The Russian Air Force has dropped its 3. 3-ton bomb for the first time in combat. Consecutive movements have shown how resilient – and useless – this massive new bomb is.
On Thursday or shortly before, an Air Force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber introduced a single FAB-3000 bomb with outstretched wings and satellite orientation into a multi-story structure that Russian intelligence had called a transit base for Ukrainian troops on Lyptsi. , 16 km north of Kharkiv in northern Ukraine.
A day later, another Su-34 dropped one of the 6,600-pound FAB-3000s onto another giant craft that the Russians possibly suspected was harboring Ukrainian forces.
It is not known precisely what the diversity of the bombs was. Small Russian glide bombs are usually about 40 kilometers long. A 3. 3-ton bomb might not be very aerodynamic and might not have the diversity of smaller munitions.
In both attacks, the massive bombs narrowly missed their target, but that didn’t matter. According to Fighterbomber, a popular Russian Telegram channel, a FAB-3000 explosion causes damage at a distance of more than two hundred meters and throws fatal fragments at more than 1,200 meters.
Missing a target at about 30 feet “is a result” for a Su-34 armed with a FAB-3000.
But a Su-34 with smaller FAB-1500s, weighing 3,300 pounds, would have inflicted even more damage, Fighterbomber speculated. A Su-34 could bring only one FAB-3000 or 3 FAB-1500s. This last load is even less impressive. much more efficient.
Since the explosive force is not geometrically replaced by the mass of a bomb, “the strength of the FAB-3000 is only superior to that of the FAB-1500,” Fighterbomber explained.
Dropping three bombs out of one gives a Sukhoi three chances to hit a target directly: a precision bombing technique that compensates for the inaccuracy of any ammunition. “Why don’t you hang and use 3 1500?” the fighter-bomber asked. There is no moderate explanation. “
But there is an unreasonable explanation. Huge and imposing, a 6,600-pound bomb will be more useful as propaganda than as an actual bomb. “There will be a wave of rewards for those who have participated in the creation of a new miracle weapon,” Fighterbomber predicts.
The FAB-3000 is not the first aerial munition deployed through the Air Force for its propaganda value. In 2017, the U. S. Air Force The U. S. dropped one of its large 11-ton aerial bombs on Islamic State militants in Afghanistan. exaggeration, and that was the point. The Pentagon proudly posted videos of the explosion to warn surviving militants.
Reportedly, the Russian Air Force did not build many FAB-3000s. At the current rate of attack, they may soon disappear and the Air Force will return to dropping more effective 3,300-pound bombs.
But even those bombs would likely soon lose their relevance. Desperate to mitigate the effects of a hundred Russian bombs a month, Ukrainian forces have begun deploying increasingly capable radio jammers, capable of blocking the signals between the bombs and the satellites that direct them.
“Electronic warfare is winning. Accuracy decreases,” Fighterbomber noted. “The era of [glide bombs] with a reasonable satellite guidance formula is coming to an end. “
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