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just mouse over the image or open it in a new tab and look at its nameWho is saying it's Kharkiv? Why would Ukraine refurbish T-62s?
It's odd to me that there are no similar calls from the Canadian media. Australia could sit this one out, being a hemisphere away, but Canada is a founding NATO member and should be doing more, IMO.Australia must step up its effort to help end war in Ukraine
The Albanese government’s response to Ukraine’s pleas for help has been too tepid and too slow. A more generous and urgent response is needed.www.smh.com.au
It's odd to me that there are no similar calls from the Canadian media. Australia could sit this one out, being a hemisphere away, but Canada is a founding NATO member and should be doing more, IMO.
You don't suppose there's a bit of calculated "fitness cleansing" going on here; sending the fat, dumb, fifty, and fragile into the meat grinder with minimal investment in kit and training in order to lavish ever dwindling resources on the more promising specimens, do you? Given the barbarity of this regime, I wouldn't Putin it past them.
Great book. When foreign colleagues asked me in the early 1990s to recommend some reading about USSR, I advised starting with two books: Gulag Archipelago and... Orwell's 1984. The first - what has happened in real life. The second - what could happen if the Soviet model wins.Currently reading The Gulag Archipelago (long overdue and triggered by this war) and amaze me how little somethings seem to change.
Also, very powerful the paragraf about victories and defeats:
"It was a simple truth, but it also had to be suffered: in wars, not victories are blessed, but defeats! Governments need victories, peoples need defeats! After the triumphs, more triumphs are wanted, after a defeat, freedom is wanted, and it is almost always achieved."
Hope Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was right and freedom could be achieved in Rusia.
The problem with command guidance only is that the missile must be able to see the command signal, which typically means the receiver antennas on the missile point aft. This drives flatter missile trajectories for surface-to-surface operations because the last third of a ballistic profile means the command signal antennas can't see the command signal transmitter antenna any more.
That flatter trajectory results in a faster velocity over the ground in the final third of the engagement, which means the command signal must tell the missile exactly when to dive onto the target. The longer the distance from the launch site, the more time it takes for those command signals to reach the missile, which inherently reduces accuracy, even for a static target, because the message to tip into a dive may come too late (or even too early) for the missile to accurately hit the target.
Finally, the curvature of the earth means that the missile can't even see the command signal during the terminal phase. This further degrades accuracy as the missile simply becomes an unguided rocket during that part of the flight.
@WARSPITER is also bang on the money regarding the warhead. A SAM warhead typically generates a lot of shrapnel to increase the probability of kill against an aircraft. Shrapnel is great for taking out squishy human beings but it's less good at more solid targets. In the surface-to-surface mode, I suspect the primary effect mechanism of the S-300 (and similar) SAMs is the size and weight of the missile body itself.
You are missing my point. I am saying that the article is dated with comments such as:Not for for this tank i think. . It has no equel tankwise on this battlefield and can only loose. In that, nothing changed.
Below I am going to draw from my own personal exposure to radar and missile system design and heavily from two documents, https://u.teknik.io/qTeGr.pdf and Almaz S-300P/PT/PS/PMU/PMU1/PMU2 / Almaz-Antey S-400 Triumf / SA-10/20/21 Grumble / Gargoyle
Have you ever looked at the S300 trajectory? In publicly released videos they show a VERY up-and-over, even when dealing with low level targets such as helos. Have you ever looked at the missile receive and transmit antennas for the links? I can find nothing that defines the beamwidth, and the beamwidth would drive the off-angle or off-boresight capability. Since the videos (and graphs in the pdf I linked) show an up-and-over I would assume the antennas are able to look off-boresight quite well. If the system is advertised to hit a low level helo at greater than 20 km (and it is), then it can probably achieve similar accuracy against a non-moving target 25 meters lower in altitude.
