How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

After a bit of sleep and reflection, I will largely stand by most of my argument though I admit I made several statements poorly. I'm going to keep it buried though because I was actively losing my sanity over it, even if I might have been swayed on certain points. I again thank Steve and Capt for mostly good discussion though. Its certainly food for thought and I genuinely believe they are onto something, especially in certain areas. They provided a great read on a lot of stuff so kudos for them for providing that.

And thanks for sticking with us.  Having a sounding board is always a good thing, especially when at the end one can look back and see the arguments are improved/refined.

1 hour ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

On the topic of something I can more readily debate and talk about, the sorry saga of the T-14 continues. I find RedEffect is pretty biased towards Russian / Soviet systems, so for him to find this a little baffling says a lot really. Another case of a Russian wunderwaffe being a disappointment (though I think this one has been anticipated)

You may be amused to go back on this Forum to 2014 and see me trash talking the entire Armata program, but in particular the T-14.  My view then, and certainly now, is that the Russians were aiming for something they weren't capable of producing in numbers or even at all.  Each year that passed proved me right.

When debating this with the "Armata will ownz Abrams!" crowd I brought Russian corruption, industrial limitations, production inefficiencies, and budgetary constraints into the discussion.  "But it's going to roooolz, you'll see!!!" is about the best response I can remember.

The methodology I used to conclude the Armata was never going to happen (at least not even close to as advertised) is the same methodology I used to conclude years ago that Russia would get its arse handed to it if it did a full scale invasion of Ukraine.  2 for 2

Steve

[AlexUK]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

And thanks for sticking with us.  Having a sounding board is always a good thing, especially when at the end one can look back and see the arguments are improved/refined.

You may be amused to go back on this Forum to 2014 and see me trash talking the entire Armata program, but in particular the T-14.  My view then, and certainly now, is that the Russians were aiming for something they weren't capable of producing in numbers or even at all.  Each year that passed proved me right.

When debating this with the "Armata will ownz Abrams!" crowd I brought Russian corruption, industrial limitations, production inefficiencies, and budgetary constraints into the discussion.  "But it's going to roooolz, you'll see!!!" is about the best response I can remember.

The methodology I used to conclude the Armata was never going to happen (at least not even close to as advertised) is the same methodology I used to conclude years ago that Russia would get its arse handed to it if it did a full scale invasion of Ukraine.  2 for 2

Steve

To be fair Steve, if there hadn’t have been this scale of western intervention then they would have succeeded, I think. Sheer numbers, weapon systems and improved tactics would have finished the UA. 

[The_Capt]

4 minutes ago, AlexUK said:

To be fair Steve, if there hadn’t have been this scale of western intervention then they would have succeeded, I think. Sheer numbers, weapon systems and improved tactics would have finished the UA. 

My working theory is that the central Russian failure was not lack of infantry, roads/mud, or poor combined arms.  Nor was it lack of air or sea superiority, as they had this in this early days of the war, before Patriots and western support kicked in.

It was a failure to isolate. Ukrainian resistance could see and talk to each other.  They could see cell phone video of resistance one town over. They could see Russian forces struggle. Ukrainians that could still see and talk to each other continued to resist with everything they had. The first time I was convinced that something was very wrong for the RA was when we could see video feeds of this war all over the place. Russia failed to make Ukraine go dark.  And once all those lights saw and connected to each other, the RA was in real trouble.

Remember western support really did not gel until later.  The first few months of this thing saw contributions but the most important was C4ISR.  The UA was plugged into US architecture and that made a real difference.  The impact of seeing the entire battlefield in real time and being able to react to that is game changing.  It made drones and HIMARs able to do what we see in videos everyday.  The ability for the UA to target any and all RA concentrations continues to this day.

Without that, I am not sure how long the UA would have held on.

[omae2]

Ukraine drone nets russian one.

 

Simply yet effective.

