Shaped Charges – Sheet of copper going through 1ft of solid steel (2010) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
A few things stand out (spoilers of course) - the Chairman of Deutsche Bank had an armoured convoy with two vehicles with bodyguards. It makes sense seeing that someone was trying to kill him, but outside of that context it seems a lot. Most European politicians, including heads of state and government, have less today.
Second, he bled to death. I wonder what circumstances led to this, was the car too badly mangled and nobody could come to his aid? It's not something that happens instantaneously, i think, so there's some time to react. But maybe the blood loss couldn't be stopped ( severed legs, is there something that could be done? Would a tourniquet help?). No idea
Like I said if this is credible there should be some evidence, but I’d conjecture that perhaps Putin could have been part of that too
I’d have thought people would be crowing about that if it was the case.
The anti-nuclear movement wasn't driven by money. Still isn't. The organisations that wanted nuclear power used money, the ones against used people's time.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/image/sz.1.3984639/1408x792
>1% of the population attended that demonstration, and demonstrations that big matter. But they're not a matter of payment. People weren't paid to go there, they didn't even have their travel costs reimbursed: You can't reimburse 100k people and hope to keep that secret. You can't even reimburse the ~5k organisers.
Those sources are pretty shit, honestly. One says the Red Army Faction claimed responsibility (this is not disputed). The other cites an (unnamed) "former Red Army Faction" claiming they had meetings with Putin, but makes no connection with the Herrhausen assassination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Herrhausen#Assassinatio...
if the explosive went off more or less instantly, the speed of the car would not matter, not that it would be difficult to estimate anyway.
Do we call it the Russia/Ukraine war or the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
This is a discussion about a special kind of explosive and a first hand story on how it is used in a conflict. Leave politics aside.
Whilst I agree that the preceding comments are off topic with their own inflammatory agenda's I do think it's important in generally acknowledging the war was caused by a US led invasion based on lies.
Disclaimer: I fought there and lost people there, and after, but thankfully came out unscathed.
Sorry for the ones who died
Glib though your answer is it hasn't been that long since people were shot for not following orders. And at 17-18 years old you're unlikely to question much you're told to do, especially after training/indoctrination. Most of the time I had no idea what I was actually doing or why, but when you end up having to fight for your life and those of your muckers you do what you must trying to survive. Trails come if you survive.
I guess it's always a risk analysis if you will end up in the winning or losing team .
Combatants on both sides, obviously. Oh, and the civilians, too.
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcrip...
So if you're talking about these things today, it makes perfect sense to talk about the invasion in progress as it's the current event. If you bring up the Russo-Ukrainian war in a conversation, it's unclear about what part of the events since 2014 you're talking about, since presumably if you were talking about the current events, you'd be more specific. If you talk about the Iraq War, there can be no confusion with current events since it ended a decade ago.
I also don't quite buy the argument - see jhgb's reply - but that's definitely not why I flagged it.
There would be no wars without greedy politicians, but there would be no wars without soldiers too.
Propaganda is an effective drag net. We're all susceptible to some form of it. Outright lying works more effectively than it should.
You're just looking for a morale high ground, no need to pretend otherwise.
> as an Iraqi who have lived through the "war"
This is why it's never a great idea to assume anything and interested better to try to keep things neutral and reasonable.
When I got older I was thinking maybe he was telling some tall tales, but I guess this could work as an EFP.
“An explosively formed penetrator, also known as an explosively formed projectile, a self-forging warhead, or a self-forging fragment, is a special type of shaped charge designed to penetrate armor effectively.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge
The penetration distance is proportional to the diameter of the charge (counterintuitive; you'd expect the height), and can be up to 7x as large. So a ~5 inch charge shown in the film can penetrate up to about 3 feet of solid steel.
Also, all of our known defenses against shaped charged rely on the assumption that the same spot won't get hit twice. Composite armor breaks and deflects the geometry of the jet through its deformation; reactive armor relies on a mini-explosion to defeat the jet. This has interesting implications in a world of drones and precision-guided munitions, and in fact the Javelin missiles we've been shipping to Ukraine have double warheads, the first to destroy the armor and the second to destroy the vehicle.
Take a look at this graphic:
https://sites.breakingmedia.com/uploads/sites/3/2021/07/imag...
The source for this is an advertisement for a Rheinmetal brand APS. So treat it like you would any marketing material.
