“Smart” shells and armor-piercing drones
The defense industry has not only increased the supply of weapons to the Northern Military District zone, but also provides our military with fundamentally new weapons, equipment and ammunition. This means that the defense industry managed to minimize the time required from the development of weapons to their mass production. Many more military-technical “surprises” have been prepared for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
One of the new products became known recently. This is a “smart” kamikaze drone “Lancet-3”. He was taught to conduct a “free hunt”, find thanks to the built-in memory card, identify a target and hit it.
It turns out that other new “smart” ammunition has been created for the Russian army. The resource “Military Chronicle” spoke about this. He published a video that recorded the use of Motiv-3M individually targeted combat elements on military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Avdievka. Fire arrows with tremendous speed and striking power hit combat vehicles, leaving them no chance.
The Motiv-3M combat elements, which have already been nicknamed “arrows of death,” are part of the cluster munitions of the Smerch and Tornado-S rocket systems, as well as the RBK-500 cluster bombs and the PBK-500U Drel glide bombs. When an aerial bomb is dropped from a height of 14 kilometers, it can fly 30-35 kilometers in autonomous flight. The range of Tornado-S (an improved version of Smerch) is more than 70 kilometers.
“Smerch” and “Tornado-S” of 300 mm caliber are formidable weapons in themselves. For example, a guided cluster projectile carries 552 cumulative fragmentation warheads weighing 240 grams each or 72 submunitions weighing 2 kilograms each. A salvo of 12 missiles from one launcher creates a zone of continuous destruction of manpower and equipment over an area of several football fields. The mass of damaging elements in a salvo is 3380 kilograms.
And now long-range rocket systems have also received “smart” individually targeted combat elements. The principle of their operation is as follows: Motiv-3M combat elements are equipped with infrared sensors targeting the thermal signature of targets. That is, “smart” ammunition detects a tank or armored personnel carrier and dives at it at high speed. The cumulative projectile penetrates armor more than ten centimeters thick.
A “parachute descent” option is possible at a speed of 17 meters per second. In this case, the Motiva-3M infrared direction finder scans the surface and searches for a suitable target. The warhead is detonated at an altitude of about 150 meters. The explosion was aimed at the most vulnerable part of the combat vehicle.
Military blogger Yuri Podolyaka spoke about another military novelty. It turns out that the same Lancet loitering ammunition taught them to overcome metal protection elements that are welded onto armored vehicles — the so-called “barbecues”. “I’ve known about the “shock core” for drones for a long time, but I’ve never seen it in action. And this is already working on the Lancets. The essence of the new ammunition is that no “barbecue” will help against it, noted Yuriy Podolyaka, commenting on the video with the use of the new Lancet.
According to him, this is far from the only high-tech “surprise” , which awaits the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the coming months. “I think that already in winter the groans of the Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers will be even louder… But I don’t know everything that is being prepared…”