[ArmouredTopHat]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

Is there any real evidence that the Armata is anything more than a Rose Parade float that they haven't gotten around to putting the flowers on yet?  For as much as actually gets shown, it could be plywood over a T-34 chassis stolen from an old monument.

I think there was / is a genuine attempt to field a new tank, but much like a lot of potentially promising tank projects like Black eagle or T-95, the Russians simply ran into too many hurdles. It was a -very- ambitious project packed with a lot of features that while not new, had only been really attempted on testbeds and prototypes elsewhere before. Coupled with some truly bizarre decisions like the whole engine debacle (Why on earth did they switch to a radically different engine), or the fact that the thing appears to be a black hole when it comes to space efficiency then its little wonder that the inefficient and corrupt Russian state messed it up so badly. The fact that there is still no factory in Russia able to build Armatas suggest to me the project wont be going anywhere. 

It is a real vehicle though, at least based on the APS test footage, gun trials and the odd propaganda video showing the internals of the capsule (alongside the hilarious tendency for the Russians to show the thing revolving its turret constantly like its larping as a helicopter)

Seriously, how do you design a capsule based tank with an unmanned turret with autoloader and have the damn thing be bigger than almost every other MBT around (Despite being a lot lighter, which means protection is evidently inferior) There is some serious space inefficiency at work here and I legit cannot figure out just why the thing is so damn big. 

Edited Sunday at 08:00 PM by ArmouredTopHat

[ArmouredTopHat]

31 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

My working theory is that the central Russian failure was not lack of infantry, roads/mud, or poor combined arms.  Nor was it lack of air or sea superiority, as they had this in this early days of the war, before Patriots and western support kicked in.

It was a failure to isolate. Ukrainian resistance could see and talk to each other.  They could see cell phone video of resistance one town over. They could see Russian forces struggle. Ukrainians that could still see and talk to each other continued to resist with everything they had. The first time I was convinced that something was very wrong for the RA was when we could see video feeds of this war all over the place. Russia failed to make Ukraine go dark.  And once all those lights saw and connected to each other, the RA was in real trouble.

Why cant it be a combination of all of those factors?

We know the Russian BTGs had issues with lack of dismounted infantry, especially once they pushed ever deeper and took objectives requiring them to parcel out the finite amount of infantry to secure before moving on.

We know that the Russians decided not to turn on half of their air defence after it had rolled into Ukraine, which is why TB-2s were able to bomb them in those first few days. How is this not a monumental cockup that should belong on an wall somewhere for sheer incompetence?

We know the VKS were only really able to hit static targets, and the majority of UA air defences had been relocated days or hours beforehand. We have subsequent reports of CAS missions from the VKS being slow and prone to friendly fire. (There is a harrowing recording somewhere of a Russian officer trying to call of friendly helicopters attacking his own soldiers somewhere after he had requested air support)

We know that Russian communications and coordination were a crapshow due to their own jamming and faulty equipment. Half of their men were equipped with cheap and unsecured Baofeng radios for petes sake. 

I mentioned it before but seeing Russian units resorting to unsecured mobile phones to simply talk to each other was that moment for me that 'something is horribly wrong' that you mentioned. If your communications systems are not working properly not even a day into your invasion, that's a product of poor planning and incompetence in my view. 

Russian failures in all the aforementioned points is the reason Ukraine was able to coordinate effectively. How do you even begin to isolate hostile resistance when you dont even know what / where or how your friendly units in an AO are doing? 

Edited Sunday at 08:21 PM by ArmouredTopHat

[kimbosbread]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

So step 1 - invest in a Canadian Defence Industry.  We actually have a lot of high tech and AI expertise.  We could really make a go of unmanned systems development and even sell it globally, an offset to Chinese dominance.  But that would require a long game strategy…something we simply do not do.

