The Russians were complaining that it is in most cases invisible to Radar and needs to be shot down by gunfire. It can also carry an explosive payload of 4-5 Kg. Apparently 3 out of 16 were shot down with machine gun fire using tracers but 13 got through to destroy several SU-30 and MIG aircraft along with several air defense and radar complexes at a Russian airbase in the Kursk Region.
Russian Military blogger on Telegram. He spoke about the attack and the challenges, Ukraine said that 13 of the 16 made it to the intended targets. There will be video or satellite imagery released at some point. I tend to believe these reports since I understand who is providing the targeting information with precise coordinates and information. You can believe what you like.
This was about the Australian drone and it's possible potential as an extremely cheap and powerful weapon. The reason it's even in the news is because they were used recently and the imagery of a downed drone and attack location was released by the Russians, not the Ukrainians.
Somehow your response has turned into a tirade against Ukraine and their claims and every other grievance you have for Ukraine.
This is about accountability. When a person constantly lies you cannot just take their claims at face value. All the things I wrote were official statements from Ukrainian government officials including the Ukrainian MoD.
As such there is currently no data corroborating the claims that the Australian drone is as good as it claims. What we do know so far is that the Geran(Shahed) and the Lancets have shown to be quite deadly for the reasons mentioned above. Although the Geran is not a loitering munition.
It is entirely possible that the Australian drone is performing as well, but as of now there is no such data. The last drone that was seen in the battlefields from the Ukrainian side was the switchblade and it was orders of magnitude more expensive than the Australian one and performed abysmal.
One thing to note here is that the Russians according to most western publications[1] have been quite successful at jamming GPS guided munition, so even if it is as successful as the Ukrainians claim it will probably not be a game changer in this conflict.
Your post is so ridiculous it's actually hilarious.
The Australian drone is literally made of cardboard.
No one is thinking that it will be a game-changer nor that it is anyway comparable to a high-end, military-spec drone from Iran, US, UK or whoever else. It's designed to be cheap, throwaway and if it is even moderately successful at avoiding detection then I am sure that's just a bonus.
There is absolutely 0 point on checking russian official channels for anything apart from maybe weather forecast. They say truth only by mistake in most topics which would matter to outside observer, or to anybody on anything even remotely political.
Russia has a very very long tradition with lies left and right, to the point where entire generations of russian citizens are trained to take those lies apart and find some truth using some obscure negation logic. Or just zone out and ignore it completely, which is convenient for dictatorship there since those folks are very easy to manipulate.
I mean in same vein that polar tribes have say 30 names for different types of snow and ice, russians have various names for various types of lies. Go figure.
They kind of are. Of course all countries use propaganda, and the US is at least as guilty as most.
But Russia has a famous history of issuing a constant stream of outright lies. It has a name, маскировка "maskirovka". It goes far past the literal meaning of "camouflage", to the point where a continuous disinformation is used to hide the notion that there might even be such a thing as truth. The idea is to make lying a reflex, in the hope of confusing an enemy into making a mistake.
(It also causes your own side to make mistakes. The idea is that the Russian people themselves are used to it, but simply have a somewhat nihilistic approach to any kind of official speech and even unofficial speech.)
As I said, every country uses deception. But the Russians really do consider it a cultural trait of its own, meriting its own name. The Wikipedia article doesn't even begin to cover it:
There was an unconfirmed report today that Ukrainian forces used drones to destroy several Russian aircraft at the Kursk airbase. I wouldn't take it seriously until we see something from an independent source, or satellite imagery.
"You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension." - Tesla
The prospect of low cost swarms of AI enabled drones terrifies me. If you've watched any drone combat footage from Ukraine you know it's just around the corner, and this is another step in that direction.
This capability is mostly open source already isn’t it? Granted the AI isn’t fancy but it’d be reasonably trivial to adapt some foamboard or cardboard designs to carry a small payload and turn them into GPS guided bombs. Probably doesn’t happen often more due to it being substantially easier to do what people inclined towards this action want another way.
Yes, a software stack to turn these drones into autonomous area denial or autonomous trench clearing tools could be readily cobbled together using mostly open source components. It would be such a tide changer that it's only a matter of time, and god help the poor souls on the front lines.
You can find cheap disposable drones for £15 on Chinese sites. Weaponizing them should be pretty easy.
The only problem is that the novelty of the approach would be such, that it would bring too much visibility to the attack. Most bad actors don't want to be detected: "he fell from the window" or "his plane crashed" leaves the door open to coincidental causes. Drones are noticeable, particularly in swarms. They would be useful only in "showy" attacks, i.e. open terrorism, a tactic that is largely out of favor after 20+ years of substantial failure.
It's not any AI that I'm scared of. It's the assembly line that produces thousands per month, and all it takes to deploy and launch them all at once, is one nondescript semi truck with a 40ft container. The saturation attacks will be real. And just as scary as AI sci-fi, even if the individual vehicles are simply waypoint controlled.
Does it terrify you more than long rage artillery and cluster bombs? All I see is a more efficient anti-personnel weapon that should be better at discerning between combatants and non-combatants. If it becomes a ‘better’ weapon than say cluster bombs, that’s a great outcome.
I’m somewhat gloomy about all of this. It’s just that war is war, it means killing people. Once it’s on, it’s on. So you need to be able to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible while minimizing non-combatant casualties before and after the conflict.
That's just emotional reaction to something very in-your-face, in same vein some folks are terrified of flying planes, despite it being consistently safest method of travel but can hop on a car and drive day and night without much of a worry.
Long range artillery is the killer in Ukraine in terms of numbers, combatants consistently say so on both sides. But it doesn't have that wow effect of drone drop videos.
It has been the same say in WWI, anybody who read for example All Quiet on the Western Front would see it there. Not typical US wars against some poor fuckers with rusty AKs, but this one is very different and much more symmetrical. Something tells me that any symmetrical non-nuclear conflict these days wouldn't look that different to Ukraine.
If you don't become collateral damage then why would you care for that political rival? There are many ways to kill a single person and most of them won't target you.