As I stated in my comment, accuracy of a CG system is degraded by distance, yes. However, it is typically angular track accuracy that becomes the larger issue at distance. The further the target is away from the radar the worse the target positional accuracy of the radar, i.e., as range increases, the track cell gets larger and the uncertainty of the center of the target becomes greater. If, for example, the radar can tell the positional accuracy within say 0.1 degrees, that 0.1 degrees uncertainty is approximately 26 meters at 15 km, and and has grown to approximately 78 meters at 45 km. I am not claiming the S300 has 0.1 degree track accuracy, I am just using that value as an example. Angular positional accuracy degrades as distance from the radar increases.
If you have a surveyed point to the center of the unmoving, unchanging, target, this radar track positional degradation with distance becomes a non-issue. The radar does not track / calculate the position of the center of the target (suffering its track inaccuracies), it just guides to the surveyed center of the target.
With regards to propagation time of the commands and how it impacts guidance accuracy, distance from the launch site to the target is probably not a player with the advertised ranges of the S300 family, especially the early versions. The max range of the early, command guided only, S300 (5V55K) is often quoted as ~45 km. The travel time for the commands from the radar to the missile at 45 km are going to be roughly 150 microseconds. The commands arrive at the missile, at max range, in about 0.00015 seconds. The maximum speed of this missile family is often quoted as Mach 5+, or a tad over 6000 kmh / 1.667 kms (the pdf linked above says the missile peaks out at 1.9 kms, but I am going to use 1.667 kms for this example, reasons below). So the missile moves, at maximum speed, at something like 1.7 km per second, pretty darned fast, but we are talking about a propagation time of 0.00015 seconds. If the missile is still traveling at maximum speed (assuming max speed of Mach 5), and at maximum range (~45 km), from the time the command leaves the radar until it gets to the missile 45 km away, the missile has moved forward approximately 0.25 meters.
Light (in this case, RF) travels fast, I don't think a missile movement of 0.25 meters during propagation time is significant.
However, at distance the missile is not really flying that fast. If you look here ( https://u.teknik.io/qTeGr.pdf ) and look at page 18, you will see the missile is actually under power for a relatively short period, the first 11 or so seconds (max acceleration ~19G), and is coasting from then on. At the end of initial boost it peaks out at about 1.9 kms, and then it slows down the further it goes. So while it maxes out at slightly over Mach 5, the majority of the flight is actually under that speed, but even at ~45 km appears to be ~750 ms, or well over Mach 2 at sea level.
Of greater importance is the radar frame rate, how often the radar revisits the target track and how often it sends commands to the missile. For many systems these values do not change with range, i.e. it corrects the missile guidance the same number of times per second if the target is at 10 km or at 45 km. Some systems do increase the frame rate (shorter intervals between commands) for closer range targets. This revisit rate should be selected (in system design) to be something less than the time constant of the missile autopilot, which is selected partially based on the aerodynamic responses of the missile air frame and the anticipated maximum maneuvering rate of the target set.
If the commands are sent to the missile 20 times per second (every 50 msec) then the Mach 5 missile will move forward about 83 meters between receiving sets of commands. However the commands will have been sent with the projected target point of impact at the time the commands were sent, i.e. based on where the target will be in the future, not where it is now. Indeed, to avoid a tail chase scenario, and to maximize range based on available energy (particularly true with a coasting missile), all commands should be based on the calculated target position at time of impact. You guide to where you (the radar) thinks the target will be when the missile gets there, not to where the target is right now.
Which is why I said "In an up and over it (the radar) might be able to see the missile until the missile is within a few thousand feet of the target, and the last command would arrive with the missile pointed right at the unmoving ground target." Calculating the horizon, without mountains, over flat terrain, at 45 km the missile will lose link about 150 meters above the level of the target. Any additional features, mountains, buildings, etc, will increase that number.
But if you put the 5N63 / 30N6 radar (the radar that tracks the target and provides the missile links) up on the 40V6M mast you push the radar horizon out significantly.