If Canada decided it wanted to be the leader in cheapo autonomous drones, it could definitely do it. It’s not complicated manufacturing and you have tons of AI experts at Waterloo etc. You don’t need a pre-existing military industrial base for it at all.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, AlexUK said:

To be fair Steve, if there hadn’t have been this scale of western intervention then they would have succeeded, I think. Sheer numbers, weapon systems and improved tactics would have finished the UA. 

What is the point of saying this?  Might as well say "if Martians had come on on the side of Russia that could have counteracted all that Western aid".

I made my predictions based on the most likely scenario, which was massive Western aid would be put into Ukraine.  In fact, that is EXACTLY what the West warned Putin would happen.  Someone predicting Russia would win because Ukraine would not have that aid would likely have been wrong.

While "what ifs" are interesting, they have no place in analysis.  Especially looking backwards on what actually occurred.

And for the record, I thought that Ukraine's conventional war would only last for a few months, Russia would freeze the conflict after getting the land bridge, and Ukraine would continue the fight.  I had not counted on Putin insisting on all or nothing, though it became very clear very quickly that was what he chose to do.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

27 minutes ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

We know that the Russians decided not to turn on half of their air defence after it had rolled into Ukraine, which is why TB-2s were able to bomb them in those first few days. How is this not a monumental cockup that should belong on an wall somewhere for sheer incompetence?

This right here is why so many people predicted this war would go better for Russia.  They did not take into consideration incompetence and corruption.  I did.  I did not know HOW specifically it was going to bite Russia in the butt, I just knew that it would.

As someone pointed out a page or two ago, I have an advantage in that I've designed simulations of this stuff for 25 years based on historical study of warfare going back another 10 or so before that.  I know that if you take one set of units and change them from Regular to Conscript you get a different end result.  Or at least are likely to.  I also know that if a really good CM player goes against a nOoB the odds are in favor of the good player.  Give the good player good troops on the defense against a nOoB with crap troops on the attack and it gets really lopsided.

People completely and totally and massively and unreasonably held Russians to a higher standard of competence than was supported by reality.  This is where I said people like Kofman came up seriously short.  He could see the trees very clearly, but not the forest.

I saw the forest in 2014 and 2015.  I maintained at the time, and ever since then, that Russians way under performed against Ukrainians.  At best I saw people recognizing their shortcomings, but then writing them off as a side effect of the way Russia chose to fight that war, whereas I saw it as the cause.

Steve

[Vet 0369]

23 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

The argument isn't that the US can't innovate, it's that it only seems interested in innovating if it costs billions to achieve.  Entire country's worth of GDP were put into things like the Predator, but absolutely nothing into cheap and effective FPV.  Why?  Because it was cheap and effective?  Something like the Switchblade does make it seem that way.

Let me turn this around.  If the US is so amazing at innovation, don't you think that the US should have been the one to come up with the idea of cheap platoon level ISR drones and mass produced FPV killer drones?  I sure do.

Ukraine and Russia have been using cheap commercial drones for most of the last 8 years.  That is plenty of time for the Western militaries to have saw something, anything, of value to invest in.  They did not.

On top of not investing in the sorts of things that has significantly aided Ukraine staying in the fight against Russia, but it hasn't addressed the "tank is dead" threat with anything even approaching a practical solution.  Even now there's tons of pressure to maintain the status quo and reject real change. 

Steve

There are other factors involved in military R&D and other decisions. There still massive and cut-throat “turf wars” that the U.S. Military services engage in and shape the R&D and operational decisions by the Politicians. For example, after WW II, the newly created USAF worked very hard with their supporters in Congress to disband the U.S. Navy because the USAF had the Atomic bomb and there was no use for the Navy, and Congress could save all the Navy’s funding (or give it to the new USAF instead). A portion of the USAF, know as the “Fighter Mafia” has tried to get rid of the A-10 Warthog because it was designed to support the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army has been trying to gain control of the USMC or to absorb it since WW II ended. We’ve all seen how those “turf wars” ended. And the “turf wars” continue to this day!