You make some great points and I agree. Low cost autonomous drones swarms aren't scary because they're more lethal than 155mm shells, they're scary because there's no effective defense (yet).
Seems like another example of the importance of battery improvements. With enough thrust-to-weight I've heard you can get a Buick to fly. Thus, some of the marginal aerodynamic optimizations that necessitate more complicated builds maybe can be dispensed with.
Indeed, zinc air batteries (used in hearing aids) are more energy dense than lithium ion, and are cheap. Lithium air would be much better again (close to gasoline) but a harder material to work with, and more expensive.
Metal-air batteries have the somewhat unusual property of gaining mass as they discharge (they fix oxygen from the air). How significant that mass gain is I'm uncertain of, but it confounds the diminished-mass-with-flight logic of fuel-based powerplants.
One-way travel also at least doubles effective range, which increases the targetable area by a the square.
For battery-powered craft, where there's no appreciable reduction in propellent mass over the course of the flight, this is a direct scaling. For fuel-based craft (which I'm surprised are not more heavily used), the fuel mass falls as it's consumed, such that the effective net mass is somewhat less than 1/2 the total launch fuel load (less fuel mass -> less lift and drag load).
In the extreme case, ballistic missiles consume virtually their entire fuel load early in the flight ("boost phase"). Cruise missiles / drones might fly to a higher altitude and glide to their targets. Even battery-powered drones might jettison their primary battery (retaining a small navigation power source) and glide to targets by first climbing to a high altitude.
Another option is solar-powered (or assisted) drones, which for small payloads (most especially surveillance, though directed weapons / shaped charges would be another option) could achieve long ranges, high loiter times, or both.
More common seems to be use of a launch system of a catapult or slingshot, where early-phase acceleration is provided by ground-based infrasturcture. This can be extremely basic, e.g., surgical tubing and a support framework. The Zipline drone-based delivery system utilises this, as well as parachute-based drops (its payloads, unlike those of the Ukrainian drones, are presumed to be shock-sensitive), and a dragline-based capture mechanism (not required for one-way flight missions). Zipline's catapult accelerates the drone from 0 to 60 kph in 0.3s: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c&t=3m50s).
Those drones, incidentally, have a 6 kg payload capacity and 160 km range (one-way).
But yes, staging or jettisonable batteries might be another option, at an increased complexity cost.
and if you can consider lipo batteries to be dispensable, you can over-discharge them, to extract a lot more capacity. It destroy the cells for resuablity, but you can get waay more Watt.hours from them.
Easy construction; you simply need to remove the various parts from the cardboard plate with a knife and then build the drone using glue, tape and some rubber bands.
The MacGyver military-industrial complex is something you just have to see to believe. Cheap Macguyver warfare makes a lot of sense economically for an economy like Ukraine’s.
Meanwhile in the US:
On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”
Well, low hanging fruit is sometimes hanging very low, but if you want to move past that and reach higher, it gets exponentially harder and thus more expensive.
Also things like reliability, durability under various extreme conditions, safety for humans involved and so on can escalate times and prices dramatically, but are not massive concerns in existential situation Ukraine currently is in due to russia's war.
US is basically never aiming so low with new tech they want for its military, it wants brilliant solutions above everybody else, and has money to burn on it. And from time to time, when looking back those investments were well worth even with flops included. US global hegemony is not something that US wants to lose due to few hundreds billions not allocated as effectively as possible.
There's a classic 1951 science-fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, "Superiority" about a country that's developing an ultimate weapon, except that specifications and costs keep expanding to the point that only one can be afforded, and that of course comes too late.
The post-WWII period and beginning of the Cold War (starting dates are somewhat ambiguous, though George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" was posted in February 1946, and the Truman Doctrine declared on 12 March 1947) also saw an arms race, particularly of increasingly-powerful nuclear weapons (the hydrogen bomb was first tested in 1951 & '52), jet-powered bombers, and work was proceeding on what would be the first intercontinental ballistic missiles (the Soviet R-7 Semyorka, first launched in 1957), as well as the still-in-operation B-52 Stratofortress long-range strategic bomber (first prototype flight in 1952).
I've seen variants of Clarke's observation such as extrapolations of combat aircraft costs which lead to a single plane being shared amongst the US Air Force, Navy, and Army, with the Marines having dibs every few weeks, something similar.
The criticism isn't entirely fair, as there is an element to which a superior weapon or capability can utterly overwhelm numerically-superior forces, given an equivalent initiative to fight, and military leadership capability. The defence-offence advantage (that is, a defender virtually always has the advantage) means that yes, a technologically inferior force can wear down a superior invader over time, though shear weight of numbers (though often at immense cost), as with China over Japan in WWII (Japan occupied portions of the country but simply lacked the personnel to control all but a small fraction of it), the Vietnam against the French and Americans in Indochina, and Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans from the 19th through the 21st centuries. But at the same time in an initial assault phase technological supremacy can offer overwhelming advantage, as with the US in both Iraq wars and initially in the Afghan conflict, Nazi Germany against France in WWII (most notably radio-equipped tanks overwhelming the noncommunicative French forces), and presently in Ukraine where more advanced Nato munitions seem to be giving a critical edge over Russian massed forces and dumb munitions, though that's been a relatively closer contest, given that Russian leadership seems to have little concern for its own forces' losses.
Most notoriously, Zumwalt is built around the Advanced Gun System, since Congress is obsessed with naval shore bombardment. (See also how they kept Iowa in service decades after it was obsolete)
But...
>A total of six of the systems were installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1,000,000 per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used. The Navy will remove the AGS from the ships in 2023.
I have absolutely no information on the viability of the Chinese military. However, I will observe that the US military a) has people with combat experience at pretty much every level b) publishes documents detailing its fuck-ups. We’re not comparing apples and oranges here.
The Ukrainians have one very big advantage: they know exactly where they want to wage war and against who. This allows them to do all kinds of optimizations.
1) US military programs are a domestic jobs program / political pork barrelling exercise more than anything. Because of course support for the military is one of the only things left everyone can actually agree on.
