Does the West have a system comparable to Shahed-136 or better? I'm asking because I actually want to see the West frick up Russia and dunk on them. I'm not a Russian shill. Maybe there already is one and we just need to send it?
Or is Shahed just overrated by desperate Russians?
Put the feelings away and tell me nothing but the truth.
ameriga can afford more tomahawks than the russian can afford shasneeds
also rapid dragon
>also rapid dragon
>just have mexican women push bombs out of a cargo plane
the absolute state
Its good compared to the crap Russia has been using, but a polished turd is still a turd.
Funny how quickly people forgot about a literal Aliexpress drone blowing up a russian oil refinery.
Ukrainian revenge for shahsneeds will be slow, but deadly, Allah wills it
i member
Pretty sure that's a Chinese-made drone.
But does Ukraine do stuff like that still? I know Russia has bought lots of Shaheds and is awaiting their delivery, it's not some one-off attack, they will continue. Do we Westerners have a similar or better drone when it comes to cost:reward? And why aren't we sending them to Ukraine/producing them/whatever?
Are those grenades thrown from commercial drones effective when it comes to cost:reward? I keep hearing training a soldier costs a bit too. I just want good arguments to dunk on vatnigs in discussions. How is current Ukraine cost:reward ratio? How can it be improved?
>And why aren't we sending them to Ukraine/producing them/whatever
The west doesn't actually want Ukraine to win the war. They are sending bare minimum to keep it in the fight for as long as possible but never win.
>The west doesn't actually want Ukraine to win the war.
What makes you say that?
He means "doesn't want them to win" as in doesn't want the war to end, not as in he wants Russia to win.
Why wouldn't the West want the war to end quickly? Why wouldn't they want the problem to end quickly?
The longer it goes on, the worse position Russia is in. Plus it makes lots of money for defence industries.
Bleed Russia of money, troops, missiles, tanks, aircraft etc. stuff they can’t produce under sanction. Also it shows the world how bad Russian/soviet gear is in the modern age this boosting sales and reliance on western gear.
I was gonna answer you but
&
pretty much nail it
One of the biggest advantages China would have in a conflict with the US was that they would always have to worry about countering Russia/defending Europe. With a Russia that is dead in the water and used up all their manpower and resources that is no longer a concern.
Yes, I've been on this theory as well since the war started. We wanted no part of this when we thought Ukraine was 3 days from complete unconditional surrenender. Then once we saw how cumbersome and ineffective the Russians were being we gave a lot of infantry level support and nothing else and just watched them grind away at each other. A dozen HIMARS is hardly a grand departure from that. We seem all too pleased to let this become Russia's Afghanistan on the blood of the Ukrainian people.
Was that the one with the "is it one of ours?" comment in the video seconds before it dives down and explodes? That was funny as frick.
Why would you use shitty suicide drones? The west can just bomb accurately without losing the drone
The Tomahawk is just this but it goes at 500 miles per hour and carries a thousand pound warhead.
>thousand pound warhead
That's great, how's the cost though? Vatnik constantly spam the cost:effectiveness argument. Also something something about overwhelming air defences. What would you say to that?
About 2 million a pop as of 2022.
The thing is, we can afford to field more 2 million dollar warhead than they can field 20,000 dollar warheads. It's a lot more cost effective to field extremely capable, extremely expensive weapons and just win the war in the first few weeks than it is to field cheap weapons and fight a stalemate.
America doesn’t need to worry about air defenses. They were HARMd, PrSMd, and JASSMd 4 minutes before the tomahawks went out. I’m sorry if this isn’t what you were hoping to hear but that’s the world you’re living in
Actually that's exactly what I want to hear because as I said, I'm pro-Ukraine. Vatniks make the argument that some drones will always go through.
Why do you put so much stock in vatnik arguments. Just disregard
I mean, some will, but a 50 pound warhead is going to be annoying, not lethal.
And if you're fighting an enemy like America, it can easily just shoot them down from the air. Flying nape of the earth doesn't protect you from a look down shoot down radar. The only reason the Ukrainians aren't doing this is because they don't have air superiority.
It's 40kg, not 50 pounds. It's around 88 pounds. I think that unfortunately can do some damage. But to be honest I don't know that much. How much armor/people can that destroy?
