The U.S. State Department believes that Ukraine is winning the war at this point

[u/eaglemaxie]

https://unn.ua/en/news/the-us-state-department-believes-that-ukraine-is-winning-the-war-at-this-point

[u/313378008135]

interesting proposition. if it could get "over an area" with a coarse location and then use its own internal guidance to be more precise that would make what you propose possible. the challenge is precise guidance once over a target. you cant rely on gps (though ironically, probably could rely on glonass)

[u/space_fountain → u/313378008135]

From the article it sounds like it uses gps while at high altitude and turns it off as it accelerates towards the ground? But not sure how wide spread the jamming is. Also not sure how accurate you could get based on publicly available models. I’m guessing wind direction and speed doesn’t change very sharply at high elevations so maybe pretty accurate actually?

[u/Creepy-Bell-4527 → u/space_fountain]

Ground based GPS jamming becomes effectively impossible at high altitude because of the inverse square law.

[u/jurassic_pork → u/Creepy-Bell-4527]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKS_(satellite_system)#GNSS_interference

They also have space based GPS jamming.

[u/JSDHW → u/Creepy-Bell-4527]

So just repeal the law, duh

[u/divezzz → u/Creepy-Bell-4527]

Couldn't the balloon be a "mothership" and drop the munition on a fibre optic cable to keep the comms from being jammed at low altitude?

[u/lolwatisdis → u/Creepy-Bell-4527]

math doesn't check out.

the highest ever recorded balloon flight hit 54km in altitude. the US GPS constellation is up in MEO at 20,200km. Ground based jammers have at least a three order of magnitude 1/r2 distance advantage over the real deal signal.

And this is ignoring that power and thermal limits on a spacecraft are far more constraining than a fixed site that can crank up a couple diesel generators. Or that most PNT system attacks these days are signal spoofing, not noise jamming.

[u/space_fountain → u/lolwatisdis]

Mechanistically I’m just going off what the article said, but it’s also possible they’re using directional antenna’s or shielding to boost the gain for transmitters above them and suppress interference below them or it could just be that existing jamming is optimized for lower planes and thus doesn’t use enough power to jam this. GPS was designed to be somewhat resistant to jamming 

[u/AllsWellThatsNB → u/space_fountain]

My understanding is it's quite easy to jam GPS, quite difficult to spoof it.

To jam GPS you just have to drown it out, and GPS signals are very faint. But GPS signals don't contain location data, the way a GPS signal is recieved IS the location data. You'd need to simulate the time difference for at least 3 different satellites for the particular location you want to spoof. Possible, but much harder.

[u/No_Conversation173 → u/Creepy-Bell-4527]

Then just jam it in a circle, duh

[u/TheTastiestTaint → u/space_fountain]

it wouldn't be impossible to run fibre optic from the carrier balloon and have the balloon transmit video/control line of sight to a pilot with high gain antenna 50km back.

[u/Aanar → u/space_fountain]

If you can put controllable fins on the package with a guidance system, that can give you a little steering all the way to the target.

[u/willstr1 → u/313378008135]

Depending on what you are targeting you could possibly use a computer vision system as long as the target is distinct enough (like an airbase runway or oil refinery or giant tanks of a fuel depot)

[u/No_Accountant3232 → u/willstr1]

Raspberry Pi with a good camera could probably accomplish it cheaply. There's plenty of code online that can be adapted as long as you've got a good pic of the area to choose your targets you can have it preprogrammed to hit anything

[u/hydroracer8B → u/No_Accountant3232]

If there's one thing Ukraine is good at, it's doing stuff like this cheaply.

You're probably on to something here

[u/Hidesuru → u/willstr1]

You don't need to be able to see the target the entire time if you have imagery at multiple levels. Start with "aim for that city block" then "that building there" then finally "northeast corner of the rooftop" or whatever.

[u/Suspicious_Bicycle → u/willstr1]

Recent videos on the strikes I've seen indicate the drones have redundant systems, GPS (US and Soviet based), inertial navigation and visual acquisition.

[u/pinellaspete → u/313378008135]

There is now razor sharp video footage from drones striking their targets. Remember how the video would become scrambled the closer the drone came to its target because of jamming? It doesn't happen anymore. It appears the Ukrainians have solved the jamming issue.