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Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

wsj.com

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Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#181

Post by selimthegrim »

reaperducer wrote: post #160
selimthegrim wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of diversification, what’s Houston’s plan?

From an outsider's perspective, it seems to be more robust than some other cities. It went from being an oil town to an energy town a few decades ago. It has massive investments in the medical sector, with 60 institutions generating $25 billion annually.† That's bigger than the GDP of Iceland coming out of just one neighborhood. NASA Mission Control is still there, and it's the headquarters of NASA's manned spaceflig…

Just leery about their tech scene if I were to take a job there

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#182

Post by yyyk »

snovv_crash wrote: post #175
yyyk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. Even if you magically had a 1000 mile drone (extremely unlikely even for US 'amateurs', much less wartorn Yemen), it can't do anything without guidance, which they can't provide. Everybody, but Everybody, knows Iran is responsible for this.

Guidance is easy. Throw on Ardupilot with a preprogrammed mission onto an EPP wing. 100km of range with 2kg payload is possible for under $1000.

So you say can get a small range with a tiny bomb (nowhere near enough to cause this damage), and also without any real guidance (Preprogrammed mission isn't real guidance. Deviations are very likely to kill the mission). All this while (presumably) not living in a wartorn county.

Now guess how hard it must be for the Houthis. Either Iran did it directly or had so much involvement it's practically the same.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#183

Post by yyyk »

fit2rule wrote: post #179
yyyk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. Even if you magically had a 1000 mile drone (extremely unlikely even for US 'amateurs', much less wartorn Yemen), it can't do anything without guidance, which they can't provide. Everybody, but Everybody, knows Iran is responsible for this.

Evidence: Provide some, or quit it with your BS war-mongering against Iran.

Gee I don't know. Maybe the Saudis bombed themselves. What better way to deal with oil-addiction then to blow up your own infrastructure? Or maybe its their arch-enemy which has the motive, opportunity, ability and past history of doing those things. Too reasonable, I guess.

I am not "war-mongering" - the only warmongers here are the people who blow up stuff.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#184

Post by dragonwriter »

avocado4 wrote: post #13
tdhz77 wrote: post #2

The use of drones in this way by rebels makes me rethink the media image of a rebel. They are educated, lawyers, doctors, engineers.

Yemen is a really poor country, they don't have this capability. This is a proxy war, we had a lot of them in the past 100 years.

> Yemen is a really poor country, they don't have this capability.

The Houthis capabilities for anything short of deploying regular military forces is essentially ide identical to Iran’s since they.are actively supported by Iran including deployment of the Iranian Republican Guard to aid, train, advise, and support them.

Saying the Houthis are too poor for this kind of drone attack is like saying the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were too poor to have had shoulder-launched SAMs.

Also, arguing whether it was the Houthis or Iran based on capabilities that Iran could have easily supplied to the Houthis is kind of silly given the nature of the conflict.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

bidatzi wrote: post #37
lacker wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really not have this capability? You can buy a decent drone off the shelf for a thousand bucks, how hard is it to strap an IED on the back?

With a range over 1000km?

The attack was, per their claim, carried out with assistance from inside Saudi Arabia.

The required range is vastly smaller than 1000km.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#186

Post by snovv_crash »

yyyk wrote: post #182
snovv_crash wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guidance is easy. Throw on Ardupilot with a preprogrammed mission onto an EPP wing. 100km of range with 2kg payload is possible for under $1000.

So you say can get a small range with a tiny bomb (nowhere near enough to cause this damage), and also without any real guidance (Preprogrammed mission isn't real guidance. Deviations are very likely to kill the mission). All this while (presumably) not living in a wartorn county. Now guess how hard it must be for the Houthis. Either Iran did it directly or had so much involvement it's practically the same.

Ardupilot (and a number of other open source flight stacks) do 'real' guidance. GNSS based, or optical flow, or whatever other source you want. You can program drones (multirotor, fixed wing, vtol, whatever) to go to exact coordinates, following whatever flight paths you want. This is something a teenager can put together in a weekend with parts ordered from banggood or gearbest or any other number of chinese webstores.

