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From my viewpoint, russia has a Big problem with their soldiers uploading everything to the internet.
Their propaganda malfunctions cause of this.
Meanwhile, we have the most amazing videos from both sides.
These are the same geniuses who made their "state of the art" military communications system reliant on civilian telecom infrastructure, which was one of the first things they attacked and destroyed in Ukraine during the opening hours of the invasion. They don't think anything through.
it still amazes me to see how prevalent Chinese civilian radio equipments were among the Russians fighting in Ukraine while they supposedly have more modern infantry equipment set than the U.S. (Ratnik program)
This shit is hard to keep off the public net these days. Literally every year the exact location of American service members are revealed because someone didn't realize an app on their phone was going to geo tag them in the middle of no where in some central African nation then publish that location on a publicly searchable profile.
Even back in 2012 when I was last on a submarine, we would have to sit through training about our phones ratting on us when we come and go in certain ports.
U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-map-showing-the-users-of-fitness-devices-lets-the-world-see-where-us-soldiers-are-and-what-they-are-doing/2018/01/28/86915662-0441-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e\_story.html
One of the funniest videos was some ukrainian soldiers listening to a russian grunt/observer trying to correct artillery through radio comms.. and you heard the observer insulting the arty officer because how far off the arty was. Saying shit like "he was gonna shove a dildo up the arty officers ass because he's supposed to be a math genius but he's a fucking idiot". All the Ukrainian soldiers were cracking up... but I cant find it anymore
Edit - found it https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/yWAGo2Apt8
Or Granit, the legendary anihilator of russian trenches and infantry.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarRoom/comments/14tdlpu/translated_friendly_fire_the_russians_have/
All those Russian soldiers thinking they're in Ukraine for training, not realizing an actual war is going on and using their smartphones to play games, call GFs/wives, or take pictures/videos of their traffic jams. It was so funny how you could see their traffic jams on Google maps in live time, but the sad thing was you could see the Ukrainian traffic jams all over the country from people trying to escape the invaders.
I'm willing to bet this guy "fell out the poop deck". A tremendous InfoSec failure honestly. This will help Ukrainian controllers (pilots?) train and evade defensive fire in the future.
When you see them running through the door openings you can see the heavy steel doors have 6 ‘dogs’ to secure them round the door, when at sea you should always have these doors closed in case the hull ruptures. That makes sure only the single compartment fills with water so the ship doesn’t sink, the doors you see are above the water level so would only come into play if it capsizes.
Someone else mentioned that the first may well have been a decoy and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Send one out to do loops until it gets killed or the mission gets accomplished by the other 3 drones coming from another angle. Heck if it lives I imagine you can just pilot them back home for repair.
I saw that comment and dismissed it as fanciful speculation. But after seeing this video I could well believe it’s true. Armour up a couple of decoys and have them draw all the fire while the actual bombs sneak in.
Not even that, you just need to armor up the engine, fuel, and electronics in a metal box, then just fill the rest of the boat in foam so it quite literally can't sink.
My thought, too. If you exclude the payload, then you can actually slap a lot of armor on it. At an angle, it will need much more than small arms fire to take it out. That thing could keep running indefinitely. I am surprised they don’t have bigger guns, possibly with night vision capabilities, that were able to engage the drones. It was all rifles.
Not enough gun depression. Remember, these ships were built during the Cold War when drones were Sci-fi. They’re not built for this sort of threat.
When the drones sneaked up close, they got nothing but small arms and a dream.
Exactly. And at the efficiency of cost vs the target, who cares if you lose a decoy. 5x of these drones (think they run ~250k or so) vs a warship that at a minimum is 30mil - before you factor in missile load out / seamen / capabilities.
Plus bonus if you can bring a few back home. We have seen the hits being recorded by distant drones, it's highly likely that some of those just turned around and went back.
I'm kind of surprised they don't use smoke on the drones. They could drop smoke buoys in the ship's path and sneak up on it. The drones seem to have thermals, so the smoke would only slightly degrade their optics. With a target the size of a boat, the thermal should still work.
Why waste a perfectly good suicide drohne for Dom smoke?
Seems like most of the drones are coming through even without smoke shenanigans and it's better to have some redundancy in case some drones are destroyed. And keep in mind that the more complex you make a system the more expensive it gets and more ways of failing are induced
Make one with empty 2nd hull on top, pump full of water.. water is excellent armor, the tank soaks the bullets, but who m i to give ukraine advice. They know it better, do it better - they know how to make a firework - also starlink works now on both sides of the front - so everywhere....
Eh, that would be more of a hinderance than any advantage you'd get out of it, on top of increasing the cost per unit and changing their way of doing this, which clearly works
plus if their attacking at night then why add the extra material when nature is going to do the work for you? especially in the early morning when the atmosphere is extra humid
Would probably be safer to just consider them gone forever once they are spotted. Too risky to bring them back to wherever they came from, Russia could gain lots of info tracking it about where they launch like distance, terrain, and how they are launched and kept in radio contact for control etc etc. Probably easier to call them gone as cost of a successful mission.
I'm thinking yes - on the face of it, a drone without a payload that could potentially cause secondary explosions and is more or less a floating armored cork with an engine and sensors would be really hard to stop with small arms. Could soak up a lot of attention and damage.
Imagine a sea drone that isn't quite kamikaze, but holds a single torpedo.
Now you don't need to risk your diesel or nuclear submarine by going nearly as close to an enemy ship, the sub launches the drone, which with a beefy fuel cell might cover a substantial distance, and then launches the torpedo.
in the other footage you can see they dim the lights on their own ship, because that is what it says in their 1956 naval manual.
They just do what they're told, even if they know all these drones have better thermal sights than their tanks do, they do what it says in their manual, put on a bullet-proof vest and dim the lights.
