"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (7 Viewers)

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A one-year hitch is not a lot of time. Even a dingbat fireman like myself had 16 weeks of BMT and tech-school, just to grad as an apprentice, entrusted with a firehose when SHTF but nothing else. It took another six months of OJT and some book study to get my -50 level appointment as a "journeyman" -- USAF term.

Now how much more complex is a ship and its systems? It sounds to me like the RF military is in the habit of plugging warm bodies into personnel slots and calling it a day ... but anyone who's served knows that on stuff like this 1) recruits make mistakes in direct proportion to their inexperience and 2) mistakes in combat (or a fireground, for that matter) can and do kill people.

U.S.S. Stark, frigate, 2 Exocets, remained afloat. Moskva, guided missie cruiser, 2 Neptuns , sunk.

If the Ukrainian reports are accurate. they hit it with two 330-lb warheads. An Exocet has a slightly larger ~370-lb warhead so the Stark took a little more payload onto a smaller hull. But where they hit matters. A bridge hit hurts. An engineering hit is dangerous. A magazine hit ... well, you know ... The Stark was knocked out of action, but the captain and crew took action to keep the second hit -- which actually exploded and blew out some hull -- out of the water.

I'm kinda second-guessing myself right now and wondering if those Russian sailors saved their ship from a magazine hit? It would explain the two apparently-contradictory accounts.

In any event, 650-700 lbs of explosive coming aboard quickly is bad for your health. Given the Russian butthurt being shown, I'm in agreement that Ukrainian missiles docked it on the seabed.

It looks like Putin's in "oh yeah?!" mode.
 
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Agreed. HMS Glamorgan managed to turn the ship so that the detected incoming Exocet partially glanced off. Her radar ops and command folks were up to the task.

 
Look at the superstructure in that photo, damn-near all of it's radar array is gone along with what appears to be portions of the structure itself.
One of the Neptunes had to have hit at or near to cause such damage.

Sure, it's holed upper-side and from the color of the smoke it's clear that there's some fire that hasn't met water.

I just wanted to point out that the stern damage bespeaks something very bad happening there. Missing plating, discoloration, and what seems to be structural damage to the hull.
 
And the hangar door blown open, too.
 
So the russians were not lying when they stated a fire aboard caused an ammo explosion. They just omitted the cause of the fire (did not self-ignite) and made up the storm as final cause of sinking.
The fire and smoke marks show a blast rocking through the whole ship indicating the crew on a weekend trip but not in a combat zone where you would have your watertight doors closed. With that fire still raging near/around the big missiles it just needs to get hot enought to set off their propellant and it's gone.
 
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something about quality of soviet/russian ship defense systems in compare to US made. When ive served in Polish Navy we have been donated by US two old OHP frigates which replaced ORP Warszawa - 1980 era mod Kashin class destroyer. Till this even very often my unit have been tasked with simulating sea skimmer attack on Warszawa with TS-11 advanced trainer jets. Basically take off from OPCE airfield and flying very low profile to the position of the ship trying to surprise it's AD systems. When OHPs being introduced my friend serving in CIC of the one of the OHPs said that this exercise has loosed all sense - "we have seen this airplane basically when they started taxing on the runway and keep tracking them independently to the best efforts of pilots" - polish coastal is quite flat - there is no terrain profile you may really hide, but russian radar was unable to detect the same airplane in the same training condition until pilot made error or crossed Hel peninsula line.
 

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