For a 1000km range, sure, maybe they didn't do it themselves, but nothing stopping them from just ordering slightly larger off-the-shelf drones from China. But lots of small drones is cheap and easy, and harder to stop.

Source: I work in the commercial drone industry.

Edit: here's an off-the-shelf drone with 1000km range, costs $4.5k: https://www.muginuav.com/product/mugin-4450mm-uav-ht-tail-pl...

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#187

Post by dragonwriter »

mhkool wrote: post #84
avocado4 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yemen is a really poor country, they don't have this capability. This is a proxy war, we had a lot of them in the past 100 years.

The Houthis are genuinely fighting for their own country. Iran may help them but Iran is not commanding them, so I do not see this as a proxy war but an internal affair to Yemen.

The Afghan Mujahedeen were genuinely fighting for their own country, and yet the war they fought in was absolutely a US-USSR proxy war.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#188

Post by droithomme »

snovv_crash wrote: post #186
yyyk wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you say can get a small range with a tiny bomb (nowhere near enough to cause this damage), and also without any real guidance (Preprogrammed mission isn't real guidance. Deviations are very likely to kill the mission). All this while (presumably) not living in a wartorn county. Now guess how hard it must be for the Houthis. Either Iran did it directly or had so much involvement it's practically the same.

Ardupilot (and a number of other open source flight stacks) do 'real' guidance. GNSS based, or optical flow, or whatever other source you want. You can program drones (multirotor, fixed wing, vtol, whatever) to go to exact coordinates, following whatever flight paths you want. This is something a teenager can put together in a weekend with parts ordered from banggood or gearbest or any other number of chinese webstor…

That's a really cool and super inexpensive long range drone! Thanks.

The Houthi models are jet powered, cruise at 450mph, and can fly for 2 hrs on 500 lbs of jet fuel, which requires a 10 cubic foot volume fuel tank. The interior of the fuselage has around 70 cubic feet of capacity, which is more than enough for the fuel (even enough for a 900 mile each way round trip if desired), the controls, and the payload. They have a solid fuel rocket booster on the back as they are sled launched. Once up to flight speed the jet takes over and the rocket element drops off. They are really cool drones and within the scope of what the serious amateur community in the US and elsewhere is experimenting with. Some guys even are building their own jet engines from scratch.

The guidance systems are a done deal. Can DIY or can buy off the shelf. My kids build drones and program the guidance systems on them themselves (one started at age 8). It's fun and there's even online classes telling you everything you need to know. Ours currently use inertial guidance and GPS and have no problem getting somewhere with great accuracy. We've also got a celestial navigation system under development which works even when there is no GPS.

Houthis mentioned they have local assist at the end of the flight which makes sense to deal with GPS jamming. The region they hit contains significant Shia populations who hate Saudi Arabia and have even revolted against the Kingdom in the past. Once you're at the last mile if for any reason there's a question about the target, local observers can and do provide guidance assist.

People saying Houthis are too dumb or primitive to make drones are warmongering anti-Iranians, IMHO. Houthis have systematically and incrementally been developing this technology for years now to defend their homeland and have shown off their drones. There's no question the Houthi drones have the capabilities we are seeing.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#189

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

trhway wrote: post #122

One of the side effects of Russia's maintaining of the official decorum of non-involvement ("little green men" of unknown origin in Crimea, and the whole tank battalions taking their tanks on voluntary vacation to Donbass :) in similar situation in Ukraine was avoiding opening themselves to the risk of otherwise legitimate counter-strike by Ukraine and scaling up of the war. Saudis seems to have forgo such risk in fa…

The Houthi are Iran's "Little Green Men," in the same way as you say the Donbasses in Eastern Ukraine were Russia's. Heck, Iran and Russia are allies, and each other's "little green men" in this conflict, where the objective is to boost your economy by wrecking your competitor's ability to produce or ship to market.

Re: Saudi Arabia Shuts Down About Half Its Oil Output After Drone Strikes

#190

Post by humble_engineer »

SergeAx wrote: post #130

Commercially available drones are easily detectable ("a week project", as said before) and very fragile. I believe automatic anti-drone systems are now months from being deployed worldwide. It is not even necessary to be very powerful: something like airsoft gun gonna be enough.

You're a bigot.
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