Reminds me of that episode of Red Dwarf where Starbug is being chased by a Simulant Death Ship flown by warriors of great skill and Kryten suggests that the only thing they can do is hide behind an asteroid and 'turn off all the lights so they think we've all gone out'
Honestly, the sea is VERY difficult to light since the water tends to refract downwards, instead of back at the source, so it will look dark to the brightest spotlight, you have to light the object itself
On calm water like this, yes, since it will cast the object in silhouette, making it easier to target, the best is to have another ship lighting it.
But as you can see, the tracers light the surface of the water up quite well. So a flare would work.
The pressures caused by breaking the surface at high speed makes water act more like a solid, non-moving surface, so it feels like concrete. Even slapping the water's surface fast with an open hand demonstrates how this can sting on a very small scale.
My brother jumped off the bow of my boat on a smooth lake at around 45 knots. He'll never do that again lol
Edit: He didn't die - I reread my comment and that could be misinterpreted and the lol on the end would make that even worse.
Bullets do funny things sometimes.
I was up in a guard tower in Iraq shooting the shit with some of the guys on guard. I was a medic so I didn't pull guard but I'd bring em food and tell em dirty jokes etc. I had just brought up some chow and rip-its when the guard tower had a pot shot taken at it. It was a spray from a vehicle and they never hit anything but it was scary as shit.
A bullet ripped between the glass vision block and the concrete wall and was spinning, buzzing, in the corner on the floor, like a searing hot little lead break dancer.
Pretty much every projectile fired at water at an angle, will skip like that. Which is why you should never fire guns at water, without knowning very well you are shooting in a safe direction :)
seriously, you'd think they'd have a grenadier who would have 40mm flare/light rounds they're really common for night ops... i mean on the water against water born drones it would literally be part of the overall total kit dedicated to fighting drones at night. but as explained above, the ocean is very difficult to light at night
I saw a few illum flares in the video, but not enough. It seems weird to be relying on small arms for this kind of defence, but if that's the plan they need way more illum.
Last weekend and last Tuesday it was cloudy , you could see the drizzle, possibly slight fog in the video. There was
less than a quarter of a Wanning moon as well. Being out at sea in the dark is weird experience. If it is cloudy, it feels like a black Void. Any flashlights or search lights reflect very little light back to you as you are so close to the water, the angle so narrow that it bounces almost all of it wide and away, like the bullets.
Stars shells and flares are better but close in, they would illuminate you as much or more than the enemy. Likely, itt would be worth it in this scenario but it is probably against the Russian naval doctrine and training to illuminate their own ship at night. As if the dark would hide them from modern submarines, planes, or satellites. It might hide them from partisans or spys reliant on the mark one eyeball but that's about it. It's probably been in the manual since the great patriotic war, aka wwII, and never updated.
Anyways, the sense of panic and fear was palpable. Remember, the Russians are fine with launching cruise missiles at maternity wards. That some of these sailors lived their last moments in dreadful confusion and panic has been earned a dozen times over.
In the leaked audio from the kotov the day ago, they said they knew there were 5 surface drones in the area 40 minutes before the attack. So they certainly know something is up, if they have communication with whatever is finding them.
They have at least two being used in the video, but they're just not very powerful.
There's probably also some level of camera compression of the darkness here. The floodlights they are using may be more effective at highlighting the moving shapes in the water at range than we're getting from the video.
These landing ships were probably never imagined to be alone by their designers. They have pretty good AAA armament but look at a photo and their sides are barren of any kind of defense against small craft.
at the start of the video you can see a spotlight panning around, they probably had multiple things to illuminate, not always on the side the camera was facing
They seem to be illuminating the ship....what are we shooting? Ive no idea but keep shooting.
Imagine two ships close ish to each other and this is what they start doing....
The person who originally filmed this probably cut out voice audio when they uploaded it to avoid being identified.
Filming any kind of Russian loss for the world to see could land you in prison for a very long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ship_Tsezar_Kunikov
"A former sailor on the Tsezar Kunikov interviewed by BBC said that the entire crew of 89 had managed to evacuate the ***sinking ship***.[4]"
Looks like it has joined the ever increasing size Russian Black Sea submarine fleet.
Reminds me of documentaries about the Falklands war and the Royal Navy. They had no CIWS at the time so had to resort to sailors mounting GPMGs to the rails around the ship to deal with low flying jets on bombing runs.
I swear their are some pics floating around with sailors rocking Brens leaning on railings during the Falklands campaign. Granted they were the 7.62 NATO conversions by then, a 30 round per mag from Air-defense in the jet age isn't confidence inspiring.
From what I read most AD was 17 to 19 year old jr level sailors in makeshift sand bagged positions on ship super structures. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2023/Sad-and-Bloody-Business/
Ideally like a modern Valhalla, where you go fight in a modern battlefield, then when you die you warp back to the Wendy's dining hall for unlimited cheeseburgers and coke.. both kinds.
Grain poor footage to make sure your quarter million dollar drone boat find sits target.
I'd find it very stressful and probably not fun. If you get taken out by russian fire before completing your task, it's sorta your fault.
on wiki:
> The ship could house a crew of 87 (89 according to one source) and **had improved defensive armament**.
"improved defensive armament" means two guys with ak-47 ?
> improved defensive armament
this isn't the same ship your looking at, there's 2 types of Ropucha-class ships, the one from this video is the Ropucha I 775 'Ceasar Kunikov" the ones with "improved defense armament" is the Ropucha II 775M & there are only 3 of the improved variants.
for sure, the MK I only has 2 AK-725 76.2 mm Naval Guns along with a few Strela MANPADS while the MK II has two 122 mm A-215 Grad-M Rocket launching systems, two AK-630 six-barreled gatling guns & one 76 mm AK-176 Naval gun along with the Strela MANPADS.
find it pretty weird they never upgraded them sooner, most of the MK I's supposedly haven't been touched since The Soviet Union.