One further note for those of you who think they aren’t still being fought behind closed doors. In the late 1980s I worked with USAF, USA, and USN reps to create an aircraft engine  Joint Engine Specification because each service had their own unique engine specification for the same basic engine. We met for about two weeks, but failed because the AirForce and Army reps couldn’t stop arguing about how the Army violated the “1948 Keywest Accords,” that basically divided air responsibilities between the USAF and the USA, when the Army put weapons on Helicopters!

This reality continues to determine what is researched and funded.

 

[cesmonkey]

Quote

The second work from Artem Shevchenko's documentary series "Military intelligence of Ukraine: on the sea, in the sky, on the ground" is dedicated to the deoccupation of Zmiiny Island, strategically important for security in the Black Sea

 

Two years ago ... the liberation of Snake Island.

And this new footage was released today:

 

Edited Sunday at 09:53 PM by cesmonkey

[Letter from Prague]

On 6/29/2024 at 11:06 PM, Battlefront.com said:

The argument isn't that the US can't innovate, it's that it only seems interested in innovating if it costs billions to achieve.  Entire country's worth of GDP were put into things like the Predator, but absolutely nothing into cheap and effective FPV.  Why?  Because it was cheap and effective?  Something like the Switchblade does make it seem that way.

Let me turn this around.  If the US is so amazing at innovation, don't you think that the US should have been the one to come up with the idea of cheap platoon level ISR drones and mass produced FPV killer drones?  I sure do.

Ukraine and Russia have been using cheap commercial drones for most of the last 8 years.  That is plenty of time for the Western militaries to have saw something, anything, of value to invest in.  They did not.

On top of not investing in the sorts of things that has significantly aided Ukraine staying in the fight against Russia, but it hasn't addressed the "tank is dead" threat with anything even approaching a practical solution.  Even now there's tons of pressure to maintain the status quo and reject real change. 

Steve

According to wikipedia, NATO started fielding RQ-11 Raven, ISR drone with 10 km range and thermal optics on company level in 2003, and Switchblade in 2011. That's a decade or (almost) two before we saw the ISR and FPV drones transform hot war. Looking it up, the whole FPV drone racing seems to go back to like 2010 so the cycle from someone looking at it and thinking "we should build those, put on Javelin warhead and equip our soldiers with it" was pretty short.

So the innovation you're asking for did happen. What didn't happen was enormous mass adoption and manufacturing literally millions of these. Which is probably because nobody saw this as a system that will literally change war forever. But I don't know whether that counts as innovation, or as predicting the future, which is a tall order.

Moreover, investing hugely into drones in 2015 would probably gave you drones that are pretty bad compared to what Ukraine is using, because it is a rapidly evolving space.

 

[dan/california]

16 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

we should build those, put on Javelin warhead and equip our soldiers with it"

Well 2015 was the best time ,and the second best time is tomorrow morning. Literally pay somebody to build the factory. 

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, ArmouredTopHat said:

Russian failures in all the aforementioned points is the reason Ukraine was able to coordinate effectively. How do you even begin to isolate hostile resistance when you dont even know what / where or how your friendly units in an AO are doing? 

So it was a combination but RA failures and shortfalls cannot empower and enable the UA to know where the RA is on the ground.  Nor can it enable the UA to coordinate effectively.  In the blind the UA would not have seen any of these errors (for that matter neither would we).  An enemy performing poorly is not going to afford targeting superiority.  Where to position all those Javelins and NLAWs, where to put the Starstreaks and IADs.  And most importantly to ensure that resistance knows that they are not alone. The average Ukrainian fighter did not know the RA was doing all these screw ups nor did they care.  They did know exactly where the target they were looking for was or was not.

