Ukraine uses Australian drones made of cardboard
aircosmosinternational.com
aircosmosinternational.com
but just for you: https://t.me/fighter_bomber/13797 (not sure where from op got his news)
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-kursk-airbase-suffers-major-16...
It's like reading a MacGyver script.
Meanwhile in the US:
On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”
Sometimes, worse is better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#:~:t....
Mentioned here on SE:
<https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/237557/science-fic...>
And of course Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)>.
ISFDB: <https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40897>
It's published in Expedition to Earth (1953): <https://archive.org/details/expeditiontoeart0000arth/page/90...>
Considering the period it's not exactly science fiction.
I've seen variants of Clarke's observation such as extrapolations of combat aircraft costs which lead to a single plane being shared amongst the US Air Force, Navy, and Army, with the Marines having dibs every few weeks, something similar.
The criticism isn't entirely fair, as there is an element to which a superior weapon or capability can utterly overwhelm numerically-superior forces, given an equivalent initiative to fight, and military leadership capability. The defence-offence advantage (that is, a defender virtually always has the advantage) means that yes, a technologically inferior force can wear down a superior invader over time, though shear weight of numbers (though often at immense cost), as with China over Japan in WWII (Japan occupied portions of the country but simply lacked the personnel to control all but a small fraction of it), the Vietnam against the French and Americans in Indochina, and Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans from the 19th through the 21st centuries. But at the same time in an initial assault phase technological supremacy can offer overwhelming advantage, as with the US in both Iraq wars and initially in the Afghan conflict, Nazi Germany against France in WWII (most notably radio-equipped tanks overwhelming the noncommunicative French forces), and presently in Ukraine where more advanced Nato munitions seem to be giving a critical edge over Russian massed forces and dumb munitions, though that's been a relatively closer contest, given that Russian leadership seems to have little concern for its own forces' losses.
But...
>A total of six of the systems were installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1,000,000 per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used. The Navy will remove the AGS from the ships in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System
A complete dead end, a decade spent doing nothing. Meanwhile, China is launching a dozen guided missile destroyers a year.
Also things like reliability, durability under various extreme conditions, safety for humans involved and so on can escalate times and prices dramatically, but are not massive concerns in existential situation Ukraine currently is in due to russia's war.
US is basically never aiming so low with new tech they want for its military, it wants brilliant solutions above everybody else, and has money to burn on it. And from time to time, when looking back those investments were well worth even with flops included. US global hegemony is not something that US wants to lose due to few hundreds billions not allocated as effectively as possible.
2) US needs to build weapons for the future not the present. And as such the amount of cutting-edge R&D as a percentage of the total program spend will always be significantly higher than for most other countries.
> Declining reusability due to the stress on the structure: the cardboard will not be strong enough to make many flights.
Which is no doubt absolutely true—but on the other hand, the cardboard isn't the valuable part of the drone. You could have a stockpile of the cardboard (which they claim is a little larger than a pizza box), and swap out the motor and electronics if a unit survives long enough that the cardboard starts to fail.
https://store.flitetest.com/ft-simple-cub-mkr2/
This one’s technically foam, but it’s a very cardboardy foam. With a little bit of carbon fiber reinforcement (provided) it’s surprisingly durable and MUCH simpler and easier to build that a balsa or fiberglass airplane.
After building and flying one of these, I can certainly believe that cardboard/foam construction is great for a “disposable” (single use) airplane or even for a couple of missions - knowing that the life span will be short.
My favorite one was the F-22 replica (https://store.flitetest.com/ft-22-mkr2/). With the right motor and prop—and by abusing the discharge rate on the battery—I think I got that jet screaming at ~60mph. Not sure what the precise speed was, but it was definitely in the “should I be buying insurance for this?” territory.
The Bloody Wonder was my favorite for aerobatics. It was easy to build, fairly tough, and easy to fly but still twitchy when you wanted it to be.
I have a kit by an FPV pilot (Shelby Voll) that consists of a couple of pieces of pre-cut styrofoam, some carbon fiber rods for rigidity, and other various odds and ends. I think I paid $200 for it. I haven't built it yet, but I've flown friends' builds from the same kit and have built similar ones. It'll take about two hours to build with simple hand tools, and is probably the most durable "flying wing" design of which I'm aware.
