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I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

warontherocks.com

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Re: I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

#4
post #3

You need to compare this to hit rate with mortars and attrition by counter battery fire on mortar teams. Not to detract from a sober assessment but it's hard to judge without the other parts of the story. Thr tldr would be "temper expectations"

Yes, even a 20% success rate seems quite high.

Re: I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

#5

> They are controlled by an operator wearing virtual-reality goggles They aren't really using VR headsets, right? The FPV goggles I know are just a screen showing the camera image without any virtual reality.

Basically its just screen yes. It's just convenient and more portable to do it this way. Small desktop screen also exist and are used to peek on what the FPV operator is seeing.

Re: I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

#8

> They are controlled by an operator wearing virtual-reality goggles They aren't really using VR headsets, right? The FPV goggles I know are just a screen showing the camera image without any virtual reality.

Yeah I'd much rather use an xreal air or something. You can still see if someone (or an enemy drone) comes to kill you. AR is much better for this.

Re: I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

#10
post #3

You need to compare this to hit rate with mortars and attrition by counter battery fire on mortar teams. Not to detract from a sober assessment but it's hard to judge without the other parts of the story. Thr tldr would be "temper expectations"

This.

Mortar may be 5 times cheaper but 100x easier to destroy it and its crew.

Also half of the problems described are purely technical and can be easily solved with some budget. In Ukraine most drones are assembled by volunteers. So its not the reliability of drone that is an issue, its lack of proper assembly and QA.

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