As to infantry, I have not found any really good analysis on this.  We largely compare the BTGs to our battle groups and fair to say they have less infantry but 1) this was not a critical shortfall in 2014 where then BTGs performed well-ish. And 2) no one has explained to me how infantry are supposed to solve for ATGMs with 5km ranges, fire and forget capable, man portable and have a reported 80% Pk.  I read in one account that a modern battalion sized arms team needs to sweep an arc 25kms long in order to find and suppress ATGm teams.  The UA, modelled directly on western organization and structure could not deal with this problem either.  In fact the only way to deal with it appears to be to leave vehicles back and march dismounted - if this latest twitch from Russia is an indication.

I honestly do not know how much infantry is enough to try and protect mech/armor from weapons with those sorts of ranges.  As an engineer, the bridgehead for a crossing has gone from 2000m our past 5km for ATGM and 10km for FPV.  And none of that will solve for artillery and missiles that are watching a crossing in real time.

So, yes, Russia was a hot mess, but that reason is not enough to explain what we saw happen.  Definitely a contributing factor but the levels of denial are baffling - the Strarstreak alone can reach up to 20k feet….a MANPAD.  Someone is going to stick one of those on a drone and we are talking point air denial up to 30 or 40 thousand feet, cheap and many.

So I do not discount these factors in the least but they are secondary to my mind.  They were not deterministic.  If the UA had been blind and isolated then the RA failures would like have been a footnote in their AARs.  To my mind they have been over amplified as the central cause for what we have seen and that is dangerous as it situates the estimate.

[Peregrine]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

It was a failure to isolate. Ukrainian resistance could see and talk to each other.  They could see cell phone video of resistance one town over. They could see Russian forces struggle. Ukrainians that could still see and talk to each other continued to resist with everything they had. The first time I was convinced that something was very wrong for the RA was when we could see video feeds of this war all over the place. Russia failed to make Ukraine go dark.  And once all those lights saw and connected to each other, the RA was in real trouble.

They were using facebook to collect photos of Russian troop equipment and locations in the beginning. 

Edited Sunday at 10:55 PM by Peregrine

[The_Capt]

12 hours ago, Peregrine said:

They were using facebook to collect photos of Russian troop equipment and locations in the beginning. 

Linked up through Starlink. There was one account back in Feb of ‘22 of a gas station attendant giving his password to an artillery commander so that he could see through his gas station security camera and call down accurate strikes on an RA company. That right there was not due to Russian screwups.

It also goes some way to explain the mauling Russian logistics took.  Normally logistics are well behind the lines and protected with air cover.  The RA was not great in the air but the UA was comparatively non-existent.  So when we saw fuel trucks blowing up everywhere and tank being abandoned out of gas, my first question was “what is happening here”.  Turns out UA SOF with TD teamed up in then backfield and using western ISR were hammering LOCs with all them long range options.  Remember this was before FPVs.  The UA had artillery and western ATGMs.

So while the RA over extended and no doubt had screwed up logistics lines, that did not lead to trucks exploding all over the place.  “Not enough infantry”.  So a LOC is 100kms long.  A Javelin missile can reach out and hit at 5kms so that is now a box 100 x 10 x altitude from ground to space that needs to be secured.  How much infantry does someone need to secure that route from small two man teams?  And your convoys are being pinged from space, social media and drones, locations handed off to those teams in real time.

So sure Russia sucked but that does solve for what they faced by a long shot.  I have no idea how we would secure that LOC.  I am not sure we could.  Now add in FPVs and NLOS systems like Spike LR - you can “mission command” and “NCO Corps” all day long but that is an environment that no one is really ready for right now.

I have said it before, I will say it again. I am not worried about facing an enemy that fights like Russia - we fight like Russia and will crush them in that sort of fight.  I am worried about an enemy that fights like Ukraine.

Edited yesterday at 11:35 AM by The_Capt

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Letter from Prague said:

According to wikipedia, NATO started fielding RQ-11 Raven, ISR drone with 10 km range and thermal optics on company level in 2003, and Switchblade in 2011. That's a decade or (almost) two before we saw the ISR and FPV drones transform hot war. Looking it up, the whole FPV drone racing seems to go back to like 2010 so the cycle from someone looking at it and thinking "we should build those, put on Javelin warhead and equip our soldiers with it" was pretty short.

