The fibreglass lifting body immediately makes it more than your basic drone. Granted it’s not exactly rocket science, but you still need to get the shape right, make a giant mandrel, fit all those panels and doors together nicely. And then you need to figure out a production line that makes it cheap enough to mass produce them – after all, they get exploded.
Just imagine they used all of those tools and skills to make sailboats instead. Or still in the drone form-factor, have them circle events with a 5g cell relay on them or something. War sucks but it pays salaries, sadly.
Should have been kept quiet so that kyivstar can provide warning and tracking of these systems. Maybe they did. Maybe it’s already played out. I guess the story here is that Russia doesn’t have a c&c radio network that works?
Probably a mistake to reveal this info. After recovering the SIM, it may have been possible to go back and see the network traffic from the drone. That could create an opportunity to disrupt or hijack drone c&c in the future.
Ukraine should build some protections into their cell network. Like if the signal is coming from a high altitude and doesn’t follow any known commercial flight path (if commercial flights are even flying in that area), or if it exceeds a certain speed that varies, and isn’t on a Ukraine military whitelist, then interrupt the signal just enough to make it ineffective for combat.
It’s physically possible, though depends on if the receivers care about the vertical signal direction (for determining up) and if two towers can see it at the same time (for determining how high up, if signal quality alone isn’t enough to estimate it, though with these custom devices, it’s probably not reliable to go by signal strength). I don’t know if any go to that length, inside Ukraine or outside.
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