Hacker News Reader

Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

Quote from the Moscow-based think tank, the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies:

“The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva cruiser, was indeed attacked by the Neptune anti-ship missiles from the coastline between Odessa and Mykolaiv,” it said, adding that a drone distracted the ship before the missiles hit. [emphasis mine]

Ref: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/14/ukraine-russ...

View on HN

As the ship was host to a S-300F system, roughly analogous to the US's AEGIS missile defense, getting distracted by a single drone sounds like it should be yet another black eye in this whole chain of events.

What if, just hypothetical, it was a swarm. (I don't think it was in this case).

I mean private persons can use drone swarms to put pictures on the night sky.

And while they are rout pre-programmed, it's not hard to use a template to very fast pre-program a drone swarm to fly some pseudo randomized pattern around a ship of which the position is known.

Likely not a consumer class drone/quadcopter like what you're picturing, but a combat drone (basically a small airplane) like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_TB2

The analysis I saw noted that their air defense only had a 180-degree range. So a drone could be used to distract their defense, get it pointed away from the Neptune launcher, then fire from the ship's blind spot.

Pretty sure the drone wasn’t merely a distraction, I think they have pods with data links to the missiles with also talk to each other.

Yes, the drone was used to provide the precise ship's position to the missiles, and that allowed to almost immediately turn off the main radar of the missile launching battery, thus not allowing Russia to learn about its position and to strike back.

Do you know this for a fact or is it speculation?

It is not even a speculation, it's a nonsense. Strike distance was between 50 and 150 km, ground based radar is useless against surface targets on that range. Neptune has an inertial+GPS navigation system with active radar on the final approach[1]. This is how anti-ship missiles are working.

[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%BF%D1%82%D1%83...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com