I'm mostly into FPV quadcopters, but it seems most people who fly them who get into "wings" seem to prefer them.
Just such a travesty that they need to do this at all.
Obviously Russia can do anything that Ukraine can do but Ukraine has a very large and wealthy contingent of the world behind them and they are motivated far beyond the Russians. I really hope they will be able to force some kind of breakthrough to the point that even Putin realizes that giving up is the better outcome.
Most of whose did not live under Ukrainian control for a decade now.
Those who did not live under Ukrainian control have lived under occupation.
Russians understand what's going on here and are motivated to not let that happen. At the moment they are successful.
That's just funny. Seriously, I can't tell if you're trolling or serious but on the off chance that you are serious: you're so misinformed it is tragic, at the same time you are apparently able to fix that and refuse to do so. Which makes me wonder why. I have enough contacts in former USSR countries and inside Russia itself to know that this sentiment is prevalent, wilful misunderstanding as some kind of defense mechanism. But in the modern day with ample access to information you really have no excuse.
Serbia will have to come to terms with the degree to which Russia has been using them at some point. This probably won't happen until Russia itself has gone through an enlightenment and shaken of the current crop of mobsters. I'm not holding my breath for that one.
Russian citizenship is a prized asset in the post-USSR countries to the extent that people spend effort to move to Russian Federation and pay money to engage in shady schemes to obtain it.
If drones are widespread within Russia ... that logic might not hold so well.
A blade cuts two ways, and much of that is at the initiative of the wielder.
Let's be happy the Germans didn't have access to any of this tech in the middle of WWII, their V weapons were bad enough as it was.
Direct attacks on them would trigger Article 5.
This is one case where asymmetric advantages favour Ukraine over Russia.
As to general availability: I'm presuming individuals or non-governmental entities would have access to the technology. Again, in Ukraine there seems to be far greater alignment against a common enemy, as illustrated by Russia's failure to avert open rebellion within its own allied forces, and apparent organic resistance and sabotage withing Russia and Belarus against Russian forces and logistics infrastructure.
But a volley of explosives they are not. If that’s all you want, it’s still much cheaper to use artillery. Which both sides are fond of
I mean the US Democrats voted down even the mere notion that maybe the most surface-level audit of US aid to Ukraine could be allowed[1].
[1]https://theintercept.com/2023/08/02/ukraine-aid-special-insp...
Can you provide a source, because everything I've seen says otherwise.
Even Democrat-friendly media, has been essentially forced to reluctantly report that indeed, the US government has no idea where billions of dollars of weapons and aid are ending up[1]. And there is always a delay with these things, so we can only assume the amount is exponentially larger and will never be truly known.
Clearly, if the material and monetary aid is already being audited, it's not being done well or correctly, so an actual auditor was more than warranted.
---
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/14/us-ukraine-aid-cabl... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/27/...
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) is committed to conducting independent and objective audits, evaluations, and investigations to promote efficiency and prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in DoD support provided to Ukraine.
In addition, the DoD OIG coordinates closely with the OIGs of the Department of State (DoS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and chairs a joint working group with representatives from multiple Federal oversight agencies to ensure a whole-of-government approach to Ukraine oversight.
That's a bit overstatement, no? I mean we have Trump who is very visibly admirer of Putin and his practices and various other dictatorial murderers like MBL and strongly supports current apartheid in Israel, no change there since invasion. If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.
I don't get it at all, republicans should be as anti-russian as possible historically since current russia is much more Soviet russia rather than anything else, but they keep voting for him and he was very clear on the topic in the past. That says more about real opinions of republicans rather than anything else.
Or am I missing something as an US outsider?
I'd bet that it will not. Because America can not afford to be dragged into the much larger war that will follow if that were the case. Ukraine is - cynically - the cheap option.
I reckon Poland will still be pretty much in favour of helping Ukraine push Russia back. Probably a bunch of other European nations too.
The issue with most of the news on the matter is that it's so deluded by partisan politics that even those reporting on their own poll results don't interpret them sanely.
