Plastic bottle instead of a gas tank: UAV Orlan 10 Russian tech

Well that’s the point, does it? Without knowing the failure rate and operational effectiveness it’s impossible to say. Maybe 50% of missions fail due to fuel line problems and the camera doesn’t work on cold days.

the components are off the shelf civilian crap ,dont look milspec at all

this looks like typical russian grift project

However, I would be worried about the dependencies taken on.

Knowing this, the west will make the export of plastic bottles (and DSLR cameras) to Russia illegal. If they don’t have domestic industry to fall back on, they have a problem. If they _do_ have such industry, why don’t they use it? I doubt it’s already running at full speed. Automation can easily crank out this kind of stuff by the thousands each month.

Edit: I guess Canon also could be coerced into releasing firmware that, if that control hasn’t been turned in a few hours/days of operation, and, assuming this camera has it, GPS tells it’s airborne near Russia, runs some code that puts the camera on fire or just randomly disables the video output stream.

edited for typo

[edit] It's pretty embarrassing, and I think tells a bigger story.

I strongly suspect that part of the reason the Ukraine invasion was so bungled is that the military procurement folks were getting cheap knock-off equipment and pocketing the difference. Leadership was told stories of cutting-edge tech while reality on the ground was very different. I suspect the whole army looks either like this - mixed in with whatever was left over after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I do agree that the PJSC United Aircraft Corporation [2] (a merger of Ilyushin, Irkut, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev and Yakovlev design bureaus) has some decent, modern designs but I'd argue a lot of that is carry-over from the cold war too. Their F-35 competitor (Su-35S/Su-27M) are improved variants of the Su-27 which debuted in 1977. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-35

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_Corporation

The last truly new Russian jets ( MiG or Sukhoi, doesn't matter) to enter mass production are the Su-27 and MiG-29 from the 1980s. Everything since has been new versions of those designs, or failures ( Su-57). They aren't bad planes, and might have some specific advantages (e.g. IIRC a MiG-29 is a better interceptor than an F-16), but they're old. They're certainly cheaper, easier to maintain and with good training and systems can do plenty of damage in good circumstances and with some luck, but saying they're "in many ways better than their US counterparts" is a stretch.

Is there an onboard computer that can send photos back to the operator? Or does the drone have to fly back and the operator collect the memory card.