this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
38 points (100.0% liked)

Ukraine

10549 readers
709 users here now

News and discussion related to Ukraine

Matrix Space


Community Rules

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ Sympathy for enemy combatants is prohibited.

🌻🀒No content depicting extreme violence or gore.

πŸ’₯Posts containing combat footage should include [Combat] in title

🚷Combat videos containing any footage of a visible human involved must be flagged NSFW

❗ Server Rules

  1. Remember the human! (no harassment, threats, etc.)
  2. No racism or other discrimination
  3. No Nazis, QAnon or similar
  4. No porn
  5. No ads or spam (includes charities)
  6. No content against Finnish law

πŸ’³ Defense Aid πŸ’₯


πŸ’³ Humanitarian Aid βš•οΈβ›‘οΈ


πŸͺ– Volunteer with the International Legionnaires


See also:

!nafo@lemm.ee

!combatvideos@SJW


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
top 2 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Don't let the framing be set for you (you referring to a general appeal not OP*) here, make sure to take a step back and consider why Russia is turning to potentially using jet engine drones that can fly higher and faster.

longish response

Yes.. these weapons are more sophisticated, harder to shoot down and faster... but they are also significantly more expensive and require a much larger investment per unit for Russia. Also flying higher inherently makes an aircraft easier to spot with radar, the sphere of visibility grows larger the higher an aircraft goes, this makes remaining hidden from Ukrainian sensors and evading jamming much harder so long as Ukraine can field cost efficient high altitude platforms equivalent in effect to the Sky Sentinel heavy machine gun turrets.

The focus on satellite based navigation, surveillance, reconnaisance and communication is a political one pushed because of who has power in the US. There are many good reasons to consider GPS/satellite communication a liability at least as the ONLY form of doing any of these things.

As Russia pushes their flying bombs up to higher altitudes Ukraine should and likely is considering high altitude lightweight surveillance/electronics warfare/reconaissance aircraft that may or may not be manned.

A possible vision of an aircraft like that is the Airbus Zephyr a solar powered aircraft capable of flying for weeks at a time. I think a backup system of navigation and communication equipment mounted on an airframe somewhat like the Airbus Zephyr could be a crucial asset in hotly contested war zones as a far more durable solution that also dovetails nicely with constructing a thorough defense against mass flying bomb attacks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr

However Ukraine chooses to counter jet powered shaheds, solutions that are cost effective will be found and I don't necessarily think this is a sign Russia is winning the war since Russia would have already transitioned to producing these jet shaheds if they were preferable so this must be the fall back plan for when their preferred lower cost weapon system became ineffective.

What is happening here is an echo of how level bomber design evolved as anti-aircraft weapons became more sophisticated, higher range and more lethal towards the later half of the 20th century. Initially low flying, slow, mass bomber attacks were very effective, but as flak cannons, autocannons (like the Gepard) and then anti-aircraft missile systems became more lethal, bombers responded by flying faster and higher. Eventually however traditional bombers like the b52 decisively were shut out of the lethal airspace of a fullscale war by anti-aircraft missiles and radars becoming too powerful for bombers to simply out-fly.

Briefly there was an attempt to make nuclear bomb capable carrying traditional bombers that tried to deal with the growing lethality of anti-aircraft defenses by flying lower and faster such as the B1 bomber and Avro british retired strategic bombers, and while these aircraft remain immensely useful to militaries that still possess them in working order, the basic idea of using a level bomber like you could in WW2 as a weapon in fullscale war is simply not a viable strategy anymore. Instead these bombers are now relegated to cruise missile launching platforms (and they are very useful for that, but still..).

Notice... Russia never even got to jet engines with it's early cold war strategic bomber fleet of Tu-95 turboprops even though they did produce jet powered large bombers in smaller number, so... what has changed? If jet engines are better why was Russia still heavily relying on turboprop bombers as a launch platform for a large amount of munitions until Operation Spiderweb scared Russia into scrambling the rest of their bomber strategic bomber fleet?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95#%3A%7E%3Atext=Like+its+American+counterpart%2C+the%2Cfor+modification+to+different+missions.

There is nothing physically different about what will happen with flying bomb attacks here, yes the raw number is much greater but there are cost effective ways to shoot down high flying shaheds as there are bombers, they just might involve networks of high altitude, long loiter time unmanned aircraft. Further, if Russia pushes Ukraine into having to develop and integrate this kind of highly cost effective high altitude air defense system they will have made Ukraine into the most important defense partner for a majority of the world's militaries....

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I still don't understand why Ukraine isn't building V1 style buzzbombs with modern navigation systems. Cheap as fuck, long range, easily manufactured in massive scale. Pulse jet engines are so cheap, tha RC enthusiasts use them.