there also seems to be a “night-of-long-knives” going on:
.
making this a bit shorter:
Referencing “suicide drone”.
Most drones are designed to return to their base, after either reconnaissance or delivering some form of ordinance. Separate nomenclature for ones that are deployed more as missiles (crash into something and explode) seems reasonable.
I don’t have an exact number in memory, but at the height of the Mariupol-asovstal- bombing, they brought the TU22 in for the heavy 500kg bombs on the factory
… and some numbers were mentioned, and the number was surprisingly (for me) small … 60 planes of that type around (or ever built)?
(high chance of me misremembering or generally screwing up )
“Expendable” seems a better adjective than “suicide” or, even worse, “kamikaze”. They are merely guided missiles with wings; not a desperate military gamble.
The nomenclature exists: “cruise missile”.
I have no idea what bonehead coined that abomination of a pointless, unneeded, and wrongheaded neologism.
Probably an “Alibaba” drone, so named because you can actually buy them online from China.
I believe AI128 may be implying that it was probably a inside job (“the airfield is way closer to Moscow than to Kyiv”, which is not really true, it is somewhat closer to Moscow). And we will never actually know accurate details, only what Kremlin MoI (or MoMI) tells us: what they want the world to hear.
Cruise missiles don’t loiter. “Suicide drones” do. It’s a silly term but something new was needed to distinguish from existing types. And since these are more likely based on drone platforms than cruise missile platforms, calling it a drone variant makes sense.
no, no insider job assumption made … I was just surprised how far away from Ukr. this airfield was … I (implicitly) assumed it was close to the border - as Belograd or so … and the google map surprised me …
what you are right about … how does a Ukr. drone get there? … were those some “rucksack” sized “nuisance” drones operated by some special agents? b/c that is some 400-500km off limits … and not even the bayraktar can go that far iirc … or anything in between like those south-corean huge-drones that can carry 6 or so granades
I guess we have to wait for tomorrow’s sat pics (if there are any) and see how much damage was done and deduct from that what vehicle might have been used
In the US we have those types of drones. An example is a Switchblade made by Aeroenvrionment. They call them “suicide drones” on their web page. I agree that someone should have come up with a better term.
If the Russians are rational (which, admittedly, is a big “if” these days), they’ll sooner lose their entire bomber fleet than drop nuke bombs. After all, the consequences of dropping nukes are still much worse than losing all the bombers, and they still have ICBMs, SSBNs and other means of using nukes.
Doesn’t the US get most of its tungsten from Russia, or has that changed in the 60 years since Lockheed was building the SR-71?
The airbase is about 140 miles from the border. And, there is a nice big wooded national park along that part of the border – good cover for launching a non-ballistic missile from a truck.
China produces >25x as much tungsten as Russia:
In fact, China produces >80% of all tungsten.
SR-71 was titanium. Tungsten would be a spectacularly bad choice for a plane for many reasons, not the least of which is weight.
See…this is why I find the use of tungsten puzzling. It weighs more than steel, it’s more expensive than steel, it is in limited supply, and the targets to be engaged are not tanks. I can’t see any reason steel wouldn’t be an improvement for the munition. Attacking from above does away with the need for maximum penetration. Guess this is why I don’t design munitions.
In sweet irony, the M777 howitzers that America has donated to Ukraine with which to fight Russia with are mostly made out of Russian titanium.
Consider going even farther: would styrofoam balls be an improvement? No; they wouldn’t transfer significant energy, and you could not fit many of them in the shell.
When momentum and/or kinetic energy is the crucial factor, denser is pretty much always better. For the same mass, you can have a smaller volume, which makes the entire projectile smaller, which means less mass wasted on structure, and so on.
The generic term covering a slew of existing and proposed weapons is “loitering munitions”.
Which, like I said, is the reason I’m not designing these things!