Nonetheless, if it’s even remotely accurate, I would not want to be part of a tank crew that is visible to surveillance aircraft multiple countries away.
I get the impression these APS systems were designed with low intensity “anti-terror” operations in mind. They’ll do a decent job killing an RPG fired from across the street but they light you up like a Christmas tree. Not a problem if you’re battling ISIS but a significant liability against opponents with modern surveillance capability. Also they’re useless against top attack munitions which seem to be remarkably effective in Ukraine.
The Javelin has multiple tricks up its sleeve to defeat sophisticated armor and Russian armor is just behind the curve. It's a literal arms race to add more layers of defense and more layers of attack and right now, NATO is far ahead.
But Ukraine is advancing. So they are winning anyway which indicates that something is going wrong on Russia side and it fits the outcome.
I would argue that based on that you can assume that the Story to be more true than just 50/50
A scaled down model of the Möhne dam where the bouncing bomb was used can be found at the BRE site in Watford on your way to the lunch canteen. https://bregroup.com/ipark/parks/england/visit/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb#Re-creating_the_...
I got onto the topic years ago when watching the Dambusters. Related to this, he also has a video showing how putting a simple tube/bag of water behind an explosive charge magnifies its force incredibly. I believe he started a company that built and sold explosives with such a water-fillable jacket that could be used to knock down doors by police forces.
edit: here's the water filled explosive knocking down a door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_80gWlDQdHg
>here's the water filled explosive knocking down a door
The real thing: Take stiff cardboard slightly larger than the hole you want to make, any shape. Using wire or such to hold it in place, arrange flexible "rope" of plastic explosive in loops on the cardboard, in any shape you want. It's going to be a continuous rope, not separate bits like in that image. Make it a triangle: 3 layers, then 2 on top, then 1. This is the "shaped explosive" part, and directs the force toward the wall. Nail/etc flat side of cardboard to door/wall you want a hole in, move to side & to safe distance. Make it go boom.
I've converted a thick wood door into toothpicks with that.
nitrocellulose is very simple to make and detonate... and is also very stable.... I don't see why we need secrets... I played with that stuff when I was a teenager
Nitrocellulose can also be detonated with a properly brisant primary charge, which nitroglycerin is quite capable of being.
Typically Nitrocellulose (aka gun cotton, and the primary ingredient in most smokeless powders) won't detonate on it's own, but it's a very different beast from nitroglycerin.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...]
I stamped initials in steel beams etc. Hardest thing was getting detonators = well controlled. Never tried to make a tank buster.
Fond memories!
https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/the-history-of-radi...
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/29/garden/shopping-canal-st-...
If properly prepared and used and stored responsibly then gun cotton can be safe, even when used for teenage antics. Lighting off a piece while resting it on an open palm of course being one classic trick with nitrocellulose. I'd say storage and transportation of low and high explosives are some of the riskiest aspects because there's so many insidious ways for it to go wrong that you wouldn't learn about until you need to take your shoes off to count past 7. It doesn't help that nowadays it's so trivial to find out how to synthesize acetone peroxide and storing it long term is always going to be fraught with peril. Especially when someone without any semblance of proper containers stores it sealed up in a plastic bottle with a screw on cap. Just one drop or one crumb of primary explosive on the screw threads and maybe you get it sealed up, but when it dries out in the threads there's a good chance it goes off in your closed up hand when you try to open it and add in all the friction rubbing between the threads.
It’s thoroughly explained in the manuals freely available at US Army web site.
It didn't occur to me that the subject matter would be incompatible with narration, but it (IMO) just doesn't work that way. Large portions of the book have equations and heavy notation. Here's an actual passage:
> it can be simplified to cee equals bracket two aitch over em end-bracket to the one half power times bracket one minus parentheses pee e over pee cee end parentheses to the ar over cee pee power end bracket to the one half power.
Yeah, I just couldn't keep listening to that. I need to get a print copy, because the subject matter is interesting.
She realized that Feynman's verbal explanations were so clear that she had not had any trouble visualizing the diagrams as he drew and discussed them.
It was just in a box in the back of his truck. Looked fun.
I wince, sometimes, thinking back. But my family was a logging family, so getting blown up was just one in a long list of ways to die.
