this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
675 points (99.3% liked)

World News

39096 readers
2317 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

In a sharp escalation of its drone campaign targeting strategic industries deep inside Russia, Ukraine seems to have fitted Cessna-style light planes with remote controls, packed them with explosives and flown at least one of them more than 600 miles to strike a Russian factory in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow.

Ironically, the Russian factory produces—you guessed it—drones.

Russians on the ground recorded the shocking scene as the light plane dove onto the sprawling Alabuga Special Economic Zone industrial campus, where workers assemble Iranian-designed Shahed drones that, just like Ukraine’s DIY Cessna-style drone, can range as far 600 miles with an explosive payload.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

"dead reckoning" is the technical term for precalculated navigation, adjusting the path only from sensors like IMUs

(unless they used stuff like cameras and POI based navigation, but that seems unlikely)

I don't think it's correct to say normal planes use IMU more than GPS, they're all complementary. GPS tells the general direction and the IMU helps keeping the plane stable (no sudden jerks to turn when the GPS drifts). And ground radar tells the plane when it's too far off the path.

[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

“Dead reckoning” as in “dead reckoning” as in “deduced reckoning”. It’s the same kind of navigating people have done on boats for millennia. You start from a known point and move in a specific direction at a known speed for a specific amount of time. Then you change your speed and/or direction for another specific amount of time. And so on. If you have the ability to do so then you update your known position along the way via known landmarks you might pass.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah but the errors creep up, so if you don't see the islands of hope after sailing for 18 days at speed x, you're fucked :-)

That's why you have several systems, like gps to periodically try to get a good signal, or manual override.

[–] ours@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

An alternative is terrain mapping. You look at the terrain bellow you and compare in a database. Tomahawks navigate that way.

That navigation system was originally designed for the US nuclear powered doomsday cruise missile which would have zoomed across the USSR at supersonic speeds, low altitude, spewing radiation as it goes and dropping the occasional nuke. It could have done this for days.

[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Given what they've done elsewhere I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren't big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it's important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80's computing power, and it's only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.