For example, on the surface polls might say that Republicans generally oppose aid to Ukraine. However, if you plainly ask them if they support aiding Ukraine they might be in favor, but if you ask them if they support Biden's handling of the war in Ukraine, they'll be more likely to be opposed.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/americ...
The vast majority of aid to Ukraine is in weapons that are either going to be scrapped or only a handful are purchased, it’s a bit hard to feed children on surplus DCPIM munitions.
> the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad.
Not funding Ukraine won’t stop the war it will only allow Russia to move the war in the direction that it wants.
If you’re anti war then you should want Ukraine to have all the weapons they need to end the war, so they can win the war as soon as possible and put an end to it.
If your for ending Ukrainian aid you’re not for ending the war or anti war you are for feeding Ukrainians into the wood chipper and giving Russia exactly what it wants.
Isolationism won't solve your problems. America was isolationistst before ww1 and poor as hell. The good times came when the sovjet union forced large companies to bargain with unions.
In case anyone is wondering how that works, it uses on-board IMS (Inertial Navigation System) in the absence of GNSS signal, which usually has several sensors like accelerometers (to measure motion in 3D directions) gyro (to stabilize pitch roll yaw drift) and magnetometer (compass for yaw direction), these sensors will provide the drone pointing directions and how long it moved since it started, couple this with on board maps and you have a flight with no GNSS. Is it accurate like GNSS? Not cm or even meters level, but that depends on how good the IMS is. Also, you can have plenty of these cardboard models, or even 3D printable one of you are into this hobby!
For battery-powered craft, where there's no appreciable reduction in propellent mass over the course of the flight, this is a direct scaling. For fuel-based craft (which I'm surprised are not more heavily used), the fuel mass falls as it's consumed, such that the effective net mass is somewhat less than 1/2 the total launch fuel load (less fuel mass -> less lift and drag load).
In the extreme case, ballistic missiles consume virtually their entire fuel load early in the flight ("boost phase"). Cruise missiles / drones might fly to a higher altitude and glide to their targets. Even battery-powered drones might jettison their primary battery (retaining a small navigation power source) and glide to targets by first climbing to a high altitude.
Another option is solar-powered (or assisted) drones, which for small payloads (most especially surveillance, though directed weapons / shaped charges would be another option) could achieve long ranges, high loiter times, or both.
Staging?
Those drones, incidentally, have a 6 kg payload capacity and 160 km range (one-way).
But yes, staging or jettisonable batteries might be another option, at an increased complexity cost.
Who controls the DJI copter drones? Does the plane act as a relay for the radio signals?
For non-Australian readers: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM?feature=shared
No rear areas. No safe fire bases. No Green Zone. Another major change to war.
The prospect of low cost swarms of AI enabled drones terrifies me. If you've watched any drone combat footage from Ukraine you know it's just around the corner, and this is another step in that direction.
I’m somewhat gloomy about all of this. It’s just that war is war, it means killing people. Once it’s on, it’s on. So you need to be able to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible while minimizing non-combatant casualties before and after the conflict.
Long range artillery is the killer in Ukraine in terms of numbers, combatants consistently say so on both sides. But it doesn't have that wow effect of drone drop videos.
It has been the same say in WWI, anybody who read for example All Quiet on the Western Front would see it there. Not typical US wars against some poor fuckers with rusty AKs, but this one is very different and much more symmetrical. Something tells me that any symmetrical non-nuclear conflict these days wouldn't look that different to Ukraine.
The only problem is that the novelty of the approach would be such, that it would bring too much visibility to the attack. Most bad actors don't want to be detected: "he fell from the window" or "his plane crashed" leaves the door open to coincidental causes. Drones are noticeable, particularly in swarms. They would be useful only in "showy" attacks, i.e. open terrorism, a tactic that is largely out of favor after 20+ years of substantial failure.
There's nothing stopping a group of motivated people from building a drone assembling factory that fits in a cargo container.
There may come a time where we have to stop outdoor festivals and parades because of people like that Las Vegas shooter from a couple years ago.
The real concern is when people can build a factory that can build the factory...