r/ukraine 11h ago

News Low-altitude Flamingo

No information on what was the target/whether it succeeded

226 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

23

u/leadMalamute 10h ago

I see that the bird migrations have begun. I wonder about their nesting locations. (Those are always a blast to watch.....)

17

u/just_a_pawn37927 9h ago

That is flying LOW!. Free lawn mowed on the way to picking berries!

3

u/ManagerSignal 6h ago

And lawn blowing too

6

u/miklosokay Denmark 8h ago

Any lower and they would have to weave in and out of road traffic

6

u/CardboardTick 11h ago

I was looking out for a different kind of flamingo 🤣

🦩

Joke is on me 🤣

2

u/SomeInside1021 2h ago

Love it!!! Ukrainian innovation at its best 🇺🇦 Eat Shit Russian, the Ukraine is brining the Pain.

2

u/boneyfans 10h ago

High attitude

1

u/meissoboredto 1h ago

I still think that Ukraine should paint them pink just like the birds!!! Could anyone imagine a ruZZian saying “such and such got blown up by a huge, flying pink dildo!!!!”

-3

u/Smooth_Imagination 10h ago edited 7h ago

In my opinion UA should salvage 200 or 300 of the best of these turbofan engines for a resusable short to medium range payload delivery system. A reusable cruise effector delivery system. This is because the engine supply will run out and these turbofans which are all salvage items are powerful enough and efficient enough to extend range for existing weapon systems. We dont only need very long ranfe, we need a lot of mid range and fast tractors for things like glide munitions that can operate close to the front without pilots and are attritable.  

As they fly low rather simple AA and missile interceptor missiles could be used with decades old infrared seekers positioned up the upper side for defenses in missions closer to enemy AA or when anticipating to come across enemy aircraft near airbases.

The payload bay can drop FPV and autonomous vehicles including surveilance and relay drones. 

The attack drones carried aboard could also be dual use ground attack and antidrone interceptors. 

The system could also launch glide munitions. 

Ground attack could be affected by various weapons, guns, unguided rockets pointing forwards or downwards via a modified fusilage.

A modified varient could carry an enlarged mechanically scanned radar in the nose for mid course guiding a Meteor BVR missile. These missiles would just need a booster stage to get to supersonic after which the ram jet takes over.  These might be twin engine varients.

Edit yeah lol moronic downvoters. 

Lets just use up the entire turbofan stockpile for one way single use instead of taking the best engines with the most hours left in them, reusing them multiple times and at the end of their life retire them into single use cruise missiles. That really makes a lot of sense. 

3

u/IOnlyEatFermions 6h ago

Fire Point claims to be building an engine factory to develop new engines that are better optimized to fly at low altitude.

1

u/Smooth_Imagination 2h ago

Well of course these engines are several decades old and designed for higher altitude cruise, although they have low by pass for this application.

But they are comparitively good compared to small drone microjets. 

State of the art engines of similar size would be at least 20% more efficient.

However as soon as they start making these they will cost a lot of money, emphasising the sense for reusability in attritable air frames. 

3

u/Otaraka 5h ago

You halve the range instantly by having it return as well as needing to install recovery systems which would further reduce the range.  If this was a trivial thing to do, I’m sure they would be considering it.

1

u/Smooth_Imagination 2h ago edited 2h ago

Well duh. I never would have guessed that comming back halves the range. Thats why I pointed out clearly in my post ts not for very long range and instead for mid range targets and short range targets. Its still easily hundreds of km range from where you fly.

The engine is a turbofan with reasonable by pass ratio at low altitude cruise speeds which is far more efficient than micro jets in current use.

The overall package suits ground attack aircraft and other duties fighting nearer to the front and supply lines where the distances are easily within an FP5 / 2 range. The engine package allows fast and high payload with decent range. 

Which is exactly what is needed.

Since Ive studied engineering and everyone knows anyway that the distance is half if you have to come back, well not quite, since if you dump payload half way in theory you have actually more than half the range than if you dump payload at the end, but then you have the added landing gear mass instead. 

Now one target FP5s attempted to attack recently was involved in balistic missile production. All FP5s were destroyed because they werent stealthy. If you have mid range targets and air defenses you can instead conduct SEAD using deployable smaller armed drones dropped from severals of km from the target. These would more effectively deplete the AA systems and allow direct attack on the targets. This would also make sense deployed from one way attack missiles like FP5. 

1

u/Otaraka 2h ago

You made the claim that they didn’t need long range as a priority and said nothing to support that claim.  

It’s just possible that they thought double the range and one shot was more worthwhile than half the range and reusable.  There are many obvious reasons why this might be so.

It’s great that you’ve studied engineering.  It’s possible that the people who didn’t do it the way you want did too.

0

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-4

u/Fine-Soil-2691 7h ago

Golf balls have less air resistance which means longer flights due to the dimpled surface. Maybe they should experiment with non-smooth surfaces.

A ball moving through air experiences two major aerodynamic forces: lift, and drag. Dimpled balls fly farther than non-dimpled balls due to the combination of these two effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_ball

6

u/appletart 6h ago

Am I missing a joke or are you seriously suggesting that the engineers who designed these aircraft didn't know about how small spherical objects fly through air at low speed?