One of the silliest, hilarious but on point thing I've ever heard uttered from a video game character
Not problems like 'What is beauty?' Because that would fall without the purview of your condundrums of philosophy.
I solve practical problems..." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA
Serious question - just like quoting an expert in the relevant topic isn't an appeal to authority, etc.
In the same way, an appeal to an authority is better than nothing, but its still a really weak argument. You can misunderstand authorities and authority can be mistaken or suborned. Its a reasonable argument if nobody knows much about the topic, but its never convincing if people are learned in the topic; the benefit of an expert is not that they are experts, its that they know how to defend their position with reasoning. As the motto of the royal society says "Nullius in verba".
"Beware old men in a young man's game."
Edit: Nope I'm wrong, just redid the math. Apologies.
Survivorship bias is a bias because the sample is biased - Its when you pick a group of people who have already won and then are surprised that they beat the odds and won because you confuse the probability that a specific person wins with the probability that at least 1 person wins.
To get a good estimate of this you need to come up with some priors about how many skilful and unskillful equivalents there were at the age of 30 and how much worse the unskillful ones are at staying alive.
I meant if you meet X people at a random point in their career then on average more than half will make it to the end because some of the original sample died before you sampled the population. Basically older people would have a lower chance of their luck running out even if they where all equally incompetent.
At least assuming the original population isn’t dying of something else vastly more often etc.
The credentials of the expert don't determine whether or not the statement is an appeal to authority.
Sometimes I’m glad I’m in this field though, because I hear about the researchers working on prions that have started dying off, and I know it’s one of those one and 100,000 events that you inevitably experience.
Plastic explosive with electric igniter ain't that bad, but old school fuses and mines are scary.
As we say in America: “Hold my beer.”
Edit: Or more charitably, they underestimated the consequences.
This wasn’t Jackass, it was a science programme and he was the resident engineer. In theory he knew what he was doing but underestimated the risks and paid the personal consequences.
> The episode saw him "strapped into a rig like a go-cart which was propelled along a track into a post".
I'm sorry but to me this reads like something out of Darwin Awards.
Which is why he asked for 4x what might be fair? I’m being facetious: I have no idea. I am just saying there is little constraint on how much damages you can reasonably ask for.
A bit of current context - beside deep penetration the jet isn't that destructive to surroundings. And here comes design flaw of Russian tanks - getting inside a Russian tank such jet frequently hits the tank's ammo which in those tanks is stored in a carousel around/under the turret and thus it results in the whole tank ammo explosion which even throws the multi-ton turret several stories up into the air (you can see a lot of the tanks blown up in that way - 'lollypops' - in Ukraine). To compare - US Abrams tank has ammo stored in separate compartment in the back of the turret.
Fireworks and ammunition factories and storage facilities tend to have strong walls and relatively weak roofs for the same reason: if a building goes boom, you don’t want it to make neighboring buildings go boom, too.
The cone becomes very hot stream of molten copper. It melts through the steel plate, much like a jet of hot water melts through a block of ice.
This happens fast enough that much heat does not have the time to escape from the impact site, despite high thermal conductivity of metals. The high pressure created by the explosion keeps the jet compressed from sides, too, so it does not fragment easily.
Various kinds of "active armor" trigger the munition by a thinner layer of metal well ahead of the real thick armor plate, then produce counter-explosions to break the jet.
cold water can cut through steel also...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NVOThRooE
It looks like pressure cutting with pure water exists but it is limited to softer materials. This page [0] has a fair bit of detail on it all.
[0] https://www.machinemfg.com/waterjet-cutting-guide/#Classific...
It’s simply focused kinetic energy that does it. The cone focuses the copper into a slug like object, and the slug becomes similar to an extremely powerful bullet.
The flimsy straw could do it simply because of how fast it was moving. The strength of the straw doesn't matter, simply it's mass, moving that fast, carries itself through, ie the leading edge is not being pushed from behind like a nail, more like a bullet with a string attached?
Setting aside the simplification, that probably the mass of the rest of the straw does play some part not absolutely zero, is that a reasonable way to conceptualize it?
According to this article, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association thinks it's not possible:
https://www.livescience.com/39270-tornado-straw-into-tree-wo...
(Alternative explanation in the article: the tree twists during the hurricane, cracks temporarily open, and debris gets stuck in the cracks.)
Edit: obviously it penetrates, but not in the way that you would expect.
