The War in the Ukraine

Abominable said:

ATGM have warheads around 6-9kg. 25kg is a very big payload, you could easily derail a train car with that much HE, or 5 smaller warheads to cover a greater area in an anti personnel role.

All those systems you've mentioned don't weigh much at all, a few kg at most. There could be an issue with volume if they are off the shelf components but not weight.

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I think it weighs quite a bit. A SNIPER pod is basically a package of all this (minus navigation which is light anyhow). It is designed for aircraft with IR camera, TV camera, laser designator and laser rangefinder. It weighs 200 kg.

You can strip away some power, structural strength, cooling, long range optics, etc. and then it will get down to 25 kg, with a commensurate drop in capability and cost but sufficient for guiding artillery, rockets and even SRBMs.

FairAndUnbiased said:

I think it weighs quite a bit. A SNIPER pod is basically a package of all this (minus navigation which is light anyhow). It is designed for aircraft with IR camera, TV camera, laser designator and laser rangefinder. It weighs 200 kg.

You can strip away some power, structural strength, cooling, long range optics, etc. and then it will get down to 25 kg, with a commensurate drop in capability and cost but sufficient for guiding artillery, rockets and even SRBMs.

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You can't compare a targeting pod design for a fighter jet to one for a drone. They fly at much higher altitudes so require more optics so a bigger gimbal.

There's the issue of cost as well, it's fine to use the latest bolometers, optics and sensors for a jet that costs millions, it doesn't make sense for a small drone which will likely get lost.

Pretty much everything you said is already employed on orlan drones. It uses cheaper commercial products but hardly weighs anything.

Abominable said:

You can't compare a targeting pod design for a fighter jet to one for a drone. They fly at much higher altitudes so require more optics so a bigger gimbal.

There's the issue of cost as well, it's fine to use the latest bolometers, optics and sensors for a jet that costs millions, it doesn't make sense for a small drone which will likely get lost.

Pretty much everything you said is already employed on orlan drones. It uses cheaper commercial products but hardly weighs anything.

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From what I am reading about the Orlan it has an IR camera, optical camera and short range laser designator for Krasnopol strikes, but not laser rangefinder and altimeter for coordinate finding.

I still think that using a 20k drone for a land mine sized strike asset is still wasteful when it can be used for recon and produce much higher value in terms of ISR.

ATGMs derive their power from the shaped charge warhead, not from simply the mass of explosive. Many IEDs weighing 100+ kg didn't even scratch US tanks.

alfreddango said:

the thing that I find puzzling is that it got to rostov, that's pretty far from ukrainian lines

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Subsonic drones with high aspect ratio wings, lightweight load and -Long endurance- the quality which the drone is measured with can attain very long ranges if it turned into cruise missile although slow.

For example if you see Oryx's tweet yesterday, there was an Orlan-10 Drone crashed in Turkey.

If we use Orlan-10 example, at least from Wikipedia spec which already great. Using some assumption of cruising speed say 80 Knots (148 km/h) and stated endurance of 16 hours. We can use Raymer's (you can google "Daniel P Raymer" if you interested on who he is) simple Range-endurance equation to find the range of had that 16 hours endurance converted into range.

We divide the endurance first with 1.14. so 16/1.14 = 14 Then multiply that with the cruising speed so 14*80 = 1123 NMI or 2079 Km.

Doing the same for Ukrainian PD-2 with 100 km/h cruising speed (54 Knot) and 10 hours endurance yield 877 Km range, so it can be basically launched from everywhere even from Kiev.

and that commercial Mugin drone with 120 km/h cruise speed can easily reach 739 Km converting that 7 hours endurance into range.

Detectability is of course hard because it can be programmed to fly low and at speed comparable to birds where air defense radars will most likely filter it out as clutter (e.g S-300PT's 5N63 radar have minimum target speed of 125 km/h) and low RCS so even Podlets radar with minimum speed threshold of 30-50 km/h and located in Melitopol (Supposedly) will have reduced coverage. and including terrain which give more problem.

The easiest way to detect these slow commercial drones on long distance missions is to intercept the control feed.
Then you can see where the drone and the operator are and destroy both. With a supersonic cruise missile you can kill the operator before it hits the target. Expensive yes. But cheaper than a refinery.