2) US needs to build weapons for the future not the present. And as such the amount of cutting-edge R&D as a percentage of the total program spend will always be significantly higher than for most other countries.
I would expect Ukraine could learn how to produce their own in a couple of weeks. Have patterns and a press to cut out the pieces and mass produce them. The effect of thousands of these would be similar to massive volleys of arrows in medevil battle, only in this case each has targeting and 5kg warhead
The Ukranian drone industry has rocketed (no pun intended) since the invasion. I'd highly recommend checking out this video[1] from the FT on the tech industry that has popped up around this, inside Ukraine itself.
Just such a travesty that they need to do this at all.
The kind of know-how they are building up there is making them a force to be reckoned with, it is one of those if-it-doesn't-kill-you-it-will-make-you-stronger things.
Obviously Russia can do anything that Ukraine can do but Ukraine has a very large and wealthy contingent of the world behind them and they are motivated far beyond the Russians. I really hope they will be able to force some kind of breakthrough to the point that even Putin realizes that giving up is the better outcome.
Maybe that prospect is good enough for you. For all of it, you do not care about any consequences, as you did not care about the fate of ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.
Russians understand what's going on here and are motivated to not let that happen. At the moment they are successful.
That's just funny. Seriously, I can't tell if you're trolling or serious but on the off chance that you are serious: you're so misinformed it is tragic, at the same time you are apparently able to fix that and refuse to do so. Which makes me wonder why. I have enough contacts in former USSR countries and inside Russia itself to know that this sentiment is prevalent, wilful misunderstanding as some kind of defense mechanism. But in the modern day with ample access to information you really have no excuse.
Serbia will have to come to terms with the degree to which Russia has been using them at some point. This probably won't happen until Russia itself has gone through an enlightenment and shaken of the current crop of mobsters. I'm not holding my breath for that one.
With the exception of the language issue, pretty much all of the above describes the US as well. The South and Midwest are far more cohesive with regard to each other than the coastal cities and Pacific Northwest, and vice versa.
Every 4-8 years we tend to "overthrow" the preferred Presidential candidate of one of those two factions - as flawed as they are - through a democratic process.
One of those factions prefers stronger social programs while the other prefers weaker.
Note that I explicitly don't intend for this comment to become about the US civil war, and will not respond to any comments about the historical or social conditions there.
For that matter, it also describes Canada to a large extent; there is a large, geographically concentrated faction of Francophones and a similarly large, geographically concentrated faction of Anglophones. They have significantly divergent histories, social norms, and so on.
In fact... every large country with which I'm familiar that does not share a single common history and culture has these issues. They all seem to come to a workable system for integrating their factions into a single political system absent outside force. I see no reason Ukraine shouldn't be able to do that same, given a few decades to get there.
> we tend to "overthrow" the preferred Presidential candidate of one of those two factions through a democratic process
Well the Ukrainians did that by gathering a large crowd and dislodging a President they don't like. The USA is not there yet, but the latest events around Trump point that it is an option to contemplate in the future.
> describes Canada to a large extent; there is a large, geographically concentrated faction of Francophones and a similarly large, geographically concentrated faction of Anglophones.
Imagine Canada passing laws that the only language of education and government services should be French. Because that's basically what happened. It all started when the aforementioned large crowd overthrew the Eastern-elected president and then cancelled the law giving the East an option to use their mother's tongue (Russian).
And then Vancouver saying Au Revoir and joining the US. More specifically, Victoria and Vancouver Island with its naval bases joining the US outright, and Vancouver city becoming a "Republic of Vancouver" besieged by Canadian army. Then Canada spends a decade explaining everybody (in French) that it's a US proxy led by some rednecks who moved in from Seattle. Not all of them are even Canadian!
Whereas people in Toronto begrudgingly begin learning French, the ones who want to show loyalty to the state do so by switching to Frenglish.
New textbooks issued by Quebec intellectual circles depict the "many wars" that Canada has fought against the USA and England all the times. Some of those are technically correct. The wars where Canada has fought on the side of England or USA are skipped. 24 of August becoming the main pompious state military holiday.
> And then Vancouver saying Au Revoir and joining the US. More specifically, Victoria and Vancouver Island with its naval bases joining the US outright, and Vancouver city becoming a "Republic of Vancouver" besieged by Canadian army.
If this is meant to be Crimea you have seemingly left the part out where the Americans invade with tanks and guns and hold rifles to peoples heads to get them to vote the correct way.
Sure. Because of course they were all dying to learn the old and poetic French and use it for all their needs from this moment on. Only american guns could sway them away from that plan.
Which did promptly materialise when it became apparent that Canada is not in position to control its naval crown jewel.
> I'm not sure whether you are joking, or do you really think that the actual voting booths were held under a literal gunpoint.
Spoiler: they were not.
Igor Girkin, the person who was there and ran all of this disagrees with your opinion he said that they held people at gun point to make sure that the judiciary voted to annex Crimea to Russia.
>Why do you think anybody would want to be a citizen of Ukraine?
I gather the occupiers are now refusing insulin to diabetics unless they take Russian citizenship. If they have to resort to such death threats then maybe some people do want to remain Ukrainian?
Russian citizenship is not something that people cherish or want. Most of the Russian territory and population has been occupied at some point: Siberia long time ago, Caucasus in the past centuries, Crimea in 2014. Russians don't care about those people the same way the care about their own.
4 out of 5 Russian citizens are ethnic Russians, and those are prevalent in Siberia, in Russian Far East, in Crimea and (arguably) in the "new territories" also.
Russian citizenship is a prized asset in the post-USSR countries to the extent that people spend effort to move to Russian Federation and pay money to engage in shady schemes to obtain it.
Looking at it, I'm also curious if you could substitute corrugated plastic, like Coroplast. They have products that match the weight/size profiles of typical cardboard.
That would work but: more expensive, slightly harder to work. As long as it doesn't get wet cardboard would be the better option though, and depending on the availability it might be the only option.
Probably a quick coat of spray paint on a finished model would already give it better water resistant properties without adding a lot of weight. It isn't going to help against immersion or catching a downpour but it will help to hold it together just a bit longer.