The inverted apex of the cone drives into the steel, pushing the steel aside, but then the apex opens up and flows back along the outside of itself. In other words, any given part of this copper "wire" interacts with the steel only long enough to push it open, then it is replaced by new copper.
From this explanation, it sounds like the tunnel that has been "bore" through the steel would be completely coated from start to finish by the inverted copper cone.
Of course the shaped charge isn't a gun though and the stream of copper doesn't travel for hundreds of meters/yards. If you need to stand off from the target you'd want to mount it as the payload of a rocket and fire towards thine enemies.
EDIT: this is of course a better description:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/bu...
So the rod is traveling so fast that it and the target act like liquids, even though it isn't molten.
Something very roughly similar is happening here. The shape of the cone as the detonation wave goes through the explosive forces copper into the center and the only (or lowest resistance) way out is a straight jet through the target material.
>Hypothetical shape charge liner. High density is a benefit but equally low speed of sound indicate s that it may be no better than uranium. An advantage may be found in its ductility, if it leads to greatly improved jet formation relative to its cost.
It seems that sound speed and density are considered more valuable, so tungsten, zirconium, molybdenum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_lens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosio...
So the shape is such that all parts of the cone converge at the center, so the full energy of the explosive is focused in that thin column.
But also see other explanation, about being renewed.
Presenter: "DIY shaped charges, of course"
"Mmm yes"
I get that he likely meant it can be shipped on airplanes and local explosives used for easier logistics, but it's amusing to hear an explosive munitions expert brag about designing something so it can be carried on airplanes.
"This box, I'm pleased to tell you, is full of explosives."
Oh man, this guy is a hoot.
One of them before an attempt with water between the explosive and the target wall: I predict it will either go through or the wall will be really clean.
Examples (NSFW-ish, Thermal imagery of tank cook-offs):
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/ug39y1/drone...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/u29rdx/ukrai...
There are also a lot showing anti-personnel grenades, and even RPG rounds being dropped on people, and regular cars etc. too.
Switchblade 600 has a shaded charge based on a Javelin one.
Explosion of PTKM-R1 anti-tank mine that destroys the tank by targeting it from above:
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/a0ZMv2n_460svvp9.webm
I also read about some antitank missile that basically has two such auto-aiming charges and just releases them when it's above the targets and they aim and detonate forming projectiles that hit the tank(s?).
Slow Mo guys using shape charges.
> The fault is related to the way many Russian tanks hold and load ammunition. In these tanks, including the T-72, the Soviet-designed vehicle that has seen wide use in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, shells are all placed in a ring within the turret. When an enemy shot hits the right spot, the ring of ammunition can quickly “cook off” and ignite a chain reaction, blasting the turret off the tank’s hull in a lethal blow.
> For Russia, “the people are as expendable as the machine,” he said. “The Russians have known about this for 31 years — you have to say they’ve just chosen not to deal with it.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/30/russian-tank...
The autoloader is a design decision: it replaces a crew member, so Russian tanks operate with a crew of 3 instead of 4. This makes Russian tanks smaller and lighter. Here's a size comparison of the T-72 with the Abrams: https://preview.redd.it/mtwtamct1t821.jpg?auto=webp&s=101442...
For the massed tank-on-tank actions it was meant for, this is good! Smaller targets are harder to hit, and T-72s were supposed to be fighting gun duels against M60s while crossing West Germany, so all the armor is in the front plate. Lighter tanks are cheaper, so you can build more of them, going from 4 crew to 3 means your limited pool of tankers can operate 33% more vehicles in the field. Classic cold war-era doctrine, hard lessons learned from WW2. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme... (It makes regular operations like tank maintenance or replacing damaged tracks way harder, but oh well, nobody ever said being Russian was easy)
Separately, there is no particular reason to think Abrams tanks wouldn't be vulnerable to the same weapons, if the Russians had that tank today and were fielding them in the same way they're operating their own tanks. Abrams also has light top armor and no ERA tiles on the roof. An anti-tank grenade dropped by a drone on an Abrams ammo compartment would mission kill it instead of killing the crew, but it would still be out of operation. AFAIK, no Abrams are equipped with Trophy in significant numbers, so it would be just as vulnerable to Javelin or other top attack ATGMs.