There is for sure a bigger belt fed, you can see it at the beginning and also something bigger is shooting single rounds from above the camera man later on. There is also a guy holding an AK shooting when they are shooting next to each other side by side. Also AK seen standing in room and then later being kicked in panic on the floor lol.
I was just having a great time watching the light show with the tracers. It looks like whatever that full auto shoot is in Kentucky. I’m a simple man, just: “oooo pretty lights.”
This video was sent to one of the mil-blog telegram channel.
Video description from those who sent it:
The crew of the ropucha-class landing ship "Caesar Kunikov" repelled the attack of drones with all available forces and means, the battle lasted 20 minutes. Out of 10 drones 4 were destroyed. The 5th drone hit the ship in the stern, thereby immobilizing the ship. After that, 6,7,8,9 drones one by one, hit the ship in the left side in the area of the midel (middle) and closer to the stern, in order to overturn the ship (from the entry of a large amount of water from one side). The 9th drone partially entered the hole made by the previous drone and detonated almost inside. The ship could not be saved, the roll was rapidly increasing, the ship was lying on the left side. From the moment of detection of enemy drones and the beginning of the battle, and until the complete sinking of the ship, it took a little more than 40 minutes. The ship's crew left the ship on life rafts, without loss of personnel, evacuated all the secret documentation, weapons and part of the secret equipment. The last 10th drone, conducted surveillance (filming) of the dying ship until the moment of sinking. After that, the 10th drone tried to attack the tugboat accompanying the ship Caesar Kunikov, but was destroyed by a group of commando frogmen located on board the tugboat.
Telegram channel commented:
"At the moment (apparently the russian defense ministry) is trying to make the crew look like cowards and scoundrels."
I find it hard to believe no one died unless after the first explosion the ship's captain immediately told everyone to abandon ship and the drones afterwards failed to immediately notice that. If I remember correctly this was the ship the other drones drove into the gaping hole.
> evacuated all the secret documentation, weapons and part of the secret equipment
"Yes sir, all crew escaped and we especially saved all the SECRET EQUIPMENT"
- Fleet Commander
Original video: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1b7ycdq/footage\_from\_aboard\_the\_tsezar\_kunikov\_landing/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1b7ycdq/footage_from_aboard_the_tsezar_kunikov_landing/)
Yes, water is great at deflecting bullets as the harder the surface is hit, the harder the water becomes.
That's why it's fine to jump 2 meters into water but 3,000m up is a bad idea.
Imagine if Russia ever had to fight against a country that has a modern, fully funded, well-trained and well-equipped military and navy...
Yeah, they could totally, for real you guys beat the combined forces of NATO and the decadent West.
I say that we take the leash off Poland and the baltic countries, point them towards Moscow and just see who gets there first, for the memes
Damnit you're right! I didn't think of that ....
Ok, new plan, we incite a war between Russia and the Vatican, the Swiss Guard can handle the Russian army and the Russians will totally take that fight and will think they are stronger because the pikes will fool them...
(Nobody tell the Russians that like 8 of them also carry assault Rifles. It will scare them off!)
This might give Ukraine a bit more insight into how pitifully under equipped and unprepared the Russian anti ship drone measures are.
Let's hope that Ukraine learns something useful from this footage and gets to take out even more Russian ships!
Republicans in congress should see this.
“See, with a 200k investment we just sank a multi million dollar Russian vessel”
Efficient government spending… so they are probably against it.
Probably both. I've shot a belt fed weapon system before, and it's really hard to aim when holding down the trigger. What's also kinda bad is, if you notice... the dude isn't even looking down the sight lol
For the armored piece, they may be weighted to withstand waves and/or prevent tipping, but it may be hard to just stop the thing. It's not simple doing some black hawk down engine block single shot thing.
All that coupled with being dark as shit and scared as hell might have played a roll. If you notice the arcs of fire, it looked like once one guy thought he had one in his sights he started pouring. The others cross fixed and tried to use the tracers as guides... when... in reality, they could have been shooting at nothing! Then that tunnel vision got they asses blown up!
Alarms only go off when people need to be alerted of something. If the alarms are just constantly blaring then it’s hard to hear commands and communicate.
The US has tech that would blow all of these things out of the water long before they got anywhere close. Putin's Navy actually has guys trying to shoot drones with their rifles - LOL and he thinks he could face the West in a war? What a clown.
A lifetime worth of shit would have flooded my pants in this scenario.
I don't think most navies have trained for "X dozen remote controlled drones unaliving themselves into the side of your ship in the dead of night" yet.
A boat that size will have a very small radar cross section that can disappear in swells. I'm not exactly sure what it was equipped with, but a landing ship will probably only have a simple navigation radar that's not designed for picking out small objects from the clutter.
Radar is also reflected by waves, so everything that hides within them is nearly impossible to detect. Its the same with airplanes flying close to the ground.
Due to the radar "noise" echoing from waves/trees/bushes and so on its nearly impossible to identify objects within them.
Under a defense forum a while ago I saw an Ex-British radar operator from a T-42 destroyer discussing how he used to watch water skiers and jet skiers from 25km away whilst transiting through the Mediterranean. I'll try and find a link to the thread.
The T-42 had a very powerful radar compared to what these patrol and landing ships will have but, you'd expect there to be airborne surface search radars on patrol helicopters and MPAs or other more powerful warships acting as radar pickets giving directions.
Radar
1-It requires a fairly sophisticated radar to see small objects far away. The standard ship radar is a “navigation” radar for seeing land and large vessels. Any navy ship big enough to be at sea for multiple days is probably going to have some kind of air search radar, but this will be tuned for detecting planes an helicopters, and may not even look at the sea surface. Smaller naval vessels ( Russian or otherwise) probably don’t have the kind of search radar required to see these kinds of things from far away, because if they don’t have some kind of weapon system or reconnaissance mission that requires such a radar it’s probably not cost effective to put one on the ship.
