I have a drone (dji mini2) for photography and it's wild how fast you can lose all sight and sound from it if there's any backround noise. When it's calm and quiet you can hear it ~300m away but if there's any noise from traffic/city/whatever it's really easy to lost the thing to the sky even at 50-100m distance. A while ago I took photos from a sports event my kid was playing in and I couldn't spot the thing while it was stationary in the air 20 meters higher than me and maybe 70 meters away even if I had GPS, visual and everything so I knew where to look. Music was playing so I couldn't hear the motors at all and background had some forest so the drone itself wasn't visible against sky and shadows from the trees.

Based on the videos I'm quessing they're flying at 100-150m above ground and even the ones carrying grenades are a bit bigger than mine they're still very small objects against the sky. And they're getting damn accurate, I couldn't drop anything reliably from my drone even if I tried but guys at Ukraine are dropping epxlosives trough sunroofs of the cars.

All I'm wondering if it's really worth the time and effort to take down attackers one or two at the time with special equipment, but then again the alternative would be to have boots on the ground with an assault rifle, so I'm just assuming they know what they're doing and I'm definetly not the one going to advice them on anything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, the soldiers have probably spent months in trenches, and 99.99% of the time there isn't a drone to spot. After a while they just won't even look for one.

The effectiveness is huge. Just consider the k/d ratio.

And also the money spent per kill.

If you're in any way accustomed to military expenditures, the cost of these drone kills is negligible.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While the drones are indeed cheap as dirt compared to other military toys they have around it still wonders me about the scale and economics of the things. A guy with a sniper rifle costs roughly the same than a guy with a drone, difference being that a bullet from a rifle is far more cheaper than a dropped grenade, but you need a very skilled sniper to shoot into a trench potentially couple of km's away from the launch spot, so I suppose it's worth the "extra" effort in the end, but the scale of things just somehow seems wrong on my head as it's a relatively expensive and slow thing to take one guy at the time down.

Whatever the case might be, every successful drop from a drone is one (or more) less barrel pointed at the ukrainians and drones can be bought with just money. Someone (specially skilled) with a rifle isn't as easy nor fast to replace, so I suppose it makes sense to slowly grind attackers with presents from the sky.

In any case I salute ukrainians for their effort and once things calm down a bit I'll visit your beautiful country and (for what it's worth) I personally hope that you get peace and join EU and NATO soon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I guess snipers are the first ones to be picked off by enemy drones(think nicht vision).

I expect the drone pilots to be relatively safe.

I think even In WW1 most days didn't see much action in the trenches. So slow 'progress' with drones is better than no progress. Also, the drones are obviously auxiliary, and not the main strategy