It’s not meant for armor as it has no way to target moving vehicles. 40kg of explosives is enough to pen most MBTs as long as its a shaped charge. I don’t think these have shaped charges so even if it could hit a tank it wouldn’t be very effective. It has a blast fragmentation warhead.
With a cruise missile, you're trying to blow up buildings and other infrastructure, not vehicles and personnel.
After all, if you launch a drone from five hundred miles away, the vehicle will have moved when it actually gets there. Especially a drone that only goes a hundred miles an hour.
So in practice, 88 pound warheads can damage a power plant substation, which is annoying but not that important long term. Whereas the US will launch a salvo of Tomahawks and completely destroy the power plant and everything near it with thousand pound warheads. It's expensive but it works.
>After all, if you launch a drone from five hundred miles away, the vehicle will have moved when it actually gets there.
Not if the vehicle is attacked by surprise. How far away can the Shaheds be detected from? I'm afraid what can happen if they put shaped charge on them. Javelin has 8.4 kg warhead and it already has a ton of penetration. What can they do with a 40kg warhead? Also the point is that even if the West has the potential to easily and cheaply defeat the drones, Ukraine doesn't have that. They used IRIS-T recently to shoot one down. IRIS-T is more that 400 000 per missile, Shahed is from $20,000 to €50,000($49 203,25 as of now) each according to Wikipedia. We need economical air defense for Ukraine.
It isn’t accurate enough for a shape charge or to target vehicles. You would need to put some kind of targeting system on the drone which would raise the prices astronomically. These things are designed to be programmed and fly into the ground hopefully within 20 yards of where it is supposed to. Putting a shaped charge on it would make it useless at what it’s designed to do.
Ok, what about infrastructure damage. I didn't follow the news closely, was that done with Shahed-136s or with other shit?
Yes it can damage infrastructure. Think of it as a mini cruise missile strike. It’s not going to do shit against hardened targets but substations, pipelines, small buildings, vehicle or ammo depots would all be fair game. These drones wouldn’t make it past a C-RAM type air defense but most places won’t have a c-ram type air defense
So that 30% damaged energy infrastructure was done with Shaheds or with big ballistic missiles? What damage did Shaheds *actually* do?
How would I know that type of information? I’m sure it was a mix since they have both
Well vatnigs say Shahed will destroy Ukraine, so I'm asking what can it actually do since we know Russians and their collaborators can't be trusted to say the truth, just spam /misc/ and /k/ with a million threads.
Yeah, that's the niche that a Shaheed and similar systems would be good for.
It's just a very small niche because there aren't that many mission profiles where it's even worth launching a drone with a 1000 mile range, a speed of a hundred miles an hour, and an accuracy in the tens of meters.
If you're America you can just rape the enemy IADS with missiles and VLO aircraft and then drop JDAMs (which are actually cheaper than 20k) on everything else.
>Not if the vehicle is attacked by surprise
You can't hit a point target the size of a vehicle with GLONASS. This isn't like a switchblade where there's a human operator guiding it onto the target, the drone just gets a set of coordinates and goes off somewhere within a few tens of meters within that area.
>Also something something about overwhelming air defences
Just realized I didn't answer this part.
It's a lot easier to overwhelm an air defense if you can just hit it with PGMs over and over again right from the beginning of the war. Hence why every war involving the US begins with Tomahawks and F-117s hitting air defense facilities until they aren't working any more, and then teen series fighters just bombing the absolute shit out of everything else.
You can't really do this with something that flies 100 miles per hour, has a 50 pound warhead, and as a result doesn't get through and doesn't do much damage when it does get through
Chadsneeds are so shitty that they're invisible to radar and infrared though. That's what makes them good.
nah, they are fricking trash, they can only be used against stationary targets, thats the reason they are used as terror weapons.
the thing is, russia terror bombed ukraine since the start, nothing really changed in 8 months, just the names which they use
Plenty of stationary targets are legitimate
Ukraine’s power grid is one example
The west has no real use case for such a thing. It doesn’t frick with inaccurate terror bombing anymore since precision is such a massive advantage. If it wanted to I’m pretty sure the gas and maintenance cost of a B-52 hauling tons of dumb bombs is cheaper than the thousands of drones you’d need to equal it.
NINJA, Switch-blade? I dont think NATO really uses kamikaze drone swarm attacks
The Sneed-137. The U.S. alone has 4 loitering munitions that one could assume work better than Iranian shit. Despite what the Russians want to pretend it's not a wunderwaffen to change the war.