It's already audited at several levels so it was voted down because it was a case of the Republicans wanting to add another layer. For the record almost all Republicans favor helping Ukraine just like the Democrats. What we are witnessing is Politics with Ukraine caught in the middle. Zelensky is putting a vote in front of the government that classifies any corruption as treason against the Nation and a minimum of 15 years in Prison with all assets seized.
> almost all Republicans favor helping Ukraine just like the Democrats
That's a bit overstatement, no? I mean we have Trump who is very visibly admirer of Putin and his practices and various other dictatorial murderers like MBL and strongly supports current apartheid in Israel, no change there since invasion. If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.
I don't get it at all, republicans should be as anti-russian as possible historically since current russia is much more Soviet russia rather than anything else, but they keep voting for him and he was very clear on the topic in the past. That says more about real opinions of republicans rather than anything else.
What you're missing is that all aid packages have had more or less bipartisan support from mainstream members.
The issue with most of the news on the matter is that it's so deluded by partisan politics that even those reporting on their own poll results don't interpret them sanely.
For example, on the surface polls might say that Republicans generally oppose aid to Ukraine. However, if you plainly ask them if they support aiding Ukraine they might be in favor, but if you ask them if they support Biden's handling of the war in Ukraine, they'll be more likely to be opposed.
The MAGA wing of the party is anti-war in general, much like the liberals of the early 2000s. At some point these positions flipped. It's not that these Republicans are "anti-Ukraine," or "pro-Russia" or even "not anti-Russia." It's that they don't want to send hundreds of billions of unaudited dollars to weapons manufacturers and highly corrupt foreign governments, especially given the glaring contrast with the lack of spending on problems much closer to home. From a geopolitical perspective, the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad. And further, it's a misdirection of resources when the real foreign threat is China, not Russia, and that's before considering the many domestic problems going unaddressed while the gang of neocons and neolibs ("the uniparty") redirects our tax dollars into the coffers of the Ukrainian military and Raytheon stockholders.
? Those dollars stay in the US? It's researched and manufactured there. And you can't sell that stuff on the open market anyway. Ukraine even adds value by showing it works.
Isolationism won't solve your problems. America was isolationistst before ww1 and poor as hell. The good times came when the sovjet union forced large companies to bargain with unions.
> It's not that these Republicans are "anti-Ukraine," or "pro-Russia" or even "not anti-Russia." It's that they don't want to send hundreds of billions of unaudited dollars to weapons manufacturers and highly corrupt foreign governments, especially given the glaring contrast with the lack of spending on problems much closer to home.
The vast majority of aid to Ukraine is in weapons that are either going to be scrapped or only a handful are purchased, it’s a bit hard to feed children on surplus DCPIM munitions.
> the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad.
Not funding Ukraine won’t stop the war it will only allow Russia to move the war in the direction that it wants.
If you’re anti war then you should want Ukraine to have all the weapons they need to end the war, so they can win the war as soon as possible and put an end to it.
If your for ending Ukrainian aid you’re not for ending the war or anti war you are for feeding Ukrainians into the wood chipper and giving Russia exactly what it wants.
> If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.
I'd bet that it will not. Because America can not afford to be dragged into the much larger war that will follow if that were the case. Ukraine is - cynically - the cheap option.
> It's already audited at several levels so it was voted down because it was a case of the Republicans wanting to add another layer.
Can you provide a source, because everything I've seen says otherwise.
Even Democrat-friendly media, has been essentially forced to reluctantly report that indeed, the US government has no idea where billions of dollars of weapons and aid are ending up[1]. And there is always a delay with these things, so we can only assume the amount is exponentially larger and will never be truly known.
Clearly, if the material and monetary aid is already being audited, it's not being done well or correctly, so an actual auditor was more than warranted.
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) is committed to conducting independent and objective audits, evaluations, and investigations to promote efficiency and prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in DoD support provided to Ukraine.
In addition, the DoD OIG coordinates closely with the OIGs of the Department of State (DoS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and chairs a joint working group with representatives from multiple Federal oversight agencies to ensure a whole-of-government approach to Ukraine oversight.
The logical conclusion (maybe in quite a near future) will be something like the space opera engagements in Honorverse ([1]). TL;DR: space battles involve fighting typically beyond the ship's main directed-energy armaments' range. Instead, massive (hundreds, thousands and more) missile salvos are exchanged. Due to the quirks of how their propulsion works, missiles are easy to track and target with counter-missiles and point-defense lasers... but launch enough of them (laced generously with EW platforms and decoys) and the enemy task force's systems become overwhelmed.
Sure, but the Russians can move them into the war zone through their supply route almost as easy as the Ukrainians can, that isn't a huge advantage. What is an advantage is that the Russian supply lines are somewhat vulnerable and that Ukrainians don't have to work around any sanctions.
Let's be happy the Germans didn't have access to any of this tech in the middle of WWII, their V weapons were bad enough as it was.
Ukraine's supply lines and staging areas are largely Nato nations and resources.
Direct attacks on them would trigger Article 5.
This is one case where asymmetric advantages favour Ukraine over Russia.
As to general availability: I'm presuming individuals or non-governmental entities would have access to the technology. Again, in Ukraine there seems to be far greater alignment against a common enemy, as illustrated by Russia's failure to avert open rebellion within its own allied forces, and apparent organic resistance and sabotage withing Russia and Belarus against Russian forces and logistics infrastructure.
Absolutely, absent the - ridiculous - propaganda it is clear who is driving the war from the Russian side, the Ukrainians don't really have a choice: fight back or be wiped out. Everybody has seen what Grozny looked like and what has already been done to some Ukrainian cities.
Small drones are generally individually piloted. You can find plenty of footage of them trying to take out individual vehicles or troops. Generally pretty successful.
But a volley of explosives they are not. If that’s all you want, it’s still much cheaper to use artillery. Which both sides are fond of
> Declining reusability due to the stress on the structure: the cardboard will not be strong enough to make many flights.
