381–390 of 561 posts
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> rocket propellant You can homemade it, kno3+sugar
You can also blow your hands off, blind yourself and/or burn down the building. So be very careful if you try this. Note it is illegal to make your own solid fuel motors in some countries (you need a special license in the UK).
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They should be sweating, because if the other side can fire 100 rockets for $10k that are close enough to not immediately and obviously be off target, and you don't know whether a more expensive one with actual explosives is hiding within that barrage, you now have 100 targets to try to intercept, and suddenly your costs have gone up dramatically while the other sides costs has barely moved.
100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. Take a look at Raytheon's manufacturing line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc That's what it takes to have missiles that are nearly guaranteed to perform to sp…
This is bonkers. Video on GitHub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE I'm impressed by the kid's engineering and gumption, but I think he's a bit.. misguided, if you'll pardon the pun. The video ends with shots of Russian drone war, and, bizarrely, photos of David Koresh. I don't think this ends well.
soo... i have no kept up with what's gone on in russia/ukraine. Are those drone videos what i think they are – drones sneaking up on humans and, presumably, ceasing them of life? edit: Ok, I googled the guy > I have read the works of authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Desmod Morris, and Ted Kaczynski who believe that technology is harming us and the world. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/User:Alisherkhojayev
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> a war of conquest Israel invading Gaza is kind of proving the point? Those are American weapons bombing civilians.
Hamas turned Gaza into a terrorist military installation with tunnels and operatives under and within a heavily populated urban environment. Their civilians were heavily dependent on foreign aid, much of which was used to buy arms and construct the elaborate tunnel system used to stage the Oct attack. If they were in my back yard and I had power and military force, I’d try to minimize civilian casualties but I wouldn…
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> equally cheap or cheaper I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
> I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving. It's a good point, though I should point out that GPS denial is assumed in those sort of contexts as a first countermeasure so D_A likely has alternative targeting, and that smaller drones can move faster with less energy storage, which itself requires less weight, compounding the benefits of being smaller.
D_A only needs to get to coordinates (X, Y) with a minimal requirements for Z as "some meters above ground." It doesn't matter if it gets there in 15 minutes or in 20 minutes, or in 2 hours.
D_B needs to absolutely nail X, Y, Z -- but also t!
To be at the time t0 at the point (X0, Y0, Z0), the defence drone needs to be at some other point (X1, Y1, Z1) at the time t1 -- given the speed and the direction of the attack drone. But what the defence drone has is just an estimation of these. The amount of back-propagation calculations for the defence drone is simply immense.
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Reasonable people know to take your flippant tone for the colorful warning of a rotten, toxic brain.
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> White phosphorous is a way to light up the night sky during warfare Lol No. Hilariously no. The thing to use to light up night sky is Magnesium (mostly, also aluminum. nowadays specialized resins). The primary use of WP is for smoke, but it is used illegally as an incendiary munition. For someone who talks so much about WP I did not expect this level of ignorance. Empty vessels sounds much, I suppose. Use of WP is…
So prove it. Prosecute those people.
Whining that bad people do illegal things is asinine.
>*There is a specific exception made for WP, which the Israeli army habitually and illegally abuses.
You mean it's not actually illegal.
I'm honestly not a big fan of Israel, but until we can locate all six of their submarines that launch the Popeye Turbo nuclear cruise missiles and destroy them (at sea, hopefully) with megaton nuclear first strikes, Israel gets to do whatever they want. They'll Samson all of Europe, North America too. But that might be a little too harsh... you're still hoping to shame them into behaving. Or something.
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> propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. The further down the list you go, the more optional the requirements get in a sufficiently dire scenario. Shelf life doesn't matter if you are firing them as quickly as you can make them, especially if you actually can make them as quickly as you need them because they're so simple. QA and traceability may matter less if yo…
I don't understand your point. Sure, Ukraine can cut a few corners that western militaries are unwilling to cut. They still can't produce a domestic ballistic missile at scale, because it's genuinely hard, and simple terror weapons like Qassams are useless for militaries. "100 rockets for $10k" is off by orders of magnitude.
Also, because it costs a lot and there are only two benefits of ballistic over cruise (if you exclude delivering nuclear payloads, which Ukraine doesn't have): it's very fast and hard to intercept. Both are needed sometimes, but often not a requirement.
Ukraine is comparatively small, so air defenses can be packed close, Russia is big and harder to cover with air defense systems, so drones and cruise missiles are a better investment for Ukraine, since they can overpower the AD locally and are much-much easier and cheaper to produce, meanwhile ballistic is a better investment for Russia, since anti-ballistic systems are even harder to build and cost a lot.
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If you think shelf life, QA, safety, blah blah blah matters when a rocket is 100 bucks, I have just three words: you will lose. The Ukraine war is being fought with a bunch of cheap toy style drones dropping grenades everywhere. The US got their bases blown to pieces across the Middle East by cheap drones that gently float through the air like a paper airplane in comparison to absolutely any missile. And let's not fo…
I'm just not sure what to even say when you're both so assertive and completely wrong. Please stop relying on twitter/reddit to inform your takes. The war in Ukraine is being fought with all tiers of systems, ranging from Zircons and PAC-3 on the high end to booby traps on the low end. All of them are essential, and shortcomings on any of the tiers is ruthlessly exploited by the other side. Saying that it's only the…
You still need to get to the line of sight with your Javelin, which is unlikely in current meta.