Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

These videos are horrible. On one side I feel for that kid who probably didn't chose to be there and grappling with imminent death. On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn. It's a weird war, mixing social media with a ww1 trench war, military hardware with a share button, you get to watch live the horror of the trenches from under your duvet.

The other thing is those drones are mostly made of plastic, have no hot exhaust. Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

View on HN

Patriots aren't the answer to Shaheds, but that's the wrong way to look at it. You don't compare the price of an APS charge with the price of an RPG. You don't spec your soldiers' ballistic plates by aiming to bring their cost down below the cost of the bullet you hope it'll stop. The plate is replaceable, the soldier's heart isn't, you sacrifice the thing you're happy to lose to save the thing you want to keep.

They're not happy they shot down $50k of drone, they're happy they shot down 50 kg of explosives that was going to strike a power station, it's not a hard trade to make.

A key difference from your examples is that the enemy doesn't have the capability to simply (and risk-free) send an arbitrary number of bullets at your soldiers' hearts or RPG rounds at your vehicles; the major "cost of delivery" is not the bullet/RPG but the trooper (and his risk) bringing the gun to get a chance to make a targeted shot with the bullet/RPG.

If bullets could leave the factory and magically fly straight at your soldiers, expensive single-use ballistic plates would not be a practical solution - you'd simply run out of them as you can't possibly produce as many of them as the enemy can make bullets.

>On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn

We don't even know which country the soldier belonged to. And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.

I agree how weird this war is. The first war being live streamed. That increases the horror since watching videos of something happening is much worse than just reading about it. And most people don't read but will intently watch a drone following a soldier and exploding.

> Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

More drones and more missiles. Until someone figures out cheaper ways of stopping drones. My gut feeling is that in 1-2 years, we will have proper industrial ways of stopping drones en masse. And then drones will become just a part of the commander's arsenal like any other weapon.

> And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.

Most military age ukrainians do. Ukrainian mobilisation is nothing of the scale of ww1. France was roughly the same size as Ukraine in ww1 and had 7m men under arms. Ukraine has less than 10 times less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com