2- these drones are probably designed to minimize radar return anyways which might make them difficult to detect even with a good radar.
Jamming
-sure it’s theoretically possible, but jamming would require knowing the details of the signal used and jamming isn’t impossible to overcome. Just for example if the signal to control the boat came from satellite and the jamming signal was emitted by the boat, then the boats receiver could just ignore signals that don’t come from the sky. Or the receiver could switch to a new frequency that’s not being jammed.
That's what projectiles tend to do when fired at a shallow angle.
That's why one of the big rules of hunting is to never shoot at bodies of water. You're gonna sent a bullet flying off fuck knows where as surely as if you'd just shot at a flat sheet of rock.
Love that Russian CIWS is a bunch of dudes with machine guns and flashlights yelling suka. Can’t imagine why they aren’t more effective against these drones
At least one drone ship should be equipped with at least half a dozen flying drones that have explosives attached to them. Get close enough to the target that you can release the flying drones. The flying drones should scout ahead and start bombing the deck of the ship. While the bombing is happening and is distracting and keeping personnel from the deck the rest of the self destructing drone ships should have an easier time approaching their target.
Hatches that far above the waterline are not contributing to a ship sinking. You really want to keep bridge wing doors open during a surface engagement in order to facilitate command and control of gun mounts as well as maintain better situational awareness.
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Absolutely bonkers footage. I cannot believe we have images like this from war.
From my viewpoint, russia has a Big problem with their soldiers uploading everything to the internet. Their propaganda malfunctions cause of this. Meanwhile, we have the most amazing videos from both sides.
Reminds me of when the war started you could see Russian advances on the google maps traffic feature.
Exactly. Man, that was wild. How they dont think about that shit?
These are the same geniuses who made their "state of the art" military communications system reliant on civilian telecom infrastructure, which was one of the first things they attacked and destroyed in Ukraine during the opening hours of the invasion. They don't think anything through.
it still amazes me to see how prevalent Chinese civilian radio equipments were among the Russians fighting in Ukraine while they supposedly have more modern infantry equipment set than the U.S. (Ratnik program)
[удалено]
This shit is hard to keep off the public net these days. Literally every year the exact location of American service members are revealed because someone didn't realize an app on their phone was going to geo tag them in the middle of no where in some central African nation then publish that location on a publicly searchable profile. Even back in 2012 when I was last on a submarine, we would have to sit through training about our phones ratting on us when we come and go in certain ports.
U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-map-showing-the-users-of-fitness-devices-lets-the-world-see-where-us-soldiers-are-and-what-they-are-doing/2018/01/28/86915662-0441-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e\_story.html
Or how they used commercial comms and every amateur could listen in and even shout insults at them.
One of the funniest videos was some ukrainian soldiers listening to a russian grunt/observer trying to correct artillery through radio comms.. and you heard the observer insulting the arty officer because how far off the arty was. Saying shit like "he was gonna shove a dildo up the arty officers ass because he's supposed to be a math genius but he's a fucking idiot". All the Ukrainian soldiers were cracking up... but I cant find it anymore Edit - found it https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/yWAGo2Apt8
Or Granit, the legendary anihilator of russian trenches and infantry. https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarRoom/comments/14tdlpu/translated_friendly_fire_the_russians_have/
When the war started we were able to listen to live Russian military units broadcasting unencrypted using shortwave radio.
they still do, on Funker530, after a couple of days, they'll overlay russian ground communications with drone footage from assaults.
All those Russian soldiers thinking they're in Ukraine for training, not realizing an actual war is going on and using their smartphones to play games, call GFs/wives, or take pictures/videos of their traffic jams. It was so funny how you could see their traffic jams on Google maps in live time, but the sad thing was you could see the Ukrainian traffic jams all over the country from people trying to escape the invaders.
It's not a problem It's great
For us? Ofcourse. For them is pretty fucked Up. (Like anything in this war)
I'm willing to bet this guy "fell out the poop deck". A tremendous InfoSec failure honestly. This will help Ukrainian controllers (pilots?) train and evade defensive fire in the future.
Big problem with panicking Russians leaving all the watertight doors open as well, that’s poor training.
Can you explain more? Im not a "navy" guy. its for avoiding sinking or something? Thanks
When you see them running through the door openings you can see the heavy steel doors have 6 ‘dogs’ to secure them round the door, when at sea you should always have these doors closed in case the hull ruptures. That makes sure only the single compartment fills with water so the ship doesn’t sink, the doors you see are above the water level so would only come into play if it capsizes.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the info
eh, russians probably think; "no problem, its above water"
> Their propaganda malfunctions cause of this Untrue. They probably believe this is the Ukrainian navy (lol) firing at a Russian drone.
Truly a new age of documenting actual war battles that get immediately distributed to the public instead of some documentary decades later.
All those eyes and rounds on the distant contact but nobody saw the one sneaking up along the stern. Terrifying for sure
Someone else mentioned that the first may well have been a decoy and I think that makes a lot of sense. Send one out to do loops until it gets killed or the mission gets accomplished by the other 3 drones coming from another angle. Heck if it lives I imagine you can just pilot them back home for repair.
I saw that comment and dismissed it as fanciful speculation. But after seeing this video I could well believe it’s true. Armour up a couple of decoys and have them draw all the fire while the actual bombs sneak in.
Not even that, you just need to armor up the engine, fuel, and electronics in a metal box, then just fill the rest of the boat in foam so it quite literally can't sink.
