Look at the scream of that engine
Russian Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
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According to Google Translator, top says UKRTEKHMASH, which is an Ukranian company that makes heavy machinery and weapons
Code Number 041
Maybe a manufacturing date, being 04.2017
Next to it are Net and Gross Weight in KG's and something about "containment"
Best guess, if it didn't come from a weapon, its a canister to transport Radium or any other sort of radioactive element for medical purposes. The latter doesn't mean it can't be lethal though.
People have died for stealing this stuff from abandoned hospitals.
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The Shahed 136 drone is so useful because it's cheaper and easier to make than even the most simple anti air missiles like MANPADS. As long as the enemy hasn't learned how to bring them down with electronic warfare, any missile spent on shooting done a drone can't shoot down a more valuable target. At the same time, the warhead of the Shahed 136 is also big enough that you can't just ignore it. Plus, more capable drones/missiles might be hiding among a larger number of simple drones.
It's a primitive weapon compared with what else is available, but it's a very useful tool in the toolbox
Agree, the MiG-23 is an odd choice. Mig-21 would be better as Russia probably has thousands of them somewhere. I would prefer them to be used in a suicide AA drone role, but if they're desperate it'll make a very powerful missile. 2 tons of HE + fuel + the kinetic energy is going to do a lot of damage.
I don't know about MiG-23, but most of F-14's maintenance headache comes from the variable swept wings right? Assuming it's similar with MiG-23 for these sort of "Last Hurrah" mission don't worry about maintaining the wing mechanism, just set the wings to some optimum sweep angle on the ground before take off and bolt it down so it can't move.
That said I agree, whatever is available and works. MiG-21 if available would work fine too, PLAAF also has J-7 UAVs so there's even precedent.
Maintaince shouldn't be an issue whatever platform is choosen. It only needs to take off and fly for half an hour. The main reason I thought the MiG-21 was better because of the abundance of them - a lot of the Mig-23s have probably been cannibalised for spares.
Off topic but F-14s maintaince reputation was a myth, look how long the Iranians kept theirs airworthy for. The Americans just wanted to retire them after 9/11 to stop the Iranians from maintaining their fleet. Third party suppliers were selling to the Iranians and the MIC figured the only way to stop it was to chop up their F-14 fleet.
This is bollocks. The US chopped up the F-14s and destroyed the tooling because Dick Cheney wanted to cut that program out and make it totally impossible to recover. Iran was just an excuse. Iran also has F-4 Phantom fighters and other US aircraft in larger numbers and nothing like that was done to those aircraft.
The US wanted to cut down the amount of weapons manufacturers after the ending of the Cold War and by cutting the F-14 program Dick Cheney basically removed Grumman from the map.
Well, why not just build more Kh-101's or Kalibr's...
If the purpose is to decoy air defense.. well You know, Russia can just use their old target drones, then add Luneburg lens or other RCS enhancement technique to make it look like aircraft. and they actually done so in the early phase of the war.
Target drones based on M-23 does exist. Although im not sure how many are there or how easy it is to convert into cruise missile. Still why not just build more dedicated cruise missile instead.
Soviet or Russians did build Missile based on MiG-19 which is the Kh-20 (AS-3 Kangaroo) and they actually use MiG-19 suspended from Tu-95 to emulate the missile. Still, the flying article of the missile is a dedicated airframe which does not really share anything with MiG-19's except wing sweep.
I was thinking they may modernize or upgrade old AshMs into land attack missiles, in particular, missiles like the Granit and the Moskit.
Mig-23 drones being shot down could possibly give propaganda fuel as Mig-23 is still in operational reserve and are a more modern plane, so they can claim Russian desperation.