Skip to main content

$5,000 killer drone & Russia buying North Korean missiles

This takes the cake, a $5,000 drone with a 5 kg carrying capacity made out of cardboard, invisible to radars is causing Russia real headaches, and military planners everywhere a rethink of their defence procedures.  These slow-moving cardboard Australian reconnaissance aircraft drones have been repurposed to become kamikaze attack platforms that can (and have probably) destroyed aircraft, radars and maybe even fuel depots.  

The key here is the cost.  If a Su27 aircraft can be disabled or destroyed (as seems to have been the case two weeks ago), for a cost of $5,000 (where the aircraft are worth $30 million each) the Russian Air Force has a real problem.  Moreover, these drones are easy to assemble, totally stealthy and have a range of nearly 70 miles.  The destroyed aircraft were nearly 400 miles from the front.  

Russia has been forced to position its aircraft even further away from the Ukraine front.

The way forward in the current war is hard to estimate.  There are many issues at hand.  Success for Ukraine is hard to quantify since this is not the first time Russian troops invaded the country (also in 2014).  Removing Putin is unlikely to change anything, considering that the Russian's position is one of protecting the homeland and re-establishing the old Soviet borders. 

The Ukrainians have learned valuable lessons over the past two years.  They have also been smart with their resources and deployed inventive solutions for dealing with the Russian army. 

The rumours are that the Russians have completed negotiations with North Korea and Iran to purchase missiles.  They are generally not very good, with a target error range of 200/500 meters, but the Russians can probably improve this performance.  The question is what did Russia offer in exchange, my educated guess would be satellite launch windows for both nations.  

The game is getting interesting, and the advantages won by Korea and Iran are potentially game changers.


BTW, and I am not a strategist.  I see no obvious win for the Ukrainian forces, the only thing I worry about is once the Russians win, what happens next, are they off to Poland next?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more