Tanks are vulnerable from the air, so you need air supremacy; vulnerable to artillery, so you need counterbattery suppression; vulnerable to man-portable AT weapons, so you need dismounted infantry combined arms; vulnerable to AT mines, so you need demining combat engineers, perimeter security so UKR spec ops can't cross lines and plant them, and military police so enforce civilian curfews. Russia is doing none of this, partly due to incompetence, and partly because they just didn't have a big enough force. (Desert Storm took just a hair under a million troops!)
If Russia had Abrams, but held all else equal, we'd still be seeing hundreds of flaming wrecks on the nightly news.
It has dual-mode: direct attack and OTA. The many tanks in Ukraine are killed in OTA, that does not use the shaped charge effect.
"In conventional overflight missiles a keyhole effect resulting in reduced penetration into the target is caused by a shaped charge jet which develops during the missile flight. The MBT LAW warhead, similar to the BILL 2 missile warhead, incorporates a dynamically compensated shaped and copper lined charge to retain the penetration characteristics."
To quote from SAAB's own website: "Our NLAW system is a easy system to use. Watch this video to see how it uses PLOS (predicted line of sight) and OTA (Overfly-top-attack) to enable its powerful shape charge warhead hit the tank at it´s weakest point - the turent. Maximising the potential damage to the tank."
Russia used Ukraine's mobile network and cell phones, then when they realized Ukraine was just targeting where they saw lots of Russian phone numbers, they stole Ukrainian phones off civilians...so Ukraine started accepting reports of stole SIMs/phones and tracking those.
Turns out that surrounding yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear (and who are siphoning off every ruble they can into their own pockets) isn't that great for having a strong armed service.
Also, you've got a force with a lot of conscripts who were lied to about what they were doing, versus a force which has watched their friends and family get butchered. That's one reason you don't go around slaughtering civilian populations...it makes for a very, very motivated, united, angry enemy.
If you, a non-farmer, shows up to buy some fertilizer, etc, calls are made.
Explosives are terribly fun but please do not try messing with them at home.
You know those little bang snaps you throw at the ground and they make a popping sound? For DIY, ideally, I'd do things in that kind of volume. I'd probably need a smidgen more, but I wouldn't want to do more than e.g. make a pinhole in 29 gauge sheet metal.
What I'd really love to make -- but I don't think I ever could safely -- is a little 1/8A or 1/4A rocket engine (of the that cost a couple bucks at the local hobby store).
This is science lab with kids, not bomb-making 101.
Most high explosives involve nitric acid of decent concentration.
It’s hard to make them in quantities small enough to be actually not dangerous, especially since many of the compounds will react with all sorts of normal everyday substances (like aluminum, copper, etc) to form even more unstable compounds.
Some of them can even explode on exposure to light.
The two are not in the same ballpark. I wouldn’t recommend high explosive synthesis without a solid grounding in organic and inorganic chemistry.
Even a pea sized portion of these compounds can remove a finger or part of a hand, or blind you.
If you still want to know more ‘The Chemistry of Powders and Explosives’ is a good read.
Published in '43, so won't have some of the newer exotics, but comprehensive regardless. Sometimes hard to find, but Amazon has new hardcovers for $20. Don't blow your hands off.
I have a lot of experience with medical biohazards, high voltages (>2kV), welding, dangerous tools, handling dangerous liquids (HF and similar), etc. I've never hurt myself. That's enough background to know not to do things before I know how to do them safely.
Presumably this is of dubious legality, but I can't find any official way to view it online in the U.S., or any recorded media form you can buy.
Momentum trumps substance.
Attach it to a few tens of dollars worth of drone. (The cheapest drones are under 10 dollars now).
A country could release 1000 of these and direct them at any military target, and they'll do massive amounts of damage at very low costs.
Most anti-drone defences can be defeated simply with a redesign of the drone (eg. Use UWB for Comms, and have dual gyros and use a camera for location instead of GPS).
I think the only reason we haven't seen this on the battlefield yet is that we haven't yet had a war between the right countries. But we will.
> I think the only reason we haven't seen this on the battlefield yet is that we haven't yet had a war between the right countries. But we will.
There are videos every day of Ukrainian drones dropping shaped charges like the Russian RKG-3/1600 from drones.
Ukraine even has special troops specialized in it, the Aerorozvidka (Google for the videos).