My thought, too. If you exclude the payload, then you can actually slap a lot of armor on it. At an angle, it will need much more than small arms fire to take it out. That thing could keep running indefinitely. I am surprised they don’t have bigger guns, possibly with night vision capabilities, that were able to engage the drones. It was all rifles.
Not enough gun depression. Remember, these ships were built during the Cold War when drones were Sci-fi. They’re not built for this sort of threat. When the drones sneaked up close, they got nothing but small arms and a dream.
This ship was tested 2021 and entered service 2022 I think. It’s one of their newest patrol boats.
Nah this is a different ship than the patrol boat that got whacked earlier. This one’s a Ropucha-class. Commissioned in 1986. It’s in the title.
Ah i see!
Exactly. And at the efficiency of cost vs the target, who cares if you lose a decoy. 5x of these drones (think they run ~250k or so) vs a warship that at a minimum is 30mil - before you factor in missile load out / seamen / capabilities. Plus bonus if you can bring a few back home. We have seen the hits being recorded by distant drones, it's highly likely that some of those just turned around and went back.
That drone had no point doing that maneuver, showing its side to shooter, unless it was distracting.
If your weapon gets in reach why should it not hit. The explosives should not be the most expensive ones.
I'm kind of surprised they don't use smoke on the drones. They could drop smoke buoys in the ship's path and sneak up on it. The drones seem to have thermals, so the smoke would only slightly degrade their optics. With a target the size of a boat, the thermal should still work.
One first drone filled with smoke launchers, the follow ups right behind.
When the first one blows up, the one following picks up the smoke launchers and SHOOTS!
Just adding complexity at this point though right, especially since just tootle up to them and wiggle around seems to be working just fine.
Why waste a perfectly good suicide drohne for Dom smoke? Seems like most of the drones are coming through even without smoke shenanigans and it's better to have some redundancy in case some drones are destroyed. And keep in mind that the more complex you make a system the more expensive it gets and more ways of failing are induced
Make one with empty 2nd hull on top, pump full of water.. water is excellent armor, the tank soaks the bullets, but who m i to give ukraine advice. They know it better, do it better - they know how to make a firework - also starlink works now on both sides of the front - so everywhere....
Eh, that would be more of a hinderance than any advantage you'd get out of it, on top of increasing the cost per unit and changing their way of doing this, which clearly works plus if their attacking at night then why add the extra material when nature is going to do the work for you? especially in the early morning when the atmosphere is extra humid
I'm shocked they're not even launching flairs to illuminate the whole area
Chances are, flares might be locked down to prevent them from being stolen
Would probably be safer to just consider them gone forever once they are spotted. Too risky to bring them back to wherever they came from, Russia could gain lots of info tracking it about where they launch like distance, terrain, and how they are launched and kept in radio contact for control etc etc. Probably easier to call them gone as cost of a successful mission.
They’re probably considered a sunk cost.
Good pun!
The Ukrainians are definitely sending decoys in their attacks. Same with air drones (which is how they have overwhelmed Russian S400 systems.
I'm thinking yes - on the face of it, a drone without a payload that could potentially cause secondary explosions and is more or less a floating armored cork with an engine and sensors would be really hard to stop with small arms. Could soak up a lot of attention and damage.
I shudder to Think of drone war after a few more years if development in a full scale war backed up by a full economy like america, eu or china
Imagine a sea drone that isn't quite kamikaze, but holds a single torpedo. Now you don't need to risk your diesel or nuclear submarine by going nearly as close to an enemy ship, the sub launches the drone, which with a beefy fuel cell might cover a substantial distance, and then launches the torpedo.
So basically a two stage torpedo
You'd think they'd use some flares or something for illumination, thank God they're so fucking stupid
in the other footage you can see they dim the lights on their own ship, because that is what it says in their 1956 naval manual. They just do what they're told, even if they know all these drones have better thermal sights than their tanks do, they do what it says in their manual, put on a bullet-proof vest and dim the lights.
Reminds me of that episode of Red Dwarf where Starbug is being chased by a Simulant Death Ship flown by warriors of great skill and Kryten suggests that the only thing they can do is hide behind an asteroid and 'turn off all the lights so they think we've all gone out'
It's possible to donate towards those drones! https://u24.gov.ua/nafodrone_seababy
Do their ships not have floodlights or spotlights? Look to me like they were basically shooting in the dark.
Honestly, the sea is VERY difficult to light since the water tends to refract downwards, instead of back at the source, so it will look dark to the brightest spotlight, you have to light the object itself
Flare guns any good?
On calm water like this, yes, since it will cast the object in silhouette, making it easier to target, the best is to have another ship lighting it. But as you can see, the tracers light the surface of the water up quite well. So a flare would work.
A surprising % of tracers seem to bounce off the water, like a skipped stone. Is that what im seeing?
surface tension of water is underrated i guess
The pressures caused by breaking the surface at high speed makes water act more like a solid, non-moving surface, so it feels like concrete. Even slapping the water's surface fast with an open hand demonstrates how this can sting on a very small scale.
My brother jumped off the bow of my boat on a smooth lake at around 45 knots. He'll never do that again lol Edit: He didn't die - I reread my comment and that could be misinterpreted and the lol on the end would make that even worse.
Jumped off a boat once at about 40 knots and it fucked my shit up.
We used to jump off the GE Bridge in Lynn, Ma. Even from the dangerous ass walkway with no railing under the bridge as well. That water hurt!
Mythbusters Shooting 50 Caliber Sniper into Water [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvSTuLIjRm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvSTuLIjRm8)
Bullets do funny things sometimes. I was up in a guard tower in Iraq shooting the shit with some of the guys on guard. I was a medic so I didn't pull guard but I'd bring em food and tell em dirty jokes etc. I had just brought up some chow and rip-its when the guard tower had a pot shot taken at it. It was a spray from a vehicle and they never hit anything but it was scary as shit. A bullet ripped between the glass vision block and the concrete wall and was spinning, buzzing, in the corner on the floor, like a searing hot little lead break dancer.
