Ukraine is developing a secret weapon with a large range and high power, and information about this combat vehicle causes a lot of curiosity for observers.
A representative of the arms import and export company Ukroboronprom recently announced that they are developing a secret weapon that can become the longest “arm” in launching a long-range attack on the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The company statement said: “This weapon has a range of 1,000 km, a warhead weight of 75 kg. We are completing the development process”, accompanied by a photo of a part of the weapon, most likely. This is the fuselage of a suicide drone.
Of course, it is difficult to accurately predict Ukraine’s new weapon from just such a picture, but it is easy to see that the warhead it carries is very heavy.
If this is a suicide UAV, it should have an estimated wingspan of more than 4 meters, and a takeoff weight of over 200 kg. Currently, Ukraine has not provided an overview of the engine as well as the control system for the weapon to work over large distances.
It should be emphasized that the combat range of 1,000 km of an unmanned aircraft is very large, which leads to questions related to the means of navigation and data transmission to the control center in real-time.
If there is no satellite connection, then at such a range a direct control channel cannot be realized due to exceeding the limits of the radio-electromagnetic horizon.
In these conditions, the simplest way to implement guidance would be conventional satellite navigation, which allows the hitting of stationary objects with known coordinates. But its accuracy does not allow for the destruction of highly mobile military objects.
But the question of accuracy is often offset by the mass of warheads carried by the weapon, and in some cases, it is even more appropriate. For example, when it is necessary to disable enemy airfields.
More difficult but much more useful could be the ability to install a passive radar head on a suicide drone to destroy enemy air defenses and surveillance radars.
High-tech guided vehicles in autonomous mode are said to be quite expensive, in addition to being easily intercepted. So it will be much more effective if this weapon is equipped with a conditional thermal imaging probe, with the ability to identify targets on the ground.
If this is done, Ukraine’s “secret weapon” will have a much higher chance of penetrating an adversary’s air defenses than a traditional slow-moving drone.
According to Ukrainian media, the most important issue now is the completion of R&D and maintaining a high rate of mass production in order to provide a variety of combat vehicles of this type to the army.
Currently, the Iran-made Shahed-136 suicide drone supplied to the Russian Army has proven highly effective on the battlefield, which prompts Ukraine to soon give an answer with full weight.
We are not talking about the fact that Ukraine will create single models, but about the need to mass-produce at least a few hundred suicide UAVs to achieve efficiency and overload enemy air defenses.
