I’ve previously covered suicide drones and drones dropping RPGs. Now Ukraine is evidently cutting out the middleman and passing the savings on to Ivan by just strapping RPGs to light drones and guiding them in.
Here’s a screen-grab of this masterpiece of redneck engineering:
The is a great application of one of Murphy’s Military Laws: “If it’s stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid.” For the Russians, it must be quite embarrassing to get yeeted into the afterlife by Doogie Howser’s science fair project.
I’m somewhat surprised that drones that small can carry the RPG rounds effectively, but presumably they’re replacing camera gear or something close to the same weight.
An RPG-7 costs about $2,500 each, while a BMP-3 costs about $800,000 each. Even if you double the price for the quadcopter ($2,500 is a bit pricey, but not out-of-line for some pro rigs), you still get a hugely useful loitering munition for less than 1/100th the cost of the target you’re taking out…
Tags: BMP-3, drone, loitering munition, Military, RPG, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Suchomimus, Ukraine, video
What the heck is the payload capacity of those tiny little drones? They STILL need a camera (for terminal guidance if nothing else), but those RPG rounds, even without the propellant, have gotta weigh a whole lot more than those the capacity of those quads.
No discussion of what they did with the contact fuses, either.
I kinda wonder if it’s just more Ukrainian propaganda meant to discourage Russian morale.
“… love from Odesa” 😀
This is more along the lines of the explosive devices small UAVs can carry.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/03/23/shuttlecocks-grenades-dropped-drones/
We’re living in one of those “Revolution in Military Affairs” moments, right now.
I’ve been saying something like this was on the way, and here it is, being played out in real time. I did expect that it would likely be one of the actual small producing nations like Singapore or Taiwan that builds these things, but… What the hell. I’ll take Ukraine as a vindication.
The interesting thing is how this has all played out pretty much as an organic, bottom-up affair. If you go back and look at the whole Aerorozvidka saga, they were a bunch of enthusiasts who were operating on their own, got semi-coopted by the military authorities, who then decided to shut them down as unnecessary… And, then the Russians invaded. Total vindication for the guys from Aerorozvidka.
This kind of crap is one reason you have to be careful not to put pressure on underdogs like Ukraine. You are basically force-drafting evolution, which then leads to revolution in “how you fight”, which rarely results with things to your benefit. This is precisely the mistake that the various European monarchies made when dealing with the French during the late Revolution; by attacking, they forced innovation, which resulted in the French transformation from what they conceived of as a non-threat (because unprofessional army run by commoners, not aristos…) into something entirely unstoppable by those same traditional aristocrat-run military systems.
Smartest thing for Putin and the Russians to have done with Ukraine? Strategy of nibbles, little bits at a time. Nothing too objectionable, nothing that would get everyone’s attention in the West, and which the Ukrainians themselves would eventually resign themselves to. By doing what they did? They’ve essentially chosen the form of their destructor; Ukraine is going to wind up with a stronger national identity, and they’re going to be a far more dynamic and adaptable society, going forward. No telling what having that on their border is going to do to the Russian psyche and strategic situation; I don’t think they’re going to ever be able to go back to having all those buffer nations to their west, ever again. So, they’d better get used to either making friends with their western neighbors, or resigning themselves to a long period of having them grinding their heels into the Russian self-image, demanding respect as equals.
Next few years are going to be very interesting ones on the Eurasian steppe.
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It’s a good thing the Russkies can’t figure out how to strap grenades to their drones.
Bottom line is, this is the war in which the tank became obsolete. A Gopnik Orc in Ukraine is safer on foot than he is in a tank.
-jcr
If you think those drones are actually carrying around RPG loads I have a bridge to sell you.
This video is about as sus as sus comes.
Maybe a bit less willful credulity eh?
Commies on one side and Fascists on the SAME SIDE. Ukraine and Russia should just Nuke each other.
I’m going to raise the bull**it flag on this one. An RPG7 has a shaped charge warhead that has to reach a certain velocity in order to properly form an explosive jet projectile upon impact. That speed is in the hundreds of feet per second. The warhead may explode on impact, but the likelihood of it forming the explosive jet needed to penetrate armor is slim.
Second part is the rounds weigh about 5-8 lbs. a European Swallow as illustrated couldn’t lift that – maybe an African Swallow…
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/06/07/how-rpg-works.html
The redneck engineering to strap a rocket on looks hilarious, but i THINK this is bunk – i remember as a kid my dad explained M203 grenade has to spin certain # of times to “go live” & i think RPG rocket has to fire & be like 10m away before going live. Even if they (added servos & could still fly) managed to fire rockets, your talking more like 4th of july bottle rockets going haywire than “redneck tank killing drones”.
I remember seeing this (fictional, at the time) video a few years ago and thinking that variations of the concept were both terrifying and inevitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
RPG 7 Rockets weigh about 2KG. An Arris M900 drone or similar has a lifting capacity of 3KG. Ungainly for sure, but certainly possible.