The reason they apparently aren’t bothered by anti drone efforts is because the Russian forces don’t seem to have the training and equipment for it, so regular drones work well enough (with selection bias of course - we don’t see the videos of the failed attacks).
It’s clear from that footage what an advantage it is to be able to drop 2 or 3 munitions since you can correct for wind if you miss the first, something you can’t do with a single drop.
The larger octocopters that can carry 5kg or more is probably what you want for the job. Some range, and at least 2 charges to drop.
But AT4 is not reliable, only 400mm of penetration and tanks can have 500mm or 600mm of armor. (Or really, equivalent to 500+mm once special materials or geometry is factored in).
To reliably kill a main battle tank requires a larger munition. Javelin is a 8kg warhead IIRC. This is because Javelin is tandem: two warheads. First warhead destroys reactive armor, 2nd warhead actually kills the tank with 900mm of penetration.
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For drones to be optimized on the battlefield will require specially designed drones and special warheads designed to fit in the cargo-capacity of drones.
Switchblade 300 is nice for example but is too small to reliably kill a tank.
Switchblade 600 can kill a tank, but no longer has the small and lightweight form factor that I'm sure the soldiers who have to carry this crap care about.
I think NLAW is ~500mm of penetration and top-down. Its not too hard to make a top-down weapon these days, but it does add weight to the device.
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EDIT: I'm pretty sure that you can't just "drop" a mortar or AT4 warhead reliably either. You'd want to make it into the shape of... well... a bomb. So that the "shape" of the shape-charge points in the correct direction.
Dive bombing. These drones should be dive bombing. WW2 strategy to increase precision and placement of the bomb.
Only lesser-trained pilots glide-bombed or otherwise avoided dive-bombing in WW2.
I don't think the let-go at height maneuver is historically considered very good. By dive bombing, you set forward-momentum on the bomb and more accurately place it, compared to dropping it from a hover. The bomb also reaches its target faster, and the pilot has the ability to line-up the shot (especially useful if the enemy is a moving target).
I'm very much unimpressed by the "let go at height" videos, its just not good piloting IMO. But if these drones were dive-bombing instead, maybe I'd have a bit more respect. I'm not necessarily saying that the pilots have to dive-bomb, but maybe an AI could control that kind of pass.
A multi-rotor drone (what the videos seem to be shot from) cannot fly fast, and cannot pull the high gees after drop. Dive bombing won't help much. Likely even a controlled flight into the target (kamikaze) would end up slower (final velocity) than just dropping, making the drone a much easier target for small arms fire than just the bomb alone.
Fixed wing drones - different story. Getting them back to the ground in a reusable way requires effort, simply flying into the target seems to make more sense. The big reusable ones usually carry self-guided amunitions.
A combination of remote controlled, fast, high payload, high-g capable, and reusable would likely not be cost-effective (losses to be expected in any case).
Every one of these drone-drop videos is several seconds between letting go of the bomb, and the bomb colliding with the target.
If they actually want these drones to reliably hit a moving target, or even a vehicle in combat, they'll need to do something.
That's a lot of hang-time and delay in these "drone drop" videos. Once the bomb is let go, there's going to be another 20+ to 30+ minutes before the drone operator is able to fly another drone into the field, and that's if the drone operator has a 2nd drone with him. Maybe it will be hours, or maybe the next chance to drop a bomb never comes ever again.
You really want to maximize the chance of striking the target with these operations. A huge number of WW1 and WW2 operations were summarized as "Flew for 4 hours, missed my bomb, flew home". You want to minimize that kind of thing.
Especially if these drones are considered somewhat expendable.
Sophisticated militaries will strike moving targets with precision guided munitions. Generally either laser guidance with a designator mounted on the drone, or some kind of pattern recognition built into the bomb itself (could be optical, IR, or millimeter wave radar). For example, something like the GBU-44/B.
Poor militaries and insurgents will make do with whatever they can get. Either wait for the target to stop moving, or just lead it a little and hope.
they have been dropping 60's-vintage anti-tank hand grenades with 3d printed stabilizers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RKG-3_anti-tank_grenade#Histor...
"220 mm penetration of RHA" which is plenty for top armor
I seriously doubt that. Almost all modern tanks have reactive-armor on top.
There's a reason why NLAW has 500+mm penetration AND top-down. NLAW is single-charge (no-tandem), to punch-through reactive armor requires a lot more penetration.
