Drone tech August

A win for the commies. Lasers v drones. The drone black market. Russia's V2U AI-powered drone. Anti-EW drones. Comparing drone detectors.

Yesterday we explored the development of drone tactics. Let’s now move onto analysis of latest new technologies from Ukrainian drone expert, Serhiy Bezkrestnov.

Unfortunately, this interesting source of information has been suffering from a lack of data. On August 9, Bezkrestnov complained about how the thirst for profit meant that new Russian tech wasn’t falling into his hands for research purposes:

I’ve already complained to everyone I could. I raised the issue at all levels, but everything remains the same.

Soldiers are selling captured equipment to private individuals, depriving all institutions and agencies of the ability to study them.

For a long time now, we haven’t been able to find ways to protect our cities from some of the strike UAVs, because the samples never reach us. One was sold for 5 thousand dollars, another for 10.

Law enforcement can’t help because there’s no criminal offense formally, and the military structures don’t have cash to buy back the captured equipment.

I just feel like giving up :-(

They’re tearing apart Sumy, people are dying — but some bastard has a little drone hanging on his wall.

I wonder who is buying all these advanced Russian drones? Are they really simply hanging on walls?

No wonder the Ukrainian press is warning/threatening the west that the drone technologies of this war are falling into the hands of transnational criminal and terrorist groups.

Anyway, the Ukrainians have their reasons for selling off drones. One of the comments on Bekzrestnov’s post read:

But fear not, there’s still plenty to read about today:

— The new mine-dropping feature on Shahed/Geran drones

— Detailed analysis of Russia’s new V2U recon drone, known for its AI capabilities. It can supposedly ‘independently detect ground targets, identify them, and execute attacks.’ Bezkrestnov also wonders whether it is able to autonomously interact with allied drones in a swarm formation, the holy grail for drone technologies. It also lands via parachute.

‘I consider this AI-powered UAV series the most innovative and dangerous development yet.’

Satellite-free navigation makes the UAV immune to electronic warfare jamming of GPS/GLONASS signals.

— Drones specialized in the struggle against electronic warfare. The Veles-10, a new Russian strike-drone equipped to identify the radio emissions from anti-drone electronic warfare stations and destroy them.

— Russia’s new Bulat MX3 drone detector. According to Bezkrestnov, the Ukrainian army ‘has no analogues’, given the accuracy with which the Bulat can detect and distinguish between various types of drones. The Ukrainian drone expert compares the Bulat to Ukraine’s Aspirin 2.0, which often suffers from false alarms, something the Bulat does not do.

— Drones vs lasers. Russia has deployed a Chinese laser system to down a Ukrainian long-distance drone:

LASS is known to have a power of 10–20 kW and requires 10 seconds of operation to destroy a target. Its range is 1.5 km for destruction and 3 km for blinding.

An interesting thread in today’s analysis is the strength of the military industrial complex of what our Ukrainian analysts call ‘the axis of evil’, and others call ‘the emerging multipolar world’.

This comes through in Bezkrestnov’s complaints that the Aspirin 2.0 drone detector is only available through the private fund of ex-president Petro Poroshenko. Or that it is impossible to analyze Russian drone technologies and come up with antidotes/imitations because Ukrainian soldiers keep on selling them off. And finally, on the topic of the Chinese laser system, the Ukrainian nazi militarist telegram ‘white sun’ complains about how the west’s neoliberalism has doomed it in the face of the interventionist east:

If you sit on the riverbank for too long, waiting for some “holy little market” to fix itself and solve our problems, you can see how the interventionist, Keynesian commie with “rationed goods” surpasses you in efficiency of production and technology.

Indeed, just about all of today’s Russian drones are assembled with Chinese technology. The Ukrainians are desperate to get their hands on them - simply for imitation purposes.