(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
A 3D Look at Tokmak [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-22
I haven’t had much time to do these diaries lately, so this will have to be fast.
Hopefully we’ll see a big push in the south now that Ukraine has taken Robotyne and many eyes are turning to Tokmak. I know that this may be a ways away yet, but one can hope.
We see a lot of maps, and can see all the roads and the one main through rail line that is in Zaporizhia Oblast all passing through Tokmak, along with great writeups like this from RO37: www.dailykos.com/...
Click here for larger image.
Above is a map by Brady Africk who is doing an astonishing job mapping Russian fortifications onto Google Maps. (see more of his work here):
read.bradyafrick.com/…
www.google.com/...
Whenever I see maps like this I always wonder why a fortification is placed where it is. Surely the ground truth is more significant than a random sprinkling.
So we go to 3D. In 3D, the terrain looks fairly flat and open. Tokmak is around 50 m (164 ft) in elevation, the river beds down at 35 m (115 ft), and the hills above the river are around 100 m (328 ft). But on a model that is 80 km / 50 mi wide (see checker scale of kilometers along side of model), you won’t see much of that undulation.
So a steep bluff overlooking the river that is 70 m (230 ft) high is not even a speed bump at this scale, but to a soldier on the ground, driving an vehicle, it can make a big dent in their day.
Click here for larger image.
While this may give a better idea of the major roads (orange) and rail line (yellow) connections that make Tokmak so important, it’s not much more than you can get from a 2D map. So, the trick I like to play is to exaggerate the physical relief:
Click here for larger image.
Water always drains and follows the path of least resistance, and in this area, at this point, it is mostly flowing south (away from us in this image). As rivers flow, they combine, forming a 70m bluff that overlooks the Molochna river. Now the terrain looks significant and gives the sense of where natural heights and waterways would be. That bluff would be fairly commanding as a defense or artillery observation point which is still important since drones reportedly only last an average of three missions.
What I find really interesting is to project Brady Africk’s fortification mapping onto the exaggerated terrain:
Click here for larger image.
This is from the North, which is the direction that Ukraine is advancing from. Now we can get a better idea of where those fortifications are placed. I don’t know if they are continuous trenchworks or ditches or what, so I have just marked them as spots on the landscape.
Looking at this from the East to get another perspective:
Click here for larger image.
Just in this small slice of land, I marked 615 fortifications. No idea how many are actually occupied or what state they are in. In any case, it is huge amount of earth being moved.
I don’t have the knowledge to be able to assess the effectiveness of the defenses, I just find that it is interesting to look at the terrain in this way because it tends to bring home the nuance of fighting one’s way past such fortifications (in that it’s not just a flat push through a field) and I wanted to share it.
Again, the last images are exaggerated relief, but up close, at an individual soldier’s scale, some of those hills would become significant and may explain the positioning of the defenses.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/22/2188934/-A-3D-Look-at-Tokmak
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