This is not the right way to look at it.  The military was not just ahead of the curve, it created the curve.  If the commercial industrial base was ready to start cranking out FPVs in 2010 then the military should have already a) foreseen such an eventuality and b) taken it into account when making decisions.  There's no real evidence that it did either of those things.

Using your 2010 timeframe, at the very least the military should have seen the first cheap commercial drones and thought "well, now, what could we do with this?".  I'm sure some did, but here we are 14 years later and there's no evidence of anything tangible.  Even by generous standards, the military should be on Gen2 or Gen3 disposable drones by now.  We're not even at Gen1.

On top of that, there's been f'all done to defend against drones in any meaningful way.  Lots and lots of stupidly expensive things that don't perform the role they are intended to.  And even then there's almost no Gen1 systems online.  Only one I can think of is the lasers mounted onto Strykers.  Not really intended to take out drones, but I think they probably could under perfect conditions.

1 hour ago, Letter from Prague said:

So the innovation you're asking for did happen. What didn't happen was enormous mass adoption and manufacturing literally millions of these. Which is probably because nobody saw this as a system that will literally change war forever. But I don't know whether that counts as innovation, or as predicting the future, which is a tall order

Wrong.  The military is all about predicting future needs, in part because it takes them SO VERY LONG to make anything.  They say "this is something that will be in service in 10 years and it needs to last 20".  If they aren't trying to predict the future then they should be fired so they can do something more productive with their time, like flip burgers.

1 hour ago, Letter from Prague said:

Moreover, investing hugely into drones in 2015 would probably gave you drones that are pretty bad compared to what Ukraine is using, because it is a rapidly evolving space.

If the US had invested in this space in 2015 we would be on at least Gen2 or Gen3 by now.  And yet, Gen1 still isn't anywhere to be seen.

Look, I understand that it's tough to figure out when to commit and what to commit to.  Very.  But sitting back and not doing anything because something better is coming is just not responsible decision making.  By that logic I would still not have a home computer because every year the next one will be cheaper and better than the one before.

Sorry... you can try to excuse this as much as you like, but I'm not buying it for a second. This was, and still is, a major failing on behalf of the Western militaries.  I've already rattled on about why it is, so I won't do it for the 10th time.  The facts are the facts.

Steve

[Leeo]

Did someone utter "Peng?"

Peng. It's what's for dinner.

[The_Capt]

44 minutes ago, Leeo said:

Did someone utter "Peng?"

Peng. It's what's for dinner.

Do. Not. Speak. It.

[ASL Veteran]

 

[kimbosbread]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

This is not the right way to look at it.  The military was not just ahead of the curve, it created the curve.  If the commercial industrial base was ready to start cranking out FPVs in 2010 then the military should have already a) foreseen such an eventuality and b) taken it into account when making decisions.  There's no real evidence that it did either of those things.

Everybody excusing the MIC should remember all the components for modern FPVs existed 2010ish. There’s no fancy compute, and the batteries haven’t advanced that much. These are simple analog video transmitters and an RC control link. FPV racing drones have existed for over a decade; the tech is exactly the same.

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

On top of that, there's been f'all done to defend against drones in any meaningful way.  Lots and lots of stupidly expensive things that don't perform the role they are intended to.  about why it is, so I won't do it for the 10th time. 

To be fair to MIC, I remember people in government adjacent positions telling me about this 2016ish and saying there was huge money in drone defense, and everybody was scrambling to even think of something better than a guy with a shotgun.

[chrisl]

26 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Everybody excusing the MIC should remember all the components for modern FPVs existed 2010ish. There’s no fancy compute, and the batteries haven’t advanced that much. These are simple analog video transmitters and an RC control link. FPV racing drones have existed for over a decade; the tech is exactly the same.