Which is no doubt absolutely true—but on the other hand, the cardboard isn't the valuable part of the drone. You could have a stockpile of the cardboard (which they claim is a little larger than a pizza box), and swap out the motor and electronics if a unit survives long enough that the cardboard starts to fail.
yeah, this struck me as strange too. the ongoing maintenance on long-lasting industrially-manufactured drones might well cost more than rebuilding a cardboard one every few weeks.
1) That's for the Ukrainian people to decide and nobody else. If the Ukrainians want to fight then we should help them do so.
2) These were targets on a military airbase.
3) They had an "armistice" for 8 years. It was a joke to begin with, which provided no real guarantees (as Russia continued to lie that they had nothing to do with the conflict throughout and as such they didn't need to agree to anything), signed at the point of a gun, was often ignored by both sides, and was shattered by a full scale Russian invasion
4) Ukraine has no reason to believe that any new "armistice" will lead to different outcomes than the last one - that is, Russia will maintain it a little while and then invade from a stronger starting position than the last time. Russia ignored the Budapest Memorandum, both Minsk agreements, the "grain deal" and just this week we saw what happened to Prigozhin. Any deal with Putin will last exactly as long as it takes for him to feel that he would benefit from breaking it.
Read the actual text of the Budapest memorandum. It was not a formal security treaty and didn't require the other signatories (UK and USA) to go to war to defend Ukraine. It merely required them to bring any violations to the UN Security Council, which they have already done.
> I doubt that anybody would think Budapest memorandum would cause Russia defending Ukraine from itself, with a straight face.
The persistent myth of the “little green men” has been busted wide open by Igor Girkin who admitted there was no armed rebellion until they imported soldiers and made one.
Regardless Russias invasion of Crimea at the same time was still a violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
The last sentence is like "Understanding Russia 101" - it's essential. But it's not only Putin, it's the whole Russia from the very beginning, it's the essence of it.
We need less genocide supporters. This war is genocide and leaving even a single square meter for genociders to play with is not acceptable. If they want to kill people, they can kill their own, they have a good and long tradition in this.
> I'm anti war and the idea that these are being flown into civilian areas is troubling.
The idea of the Russian armed forces using the Geneva convention as a todo list in Ukraine is a bigger worry to me than this.
> We NEED an Armistice - our own country can't even afford this kind of war!
Then tell Russia to leave all of Ukraine (including Crimea) that’s the only acceptable way this war ends, along with real actionable security guarantees for Ukraine when Russia tries again.
The only country that can unilaterally end this war today is Russia, Russia has decided it doesn’t want this war to end therefore it must continue.
minor nitpick but why would you paint a drone in jungle camo? seems like it would be easier to spot that way given that its very easy to see in the sky
This one’s technically foam, but it’s a very cardboardy foam. With a little bit of carbon fiber reinforcement (provided) it’s surprisingly durable and MUCH simpler and easier to build that a balsa or fiberglass airplane.
After building and flying one of these, I can certainly believe that cardboard/foam construction is great for a “disposable” (single use) airplane or even for a couple of missions - knowing that the life span will be short.
Oh man, Flitetest. About 10 years ago I got really into building those planes. Never bought any kits, just used their free plans to cut my own foam boards. I did buy some components from them; usually a bulkhead or landing gear setup.
My favorite one was the F-22 replica (https://store.flitetest.com/ft-22-mkr2/). With the right motor and prop—and by abusing the discharge rate on the battery—I think I got that jet screaming at ~60mph. Not sure what the precise speed was, but it was definitely in the “should I be buying insurance for this?” territory.
The Bloody Wonder was my favorite for aerobatics. It was easy to build, fairly tough, and easy to fly but still twitchy when you wanted it to be.
I've built a few like this, and have designed a handful that haven't made it out of Fusion 360 yet.
I have a kit by an FPV pilot (Shelby Voll) that consists of a couple of pieces of pre-cut styrofoam, some carbon fiber rods for rigidity, and other various odds and ends. I think I paid $200 for it. I haven't built it yet, but I've flown friends' builds from the same kit and have built similar ones. It'll take about two hours to build with simple hand tools, and is probably the most durable "flying wing" design of which I'm aware.
I'm mostly into FPV quadcopters, but it seems most people who fly them who get into "wings" seem to prefer them.
> autonomous flight (GPS) through an interface that can be installed on an Android tablet. In case of jamming, the flight continues because the drone can locate itself according to its speed and direction.
In case anyone is wondering how that works, it uses on-board IMS (Inertial Navigation System) in the absence of GNSS signal, which usually has several sensors like accelerometers (to measure motion in 3D directions) gyro (to stabilize pitch roll yaw drift) and magnetometer (compass for yaw direction), these sensors will provide the drone pointing directions and how long it moved since it started, couple this with on board maps and you have a flight with no GNSS. Is it accurate like GNSS? Not cm or even meters level, but that depends on how good the IMS is. Also, you can have plenty of these cardboard models, or even 3D printable one of you are into this hobby!
167 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadSomehow your response has turned into a tirade against Ukraine and their claims and every other grievance you have for Ukraine.
As such there is currently no data corroborating the claims that the Australian drone is as good as it claims. What we do know so far is that the Geran(Shahed) and the Lancets have shown to be quite deadly for the reasons mentioned above. Although the Geran is not a loitering munition.
It is entirely possible that the Australian drone is performing as well, but as of now there is no such data. The last drone that was seen in the battlefields from the Ukrainian side was the switchblade and it was orders of magnitude more expensive than the Australian one and performed abysmal.
One thing to note here is that the Russians according to most western publications[1] have been quite successful at jamming GPS guided munition, so even if it is as successful as the Ukrainians claim it will probably not be a game changer in this conflict.
[1] https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/07/03/the-late...
The Australian drone is literally made of cardboard.
No one is thinking that it will be a game-changer nor that it is anyway comparable to a high-end, military-spec drone from Iran, US, UK or whoever else. It's designed to be cheap, throwaway and if it is even moderately successful at avoiding detection then I am sure that's just a bonus.
