this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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[–] tastemyglaive@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The older rockets wore out the air defence, these are the guys who invented the Shahed-136. They have no shortage of small explosive projectiles.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, exactly. Why use your limited large munition stockpile.

[–] tastemyglaive@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

More explosives create larger explosions. Cluster bombs are large missiles, inhabited by many cluster bomblets. On the higher end, hypersonic weapons like Oreshnik have very interesting effects. Purely kinetically, no explosives involved, that thing left impact sites described as small volcanoes. The high speed ignites everything, metal + soil or whatever. I'll try to remember to post some of the articles I have saved on drones tomorrow.

Their stockpile is not limited. Their missile factories are in active production, mostly underground. The fuel that can't be manufactured underground has larger stockpiles.

[–] CanadaPlus 0 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Soil is chemically unable to burn.

I'm going to cut to the chase and just say it: this is the press release equivalent of "well we'll bomb you infinity plus one". All it really says is that they have morale and will keep going.

[–] tastemyglaive@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Pretty sure the correct term would be "vaporized" as the ceramic coating shears off, it would be better for me to post the material science-based speculation about the damage & the coating. The point is the kinetic damage adds bunker busting and a substantial amount of TNT. Concrete turns into tissue paper. I forgot to mention this because it's so basic but reaction time is a factor here, hence why they disabled the radar systems regionwide with the older missiles. The inner layers of the Iron Dome/Arrow or whatever can intercept drones but not missiles. Not to mention AA guns and even rifles can take out smaller drones. The same ceramics research Russia's doing that created Oreshnik's coating is also being used in some kind of anti-drone shotgun ammo, by the way, it's already out in production.

They're good because you can fire them, look around, and decide what to hit. Cheap enough to kill people and go for minor but fragile targets.

They're saying the missiles they are ready to deploy (for years if necessary) are very high yield and they are finished with phase 1. Phase 2 is gonna be fun!