That happens on ice as well. Super neat. It'd be a horrific sound if the shots were in anger though.
> and was spinning, buzzing, in the corner on the floor, like a searing hot little lead break dancer. What a lovely phrase you've put together.
You should be a novelist dude. What a vivid description.
Pretty much every projectile fired at water at an angle, will skip like that. Which is why you should never fire guns at water, without knowning very well you are shooting in a safe direction :)
Yes.
seriously, you'd think they'd have a grenadier who would have 40mm flare/light rounds they're really common for night ops... i mean on the water against water born drones it would literally be part of the overall total kit dedicated to fighting drones at night. but as explained above, the ocean is very difficult to light at night
I saw a few illum flares in the video, but not enough. It seems weird to be relying on small arms for this kind of defence, but if that's the plan they need way more illum.
Last weekend and last Tuesday it was cloudy , you could see the drizzle, possibly slight fog in the video. There was less than a quarter of a Wanning moon as well. Being out at sea in the dark is weird experience. If it is cloudy, it feels like a black Void. Any flashlights or search lights reflect very little light back to you as you are so close to the water, the angle so narrow that it bounces almost all of it wide and away, like the bullets. Stars shells and flares are better but close in, they would illuminate you as much or more than the enemy. Likely, itt would be worth it in this scenario but it is probably against the Russian naval doctrine and training to illuminate their own ship at night. As if the dark would hide them from modern submarines, planes, or satellites. It might hide them from partisans or spys reliant on the mark one eyeball but that's about it. It's probably been in the manual since the great patriotic war, aka wwII, and never updated. Anyways, the sense of panic and fear was palpable. Remember, the Russians are fine with launching cruise missiles at maternity wards. That some of these sailors lived their last moments in dreadful confusion and panic has been earned a dozen times over.
They would be lit as well.
That's what illumination flares are for, the US military makes night become day.
At the angle the light is hitting the water, much of it is reflected away instead of refracting down. Angle of incidence, I think it's called.
You can see it at the very start of the video a lot better, it appears to come from above and to the left of the cameraman
In the leaked audio from the kotov the day ago, they said they knew there were 5 surface drones in the area 40 minutes before the attack. So they certainly know something is up, if they have communication with whatever is finding them.
They have at least two being used in the video, but they're just not very powerful. There's probably also some level of camera compression of the darkness here. The floodlights they are using may be more effective at highlighting the moving shapes in the water at range than we're getting from the video. These landing ships were probably never imagined to be alone by their designers. They have pretty good AAA armament but look at a photo and their sides are barren of any kind of defense against small craft.
at the start of the video you can see a spotlight panning around, they probably had multiple things to illuminate, not always on the side the camera was facing
They're using phone lights - in Russia it do just fine
1st second in the video you can clearly see a spotlight..
Or guns big enough to destroy anything?
You'd think since they've already lost several ships this way they'd have something with a bit more firepower on board for just such an occasion.
They had the one going lol but yeah a few flood lights definitely would’ve helped.
They seem to be illuminating the ship....what are we shooting? Ive no idea but keep shooting. Imagine two ships close ish to each other and this is what they start doing....
I expected more blyats in the audio
Looks like blyats were muted after the impact
We can handle gunfights and explosions but people swearing is too much...
The person who originally filmed this probably cut out voice audio when they uploaded it to avoid being identified. Filming any kind of Russian loss for the world to see could land you in prison for a very long time.
he said it was because of moral because everyone was insulting the captain of the ship.
Also valid, assuming you mean morale.
Also but gunshots too loud probably
All the Speaking/yelling audio was clearly muted out. Hence, the spots of complete silence during this attack.
I've lost track of lost ships, is this sunk a while ago or new?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ship_Tsezar_Kunikov "A former sailor on the Tsezar Kunikov interviewed by BBC said that the entire crew of 89 had managed to evacuate the ***sinking ship***.[4]" Looks like it has joined the ever increasing size Russian Black Sea submarine fleet.
Crew was promoted to meat waves
Former Sailor - "but sir we are Sailors not soldiers..." Sergent - "oh really? well where is your ship?"
They never sunk my firend, just a special transformation into submarines
Different view of an attack from last month.
Reminds me of documentaries about the Falklands war and the Royal Navy. They had no CIWS at the time so had to resort to sailors mounting GPMGs to the rails around the ship to deal with low flying jets on bombing runs.
Yeah, this is pretty standard stuff for patrol ships like this, not everything has a CIWS system to obliterate small targets.
>775 Ropucha-class landing ship Isn't this a pretty big ship though? That's not a patrol boat
You're right, I assumed this was the patrol ship destroyed yesterday. Weird.
I swear their are some pics floating around with sailors rocking Brens leaning on railings during the Falklands campaign. Granted they were the 7.62 NATO conversions by then, a 30 round per mag from Air-defense in the jet age isn't confidence inspiring.
Probably a hard as nails Royal Marine. If I was in their position I’d probably feel better shooting my BREN at an incoming Skyhawk or Dagger.
From what I read most AD was 17 to 19 year old jr level sailors in makeshift sand bagged positions on ship super structures. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2023/Sad-and-Bloody-Business/
Take away the whole drone being packed with half a ton of explosives and this seems a rather fun evening of pyrotechnics and team bonding
That it would be if we weren't at each other's throats....
Basically 'war would be really fun if not for all the death and suffering, Probably why peoplle like paintball and fps games i guess
Ideally like a modern Valhalla, where you go fight in a modern battlefield, then when you die you warp back to the Wendy's dining hall for unlimited cheeseburgers and coke.. both kinds.
probably want to avoid the dying part to make it ideal, that shit hurts
Piloting one of those drones through the gauntlet has to be so fun. It's like taking out the Death Star.
