Tu-141 crashes in Zagreb

[Shpaget]

31 minutes ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

I wonder why you would have a orange black box on something that is meant to explode.

My guess is that it's part of the original reconnaissance/avionics package, not the more recent modifications.

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Isn't the explosive charge just a self-destruction device of a recon drone.

The language DOD used is "aviobomba"*  and that they're no longer considering it to be a recon drone. 

* which would translate to "bomb dropped from aircraft", not cruise missile. Like I said, not much info, but I can't help interpreting that wording as some sort of hasty modification where somebody just stuck an off the shelf dumb bomb inside the drone and armed it.

Unofficial leak from DOD "from a reliable source" is that there was 120 kg of explosives and that it exploded underground in soft soil. Does that sound right? The crater is 3 m wide, 1 m deep. Wouldn't a 120 kg bomb make a larger crater? Do Soviet era explosives degrade with time?

[DDE]

25 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

Unofficial leak from DOD "from a reliable source" is that there was 120 kg of explosives and that it exploded underground in soft soil. Does that sound right? The crater is 3 m wide, 1 m deep. Wouldn't a 120 kg bomb make a larger crater? Do Soviet era explosives degrade with time?

I think they're estimating based on blast effects, which means 120 kg of brand-new TNT/C4.

This old graphic says a 2.62 m deep, 2.4 m wide crater for a 100 kg bomb and 5/3.7 m for 250 kg.

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Another random table says you're describing something in between a 122 mm and a 152 mm shell. And both of these are significantly less than 100 kg - single kilos of explosive in case of the 122 mm.

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Also, here's a crater from what almost certainly was a 450 kg delay-fused warhead:

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Based on Wiki's table for FABs, FAB-250-M62 is the closest match at an exact 100 kg of explosive filling. It's also the most recent series of generic FABs and should be fairly common. There's a heavier FAB-250ShL (137 kg of filling) with a ballute and an altitude detonator, and everything else is in the 500 kg class.

Edited March 13, 2022 by DDE

[Vanamonde]

We know it's a fine line, but as always, please leave politics out of the discussion. What happened is reasonable. Why someone may have wanted it to happen gets into politics. 

[DDE]

More photos: https://www.morh.hr/ministar-obrane-o-padu-letjelice-u-zagrebu-istraga-je-u-zavrsnoj-fazi-pronadena-je-crna-kutija/

Found here, also linking in case the page doesn't open like it hasn't for me: https://t.me/wingsofwar/12423?single

The jist of the associated article: "The investigation will take time" ;|

[DDE]

OK, so according to TASS quoting HRT, it was a 120 kg bomb with a 40 kg shaped-charge payload... weird. This means it's a xAB-100-class bomb, but I'm not familiar with any shaped-charge warhead in that class. Only Soviet anti-ship missiles carry shaped charges this big.

https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/14060367

Edited March 14, 2022 by DDE
Forgot to add link

[kerbiloid]

A 40 kg shaped in 80 kg hull sounds rather strange itself.

A shaped charge needs a thin hull, otherwise why shape it.

Edited March 14, 2022 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Meanwhile a Romanian has just found an Orlan-10 in bis backyard. Not much arguing where this one could come from.

https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/14/romania-probes-drone-sighting-days-after-crash-in-croatia

Note that the image in the article is that a of Forpost (IMI Searcher), not an Orlan. Not trying to imply the Orlan was armed, are you, Euronews? Tsk-tsk.

[kcs123]

On 3/11/2022 at 8:53 AM, Shpaget said:

Reports do mention red stars painted on it.

Second picture in gallery published on this web site: https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/pogledajte-fotografije-i-snimke-srusene-letjelice-izbliza/2346724.aspx

I was certain that I saw picture of red star on that drone somewhere in media, it took a while to backtrack source.

On 3/13/2022 at 12:36 PM, Shpaget said:

Minister of defense confirmed it was a bomb. Detonator and unspecified other bomb fragments have been found. Identification of the type of explosive is underway.

Unfortunately, our minister of defense is not reliable source of information. He does not always tell gibberish, only when he talks. Not that president or prime minister is any better. So, better to check everything from multiple sources. Not that linked page is most trustworthy source either, but taken photos looks legit.

Sorry for not having english written artickle, but pictures speeks for themselfs.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Meanwhile a Romanian has just found an Orlan-10 in bis backyard. Not much arguing where this one could come from.

https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/14/romania-probes-drone-sighting-days-after-crash-in-croatia

Note that the image in the article is that a of Forpost (IMI Searcher), not an Orlan. Not trying to imply the Orlan was armed, are you, Euronews? Tsk-tsk.

Edit: yep, I think this one's a confirmed.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin/32531

'File image' for comparison:

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[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, kcs123 said:

I was certain that I saw picture of red star on that drone somewhere in media, it took a while to backtrack source.

It was another one, fallen in Crimea.

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[DDE]

On 3/13/2022 at 9:48 AM, kerbiloid said:

Some US places are named after the East-European/Russian counterparts...

And visa versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_(Ukraine)

[DDE]

Back to our regular scheduled programming.

Is this a joke?

The Romanian minister of defense says it was a Soviet-made drone that came from the Ukranian side, "very maybe unlikely but it could have been" a Russian [snip].

Soviet-made...

Edited March 16, 2022 by Vanamonde

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

38 minutes ago, DDE said:

Soviet-made

Sadly to the outside world, the last 20 years looks like NuSoviet although given the ineffectiveness of a council, NuTsardom might be more apt.

The language used is even Catherine-ian.

