It’s the deepest Ukrainian drone strike of the war, so far
A month after Ukraine began bombarding targets inside Russia with explosives-laden sports planes modified for remote flight, one of the do-it-yourself drones has struck an oil refinery in the city of Salavat, more than 800 miles from the front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
It is, by far, Ukraine’s longest-range raid—and an escalation of Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign targeting Russian refineries, factories and strategic military sites.
And it’s at least the fourth attempted deep strike involving Ukraine’s sport-plane drones. Videos shot by people on the ground in Salavat clearly depict the wide straight wings, fixed wheels and propeller that are typical of an inexpensive sport plane, the kind a middle-class pilot can build at home from a kit costing as little as $90,000.
Bombers and long range torpedos spring to mind, particularly when the carrier is moving through a relatively right corridor, like the Red Sea.
The Houthis have already functionally shut down the Suez against commercial traffic just by threatening from the coast. And they’re employing relatively unsophisticated artillery.
I specified “a reasonable distance from shore” because an important part of the point of a carrier is exactly that it can stay easily 100 km from shore and still strike far inland. If a carrier is in range of shore-based torpedoes, they’ve likely messed up long ago.
As for bombers: They’re historically the major threat to carriers, but I don’t see any modern developments that make modern bombers any more of a threat to modern carriers than WW2 era bombers were to WW2 era carriers.
Gets farther and farther away as long range artillery improves.
Jet engines have been a BFD for some time. They’ve forced significant investment in countermeasures, few of which have been tested in combat.
Long range artillery has pretty hard limits, and once you approach the 100km range, time to target becomes a real issue, even for missiles that can be shot down.
Modern anti-air hat a range of several hundred km, and has been combat tested. More short-range systems (< 50 km) are in use (with huge success) every day in Ukraine. Of course bombers have also improved, but I wouldn’t put money on the bombers having improved relative to the AA.
Ps. I’m not the person downvoting you, I think you make a decent point, I just disagree :)
The Red Sea is at most 300 km wide, and tightens up quiet a bit as you approach the Suez.
And Iran has supersonic torpedos capable of closing that distance in very short order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoot_(torpedo)
Anything that isn’t reflexively nationalist gets an ambient amount of hate on Lemmy.world.