Also remember, the missile will have been being guided to the continuously calculated position the target will be at when the missile gets there, not turned in at the last second. The last command that gets there will have been directing the missile to an unmoving position on the surface. It will probably hit pretty close even if it is ballistic for a few cycles.
Yeah, sure, we are not talking the kind of accuracy that selects which window of the building to go into, but hitting a specific building, or intersection, or power sub station, etc, should not be a big problem.
I do not dispute the issue with the warhead. And, since this specific missile is only under boost for the first part of flight, you probably do not even have a great deal of fuel left on board to enhance the results. But even given a small warhead, a 1000 lb missile impacting at supersonic speeds probably does some damage.
T!
According to one report I saw, they are bringing out some 57mm AA guns which is a sure sign of desperationIt'd be funny if after all this the Ukrainians show up next year with early-block F-16s and A-10s, and the Russians find out that their SAM parks are now largely empty.
According to one report I saw, they are bringing out some 57mm AA guns which is a sure sign of desperation
Again, I go back to my previous point that, in order to understand the precision and accuracy of the S-300/S-400 series in surface-to-surface mode, we need to understand how many missiles were launched, the locations of the intended targets, and the impact point for every missile. Anything else is pure speculation.
The problem with all of the above is that one of the targets being hit is Kyiv which is at least 100km from ANY Russian S-300 or other variant system. You can talk about guiding a top-down engagement onto a helo at 20+km but there's zero, I repeat ZERO, evidence that they were capable of command-guiding a first-generation S-300 missile at 100km range...and that's what you need to hit Kyiv if you're using CG as a means of improving accuracy.
If they're using up stocks of the oldest missiles then we're back to the problem of the stated 45km range which is insufficient for many of the attacks we've seen in recent days. The range for a SAM is limited by (a) receiver sensitivity and (b) missile kinematics. Most missiles have a very limited motor burn and are then effectively coasting to the target, with each trajectory adjustment burning off speed and subsequent ability to manoeuvre. To hit Kyiv with older missiles means they're almost certainly just firing them ballistically (which is not the same as "up and over" which may, per my previous post, have a flatter trajectory) and hoping they hit "something" in the city.
I'm not saying Russia is doing this with every launch against every target but it's clear that many of the missiles are being launched purely for terror effect rather than actively targeting specific locations, hence why we're seeing missiles impacting the middle of wide, 4-lane intersections, civilian apartment blocks and other non-military targets.
And maybe they're just now exploring what the dang thing can do beyond its published limits. Wide open "test range" with no downrange safety concerns.Comments have been made that they have "added GPS" to the S300, with no details of what this means. What if they drive the missile out with CG to mid course, and then switch over to GPS for terminal guidance? Potentially that could be accurate, but if it is a kludge maybe not.
According to one report I saw, they are bringing out some 57mm AA guns which is a sure sign of desperation
Way back in 1968-1973 Hanoi and Haiphong had batteries of radar guided automatic 57mm flak guns that were no slouches against Linebacker raids. IIRC, the radar was called Fansong and the evasive action according to the trainer was a sharp diving turn toward the strobe on the scope to minimize RCS. A sharp enough turn reportedly could break lock, as the system was designed for lumbering bombers.No radar, slow rate of fire, I'm guessing these guns (if the report is true) are for the Russian soldiers getting their asses beat on the ground, not for targeting UAF planes that still aren't flying many sorties, and which they probably cannot track and hit anyway.
Way back in 1968-1973 Hanoi and Haiphong had batteries of radar guided automatic 57mm flak guns that were no slouches against Linebacker raids. IIRC, the radar was called Fansong and the evasive action according to the trainer was a sharp diving turn toward the strobe on the scope to minimize RCS. A sharp enough turn reportedly could break lock, as the system was designed for lumbering bombers.
We jest I know, but some cannon-equipped or capable LAVs would have been welcome. Former CAF CDS General Rick Hillier, now chair of the Unite With Ukraine Strategic Advisory Council, says it best:I know right? Where are the damn Mounties?