Let alone lol Javelin with top-down, 900mm+ penetration, and tandem charge.
I don't think 200mm or even 400mm is considered reliable today.
not sure about nlaw but javelin also features a side targeting mode
And you should tell that to USA's and Britain's military, which have chosen 400mm penetration (AT4), 500mm top-down penetration (NLAW), and 900mm top-down + tandem penetration (Javelin).
200mm, even top-down, is significantly less than other anti-tank weapons. I presume that the militaries who made these modern weapons know what they're doing.
Well it's good for Ukraine then that Russia doesn't really have a lot of modern tanks.
> Let alone lol Javelin with top-down, 900mm+ penetration, and tandem charge.
A Javelin can engage tanks directly if they're obscured from above of if the distance to target is insufficient for flying on a top-down trajectory, and for those situations it needs the 900mm+ penetration (otherwise the direct attack mode would be unusable and would not be provided as a feature). So you can't make the inference that because Javelin has 900mm+ penetration, top-down attacks require 900mm+ penetration.
Providing weapons has been a US-Soviet past time for the whole Cold War.
In this case, I think the US could have even moved in troops without being at war, early in the invasion. It just needs a pretext. By far the best response a week in, when Russia claimed chemical weapons, Nazis, etc., would have been to send in a multilateral force to investigate Russia's claims. It's face-saving for the Russians and ends the war.
Tensions are too high for that now.
I've got a feeling we might be pulling a Russia... Ie. None of our troops are there officially, bit there's an awful lot of troops volunteering and 'on holiday' and 'advising' there.
Arming your enemy's enemy is nothing new.
There are "rules" (and by rules I mean what is interpreted as "participating" vs "supporting" in a conflict that have been established and enforced for well over a thousand years. And supplying weapons has been firmly established in the 'supporting' category not the 'participating' category.
This conflict is illustrating a lot of things that haven't been seen since the cold war, which is an opportunity to learn new things about how the world works if you haven't seen it before.
The next interesting step happens when this conflict settles out, what does it look like.
actually I think that you didn't because slaughter bots are trying to not cause any collateral damage
Cheap commercial drones have a short range. In order to use them effectively on the battlefield, each drone needs an operator, who must also be on the battlefield. Those operators then need other people for watching their backs, coordinating their actions, and handling the logistics. Those 1000 cheap simultaneously launched drones are now an entire brigade on the battlefield, which is definitely not cheap.
Just a couple of days ago, a single artillery brigade eliminated an entire tank battalion at a river crossing.
Generally, if you can wipe out the fuel trucks, they have to abandon the tanks. An ordinary grenade suffices to blow up a fuel truck.
The swarm leader could be human-piloted or autonomous. Autonomy would be a matter of software and sensors; once you've invented it, it would be dirt-cheap to implement. A swarm of 50 would be enough to baffle air-defence systems capable of tracking multiple targets.
I have no idea if this exists, but it seems an obvious idea; if it doesn't exist, it must have been tried and found wanting.
The overral objective was for any drone within the swarm to immediately chase and ram into the first human it could locate. The processes were automated and could be triggered while unattended.
For reasons the video explains, letting 12 drones all try to independantly do the same thing at the same time was not going to work, so he came up with ghis structure.
1 server that processed the video feeds from the drones using AI trained to recognize humans/human faces 1 C&C computer that sent master commands and stuffs .... and maybe the computer flight code ...? 12 drones assigned to their own LAN making them a virtual group 4 of these drones were designated as flight leaders. They sent data from their cameras to the video processing server and recieved targetting results back. Sent target and flight instructions to the two drones assigned to them. 2 drones are assigned to each flight leader drone forming a single unit. They only communicate with their flight leader. They do what it does.
I know ... it isnt anywhere near what would be required for combat use, but come on... in the last test, his drones did what they were supposed to do; every single one of them automatically attacked the first human being they detected immediately. Better yet, they did it in unison. More better of all, all of them him.
This guy did this with cheap, off the shelf parts, by himself, during his downtime at home as a joke for Youtube.
I'm pretty sure this is how we are going to get sophisticated autonomous weapons. Everyone is screaming and shouting how dangerous they are and then some dude wants to get a quick laugh or prove everyone else wrong and inadvertently creates a high quality weapon.