[mschuster91]

> "1,500 to 2,000km (930-1,240 miles) inside Russian territory is no longer the 'peaceful rear'," Robert Brovdi warns. "The freedom-loving Ukrainian 'bird' flies there whenever and wherever it wants."

For comparison for the Americans, it's New York to Kansas City. For the Europeans, Copenhagen to Rome.

Crazy that the Ukrainians can keep up command-and-control for drones over such a distance. Probably most of it is via Starlink...

[icegreentea2]

Ukraine's "long range attack drones" are really just cost optimized cruise missiles. Long-range strike against strategic targets is something you can handle without man in loop control. For example, the original Tomahawks could do terrain radar matching (+inertial guidance) for navigation, and had a fully onboard camera based system for terminal guidance.

[tim333]

There are other technologies. GPS is an obvious one though it can be blocked. I think HIMARs used GPS with inertial backup if it's lost. Also with modern image recognition you can give the thing a picture of what it's supposed to hit for the last bit. I'm not sure which actual techs are used. Ukraine has a market set up where fighters can order the tech they need from defence startups. It's a significant advantage over Russia which has comparable tech but is bureaucratic and corrupt as to how it's allocated.

Some stuff from Google on FP-1 drones - the most popular long range one:

>Technological Features: They emphasize modularity, resilience to electronic warfare, and are developing optical navigation systems to reduce reliance on GPS.

[cyberge99]

You could literally fly drone as a starlink antenna+rpi combo. Have that drone fly far in and then go radio silent until a prescribed time. Do this a few times and you could get CNC pretty far in relatively lightly.

[stavros]

I don't know, ELRS/LoRa is pretty amazing. I don't know what kind of jamming happens there, but with a big (and tall) enough antenna, you should be able to get pretty far.

[cyberge99]

This was my thought too. Couple with Starlink on a drone and you could go deep.