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Comment by fancazzista | Hacker News Reader

Or it was simply located by one of the many, many NATO spy planes circling around in the Romanian territorial waters.

It was a huge surface ship, at sea. It was probably spotted in a 20 or more different ways - from commercial satellite imagery to HUMINT to its own radar transmitters to Russian sailors' cell phone signals.

Every way of spotting a target suffers from uncertainty. Most suffer from delays (satellite photo is X hours old), security issues (keep your spies alive), and political considerations (Ukrainians might want to feel that they are fighting and winning, not just acting as push-button-when-told minions of foreign powers).

Waiting to attack it until that could reliably be done with all-Ukrainian assets, all of which the Russians already knew about - that maximizes the number of checked boxes, eh?

The initial reporting after was that:

   - Ukraine performed the initial radar detection
   - Ukraine asked the US to confirm it was the Moskva (the US did)
   - Ukraine attacked with their own targeting data

(Then news articles clammed up about the US confirmation, and the Pentagon put out some carefully worded statements that tried to establish distance)

Which sounds reasonable. Warships like the Moskva are strategic assets.

That lowers the bar for acceptable amount of help from the US before Russia escalates.

That sounds like a plausible sequence of moves. And the initial over-sharing of a "get US confirmation" step might serve some Ukrainian strategic goals, too...

> Ukraine performed the initial radar detection

> Which sounds reasonable

If you don't know anything about radars, yes.

Located and targeted are different. Until Ukraine recently got patriot batteries and humans I highly doubt anything they have could be cued by the NATO radars. More importantly I doubt the us would, and I’m not even sure most strategic isr resources like you think of could pass targeting data in real time to missle systems.

There is not much about the Neptune online, the system tested in aprallel so (Wikipedia is great dor stuff like that) has automtic and manual guidance systems. Ukraine choose Neptune over that other system, so I assume Neptune has the same.

Manual guidance wouod allow you to shoot the missile in the direction of the located target, until you are close enough for the missile to lock on and have it hit using automatic guidance. No idea what was done during hat particular attack, but it sure was possible without radar sorcery.

Ships move slowly, you don't need integration, you can input by hand the coordinates. The missile has terminal stage radar guidance.

Ukraine also had a Bayraktar drone flying around the ship area at that time. It could have picked up rough coordinates from that.

Even in the 1990's missiles would re-acquire targets after losing them - or after turning off their active targeting systems in order to prevent countermeasures being taken against them.

It's plausible that Ukraine was told where the ship was, launched the missiles in that direction and they acquired and targeted the ship autonomously when they got closer. Of course that's pretty risky as a gambit but the downside was a failed strike and the upside was a doomed capital ship.

Indeed, us Romanians have Ukrainian and Russian blood on our hands too.

Russian blood doesn't seem to matter much these days. Even to those to whom it should matter the most, namely the Russians themselves.

Russian blood doesn't matter to Russian military command.

One could go so far as to say that "using Russian blood" has historically been and currently is their military doctrine.

Any country spy planes don't need to keep to Romanian territorial waters. They are free to do their circling in international waters as much as they want to, whether that NATO, China or New Zealand.

The missile still needs the radar to lock onto the target regardless of whether the target was spotted by satellites.

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