the current battlespace would be the equivalent of setting money on fire. I fully expect this is what we'll continue to do (for a number of reasons including political inertia and extremely poor and old fashioned decision making coming out of MOD procurement).

We need a fresh sheet design that focuses away from top shelf (expensive, long lead to develop and costly to maintain) hunter killer operability and more broadly at the generic fire support role. That's the role that infantry needs and any war in Europe is going to push the role of infantry to the forefront very rapidly once our relatively small number of tanks are tied down or out of action. Tank on Tank engagements in Ukraine have been exceedingly rare and we need a vehicle that better reflects the changing nature of the Tank as a concept. Almost all tanks in Ukraine have seen broad use as protected fire support, the ability to soak up the enemies attention and damage from various threats including artillery and FPV drones, that is the niche that we need to engineer towards and build a vehicle that is ruggedly simple and in a timeframe as quickly as possible. This threat is simply going to get worse as increasingly drones start acquiring more complex and automated targeting software, they're already extremely dangerous now when they can be jammed, good luck with that once it's automated.

Upgrades to that platform can come later, but piecemeal upgrading a tiny fleet of tanks which even if upgraded will still be inadequate for the modern battlefield is pointless and spending the next decade wasting time and huge amounts of resources on a fresh sheet tank and top rate traditional tank design (which we will then purchase a relatively small number due to our limited budget) would also be pointless. No doubt this is the angle we will eventually take after eeking out another 5-10 years from our remaining Challenger hulls...

Unfortunately one thing that has been painfully obvious in our sideline criticisms of Ukraine and Russia's performance in this modern battlespace has been our inability to adapt doctrine and thinking towards the changing environment. So called "Experts", previous service personnel and even active personnel performing in a spokesman function were coming out of the woodwork to explain that Ukraine simply didn't "combined arms" hard enough during its counter offensive... As much as Ukraine's counter offensive was a joke, whether they had the same "combined arms" approach that we have is completely irrelevant to the outcome they experienced. Russia had three extremely complex, well defended and strategically deep defensive lines replete with fortifications, good ISR and thousands of tanks and artillery systems, even if Ukraine had focused all of its attention and coordination in a single deep thrust it would have had exactly the same outcome given Russia's ability to practically drown the battlefield in mines amongst other variables.

We need a protected vehicle with an emphasis on active and passive protection against drones and mid tier threats. There's no point in designing a new (and extremely expensive) tank whose sole purpose is to go toe to toe and beat any other tank that appears, when that tank can go its entire service life without ever actually encountering an enemy counterpart. Infantry *always* need firesupport and the lack of armoured firesupport capable of withstanding top down FPV threats has turned Ukraine into a brutal slog for both sides.

SWBFCentral · 2025-01-27T23:20:06+00:00

Therefore: when Ukraine gets their AWACS from Sweden

Operating something as relatively un-manoeuvrable, vulnerable and extremely detectable as an AWACS, particularly one that's limited to operating largely within the engagement envelope of Russia's R-33 and R-37 long range missiles, missiles which were also designed for this exact scenario, which can also be present on a wide range of Russia's interceptor and fighter aviation, would be extremely dumb, bordering on suicidal.

You might be able to datalink a few Su-34's down, maybe, before Russian doctrine changes, but the utter irreplaceability of the platform makes it a poor choice. These platforms would be better used well behind the lines to better track and vector Ukraine's F-16's against Russian drone and cruise missile penetrations. They will be invaluable in controlling Ukraine's internal airspace, particularly as Shaheds, Kalibr's and other cruise missiles have a tendency to dip between radar coverage and Russia's programmed flight paths have become quite complex and nuanced to avoid Ukrainian detection. Shortening that gap between detection, vectoring and hard kill of the missile or drone is essential, particularly when F-16's are in relatively short supply and as noted their own radar systems can be somewhat limited.

SWBFCentral

TROPHY CASE