Exactly. This is a massive strike that we fully won't know the repercussions of for a little bit. We'll just have to see how their optempo changes. It honestly could be even worse for them. They have 120 of those bombers, period. Meaning some of them might not even be air worthy at all and are just spare parts.
AnalogNotDigital
joined 1 month ago
There's drone footage already out there showing the planes burning.
They have roughly 120 strategic bombers in their air force. 40 of those is 33%.
Yeah! So they use the one drone to destroy something and the next drone is looking to see what damage was done. If the damage is consistent with what they want, that drone then will go onto it's next target. If the attack wasn't substantial damage, then the drone can augment that previous mission to achieve that desired result.
That's honestly fucking awesome. It's straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but fucking real.
30% less bombers means drone and missile attacks into Ukraine can be significantly decreased that's one of the biggest developments since the start of the war.
We just saw today what that means.
Yeah, if you set a bomb off on a plane that is most likely fuel laden, you're not going to be able to fly that plane again. If the air frame isn't completely destroyed, it's going to take months or years to repair, functionally rendering it destroyed.
Literally irreplaceable as Russia can't build these planes anymore.
The dollar value is easily in the billions.
Russias border is fucking huge. These guys could have fake passports, so fly something like... idk, Moscow to Ankara, then from there back to Ukraine.
They could have boarded flights hours after doing this attack. That's just an insane level of operational ballsiness.
I was seeing from other online spaces that this would be about 30% of Russias strategic bomber fleet and it's accompanying aircraft like their AWACs that got hit.
If that's the case that's a staggeringly bad day for the Russian air force, which means it's a good fucking day.
Seems like this particular base had zero security forces to watch their planes.
What's interesting to me is it seems like they were using a 'chain' of drones. One goes in and another is watching as BDA, then that one goes on it's mission, while the next is doing BDA, etc.
That's pretty brilliant. I wonder how many operators they were using per base.
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It's even worse than that.
They have roughly 120 *total bombers. Meaning a chunk of these are not air worthy air frames, and are just kept on for parts.
This very well could have crippled 40+ percent of all of Russias strategic bombers.