To be fair to MIC, I remember people in government adjacent positions telling me about this 2016ish and saying there was huge money in drone defense, and everybody was scrambling to even think of something better than a guy with a shotgun.

the cost to performance ratio has gotten way better, particularly for batteries, but flight controllers are a lot cheaper, too.

The imaging problem is arguably worse - small format sensors I was was using 10 years ago are getting discontinued because they're small format.  So the default is more video data to deal with.  Fortunately most larger format sensors will let you just take a subwindow if you want.

A guy I work with goes to some of those meetings with the mil customers and they still seem to have the same problem with drone defense.

[Carolus]

Considering how Ukrainians are using training airplanes with propellers and a machine gunner in the backseat to take down drones, I wonder when we will see the first drone bi-planes with interruptor gear and a low-calibre forward aiming machinegun.

High speed is not that significant, and bi-planes or tri-planes have good stability and maneuverability. These things could literally be made from balsa wood. 

Edited yesterday at 08:01 AM by Carolus

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, Carolus said:

Considering how Ukrainians are using training airplanes with propellers and a machine gunner in the backseat to take down drones, I wonder when we will see the first drone bi-planes with interruptor gear and a low-calibre forward aiming machinegun.

High speed is not that significant, and bi-planes or tri-planes have good stability and maneuverability. These things could literally be made from balsa wood. 

That's probably much more effective for hitting the slow fixed wings like Shaheds and Orlans that are more like slow cruise missiles on a "set and forget" path than for dealing with electric quadcopters.  The hard part with all the drones is detection.  If you know where something is, hitting it with something is relatively straightforward.  

The Orlans and Shaheds have what are basically lawnmower engines that are loud and relatively hot, not as maneuverable as a quadcopter, and at long ranges from their launch are generally on a programmed flight path.  They're also relatively large, so they're easier to see visually, though they're still mostly made of things like wood and fiberglass, so they won't have big radar signatures.

Quadcopters (and their 6 and 8 motored relatives) are a lot harder - they're smaller, to start, even the ones big enough to carry an RPG-7 warhead.  They're much quieter - almost inaudible at 50 or 100 feet, made of mostly plastic, and not generating a lot of heat.  They're also typically controlled by an operator and capable of very abrupt maneuvers.  So hitting them with an MG from a moving fixed wing aircraft is probably a lot harder unless you have some way to detect them reliably and use an auto-aim system.

[Carolus]

46 minutes ago, chrisl said:

That's probably much more effective for hitting the slow fixed wings like Shaheds and Orlans that are more like slow cruise missiles on a "set and forget" path than for dealing with electric quadcopters.  The hard part with all the drones is detection.  If you know where something is, hitting it with something is relatively straightforward.  

The Orlans and Shaheds have what are basically lawnmower engines that are loud and relatively hot, not as maneuverable as a quadcopter, and at long ranges from their launch are generally on a programmed flight path.  They're also relatively large, so they're easier to see visually, though they're still mostly made of things like wood and fiberglass, so they won't have big radar signatures.

Quadcopters (and their 6 and 8 motored relatives) are a lot harder - they're smaller, to start, even the ones big enough to carry an RPG-7 warhead.  They're much quieter - almost inaudible at 50 or 100 feet, made of mostly plastic, and not generating a lot of heat.  They're also typically controlled by an operator and capable of very abrupt maneuvers.  So hitting them with an MG from a moving fixed wing aircraft is probably a lot harder unless you have some way to detect them reliably and use an auto-aim system.

Oh yes. I was only thinking about the Orlan equivalents. You cannot cover the frontline with training planes, so some sort of reusable yet not too extensive interceptor drone might come in handy. Does not risk the lives of the pilots but allows to push the Russian observation bubble back a bit.

Edited yesterday at 10:16 AM by Carolus
typos