Russia has a very very long tradition with lies left and right, to the point where entire generations of russian citizens are trained to take those lies apart and find some truth using some obscure negation logic. Or just zone out and ignore it completely, which is convenient for dictatorship there since those folks are very easy to manipulate.
I mean in same vein that polar tribes have say 30 names for different types of snow and ice, russians have various names for various types of lies. Go figure.
But Russia has a famous history of issuing a constant stream of outright lies. It has a name, маскировка "maskirovka". It goes far past the literal meaning of "camouflage", to the point where a continuous disinformation is used to hide the notion that there might even be such a thing as truth. The idea is to make lying a reflex, in the hope of confusing an enemy into making a mistake.
(It also causes your own side to make mistakes. The idea is that the Russian people themselves are used to it, but simply have a somewhat nihilistic approach to any kind of official speech and even unofficial speech.)
As I said, every country uses deception. But the Russians really do consider it a cultural trait of its own, meriting its own name. The Wikipedia article doesn't even begin to cover it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception
but just for you: https://t.me/fighter_bomber/13797 (not sure where from op got his news)
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-kursk-airbase-suffers-major-16...
The prospect of low cost swarms of AI enabled drones terrifies me. If you've watched any drone combat footage from Ukraine you know it's just around the corner, and this is another step in that direction.
There's nothing stopping a group of motivated people from building a drone assembling factory that fits in a cargo container.
There may come a time where we have to stop outdoor festivals and parades because of people like that Las Vegas shooter from a couple years ago.
The real concern is when people can build a factory that can build the factory...
The only problem is that the novelty of the approach would be such, that it would bring too much visibility to the attack. Most bad actors don't want to be detected: "he fell from the window" or "his plane crashed" leaves the door open to coincidental causes. Drones are noticeable, particularly in swarms. They would be useful only in "showy" attacks, i.e. open terrorism, a tactic that is largely out of favor after 20+ years of substantial failure.
I’m somewhat gloomy about all of this. It’s just that war is war, it means killing people. Once it’s on, it’s on. So you need to be able to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible while minimizing non-combatant casualties before and after the conflict.
Long range artillery is the killer in Ukraine in terms of numbers, combatants consistently say so on both sides. But it doesn't have that wow effect of drone drop videos.
It has been the same say in WWI, anybody who read for example All Quiet on the Western Front would see it there. Not typical US wars against some poor fuckers with rusty AKs, but this one is very different and much more symmetrical. Something tells me that any symmetrical non-nuclear conflict these days wouldn't look that different to Ukraine.
For battery-powered craft, where there's no appreciable reduction in propellent mass over the course of the flight, this is a direct scaling. For fuel-based craft (which I'm surprised are not more heavily used), the fuel mass falls as it's consumed, such that the effective net mass is somewhat less than 1/2 the total launch fuel load (less fuel mass -> less lift and drag load).
In the extreme case, ballistic missiles consume virtually their entire fuel load early in the flight ("boost phase"). Cruise missiles / drones might fly to a higher altitude and glide to their targets. Even battery-powered drones might jettison their primary battery (retaining a small navigation power source) and glide to targets by first climbing to a high altitude.
Another option is solar-powered (or assisted) drones, which for small payloads (most especially surveillance, though directed weapons / shaped charges would be another option) could achieve long ranges, high loiter times, or both.
Staging?
Those drones, incidentally, have a 6 kg payload capacity and 160 km range (one-way).
But yes, staging or jettisonable batteries might be another option, at an increased complexity cost.
It's like reading a MacGyver script.
Meanwhile in the US:
On top of the $22.4 billion it cost in research and development, the USS Zumwalt, one of three Zumwalt destroyer class ships, cost over $4 billion to create….Military Watch Magazine reported issues back in 2018, saying that the USS Zumwalt “suffered from poorly functioning weapons, stalling engines and an underperformance in their stealth capabilities, among other shortcomings.”
Sometimes, worse is better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#:~:t....
https://veteranlife.com/military-news/uss-zumwalt/
Also things like reliability, durability under various extreme conditions, safety for humans involved and so on can escalate times and prices dramatically, but are not massive concerns in existential situation Ukraine currently is in due to russia's war.
US is basically never aiming so low with new tech they want for its military, it wants brilliant solutions above everybody else, and has money to burn on it. And from time to time, when looking back those investments were well worth even with flops included. US global hegemony is not something that US wants to lose due to few hundreds billions not allocated as effectively as possible.
Mentioned here on SE:
<https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/237557/science-fic...>
And of course Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)>.
ISFDB: <https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40897>
It's published in Expedition to Earth (1953): <https://archive.org/details/expeditiontoeart0000arth/page/90...>
Considering the period it's not exactly science fiction.
I've seen variants of Clarke's observation such as extrapolations of combat aircraft costs which lead to a single plane being shared amongst the US Air Force, Navy, and Army, with the Marines having dibs every few weeks, something similar.
The criticism isn't entirely fair, as there is an element to which a superior weapon or capability can utterly overwhelm numerically-superior forces, given an equivalent initiative to fight, and military leadership capability. The defence-offence advantage (that is, a defender virtually always has the advantage) means that yes, a technologically inferior force can wear down a superior invader over time, though shear weight of numbers (though often at immense cost), as with China over Japan in WWII (Japan occupied portions of the country but simply lacked the personnel to control all but a small fraction of it), the Vietnam against the French and Americans in Indochina, and Afghanistan against the British, Soviets, and Americans from the 19th through the 21st centuries. But at the same time in an initial assault phase technological supremacy can offer overwhelming advantage, as with the US in both Iraq wars and initially in the Afghan conflict, Nazi Germany against France in WWII (most notably radio-equipped tanks overwhelming the noncommunicative French forces), and presently in Ukraine where more advanced Nato munitions seem to be giving a critical edge over Russian massed forces and dumb munitions, though that's been a relatively closer contest, given that Russian leadership seems to have little concern for its own forces' losses.
But...
