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[Great Order]

Old artillery, Maxim MGs, trenches, frontlines that barely move at the cost of thousands of lives...

We're in WWI boys.

[King Zultan]

Hopefully they don't try to go for the full WWI experience and start using poison gas.

[anewaname]

...
Since there are some very obvious downsides to using a drone like that (eg. ukrainians can literally stumble across the multi KM long cable and send their own drone down the line to kill the people that sent it) I can't imagine its a very common mod.
...

How far could you track a hair-thin cable using a drone's camera? Near impossible.

And, why would there be an operator at the cable's tether-point instead of a signal repeater?

This isn't welding metal onto a tank, this is the field testing of assembled components that they already know can work together. It will result in a manufactured weapon component because the ability to bypass jamming is gold.

[Jopax]

Why even bother with that, just cut the cable when you find it. Don't advanced jamming equipment if a pair of cutters does the job :V

[Starver]

I'd nearly suggested taking the principle of Chain Shot projectiles into a variation usable in modern(/recentish) firearms, for better anti-drone defensive fire (a bit more destructive than a 'net flinger' shotgun-like countermeasure. Might take some work, but may be compatible with a rifled muzzle.

If there's a trailing filament (which would be hard to see, of course), a chainshot projectile could more effectively sever that. Though requires 'aiming to miss', perhaps only under the assumption that there's a fibre to be severed, and leaves the gunman exposed.


...then I thought of Kite Fighting, and how maybe a friendly drone (perhaps under more resiliant LoS control) could trail a cutting (or at least entangling) line beneath it, giving a flexibility of interception.

[anewaname]

It looks like they updated that Forbes article about unknown hardware on a captured Russian drone and back in January a Russian drone manufacturer was touting their new jam-proof drone. "When Kalashnikov subsidiary ZALA boasted that their new ‘Product 55’ quadcopter was proof against all forms of radio jamming, this appeared to point to some kind of autonomy similar to what the company had previously displayed. But a captured Russian FPV attack drone uses a very different and quite surprising technology to overcome radio interference: it has no radio but communicates with the operator via a fiber-optic cable spooled out as it flies."

...
...then I thought of Kite Fighting, and how maybe a friendly drone (perhaps under more resiliant LoS control) could trail a cutting (or at least entangling) line beneath it, giving a flexibility of interception.

There are tactics like that in use in the submersibles coldwar (against undersea network cables, telecom/power/sensor, like "dragging a fishing trawler's anchor" but militarized). But against an aerial drone, it might be too slow (2-3km/minute is "normal" drone speed).

[martinuzz]

Ukraine reports the succesful destruction of a Russian weapons depot storing missiles. The explosions and fire of the complex set fire to the town of Toropets (470km from the border with Ukraine). It's 11 thousand inhabitants have been evacuated.

Let this be a lesson: If you don't want your town to burn down, tell your government not to build a weapons depot next to it. There is a thing called collateral damage.

[Lord Shonus]

There's been multiple seismic detections from this strike, the largest of which was 3.2 on the Richter Scale. The Beirut Explosion of 2020, which was a kiloton-range blast, only hit 3.3. This indicates a massive quantity of munitions going up, since you aren't going to get one detonation of everything.

[martinuzz]

Yes, very good and succesful attack. It also shows again that even without permission to use longe range Western weapons, Ukraine has it's own capabilities to strike deep into enemy territory.

Russians, live in fear!

Heh. 3.2 on the Richter. I wonder if the strike detonated nukes in underground silos. I think NK nuclear under the mountain tests also hit somewhere in the 3+ Richter range.
1000 kiloton, that's 50 Heroshima bombs (Fat Boy was 21 kt).

Perhaps we should check sattelite images to see if there's a large smoke plume, and see which way the wind blows. Ground level / underground nuclear detonations cause horrible fallout

[Maximum Spin]

Yes, very good and succesful attack. It also shows again that even without permission to use longe range Western weapons, Ukraine has it's own capabilities to strike deep into enemy territory.

Russians, live in fear!

Heh. 3.2 on the Richter. I wonder if the strike detonated nukes in underground silos. I think NK nuclear under the mountain tests also hit somewhere in the 3+ Richter range.
1000 kiloton, that's 50 Heroshima bombs (Fat Boy was 21 kt).

Perhaps we should check sattelite images to see if there's a large smoke plume, and see which way the wind blows. Ground level / underground nuclear detonations cause horrible fallout

Not sure where you got these numbers, but from what I can see, there's virtually no chance of any nuclear involvement (the size of the explosion is way too small), and nuclear bombs can't be detonated accidentally that way anyway.

[Lord Shonus]

Kiloton range, not thousand kiloton. This absolutely was not nuclear. This would be in the same range as the first NK nuclear test, which was incredibly low yield and also in the kiloton range.

There is, or was, however, a plume of smoke that was visible in orbital imagery.


Generating an explosion of that maginitude with conventional explosives is very difficult unless you do it deliberately or have a single mass of explosive material that detonates by itself. Depot explosions tend to be a massive chain of blasts as material cooks off or sympathetically detonates with a delay. To get a blast that big (the equivalent of over two thousand of the biggest bomb that can be carried by an F-16 (the 2000 pound Mk 84, which carries 400 kg of HE filler)) means there must have been much much more going of in less synchronized fashion.

[martinuzz]

Oh I misread then