This isn’t a one-off video or tactic – it’s old news.
It’s wacky seeing peeople “call BS” on a tradtional drone tactic that’s been documented to exhaustion.
In which Greg proves he knows nothing about shaped charges, or warheads in general…
“I’m going to raise the bull**it flag on this one. An RPG7 has a shaped charge warhead that has to reach a certain velocity in order to properly form an explosive jet projectile upon impact. That speed is in the hundreds of feet per second. The warhead may explode on impact, but the likelihood of it forming the explosive jet needed to penetrate armor is slim.”
A shaped charge does not need velocity to do its work. If anything, you’d get rather better performance from one that was totally stationary, because that means the jet can’t be disrupted by movement of either target or warhead.
People who don’t understand explosives or how they work should refrain from comment on these matters, lest they demonstrate actually idiocy. Shaped charges don’t burn through things; they don’t rely on the speed of their delivery, and they don’t give a flying f*ck about much of anything besides the liner, the rate of detonation of the explosives, and a few other variables.
What is going on with the shaped charge warhead is this: The fuse at the tip of the device is detonating on contact, which then goes back to the base of the charge to initiate it. The blast wave then propagates through the explosive material from the “top dead center” of the rear of the charge. This propagation takes the form of a wave; on one side, you still have the solid explosive. On the other, you have a rapidly-formed gas cloud that carries a lot of energy from the transformation. When the wave encounters the liner, the blast waves are separated as they move through the explosive material surrounding it. The waves are still expanding, however, so they take the liner material and compress it into a narrow spike that is then driven through the target. The liner is basically turned inside-out, compressed, and then driven through the target material like some sort of giant nail. The pressures involved are so great that they induce plastic flows even in rolled homogenous plate armor, such that the layman examining the target afterwards will think that it was somehow molten. While there is a good deal of heat generated, it ain’t melting its way through the target; that’s all mechanical deformation, which generates a good deal of the heat.
And, an RPG round’s warhead is eminently suitable for drone delivery. They’re designed to be thrown for hundreds of meters by a relatively tiny initiator charge and then a relatively small rocket motor, after all. About all you really need to do is change the fusing slightly, so as to account for the naturally slower speed of delivery. That might not be all that big a deal, but if you’re going to optimize it…? Yeah. Might be best to do it, if you need to. The Soviet RPG round is, BTW, one that notoriously does not have a spin-induced safety mechanism in the fusing. Like a lot of their crap… It’s one reason the Ukrainians have been deploying the Soviet 30mm grenades as their warhead of choice for these drones: No spin-safety built in. Also, why I’ve been surprised to see apparently unmodified US 40mm grenades used… They’ve got spin-safety fuses.
The warhead weighs 4.5 lbs.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/06/07/how-rpg-works.html
Kirk,
When the RPG round detonates, wouldn’t the spike function just like a rocket? If stationary, wouldn’t the spike’s effect be largely dissipated in moving the round? And with only the velocity from gravity, wouldn’t the round be traveling much slower than if fired from a launcher?
Tried fixing a torch (smaller than the shell) to a Phantom 4 (bigger than the the drone shown) and while it flew it was very unstable. I doubt this is real.
@Davod,
Your link talks about shaped charges “burning through” armor. If they’ve got that bad of an idea about the way such things work, then it’s probable that the rest of the information they’re spouting off is just as inaccurate. I repeat and reiterate: SHAPED CHARGES DO NOT “BURN” THROUGH ARMOR. If you take the energetic component of the explosives involved, set it on the armor in question, then ignite it so that it merely combusts, as opposed to detonating? It will merely scorch the paint. Been there, done the experiment as a demonstration in training idiots who insisted to me that shaped charges are like blowtorches. THEY ARE NOT. See my previous explanation for clue.
@JackOkie,
The shaped charge effect generates itself so rapidly that for all intents and purposes, the relative motion of the target and the warhead are essentially immaterial to what happens. They’re also not dropping these warheads on the tanks from the top; these are suicide drones that they’re flying into the sides of them. My guess is that that picture is showing the RPG warhead after the propellant/rocket stack is left off (they usually come separately and get assembled by the gunner before he goes into combat with them, carrying them in a special backpack) and before the fuse is installed. I’m gonna guess that they’re using a different sort of fuse or modifying the standard one because of the different speeds of the warhead.
Gravity and all the rest have little influence on the shaped charge; the things that will cause them to deform and not penetrate need to happen on such a tiny time scale that what you’re talking about won’t actually affect much of anything with regards to armor penetration. You want to disrupt the jet, you need a bunch of counter-energy on the micro-second scale, which is why that reactive armor works: What it’s doing is exploding and causing the jet to dissipate or deform, protecting the armor beneath it. That really only works on a true shaped charge warhead or munition; you use the explosively-formed penetrator type? LOL… Don’t matter much what you do, that slug of high-velocity material is still going to punch through. This is why the majority of the modern top-attack munitions use Misznay-Schardin Effect (EFP) warheads versus the older school Munroe/Mohaupt Effect warheads we are most used to seeing.