>A total of six of the systems were installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1,000,000 per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used. The Navy will remove the AGS from the ships in 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System
A complete dead end, a decade spent doing nothing. Meanwhile, China is launching a dozen guided missile destroyers a year.
2) US needs to build weapons for the future not the present. And as such the amount of cutting-edge R&D as a percentage of the total program spend will always be significantly higher than for most other countries.
Just such a travesty that they need to do this at all.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPCPhzmL10
Obviously Russia can do anything that Ukraine can do but Ukraine has a very large and wealthy contingent of the world behind them and they are motivated far beyond the Russians. I really hope they will be able to force some kind of breakthrough to the point that even Putin realizes that giving up is the better outcome.
Most of whose did not live under Ukrainian control for a decade now.
Those who did not live under Ukrainian control have lived under occupation.
Russians understand what's going on here and are motivated to not let that happen. At the moment they are successful.
That's just funny. Seriously, I can't tell if you're trolling or serious but on the off chance that you are serious: you're so misinformed it is tragic, at the same time you are apparently able to fix that and refuse to do so. Which makes me wonder why. I have enough contacts in former USSR countries and inside Russia itself to know that this sentiment is prevalent, wilful misunderstanding as some kind of defense mechanism. But in the modern day with ample access to information you really have no excuse.
Serbia will have to come to terms with the degree to which Russia has been using them at some point. This probably won't happen until Russia itself has gone through an enlightenment and shaken of the current crop of mobsters. I'm not holding my breath for that one.
Every 4-8 years we tend to "overthrow" the preferred Presidential candidate of one of those two factions - as flawed as they are - through a democratic process.
One of those factions prefers stronger social programs while the other prefers weaker.
Note that I explicitly don't intend for this comment to become about the US civil war, and will not respond to any comments about the historical or social conditions there.
For that matter, it also describes Canada to a large extent; there is a large, geographically concentrated faction of Francophones and a similarly large, geographically concentrated faction of Anglophones. They have significantly divergent histories, social norms, and so on.
In fact... every large country with which I'm familiar that does not share a single common history and culture has these issues. They all seem to come to a workable system for integrating their factions into a single political system absent outside force. I see no reason Ukraine shouldn't be able to do that same, given a few decades to get there.
Well the Ukrainians did that by gathering a large crowd and dislodging a President they don't like. The USA is not there yet, but the latest events around Trump point that it is an option to contemplate in the future.
> describes Canada to a large extent; there is a large, geographically concentrated faction of Francophones and a similarly large, geographically concentrated faction of Anglophones.
Imagine Canada passing laws that the only language of education and government services should be French. Because that's basically what happened. It all started when the aforementioned large crowd overthrew the Eastern-elected president and then cancelled the law giving the East an option to use their mother's tongue (Russian).
And then Vancouver saying Au Revoir and joining the US. More specifically, Victoria and Vancouver Island with its naval bases joining the US outright, and Vancouver city becoming a "Republic of Vancouver" besieged by Canadian army. Then Canada spends a decade explaining everybody (in French) that it's a US proxy led by some rednecks who moved in from Seattle. Not all of them are even Canadian!
Whereas people in Toronto begrudgingly begin learning French, the ones who want to show loyalty to the state do so by switching to Frenglish.
New textbooks issued by Quebec intellectual circles depict the "many wars" that Canada has fought against the USA and England all the times. Some of those are technically correct. The wars where Canada has fought on the side of England or USA are skipped. 24 of August becoming the main pompious state military holiday.
If this is meant to be Crimea you have seemingly left the part out where the Americans invade with tanks and guns and hold rifles to peoples heads to get them to vote the correct way.
Which did promptly materialise when it became apparent that Canada is not in position to control its naval crown jewel.
If the Russians were so sure of the vote in Crimea they would not have had to use guns to make sure it went the direction they wanted.
Spoiler: they were not.
Igor Girkin, the person who was there and ran all of this disagrees with your opinion he said that they held people at gun point to make sure that the judiciary voted to annex Crimea to Russia.
I gather the occupiers are now refusing insulin to diabetics unless they take Russian citizenship. If they have to resort to such death threats then maybe some people do want to remain Ukrainian?
Also, please don't cross into personal attack or nationalistic putdowns.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Russian citizenship is a prized asset in the post-USSR countries to the extent that people spend effort to move to Russian Federation and pay money to engage in shady schemes to obtain it.
I mean the US Democrats voted down even the mere notion that maybe the most surface-level audit of US aid to Ukraine could be allowed[1].
[1]https://theintercept.com/2023/08/02/ukraine-aid-special-insp...
That's a bit overstatement, no? I mean we have Trump who is very visibly admirer of Putin and his practices and various other dictatorial murderers like MBL and strongly supports current apartheid in Israel, no change there since invasion. If he wins the next elections, which seems more and more probable, Ukraine is going to lose all western support overnight with corresponding results for war.
I don't get it at all, republicans should be as anti-russian as possible historically since current russia is much more Soviet russia rather than anything else, but they keep voting for him and he was very clear on the topic in the past. That says more about real opinions of republicans rather than anything else.
Or am I missing something as an US outsider?
I reckon Poland will still be pretty much in favour of helping Ukraine push Russia back. Probably a bunch of other European nations too.
The issue with most of the news on the matter is that it's so deluded by partisan politics that even those reporting on their own poll results don't interpret them sanely.
For example, on the surface polls might say that Republicans generally oppose aid to Ukraine. However, if you plainly ask them if they support aiding Ukraine they might be in favor, but if you ask them if they support Biden's handling of the war in Ukraine, they'll be more likely to be opposed.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/americ...
Isolationism won't solve your problems. America was isolationistst before ww1 and poor as hell. The good times came when the sovjet union forced large companies to bargain with unions.
The vast majority of aid to Ukraine is in weapons that are either going to be scrapped or only a handful are purchased, it’s a bit hard to feed children on surplus DCPIM munitions.
> the position is simple: war is bad, we are prolonging the war in Ukraine by funding it, therefore funding it is bad.
Not funding Ukraine won’t stop the war it will only allow Russia to move the war in the direction that it wants.