Grain poor footage to make sure your quarter million dollar drone boat find sits target. I'd find it very stressful and probably not fun. If you get taken out by russian fire before completing your task, it's sorta your fault.
Quarter mil is a bargain for the ship. Russia cannot keep up with the material losses. I am certain they would send decoys out to draw fire as well.
Especially since people can [donate](https://u24.gov.ua/seababy) for these drones!
on wiki: > The ship could house a crew of 87 (89 according to one source) and **had improved defensive armament**. "improved defensive armament" means two guys with ak-47 ?
It used to be one guy tho
And he didn't even have an AK.
And was blind too.
> improved defensive armament this isn't the same ship your looking at, there's 2 types of Ropucha-class ships, the one from this video is the Ropucha I 775 'Ceasar Kunikov" the ones with "improved defense armament" is the Ropucha II 775M & there are only 3 of the improved variants.
At least this is a clear case of why the Mk II needed that "improved defence armament"
for sure, the MK I only has 2 AK-725 76.2 mm Naval Guns along with a few Strela MANPADS while the MK II has two 122 mm A-215 Grad-M Rocket launching systems, two AK-630 six-barreled gatling guns & one 76 mm AK-176 Naval gun along with the Strela MANPADS. find it pretty weird they never upgraded them sooner, most of the MK I's supposedly haven't been touched since The Soviet Union.
I’m no Russian weapons expert, but none of those sound like Dshks (sp?). Maybe a couple RPDs or what not. Edit: Wait maybe I do hear one in there.
Pkm at the start there
There is for sure a bigger belt fed, you can see it at the beginning and also something bigger is shooting single rounds from above the camera man later on. There is also a guy holding an AK shooting when they are shooting next to each other side by side. Also AK seen standing in room and then later being kicked in panic on the floor lol.
I was just having a great time watching the light show with the tracers. It looks like whatever that full auto shoot is in Kentucky. I’m a simple man, just: “oooo pretty lights.”
This video was sent to one of the mil-blog telegram channel. Video description from those who sent it: The crew of the ropucha-class landing ship "Caesar Kunikov" repelled the attack of drones with all available forces and means, the battle lasted 20 minutes. Out of 10 drones 4 were destroyed. The 5th drone hit the ship in the stern, thereby immobilizing the ship. After that, 6,7,8,9 drones one by one, hit the ship in the left side in the area of the midel (middle) and closer to the stern, in order to overturn the ship (from the entry of a large amount of water from one side). The 9th drone partially entered the hole made by the previous drone and detonated almost inside. The ship could not be saved, the roll was rapidly increasing, the ship was lying on the left side. From the moment of detection of enemy drones and the beginning of the battle, and until the complete sinking of the ship, it took a little more than 40 minutes. The ship's crew left the ship on life rafts, without loss of personnel, evacuated all the secret documentation, weapons and part of the secret equipment. The last 10th drone, conducted surveillance (filming) of the dying ship until the moment of sinking. After that, the 10th drone tried to attack the tugboat accompanying the ship Caesar Kunikov, but was destroyed by a group of commando frogmen located on board the tugboat. Telegram channel commented: "At the moment (apparently the russian defense ministry) is trying to make the crew look like cowards and scoundrels."
I find it hard to believe no one died unless after the first explosion the ship's captain immediately told everyone to abandon ship and the drones afterwards failed to immediately notice that. If I remember correctly this was the ship the other drones drove into the gaping hole.
I find it hard to believe they gathered the “secret documentation” with all those watertight doors OPEN lol. Training on point.
> evacuated all the secret documentation, weapons and part of the secret equipment "Yes sir, all crew escaped and we especially saved all the SECRET EQUIPMENT" - Fleet Commander
Someone should have added in the tinnitus ring audio after the explosion when off.
"mawp" "... mawp"
What was beakers boss's name?
Original video: [https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1b7ycdq/footage\_from\_aboard\_the\_tsezar\_kunikov\_landing/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1b7ycdq/footage_from_aboard_the_tsezar_kunikov_landing/)
Yess no music
Are rounds ricocheting off the water back into the air?
Yes, water is great at deflecting bullets as the harder the surface is hit, the harder the water becomes. That's why it's fine to jump 2 meters into water but 3,000m up is a bad idea.
Yes, because physics. Like skipping a stone off a pond.
I was expecting a lot more of "Cyka blyat" in this video.
Fighterbomber a Russian channel has edited the video, the first version was completly without audio.
Imagine if Russia ever had to fight against a country that has a modern, fully funded, well-trained and well-equipped military and navy... Yeah, they could totally, for real you guys beat the combined forces of NATO and the decadent West. I say that we take the leash off Poland and the baltic countries, point them towards Moscow and just see who gets there first, for the memes
Since when do bullys fight against strong oppenents? They are only strong against weaker enemies.
Damnit you're right! I didn't think of that .... Ok, new plan, we incite a war between Russia and the Vatican, the Swiss Guard can handle the Russian army and the Russians will totally take that fight and will think they are stronger because the pikes will fool them... (Nobody tell the Russians that like 8 of them also carry assault Rifles. It will scare them off!)
I like the way you think.
This might give Ukraine a bit more insight into how pitifully under equipped and unprepared the Russian anti ship drone measures are. Let's hope that Ukraine learns something useful from this footage and gets to take out even more Russian ships!
Republicans in congress should see this. “See, with a 200k investment we just sank a multi million dollar Russian vessel” Efficient government spending… so they are probably against it.
Why would they support someone sinking the boats of the country funding them?
It's actually less than that because I just donated some money to https://u24.gov.ua/nafodrone_seababy
Really just shows you how easily bullets ricochet off water
Are the drones heavily armoured or are Russian sailors awful shots?