Trust me on this one: I know whereof I speak, having spent the vast majority of my adult life working with and studying this crap. If you want the equations and the evidence, I am going to have to tell you to do some self-directed research, because I don’t feel like putting that information out there with my name on the blame line. It is out there, though… You just have to look, read, and do some work.
I’ve never been a fan of the typical military training approach that consists of “voodoo demolitions training”, because if you don’t actually understand the underlying technology, you’re going to play merry hell when it comes time to use it effectively, especially if you have to adapt and overcome sub-optimal unplanned-for situations. Everyone can do the easy stuff; it takes someone with real knowledge and understanding to make things work when the fit hits the shan…
Not Kirk, but the answer is that of course the rest of the HEAT round functions as a rocket. F still equals ma. It does that no matter how fast it’s traveling before impact. The target’s armor more or less stops the round at the beginning of detonation anyway; that’s what trips the fuse to start the boom. The faster the rest of the shell goes away from the target the faster the penetrator goes into the target.
Why do you think rockets have those special launchpads? Because that’s a lot force (and heat) they have to absorb/shunt to avoid digging a big hole in the ground every time they fire one off.
@Boobah,
You said “The faster the rest of the shell goes away from the target the faster the penetrator goes into the target.”
I don’t know who your instructor was that told you this, but… They were wrong. Shaped charge warheads DO NOT work like this. There is no “rocket”; the term “jet” is used to refer to the spike the shaped charge forms. The effect is entirely independent of anything going on in regards to that aspect of Newtonian physics. While there is going to be some energy going into throwing bits and pieces of the warhead back from the detonation, that energy is basically wasted and doing zip, nada, nothing to aid or affect the penetration.
What is going on here is a pure effect of the explosive charge detonating.
I refer you to this handy Army Research Laboratories presentation:
http://www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2007/ARL-SR-150.pdf
It is still available on the WayBack Machine, and it shows very, very clearly how a shaped charge functions. THERE IS NO ROCKET EFFECT INVOLVED. PERIOD.
Swear to God, this just sets me the f*ck off, every time. I must have spent two-thirds of every gods-bedamned improvised explosives class I had to teach debunking this crap. This is NOT how shaped charges work.
Kirk,
Thank you for taking the time to compose that detailed explanation. You also make an excellent point about beware the underdog. Ukraine is not the same country it was in 2014, and my impression is that whatever Zelensky’s affiliations might have been in 2014, he has risen to the challenge magnificently, as have the Ukrainian people. Perhaps there is some strategic reason for the US and Germany’s pusillanimity in providing weapons to Ukraine, but I doubt it’s the threat of WMD; Poland and the other CEE countries have no doubt made it quite clear to Putin’s circle what the consequences would be. Post-war, Ukraine seems poised to become an important part of NATO and the EU, common sense and spine-stiffening among the gifts they bring.
Look at the diameter of the brushless motors rather than the size of the airframe. A larger diameter motor means more available torque for a given wattage. You just need propeller clearance. It takes about 300 watts per pound to hover. Figure 30-40% extra for forward velocity. If the weapon is 20 pounds and say 5 pounds for motors and airframe and 10 pounds for batteries… 35 pounds times 300 is 10,500 watts sum for the four rotors. 2600 watts per motor. So the motors you can get from Alibaba normally used in a drill press or lathe would work. Run the system at 56 V and it will need to handle 160 Amps wide open. You will need 80 amp-hr of battery for a 30 minute flight. It’s all doable.
Russia has a unique ability to screw things up. They’ve got this reputation for being really cunning and crafty at intelligence/espionage, but the fact is, when you go looking at it? Oh. My. Gawd.
Nicholas II had his intelligence operatives stirring up trouble in the Balkans for the Austro-Hungarians. Boom. WWI, the Revolution, and he’s dead in a basement with his family.
Stalin played reindeer games with Hitler, ignored Sorge, and wound up with Barbarossa and who really knows how many million dead… The number of intelligence failures in WWII are amazing, for these guys who’re supposed to be so good at it.
Then, the Cold War. Yikes. How many times did the Soviets get burnt by blow-back? Hmmm? How many failures were there?
And, the latest folly? LOL… Let me count the ways… “Ukraine is weak; Ukraine will surrender at the first attack; nobody will come to their aid; we’ll be welcomed with flowers; everybody wants to be a Russian; their military is a pushover; the Germans will be our willing proxies; we can’t lose…”
Instead of doubling-down and going in for more game-playing, they really ought to just recognize how counterproductive it all is, fire the intel types, and let the whole thing go.
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