If you’re anti war then you should want Ukraine to have all the weapons they need to end the war, so they can win the war as soon as possible and put an end to it.
If your for ending Ukrainian aid you’re not for ending the war or anti war you are for feeding Ukrainians into the wood chipper and giving Russia exactly what it wants.
I'd bet that it will not. Because America can not afford to be dragged into the much larger war that will follow if that were the case. Ukraine is - cynically - the cheap option.
Can you provide a source, because everything I've seen says otherwise.
Even Democrat-friendly media, has been essentially forced to reluctantly report that indeed, the US government has no idea where billions of dollars of weapons and aid are ending up[1]. And there is always a delay with these things, so we can only assume the amount is exponentially larger and will never be truly known.
Clearly, if the material and monetary aid is already being audited, it's not being done well or correctly, so an actual auditor was more than warranted.
---
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/14/us-ukraine-aid-cabl... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/27/...
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) is committed to conducting independent and objective audits, evaluations, and investigations to promote efficiency and prevent fraud, waste, and abuse in DoD support provided to Ukraine.
In addition, the DoD OIG coordinates closely with the OIGs of the Department of State (DoS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and chairs a joint working group with representatives from multiple Federal oversight agencies to ensure a whole-of-government approach to Ukraine oversight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse
If drones are widespread within Russia ... that logic might not hold so well.
A blade cuts two ways, and much of that is at the initiative of the wielder.
Let's be happy the Germans didn't have access to any of this tech in the middle of WWII, their V weapons were bad enough as it was.
Direct attacks on them would trigger Article 5.
This is one case where asymmetric advantages favour Ukraine over Russia.
As to general availability: I'm presuming individuals or non-governmental entities would have access to the technology. Again, in Ukraine there seems to be far greater alignment against a common enemy, as illustrated by Russia's failure to avert open rebellion within its own allied forces, and apparent organic resistance and sabotage withing Russia and Belarus against Russian forces and logistics infrastructure.
But a volley of explosives they are not. If that’s all you want, it’s still much cheaper to use artillery. Which both sides are fond of
> Declining reusability due to the stress on the structure: the cardboard will not be strong enough to make many flights.
Which is no doubt absolutely true—but on the other hand, the cardboard isn't the valuable part of the drone. You could have a stockpile of the cardboard (which they claim is a little larger than a pizza box), and swap out the motor and electronics if a unit survives long enough that the cardboard starts to fail.
2) These were targets on a military airbase.
3) They had an "armistice" for 8 years. It was a joke to begin with, which provided no real guarantees (as Russia continued to lie that they had nothing to do with the conflict throughout and as such they didn't need to agree to anything), signed at the point of a gun, was often ignored by both sides, and was shattered by a full scale Russian invasion
4) Ukraine has no reason to believe that any new "armistice" will lead to different outcomes than the last one - that is, Russia will maintain it a little while and then invade from a stronger starting position than the last time. Russia ignored the Budapest Memorandum, both Minsk agreements, the "grain deal" and just this week we saw what happened to Prigozhin. Any deal with Putin will last exactly as long as it takes for him to feel that he would benefit from breaking it.
https://treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000...
Pray tell, where did the little green men come from?
The persistent myth of the “little green men” has been busted wide open by Igor Girkin who admitted there was no armed rebellion until they imported soldiers and made one.
Regardless Russias invasion of Crimea at the same time was still a violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
Obviously implying that they see no point to negotiate with Putin himself.
The answer is to give Ukraine everything it needs to win this war and kick the invaders out.
The idea of the Russian armed forces using the Geneva convention as a todo list in Ukraine is a bigger worry to me than this.
> We NEED an Armistice - our own country can't even afford this kind of war!
Then tell Russia to leave all of Ukraine (including Crimea) that’s the only acceptable way this war ends, along with real actionable security guarantees for Ukraine when Russia tries again.
The only country that can unilaterally end this war today is Russia, Russia has decided it doesn’t want this war to end therefore it must continue.
No rear areas. No safe fire bases. No Green Zone. Another major change to war.
Who controls the DJI copter drones? Does the plane act as a relay for the radio signals?
For non-Australian readers: https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM?feature=shared
https://store.flitetest.com/ft-simple-cub-mkr2/
This one’s technically foam, but it’s a very cardboardy foam. With a little bit of carbon fiber reinforcement (provided) it’s surprisingly durable and MUCH simpler and easier to build that a balsa or fiberglass airplane.
After building and flying one of these, I can certainly believe that cardboard/foam construction is great for a “disposable” (single use) airplane or even for a couple of missions - knowing that the life span will be short.
My favorite one was the F-22 replica (https://store.flitetest.com/ft-22-mkr2/). With the right motor and prop—and by abusing the discharge rate on the battery—I think I got that jet screaming at ~60mph. Not sure what the precise speed was, but it was definitely in the “should I be buying insurance for this?” territory.
The Bloody Wonder was my favorite for aerobatics. It was easy to build, fairly tough, and easy to fly but still twitchy when you wanted it to be.
I have a kit by an FPV pilot (Shelby Voll) that consists of a couple of pieces of pre-cut styrofoam, some carbon fiber rods for rigidity, and other various odds and ends. I think I paid $200 for it. I haven't built it yet, but I've flown friends' builds from the same kit and have built similar ones. It'll take about two hours to build with simple hand tools, and is probably the most durable "flying wing" design of which I'm aware.
I'm mostly into FPV quadcopters, but it seems most people who fly them who get into "wings" seem to prefer them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank
In case anyone is wondering how that works, it uses on-board IMS (Inertial Navigation System) in the absence of GNSS signal, which usually has several sensors like accelerometers (to measure motion in 3D directions) gyro (to stabilize pitch roll yaw drift) and magnetometer (compass for yaw direction), these sensors will provide the drone pointing directions and how long it moved since it started, couple this with on board maps and you have a flight with no GNSS. Is it accurate like GNSS? Not cm or even meters level, but that depends on how good the IMS is. Also, you can have plenty of these cardboard models, or even 3D printable one of you are into this hobby!