- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10371689
Ukraine’s leading arms company is manufacturing about 100 long-range Flamingo cruise missiles a month, a rate able to support an enduring campaign of deep strike against targets hundreds of miles inside Russia.
Fire Point is also making FP-1 and FP-2 fixed-wing drones at a rate of “hundreds per day”, according to chief executive Iryna Terekh. Manufacturing at scale is restarting after a pause caused by the delay in signing off €90bn of EU lending to Ukraine.
The startup’s development from its postwar foundation in 2022 demonstrates the rapid maturing of Ukraine’s homegrown defence industry, finally giving its military the long-range capabilities denied by the west earlier in the conflict.
“I’m not aware of any deep strike attack that was happening in the past few months that was not involving our products,” Terekh said. Missile and drone attacks using Fire Point munitions were taking place at a daily rate of “on average five to 15”.
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Fire Point now operates from 83 factories inside Ukraine, plus another in Denmark, employing 6,000 people, up from 3,500 late last year, according to Terekh. The Guardian visited one manufacturing site last December, where dozens of men were assembling the plywood, plastic and carbon fibre structures into whole drones.
“What we’re seeing now is the result of several years of effort by the Ukrainian side,” said Ben Hodges, a former general who commanded the US army in Europe. “They can not only reach deep inside Russia with precision and get past Russian air defences, their weapons also carry a payload big enough to achieve effect.”
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Terekh, who studied architecture before joining Fire Point in the summer of 2023, when it employed 18 people, said the company is an example of how the Russian invasion has urgently forced Ukraine – once at the heart of Soviet industry – to modernise and regenerate itself.
“Ukraine, in a postwar economy, will need to be an exporter of things with a high additional added value. We do not want to be like a breadbasket any more for the world,” said Terekh, referring to Ukraine’s historical strength in agriculture. For now, however, the demands of the war mean Fire Point’s weapons are not exported.
I don’t know what exactly they use, but have some experience with autonomous drones. It’s not that simple, inertial naviagtion systems are prone to drift over distance. So they probably have a combination of gnss rpobably with CRPA, INS and visual navigation system maybe even multiple backup systems for every type of navigation system. All that information from different sensors needs to be mixed properly to get the best possible positioning. Then there is a harder part of communication dunno about FP missiles but at least some long-range drones have real time video and telemetry so they need some way to communicate over 1000+ kilometers at high speeds. And even harder part is mechanical e.g. controlling the hardware itself.
I imagined them as fully isolated signal-wise, which is what makes them able to travel such distances without being intercepted? I recall reading an article a little while ago that there has already been used “Fire and Forget” drones that truly do not send or receive any external electronic signals, and with the sole directive of flying to their destination and explode.
Also, a Raspberry Pi is very capable of handling all those signals and do video recognition to the level of steering real-time. The challenge I imagine is doing it accurately enough not to hit anything but the intended target. But to your point of having backup systems, they could also do multiple layer imaging using LiDAR and IR to get further accurate positioning based off of satellite imagery. This would require a bit more than an RPi for real-time use probably, but still very possible in a missile with a one ton payload capacity.
The Javelin missile is an example of how capable these steering/guidance systems were even 20 years ago.