I'd say if the drone works well, despite the cheap components and hacked together nature, all the better for it. Drones are expected to be expendable.
According to wiki, these are the specs;
General characteristics
Capacity: 6 kg (13 lb) payload
Max takeoff weight: 15 kg (33 lb)
Launch method: a folding catapult platform
Landing method: parachute recovery
Max. wind speed at launch: 10 m/s
Operational temperature range: −30 to +40 °C
Avionics
Imaging: Canon EOS 750D digital SLR camera[40][41]
Powerplant: 1 × Saito FA-62B single cylinder four stroke gasoline piston engine, 0.75 kW (1 hp)
Performance
Maximum speed: 150 km/h (93 mph, 81 kn)
Combat range: 140 km (87 mi, 76 nmi)
Ferry range: 600 km (370 mi, 320 nmi)
Endurance: 16 hours
Service ceiling: 5,000 m (16,000 ft)
if the UAV is able to have such specs despite using a plastic bottle for fuel tank, then i think its doing something right.
Well that’s the point, does it? Without knowing the failure rate and operational effectiveness it’s impossible to say. Maybe 50% of missions fail due to fuel line problems and the camera doesn’t work on cold days.
Meanwhile Ukrainian enrolled 20yo drone racers to monitor city outskirts and locate hidden russian position in the woods. Probably 500-2000 (max) devices. That said range is minimal.
I agree. Pragmatism is what you need in war (and also was what made the USSR produce way more tanks than nazi Germany in world war two. You really don’t need paint on a tank that’s expected to last less than a few months).
However, I would be worried about the dependencies taken on.
Knowing this, the west will make the export of plastic bottles (and DSLR cameras) to Russia illegal. If they don’t have domestic industry to fall back on, they have a problem. If they _do_ have such industry, why don’t they use it? I doubt it’s already running at full speed. Automation can easily crank out this kind of stuff by the thousands each month.
Edit: I guess Canon also could be coerced into releasing firmware that, if that control hasn’t been turned in a few hours/days of operation, and, assuming this camera has it, GPS tells it’s airborne near Russia, runs some code that puts the camera on fire or just randomly disables the video output stream.
Yeah, the same goes with the plastic bottle petrol tank. Drones are made to be expendable. A cheap DSLR and other off-the-shelf components will cut costs drastically, and allow for higher production numbers.
I can imagine it would be easier to send a "tourist" somewhere and buy up the entire local supply of available cameras and bring it home in a few suitcases, than it would to order custom-made modules possibly covered by sanctions.
In the end, I expect the producer of the drone would be the only one who can shed light on the situation.
You can also import an off-the-shelf DSLR via Kazakhstan or as a private person property. If it would be a custom imaging sensor, its supply will be disrupted by sanctions (a long time ago perhaps), and I doubt Russia has capacity to produce sensors of such price and quality.
This is quite surprising. I'd expect this level of hacked-togetherness from a freedom fighting / terrorist org.
Surely Russia has the means to make "real" UAVs? I mean, the migs are very much real and capable planes, in many ways better than their US counterparts (especially so with how the F-35 has turned out).
Edit: I would sincerely like to know why this is getting downvoted
This is legitimately the kind of thing I'd expect to see out of ISIS, not the world's ostensibly 3rd strongest military.
[edit] It's pretty embarrassing, and I think tells a bigger story.
I strongly suspect that part of the reason the Ukraine invasion was so bungled is that the military procurement folks were getting cheap knock-off equipment and pocketing the difference. Leadership was told stories of cutting-edge tech while reality on the ground was very different. I suspect the whole army looks either like this - mixed in with whatever was left over after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I do agree that the PJSC United Aircraft Corporation [2] (a merger of Ilyushin, Irkut, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev and Yakovlev design bureaus) has some decent, modern designs but I'd argue a lot of that is carry-over from the cold war too. Their F-35 competitor (Su-35S/Su-27M) are improved variants of the Su-27 which debuted in 1977. [1]
> I mean, the migs are very much real and capable planes, in many ways better than their US counterparts (especially so with how the F-35 has turned out).
The last truly new Russian jets ( MiG or Sukhoi, doesn't matter) to enter mass production are the Su-27 and MiG-29 from the 1980s. Everything since has been new versions of those designs, or failures ( Su-57). They aren't bad planes, and might have some specific advantages (e.g. IIRC a MiG-29 is a better interceptor than an F-16), but they're old. They're certainly cheaper, easier to maintain and with good training and systems can do plenty of damage in good circumstances and with some luck, but saying they're "in many ways better than their US counterparts" is a stretch.
