in the worst case (some types of) solid fuel can be milled and mixed with RDX, then used in making of thermobaric grenades of which Ukrainian army uses plenty

It’s significantly harder on fax

russian telegram channels claimed shootdown of an “ukrainian drone” earlier the same day, so il-76 could be genuine friendly fire. there’s intercepted radio chatter supporting this https://nitter.oksocial.net/olga_pp98/status/1750089351801815354#m

one does not exclude the other

maybe he was banned from academia in soviet times for being a religious nutjob, and then he shown that “political discrimination get into any position free” card and they let him in no questions asked

If it was an American made Patriot PAC-2, then that shows US support is having yet more material impacts on Russia. If it was an S300 missile spotted by Patriot radars (which we saw something similar recently), its showing Ukraine’s ability to enhance existing Soviet era weapons against Russia augmented by Western systems.

this is what already happened, once in north when two EW helis and two jets were shot, and once in south when A50 went down. some rumor-grade osint suggests that at least in the second case S300 radar spotted A50 first, relayed position to patriot radar, which illuminated it very briefly, just long enough to get a lock but not long enough for russians to react, and then sent missiles after it

one is significantly easier to pull off than the other, that’s my point

but you have to get there first. rocket with cluster warhead can fly for 100s of kilometers

cluster munitions are plentiful and just a few would damage a farm heavily

i had no idea, that’s even worse

I think the point is it’s much easier to harden NPP against some types of strikes than, say, PV farm

and there’s all that ban on strikes on NPPs which seems to be respected even now

Still no F35, they really fucked up with that S400 purcharse

you mean it should be settled out in a referendum?

i’ll believe that when it’s on paper

lasers with power required would be also pretty heavy, and only as fast as operator, so about the same as AA guns

you need something like square array sized at about 2 wavelengths wide, this can easily get into 50x50cm range at lower frequencies

I want to know why anti-drone systems are not simply using diode lasers and simple trackers to blind/fry the optics

because you have to find drone first, acquire its location and quite precisely at that, and at this point short burst of 12.7mm is more reliable. jammers don’t need any directivity and work over any number of drones in area covered

do you have any idea how big antenna array has to be for it to have any angular resolution

but it’s not continuous, it’s a few commonly used sections that are jammed. This way you get more range out of the same power, until somebody uses freqs in the gaps and you can’t adjust. And then some are broken, some are off, some don’t work, and we know that jamming doesn’t always work because there was one video of bomber drone destroying jammer. If it was home-on-jam the signal would drown in noise

that’s some load-bearing “after”