Speculation has it that either “Palyantsia” (small turbojet drone) or “Neptun” (sizable cruise missile, antiship with ground strike capability) were used. Since part of the Russian facility was hardened and underground, I would ordinarily favour the hypothesis of “Neptun”, but it’s supposed to be out of their range and the videos recorded over Russia featured a turbojet sound and the video you linked has a small explosion (this would fit “Palyantsia”, since it’s small).
/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux
They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.
Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.
On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.
However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
Both of you are right.
It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.
If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.
Ideally, people should try to get them Jas-39 Gripen with MBDA Meteor missiles to back up the F-16 fleet.
Currently, the situation seems to be: F-16 pilots are still inexperienced and their missiles are outranged by some missiles that a Su-35 could be carrying (e.g. R-77M with 190 km range). When a Su-34 (fighter-bomber) conducts glide bombing runs from a distance of 40 km, a Su-35 (air superiority fighter) typically provides it air cover. Under such conditions, it’s a difficult task for an F-16 pilot to fire an AMRAAM at the bomber (at best 180 km range) and evade counter-fire from the fighter. Fortunately they’ve got shiny new ECM pods and hopefully Russian planes haven’t got decent radars.
However, a plane with longer range weapons (Meteor can fly for 200 km) would deter even a fighter escort of the Su-34, and likely end glide bombing as a tactic.
Alternatively, one can hope that the actual range of AMRAAM exceeds the advertised range or the actual range of R-77M falls short of advertised range - or that they have better radars, or can somehow backport Meteor to F-16, or that their ECM can beat the electronics of R-77. However, as far as I’m aware, firing an AMRAAM from maximum range needs a really big target (actual bomber, not a fighter-bomber).
Either way, good to hear it happened. :) If it happens more, it might finally deter glide bombing. So far, air defense ambushes have also temporarily deterred it and drones have struck airfields where the Su-34 planes get equipped, but nothing has stopped it for long.