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Comment by InDubioProRubio | Hacker News Reader

You make it mobile- aka nuklear barges or small nuklear power plants on trucks. Also there seem to be minimal - Tit for Tat rules of engagement - you do not hit the reservoir upriver of moscow, i do not blow up zhaporischia. But moscow is running out of hostages and time. All the dams are gone in ukraine- so moscow could be flooded, unless they take the nuclear power plants hostage. Which ukraine could do to btw- no reason why warcrimeas shouldnt go both ways, now that the west is betraying them

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    > nuklear barges or small nuklear power plants on trucks

Does this exist in practice, or only in theory?

Not even in theory, it's solidly science fiction. And since you presumably need to park up and plug them into something to actually use them, they'll always be an blindingly obvious target. They'll be the things surrounded by wires, pumping out megawatts of heat.

What are you talking about? It is already built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

Which would last how long in a conflict? You obviously can have mobile reactors, it's called a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier for a start, but a fleet of mobile reactors scooting ahead of incoming attacks providing power and moving off is pure science fiction and completely impractical.

It also weighs over 20,000 tonnes so that's a big old truck you'll need. Even a submarine reactor, the tiniest and most compact type ever made, running on essentially weapons-grade highly-enriched fuel, are around 100 tonnes just for the reactor itself, which is far from the only bit you need to generate power.

Hmm, pretty sure you are moving goalposts. You said it doesn't exist even in theory, when in fact it is there in flesh and blood. As any structure that exists on the face of the earth, it can be destroyed. Would it be quicker than hitting a stationary object which has a known static position, I think not.

> You obviously can have mobile reactors

It's not about having reactors in objects, it's about them supplying power to the world outside of their vessel.

Which is all completely and utterly useless in the context of hardening an electrical grid. Which is the topic at hand. It would take days to connect one and start it. For all intents and purposes, it's a static installation.

And truck mounted reactors really are science fiction, if for no other reason than they'd be a proliferation nightmare (also for, well, all the other reasons).

But I don't know why I bother since everyone round here seem to have terminal software brain and think you can just scale and deploy energy infrastructure like Kubernetes.

Brother I don't disagree with you nor claim anything that I cannot claim since I don't know the domain. You wrote one thing that was incorrect (that they don't exist) and I shared a link that might inform you otherwise.

Cheers.

on the day trump pulls us support, the gloves come off and moscow gets it

They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.

That said:

While we all know that Russia isn't fighting all of NATO, it does claim that it is fighting all of NATO.

Do they believe what they say? I don't know.

I think if Ukraine attempts Hail-Mary tactics, if you assume the hypothetical that Russia really does believe that Ukraine is only capable of such things with NATO support, it is still bad for NATO.

There's certainly Ukrainians who want nukes now, who think giving them up was a mistake. Some say it would only take them months to get nukes… and they said that months ago. If they do develop their own independent capability, and Russia just assumes it's an American or French or British nuke, that's still bad for the rest of us, even if Trump is shouting about how the USA didn't do it.

    > They're probably both fighting at maximum capability already.

Absolutely not. In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories.

> In my view, NATO should be supplying 1M+ artillery shells per month, so that UA can unleash scorched earth tactics on Russian positions inside UA territories

Sure, but that's not Russia or Ukraine, that's us as outsiders.

If Ukraine has secret weapons to fall back on in the scenario that — as per the comment I'm replying to — the US stops giving them weapons, why aren't they already using them? Likewise if Russia has any significant number of other weapons they could actually use*, why did they not use them already?

* while Russia may have plenty of unused submarines, they're not going to be of any significance beyond the handful of SLBMs that might spook the rest of the world into thinking it's World-War-Three-O'Clock

Because the US would withdraw weapons access immediately and - there was a tit- for tat situation implicitly, you attack my refinery, i attack your dam. But moscow has run out of tat. They have destroyed all they can destroy, after the 20th its payback time.

This expression is often misused, it seems. It sounds so cool, 'scorched-earth tactics'... like 'medieval', 'fire-and-brimstone', 'kill it with fire', etcetera.

Maybe read up on the specifics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

And BTW, there just aren't any 1M+ shells per month to send. Maybe in 2028 or something. Production takes time to build.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ammunition-ukraine/ (Aug-24)

Its russian colonial bias- none of the countries that start with "the" can amount to anything. All just farmers, peasants, runaway traitors. Its a sort of smear that ukraine CAN not do that alone.

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