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Comment by bzmrgonz | Hacker News Reader

I peg Russia's failures to 2 things a)lack of experience(they haven't been in a ware in ages). and b)where the hell are the drones? it's 2022 for crying out loud. Wars are not won with big-iron anymore, you can buy/build a fleet of drones for the price of one single jet fighter. Wait till they build tortoise mimicking sea drones, then it's bye-bye aircraft carriers. The missile of a manpad cost 38k, lookup ukraine's "punisher drone" to understand what Im talking about.

The point is, Russia needs to level up, before the world take them for a lame duck super-power and the West decides to bring some freedom and liberation to the siberian region!!

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1 Russia is in a constant state of war here or there since ww2

2 They have over 1000 (minus ~60 destroyed/captured) Orlan-10 artillery spotting drones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan-10 They may look funny with PET bottle fuel tank and Canon DSLR, but they also have modern German/Swiss/US electronics and French 640x480 microbolometer (IR camera https://lynred.com/sites/default/files/2021-07/PICO640GEN2%2...)

Orlan-10 breakdown by supplier:

GPS u-blox, Switzerland.

Telemetry compass Honeywell, USA.

IMU Silicon Sensing Systems, UK.

Radio transmitter Municom, Germany.

Receiver AnyLink, Germany.

Antenna PPM GMBH, Germany.

Microbolometer - the only export restricted military grade part aka illegal AF to sell to russia after 2014 Lynred, France.

Daylight camera Canon, Japan.

Engine - Saito, Japan.

What alternative reality you are thinking about, for crying out loud? Both sides are using drones heavily every day, Bayraktars, Mavics and heavier DJI's on one side; Orlans, Mavics and heavier DJI's on the other side, not to mention the home-grown ones on both sides. Do you even know which topic you are commenting on?

Syria for instance? Drones are a big failure which they already fixed. I haven’t heard of any successful bairaktar attack for the last few months.

Very prominent multiple use on Snake Island in May with videos etc?

I am waiting to see swarm drone attacks. Has anyone tried it yet? I think the money bracket is just right for this kind of experiment. 38k for one manpad missile (check). cheap disposable long range heavy lifting drone<approx 50k??> (check). Software onboard to support swarming (check). So say a million for a swarm of 10?? 10 synchronized explosions would make a sizeable hole in the ground right?? Seems the problem would be stealth and anti-jamming tech.

It looks like the snake island was a huge failure for Ukrainians, with videos confirming that

Syria is/was a proxy war. Their troops and top brass is as rusty as the hardware they sent initially into Ukraine.

You haven't heard about it, because the Ukranian high command decided to stop putting out more videos, as they gave too much away.

This may be bs, but I don't see it as unreasonable.

What’s the reason for that?

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