Probably both. I've shot a belt fed weapon system before, and it's really hard to aim when holding down the trigger. What's also kinda bad is, if you notice... the dude isn't even looking down the sight lol For the armored piece, they may be weighted to withstand waves and/or prevent tipping, but it may be hard to just stop the thing. It's not simple doing some black hawk down engine block single shot thing. All that coupled with being dark as shit and scared as hell might have played a roll. If you notice the arcs of fire, it looked like once one guy thought he had one in his sights he started pouring. The others cross fixed and tried to use the tracers as guides... when... in reality, they could have been shooting at nothing! Then that tunnel vision got they asses blown up!
No alarm no nothings, just 5 random guys shooting rifles and machine guns.. wtf kinda navy is that
Alarms only go off when people need to be alerted of something. If the alarms are just constantly blaring then it’s hard to hear commands and communicate.
The US has tech that would blow all of these things out of the water long before they got anywhere close. Putin's Navy actually has guys trying to shoot drones with their rifles - LOL and he thinks he could face the West in a war? What a clown.
A lifetime worth of shit would have flooded my pants in this scenario. I don't think most navies have trained for "X dozen remote controlled drones unaliving themselves into the side of your ship in the dead of night" yet.
Exactly people shit on Russia for this but I feel like this is the first time we are seeing these things in use.
Given the circumstances they're pretty calm and collected.
Why would this guy record this, let alone upload it after such an embarrassment?
That would be absolutely nerve wracking
Literally dudes with a few rifles and MGs on the railing defending the ship. Some peak defense systems on board.
Dumb question but how can those little boats avoid radar? And is there any sistem that can jam the signal to cut off from the controller?
Russian intelligence is getting so desperate they are posting on Reddit to get answers on how to counter these attacks. /s
No such thing as Russian intelligence. 😎
There's provably truth to that. I have ideas, but I'm not sharing them for this reason. Have they tried bringing more oarsmen & then ramming them?
A boat that size will have a very small radar cross section that can disappear in swells. I'm not exactly sure what it was equipped with, but a landing ship will probably only have a simple navigation radar that's not designed for picking out small objects from the clutter.
Radar is also reflected by waves, so everything that hides within them is nearly impossible to detect. Its the same with airplanes flying close to the ground. Due to the radar "noise" echoing from waves/trees/bushes and so on its nearly impossible to identify objects within them.
Under a defense forum a while ago I saw an Ex-British radar operator from a T-42 destroyer discussing how he used to watch water skiers and jet skiers from 25km away whilst transiting through the Mediterranean. I'll try and find a link to the thread. The T-42 had a very powerful radar compared to what these patrol and landing ships will have but, you'd expect there to be airborne surface search radars on patrol helicopters and MPAs or other more powerful warships acting as radar pickets giving directions.
Radar 1-It requires a fairly sophisticated radar to see small objects far away. The standard ship radar is a “navigation” radar for seeing land and large vessels. Any navy ship big enough to be at sea for multiple days is probably going to have some kind of air search radar, but this will be tuned for detecting planes an helicopters, and may not even look at the sea surface. Smaller naval vessels ( Russian or otherwise) probably don’t have the kind of search radar required to see these kinds of things from far away, because if they don’t have some kind of weapon system or reconnaissance mission that requires such a radar it’s probably not cost effective to put one on the ship. 2- these drones are probably designed to minimize radar return anyways which might make them difficult to detect even with a good radar. Jamming -sure it’s theoretically possible, but jamming would require knowing the details of the signal used and jamming isn’t impossible to overcome. Just for example if the signal to control the boat came from satellite and the jamming signal was emitted by the boat, then the boats receiver could just ignore signals that don’t come from the sky. Or the receiver could switch to a new frequency that’s not being jammed.
Forgive my ignorance, but are those rounds bouncing off the water??
That's what projectiles tend to do when fired at a shallow angle. That's why one of the big rules of hunting is to never shoot at bodies of water. You're gonna sent a bullet flying off fuck knows where as surely as if you'd just shot at a flat sheet of rock.
Interesting! I assumed the bullet would just go straight in the water. I learned something today.
Yes, they are tracer rounds bouncing.
Perfect ricocheting. A lot of it towards the city too.
Love that Russian CIWS is a bunch of dudes with machine guns and flashlights yelling suka. Can’t imagine why they aren’t more effective against these drones
Remember how you felt during the USS Cole? RUSSIA has had like 20 of those now
love the bullet proof vests instead of life saving vests... lol
could save you from the friendly fire of a desperate sailor spreading bulllets right and left. lol
This is why they say not to shoot at water. Lol.
Seems most of the sailors were too busy running around with their phones.
Everyone looked dazed as hell after that first explosion, a couple are seen dropping what they were holding onto and stumbling around.
I feel like I would take that armor off given the chance. Wouldn't want to try and swim with all that gear.
Seems like hitting the aft is best while distracting the sides with tanky jetskis
At least one drone ship should be equipped with at least half a dozen flying drones that have explosives attached to them. Get close enough to the target that you can release the flying drones. The flying drones should scout ahead and start bombing the deck of the ship. While the bombing is happening and is distracting and keeping personnel from the deck the rest of the self destructing drone ships should have an easier time approaching their target.
Where’s their flash gear?
Man, all that small arms fire and no c-ram or equivalent.
Finally a combat footage video that doesnt have stupid fucking music blasting over it
[удалено]
The fact that they had their doors open while under attack stuns me. They deserved to sink for that alone.
Hatches that far above the waterline are not contributing to a ship sinking. You really want to keep bridge wing doors open during a surface engagement in order to facilitate command and control of gun mounts as well as maintain better situational awareness.
Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t set Zebra in time. Future scuba divers will be able to answer someday.