> IIRC a MiG-29 is a better interceptor than an F-16
Not really, it might be more manoeuvrable than the F-16 (questionable in itself) but as an effective weapon system the F16 wins in every way.
This isn't me been nationalist, I'm British and we don't operate the F-16 - its simply that the F-16 in service now isn't the F-16 from the 70's where the Mig-29's in service now largely are and not even well maintained 70's.
The Block 50/52 F-16's are essentially a significant technological leap over any Mig-29 in service.
I mean the Russian Airfoce is using hiking GPS to navigate their fighters - I'd almost feel sad for them if they weren't butchering innocent civilians with their obsolete crap.
It's a tricky one, lots of people (obviously not saying yourself) equate effectiveness of a fighter/interceptor with manoeuvrability alone but that is only a tiny part of what makes a modern fighter effective and a relatively negligible one at that.
Missiles, Radar, Datalinks and Avionics are what matters on the F16 with stealth added on the F22/F35.
If the F16 can see the Mig29 first (either via it's on-board radar or a datalink to a loitering AWACS) and has weapons that can reach further then the Mig29 is at a catastrophic disadvantage before the fight is even joined properly.
The reports I've seen where F-16's have gone against Mig-29's all seem to reach the same conclusion, Mig-29 is more manoeuvrable below 200kn where F-16 is more at +200kn.
Thing is actual gun range dogfights are rare outside of exercises and if you are doing 200kn in one then you are at a severe disadvantage against an opponent who isn't since preservation of energy is the key criteria in a gun fight.
All that said though if an F-16 finds itself in that kind of a fight with a Mig-29 outside of an exercise then something has gone very wrong.
One of the predictable problems of military dictatorships is money directed to military readiness flows through too many fraudulent hands. Better salaries might have helped.
I think it's a bit more sophisticated looking. I'm wondering if it's from. This is the finest I could find on a quick aliexpress turret camera search and looks quite different.
You can spend anywhere from a few hundred to 10's of thousands, but a 1080p is readily available for a few hundred bucks, IR is a lot harder to come by affordably for high resolution.
When the engineers have choice between going to gulag or disappearing completely or delivering such elegant duct tape, spit and glue based solution… No general will ask for shaker or temperature chamber test results. These things must just fly couple times. I bet, that same machine made in Germany would be at least 20x more expensive.
I've heard that speed cameras in some European countries just have a DSLR in them, and whoever maintains them would have to go around collecting the memory cards once in a while. IMO the camera is fine, the bottle is a less elegant hack. On the flip side, how much does an F-35 cost again?
They're probably using the HDMI/analog video output of the camera, like some streamers do, and broadcasting that video, maybe using analog transmission on the clear. Or they could put in a Raspberry Pi-esque computer in there and have a WiFi antenna.
There are aftermarket reversing cameras that are wireless that I imagine could be repurposed for the transmission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fen3nwtllEU , although the quality would be lower that using a Canon DSLR doesn't make sense.
Yes, it can. I think the system is not nearly as sophisticated as whatever NATO uses for coordination of the military, but I assume it sort-of works, and judging by the cost of these you can allow yourself to lose a few of them.
Rostec Presents Ultra-High Strength Laptop For Extreme Conditions
The Ruselectronics holding company, a member of the Rostec State Corporation, demonstrated a production sample of the Russian-made protected laptop for use in extreme conditions at the Innoprom-2018 international industrial fair. The hardware core of the PC is based on the Russian-made Elbrus 1C+ microchip.
It probably has a cheap camera with transmitter so that operator can se where the drone is flying and a dslr to capture high quality photos for further intelligence gathering.
Some of the higher-end cameras have ethernet ports, Wifi and Bluetooth. Not sure what the remote capabilities are, but remote-controlled shutters should be fairly easy.
Yeah. But it requires an onboard computer with USB and WIFI which is not shown, and actually is kind of interesting. How does the computer link back to the operator? Is there bandwidth enough to send hires photos from the camera back?
This sub-thread was about speed cameras. I'd assume law enforcement agencies have some network they can hook the cameras up to.
As for the drone in the video, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Raspberry Pi with a 4G modem, or some other remote networking option connected to it, somewhere inside it (or something of a similar hacky nature).
According to wiki, these are the specs;
General characteristics
Avionics Performance if the UAV is able to have such specs despite using a plastic bottle for fuel tank, then i think its doing something right.