They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1].
[0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=1...
In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.
Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth.
They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
As is 10 percent of annual GDP.
The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers, or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many have to have their positions go empty or be filled by someone new without adequate experience?
Use, or expend?
Interesting, do you have more information on state of the art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once, ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight controllers are configured for out of the box.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-highest-monthly-losses-ukrai...
They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems.
Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.
Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing.
On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
I could see a sci-fi future where we visit some planet somewhere and when we land there are no living beings anywhere. Just killer robot factories pumping out more killer robots fighting an endless war with each other fully autonomously.
That's another AGI super intelligence end state. You get two AGI super intelligences fighting a war against each other and they fight until the entire planet is turned into killer drones and explosives. A plausible form of paper clip maximizer.
They are big chunks of metal that needs to be identically machined to tight tolerances and filled with explosives and a fuse.
$3k is pretty cheap for custom work.
Then you need to transport and store them.
You can buy drones off the shelf made with cheap components.
[x] this item is a gift
[ ] gift wrap this itemAnd the answer is yes, China makes their artillery shells cheaper. American labor is very expensive and American military manufacturers tend towards low volume nowadays, because they don't trust the government to commit to 1 million shells a year for two decades, because every time there's a changing of the guard in the whitehouse, plans get gutted seemingly as a "Fuck you" to anyone who worked with the previous admin.
That being said, I'd like to see a citation for the $3k figure being thrown around. The number I've seen is more like $800
[1] https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artill...
The tooling for an artillery shell is used only for artillery shells. Not many consumers looking to buy 152mm shell casings and high explosives.
In the industrial age, volume production is the usual solution to keeping costs low. Artillery shells would be a lot cheaper if we built as many of them as we did in WW2.
(As a side note, this is one reason why housing was so cheap in the post-WW2 1950-1970 era. There was a whole lot of surplus construction equipment leftover from WW2, so you could acquire the tooling needed to build a subdivision really cheaply. Once the surplus aged out and there was no economic reason to build a huge number of new diggers and bulldozers, construction got a lot more expensive.)
It's $80,000 for a switch blade drone, which can loiter for 40 minutes.
Buying a consumer fixed wing drone with similar flight time costs <$1000.
That Wikipedia page contains a link to a picture I've always found totally mind blowing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:No...
Insanity.
Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean, just imagine all that activity.
We'll see it again as soon as two super powers are engaged in an active shooting war.
I don't think that's actually true. Some quick Googling shows the US M-1 Abrams tank is not air-droppable, and maybe the best they can do is air drop light armored vehicles which are much lighter.
The US pushed ~28,000 tons of supplies ashore in the first 5 days of Overlord. Eight days later it had grown to 117,000 tons. [1] Can you show us your loading and sealift plan for delivering 10,000 tons per day of supplies, sustained, in a partially-contested airspace, especially over a beach? We're not talking about unloading a Maersk Triple E-class [2] at a container port in peacetime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_logistics_in_the_Norm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_E-class_container_ship
As for assorted supplies without too heavy or bulky separate items, 10K tons per day is a joke and can be shuffled by helicopters alone. Remember distances were absurdly short, 120-150km, easily within helicopter range, and they can make several sorties per day at this short range. Over time, pilot fatigue will become an issue and accident rate might get bit too high, but for combat operations this isn't a big deal because there will be higher losses to enemy fire.
A San Antonio has ~20,000 square feet of deck space usable for vehicles and cargo. If you stuffed it with TEUs you could fit 125.[0][1] Maximum mass capacity for a TEU is ~21t, let's call it 20t for easy math.[2] So a San Antonio moving containerized beans/bullets/bandaids is only lifting ~2,500 tons per sortie. There are only 12 active San Anontios, and keep in mind roughly 1/3 of any fleet is down for maintenance), so you would need half of all likely available LPDs (4 of 8 available with 4 in yardwork) of the largest (by tonnage, not hull numbers) Navy on the planet.
As for helicopters, you can carry palletized cargo internally on a CH-53 (one of it's few advantages over a CH-47). The K model, with stronger engines (and therefore payload capacity) than the E model, can move ~12t at 200km.[3] Let's just call it 10t at 200km, again for easy math. You would need 1,000 sorties in a day to move 10kt. If you pushed your aircraft to 3 sorties per day (limited by ground crew ability to turn the aircraft), you could do it with ~333 heavy lift helicopters. The US only has ~20 operational CH-53Ks, and ~140 CH-53Es. So no, moving 10kt per day is not a joke, and can't be shuffled by helicopters alone.
It would take both asset classes combined, let's call it 3xLPD for 7.5kt and ~80 CH-53s flying 240 sorties for 2.4kt. That would pretty much be a maximum effort for the Navy-Marine Corps Team, which is inarguably the largest and most capable military power projection and expeditionary logistics force on Earth.
So even in 2024, what they accomplished on D-Day is not a trivial amount of effort.
[0] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Team-Ships/PEO-Ships/LPD-17...
[1] 20000 / (20ft long x 8ft wide TEU) ~= 125 TEUs worth of deck space, assuming you use ALL deckspace but can't/don't stack them 2 high
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit
[3] https://www.navair.navy.mil/product/CH-53K-King-Stallion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdDJDQA0Ek
It's the largest ship in their ferry fleet.
People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar.
Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber.
Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
Even if you discount the tactical effect of losing soldiers in battle, just the gear of the soldier is worth more than a thousand dollars already (just ballistic vest + riffle is enough to pass this very low bar)
What a military really needs to look at is how much damage can that target do if they don't break it first. If a target only cost $1,000 but can somehow do a million dollars in damage to me and me spending $900,000 to service that target is $100,000 savings. This is why during some wars the US was using cruise missiles on teams of dudes in Toyotas with discarded anti-aircraft guns strapped to the back. It's not those 'shitty technicals' were worth the millions of dollars like a tomahawk, it's that those things could drive around and do millions of dollars worth of damage if unopposed. If all you're cheaper assets are already working on something you might assign a multi-million dollar munition unless the target can't do as much damage as firing the munition.
Because an unserviced enemy target can generally cause an unlimited amount of damage in wartime it generally becomes cost effective to take any opportunity to disable an enemy asset.
However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue, though.
Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver...
EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
About 600 Kpsi. That works out to somewhere around 0.1 lb per strand.
My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller boom >> incomplete boom mission.
Just post it in grams, ugh.
(14g/km)
>or 0.14kg for 10km
(or 140g for 10km)
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gateway...
The fiber does not appear jacketed or supported.
I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just staple it to the wall because it holds up fine.
(I would never do this but ...)
Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot more resilient than it used to be.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gateway...
The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful for this purpose.
Already happened: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defen...
I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5 mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up. And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair. With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get GBits down that wire.