Garbage grenades: how the Armed Forces of Ukraine make bombs for drones to blow up tanks
The carrying capacity of conventional quadcopters is limited, so the military has to disassemble foreign grenades and make them lighter.
The Ukrainian military independently collects ammunition for unmanned aerial vehicles to destroy Russian troops in the Sloviansk region. A serviceman with the call sign ‘Count’ told the New York Times journalists the details.
In the city of Slovyansk, Donetsk region, one of the divisions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has equipped a small workshop where they prepare ‘gifts’ for the occupiers. At their disposal were a soldering iron, tape, gloves, wrenches, ball bearings and pieces of plastic printed on a 3D printer, as well as a German DM51 fragmentation grenade. Defenders of Ukraine set themselves a difficult task: to create the perfect bomb – light, but powerful enough to destroy a Russian tank.
‘War is economics, it’s money. If you have a drone for $3,000 and a grenade for $200, and you destroy a tank worth $3 million, it’s very interesting,’ said ‘Graf.’
According to him, the ammunition should weigh about 500 g – this is the maximum weight that the DJI Mavic 3 quadcopter can carry without losing its flight characteristics. Existing munitions of this weight cannot penetrate the armor of a tank or armored personnel carrier, so the team decided to make a lightweight shell for their bomb by 3D printing the parts. They experimented with the design of grenades and explosive mechanisms to achieve maximum efficiency.
So far, the best ammunition in the arsenal of the Ukrainian military is the DM51 grenade. Together with the ‘plumage’ for stabilization, it weighs just about 500 g, but its explosive power is designed to destroy manpower, not armored vehicles. They also have a homemade projectile capable of piercing armor, but it weighs about 200g more.
‘Every day we learn, conduct some experiments with grenades, bombs, drones and improve our work,’ added ‘Graf’. — ‘We make grenades out of trash. But if you can destroy a tank with a Mavic, you’re the best in the war.’
As the NYT points out, technological advances in the war in Ukraine are mainly due to the more effective use of UAVs by both sides. The Ukrainians are winning this arms race, as lower-ranking commanders have been given a lot of freedom of action in terms of using drones, and soldiers have the opportunity to independently develop and test the equipment.
Samuel Bendett, an arms expert at the American research organization Center for Naval Analyzes (CNA), believes that the drone industry in Ukraine is more organized and directly related to the military, while Russia has chosen an industrial approach, preferring the mass production of ammunition . Bureaucracy left over from Soviet times prevents Russian developers from quickly delivering weapons to the front lines.
‘Graf’ stores in his workshop a 40 mm ‘OFSP’ grenade, which is mass-produced in Russia for dropping from Orlan-10 reconnaissance drones. The date of manufacture is indicated on the case — March 2022.
One of the engineers who work together with ‘Graf’ said that the Russians drop only the standard modification of the ‘OFSP’ from the air, and the Ukrainians use everything they can find, you only need to take into account the weight of the ammunition and the carrying capacity of the drones. At the same time, the Ukrainian military has to show ingenuity in order to use weapons in non-standard ways. Before using shells, in particular foreign ones, they need to be thoroughly studied.
Some grenades, such as the US M433, have armor-piercing cluster warheads, but their ovoid shape is not suitable for dropping from drones. Ukrainian soldiers have to fix a grenade in a vise, take out a cartridge with powder for firing from a grenade launcher, and tear off an aluminum glass in the nose part. Then, with the help of pliers and other tools, you need to find and disable the detonator mechanism, in order to then move the cumulative ‘stuffing’ to another case. The process is very dangerous, as the grenade can explode from any wrong movement.