FairAndUnbiased said:

From what I am reading about the Orlan it has an IR camera, optical camera and short range laser designator for Krasnopol strikes, but not laser rangefinder and altimeter for coordinate finding.

I still think that using a 20k drone for a land mine sized strike asset is still wasteful when it can be used for recon and produce much higher value in terms of ISR.

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Not sure if the Orlan has laser range finding or not. If it's something they needed they probably would have included it on the drone. They took the time to decide what payload was needed in a reconnaissance drone and designed the Orlan around it.

Even if what you're saying is true there's no reason you would need to choose one over the other. Just buy more, use some for reconnaissance and some to delivery payloads.

For the military $20k is literally pennies. Have you seen some of what they've been hitting with Iskander missiles? Plus unlike missiles there's a good chance the drone can be reused. According to one Ukrainian interview of a soldier I saw, drones typically last 1-2 weeks.

FairAndUnbiased said:

ATGMs derive their power from the shaped charge warhead, not from simply the mass of explosive. Many IEDs weighing 100+ kg didn't even scratch US tanks.

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If you wanted to target a tank, naturally you'd use a shaped charge. Russia probably has thousands of RPK-3s in storage. Russians don't seem to have a problem taking out Ukrainian tanks, and I think they don't have many left.

Much better to do what the Ukrainians are doing and target critical infrastructure. Roads, railways, power stations and so on.

Stealthflanker said:

Subsonic drones with high aspect ratio wings, lightweight load and -Long endurance- the quality which the drone is measured with can attain very long ranges if it turned into cruise missile although slow.

For example if you see Oryx's tweet yesterday, there was an Orlan-10 Drone crashed in Turkey.

If we use Orlan-10 example, at least from Wikipedia spec which already great. Using some assumption of cruising speed say 80 Knots (148 km/h) and stated endurance of 16 hours. We can use Raymer's (you can google "Daniel P Raymer" if you interested on who he is) simple Range-endurance equation to find the range of had that 16 hours endurance converted into range.

We divide the endurance first with 1.14. so 16/1.14 = 14 Then multiply that with the cruising speed so 14*80 = 1123 NMI or 2079 Km.

Doing the same for Ukrainian PD-2 with 100 km/h cruising speed (54 Knot) and 10 hours endurance yield 877 Km range, so it can be basically launched from everywhere even from Kiev.

and that commercial Mugin drone with 120 km/h cruise speed can easily reach 739 Km converting that 7 hours endurance into range.

Detectability is of course hard because it can be programmed to fly low and at speed comparable to birds where air defense radars will most likely filter it out as clutter (e.g S-300PT's 5N63 radar have minimum target speed of 125 km/h) and low RCS so even Podlets radar with minimum speed threshold of 30-50 km/h and located in Melitopol (Supposedly) will have reduced coverage. and including terrain which give more problem.

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This being the case, why then is Ukraine complaining about receiving drones?

gelgoog said:

The easiest way to detect these slow commercial drones on long distance missions is to intercept the control feed.
Then you can see where the drone and the operator are and destroy both. With a supersonic cruise missile you can kill the operator before it hits the target. Expensive yes. But cheaper than a refinery.

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Using that supersonic cruise missile to take out a single drone operator would be very expensive, the Ukrainians would probably take that trade if it meant that the missile wouldn't be used against military infrastructure.

If Russians had the ability to intercept the control feed, why are drones reaching their targets?

One interview from a Ukrainian drone operator said that once the drone approached the frontline, GPS/GLONASS was jammed, but they could rely on FPV to get to where they needed.

I have two suggestions. First would be to deploy AA guns at critical infrastructure. You could just bring out WW2 AA guns but it would be massive overkill. 5.45mm would be perfectly fine...every drone video I've seen from Ukrainians has been at low altitude.

The other one would be to develop an interceptor drone. A small fast drone with a SMG calibre machine gun.
Have them continuously circling the border or behind the front lines. Rely on radar or eyewitness sightings of Ukrainian drones and use them to intercept Ukrainian drones.

So what happened to that Russian An-124 that landed in China a few days ago?