Originally, yes. But lately the position of right wingers is "the opposite of whatever the left thinks". So when the Ukraine war broke out they tried to find reasons why Russia is not so bad. You won't hear much about it from the older ones who grew up knowing that Russia was a huge rival and possible enemy. But the younger dipshits are almost Russia fanboys because the left is anti Russia

Republicans are very split on Ukraine.

Mainstream Republicans are Team Ukraine. “Putin wing of the party” (as a GOP leader called them) actively support Trump and are Team Putin.

Ahh so typically conservative Republicans used to be foreign policy hawks who were generally for millitary interventions in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, syria, but recently there has been a bit of an "America first" moddo with Trump supporters that think we are spending too much money in Ukraine and want a spending cap, they are also angry at democrats for spending and are using brinkmanship to get concessions by threatening to not move up the debt ceiling making America default on its loans and seriously hurting the economy, personally I hate any one who doesn't support Ukraine also Taiwan and I can't stand any one who doesn't understand how much we are getting back through our millitary support for Ukraine

RU money/influence/shilling,/bot farms/western media brain worms/trump etc

They were until Trump took office. He's all buddy buddy with Putin and his supporters blindly go along with whatever he says or does though so now a lot of those on the Right are stumbling over themselves trying to justify ways to not counter what Dear Leader says.

We'll see in the next general election. If Trump is running, all conservatives will hold their nose and vote for him. There is a genuine threat to this country becuase of the very real conservative habit. You would think that Biden would win by a landslide according to the defenders of good conservatives. There are no good conservatives. This entire issue is due to them voting for the worst people in the US for many years.

Jet Boats are very popular for River Travel/Sport. Can go through shallows and over branches/logs and rocks with less potential damage than outboard props. Good point.

It's at about 34-40 seconds in, there's been a couple of articles that've come out about it too.

https://youtu.be/ZYE5w3ETtDM

I go for in-cockpit for the immersion. I like to drift and autocross IRL when I can afford it and my drift car runs, so in cockpit is just more natural feeling to me. Bumper POV does give you unmatched view of the tarmac and apex's of corners and such.

"Intelligence Ship"

There seems to be a lot of "Never should this have even happened" going on on the Ruski side.

It is actually very hard to detect small ships in these types of conditions shown in the video.

Once you do detect them, it is very difficult to shoot at said objects. Moving firing platform. Moving target. Etc.

Source: Have had to shoot at things from a ship before.

It'd be funny to me if Ukraine strapped a bunch of RPG's to these things and used those to make the gunners duck.

Fucked? Unlikely. Warships are tough.

In desperate need of repair? Definately.

This isn't situation like the Moskva from what I understand. Newer ship and the drone probably hit the area hardened for torpedo strikes.

It's hilarious how effective cheap, off the shelf, commercial crafts can be when outfitted with a remote control system and a bunch of explosives. We're talking about a $10k jet ski disabling a $10m+ warship.

That's H I Sutton, guy is a legendary Navy OSINT guy. Legit source.

Those were made in house.

Anything smaller than “snapped the ship in half” isn’t going to sink anything unless it crosses two or more ( whatever the Russian navy builds to) water tight compartments.

That wasn't necessary to sink the Moskva. An explosion and a fire can wreak havoc.

A 500kg charge will absolutely penetrate several compartments. The Cole is still sailing, but it was hit with a much smaller charge, and with very good support very fast, and some of the best trained damage control parties in the world. No one has claimed it would be "broken in half". The USS Cole was a more heavily built ship, built for direct combat, with a much higher displacement, and with a lot more reserve buoyancy, and in that attack several compartments were breached and it took 3 days to get the damage under control.

To put it into context, a WW2 US Mark 14 torpedo carried 292 kg of torpex, which is a mix of mostly TNT and RDX, and that has destroyed more then it's fair share of much more heavily constructed vessels.

Assuming this is an RDX (or comparable) charge which is likely, you're looking at more then twice that level of destruction.

Are these not Toloka TLK-150 drones, developed in Ukraine?

Though if you fuck up the drive section of a boat you will take it out of commission for months. Who knows the turn around of a Russian naval ship during peace time, let alone wartime.

Well, sinking it and getting it out of use for the foreseeable future is not to big of a difference. Even if you sink it sailors have good chance of survival in these scenarios. So this is more about denying the sea/space, than anything else.

The REFIT cost for royal navy frigates can be budgeted at £60 million plus

Those frigates use 1980s technology (gun even controlled with DOS) so almost all the cost comes from how labour intensive they are to maintain and how fast the sea eats away at their steel hulls.

I was working in one of the machine rooms on a frigate that came in, the deck was so so rusted (top of a tank so not direct sea exposure, outside of potentially leaking pipes) that layer upon layer came off. I walked past hatch coaming that had holes around it once the concrete layer was removed and we were walking on steel.

Each frigate takes several hundred weld inserts to the external and external structure every decade or so. Ships are EXPENSIVE, so insanely expensive, and wear out fast.

Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan has thousands of modern antiship missile (more than enough for every troop carrier of China) which are far more effective than these slow ass drones.

An operator must manually authorize discharge (like a trigger) for each target that is tracked. An entirely automatic system would inevitably fire upon friendly and civilian aircraft.

Indeed:

https://news.usni.org/2022/10/11/suspected-ukrainian-explosive-sea-drone-made-from-jet-ski-parts

And Prince of Wales, which had successfully torpedobeated like 20+, was done in by a single torpedo impact at the rear which damaged a propeller shaft (which pokes out through a ideally-well-sealed hole beneath the waterline), and led to massive uncontrollable flooding

Yeah they even tried to get away since the frame was intact but everything else on the ship was fucked by the constant bombardment of the allied hunting party. In the end the crew sank the ship themselves so that it wouldn't fall into enemy hands.

might sound like a nerd but bismarck was the only ship to be referred to as

"he" since the Germans thought it was too powerful to be a she.

As long as you actually close your watertight compartments up.
I'd wager the reason Moskva sank was because she wasn't buttoned up and more compartments flooded than she could handle. The last image of her she was heavily listing and down in the water.
While she was hit amidships there was soot from all her port side portholes which would correlate to fire spreading past bulkheads which should have prevented that.
Oh dear... https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1661755360191864832/photo/1

You hear in the SOS call that was posted here a week or so ago that they were struck in the tail and the rudder was struck and inoperative

Moskva was hit dead in the centre by both missiles (which is the part with the biggest radar return, which makes sense)

Kind of gives away that their “volunteers” weren’t exactly 100% willing.