Edited March 15, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Codraroll]

50 minutes ago, DDE said:

Soviet-made...

According to Wikipedia, Tu-141 were produced between 1979 and 1989, so by definition it would seem correct to call it Soviet-made.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Codraroll said:

According to Wikipedia, Tu-141 were produced between 1979 and 1989, so by definition it would seem correct to call it Soviet-made.

I'm talking about the Orlan-10 incident in Romania... and unless the reporter or the minister are severely coffee-deprived and missed a drastic change in topic, so does the article.

To be fair, I didn't specify this in my post either.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

31 minutes ago, DDE said:

I'm talking about the Orlan-10 incident in Romania... and unless the reporter or the minister are severely coffee-deprived and missed a drastic change in topic, so does the article.

To be fair, I didn't specify this in my post either.

I think a lot of people missed the Romanian one; these things are new (ish) tech; certainly 'new' in deployment and given the emphasis on cheap/off the shelf tech they're bound to 'wander' a bit.

Makes these situations dangerous.  Mistakes happen, and yet if an uncontrolled warcraft ends up in another country and kills people, bad things can happen.

[magnemoe]

On 3/14/2022 at 1:42 PM, kerbiloid said:

A 40 kg shaped in 80 kg hull sounds rather strange itself.

A shaped charge needs a thin hull, otherwise why shape it.

It could be an double warhead, know some US cruise missiles have them You have an shaped charge, then something penetrating like an artillery shell with an delay fuse behind. 
The shaped charge make an hole the shell passes trough and explode inside. 

Downside is that this require that you hit the target so it had to had terminal guidance, now this could be gps but that has its own issue because of jamming. Its ways to effectively mitigate this but its not very easy to do. Still if jammed I assume it would return once it got so far west the jamming stopped being effective. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 3/14/2022 at 8:42 AM, kerbiloid said:

A 40 kg shaped in 80 kg hull sounds rather strange itself.

A shaped charge needs a thin hull, otherwise why shape it.

 

28 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

It could be an double warhead, know some US cruise missiles have them You have an shaped charge, then something penetrating like an artillery shell with an delay fuse behind. 
The shaped charge make an hole the shell passes trough and explode inside. 

Downside is that this require that you hit the target so it had to had terminal guidance, now this could be gps but that has its own issue because of jamming. Its ways to effectively mitigate this but its not very easy to do. Still if jammed I assume it would return once it got so far west the jamming stopped being effective. 

I'm more inclined to think the total vehicle weight was 80kg with a 40kg warhead; lazy reporting or reporting by people who don't know military hardware is excruciatingly common.

Double warheads are usually for very specific (armored) targets... or things like ships where a combination of effects is desired.  You generally don't need complicated warheads for soft or targets of opportunity.

Edited March 15, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[DDE]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Downside is that this require that you hit the target so it had to had terminal guidance

No. This doesn't have terminal guidance, at least in the usual sense:

However, this involves a rather esoteric terrain-matching system on top of satellite guidance not available to a Soviet drone developed in the mid-1970s.

There don't seem to be any good sources on Tu-141 but there is a description of the autopilot on the concurrent Tu-143. https://topwar.ru/137561-otechestvennaya-bespilotnaya-aviaciya-chast-2.html?ysclid=l0sgql86qd Apparently it has simple velocity sensors and a radio altimeter, and mostly makes timed turns. That would be horrifically inaccurate, and putting a modern nav system into it would be quite the handful.

Also, the source notes that Tu-143's payload included CBRN recon and "leaflet container" options.

Now, there's four known Soviet leaflet airdrop systems, and that's AgitAB-250 and AgitAB-500 bombs (~37 kg of 'agitation'), an APT airdropped pack of some sort, and a BFK-AL pack for the modular KMGU dispenser pod (maybe a bit too late-model for the mid-1970s drone - some sources say the KMGU was designed as late as 1993, but this would raise the hairy topic of how come large stockpiles of BFK-P R-55 nerve gas submunitions existed).

Yep. You read that. Bombs. Some sort of a payload deployment and jettison mechanism, at the very least. It's not an impossible inference that a Tu-143, and therefore a Tu-141, can carry ordinary light bombs by default. It's just that you have to be a madman to try and use it this way.

Edited March 15, 2022 by DDE

[kcs123]

14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It was another one, fallen in Crimea.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

I know about that one too, but I was speaking of drone that crashed in Zagreb that it can be confirmed to have red star painted on it. 

[Vanamonde]

Please avoid speculating about the motives behind the event. 

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, DDE said:

Some trailer diner with a rocket mockup?

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[DDE]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Some trailer diner with a rocket mockup?

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A lazy emulation of S-300's fire control radar ("Tombstone") with an unconventional external accessory.

Stuff like that happens sometimes

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[DDE]

Local authorities report this was an OFAB-100-120 with a standard detonator but some sort of bootleg explosive filler.

https://ria.ru/20220413/khorvatiya-1783369442.html

It's a small gravity bomb with increased fragmentation effect.

[DDE]

Pinging this thread because there's been a development.

The munitions that have struck Engels (mild frag damage to Tu-95s, no fire but plenty of foam), Dyagelevo (near-direct hit on a tanker truck, three dead, half-dozen wounded, two Tu-22Ms with shredded tails), Kursk-East (burnt a fuel dump), and, as per some records, tried to strike Bel'bek, were Tu-141s.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5706680

Looks like they have fixed the glitch, perhaps even added GPS for a fair degree of accuracy, and maybe even worked on terrain-hugging flight. After all, it's the only cruise missile surrogate avilable to them besides the rumored Su-24 - Storm Shadow integration program.