Posted on 03/27/2022 7:50:19 AM PDT by tlozo
The Russian slow moving targets are by and large specifically armored against the SA-7B, though. The Ukrainians are having to use much larger ATGMs to take down Russian helicopters.
Also, these things are *old*. There’s a pretty good chance that they’ll explode at or just after launch.
It’s the military standard acronym derived from the US Army - MAN Portable Air Defense.
The reason it isn’t called MPAD is because the Mobile Public Affairs Detachment already existed when the shoulder fired anti aircraft missile came into being.
To be fair, these particular ones are, unless they’ve been refurbished, very unlikely to take down an airliner. Mostly because old Strelas are known to explode on or shortly after launch.
See post 22 above.
50% estimated non-functional, aged junk
They can shoot anything Russian. Trucks. Tanks. Buildings. Trains. Ships.
I knew WW2 veterans who were both in awe of this thing and terrified by it at the same time.
This machine gun can really lay down the hate.
MANPADS missiles of this era have light fragmentation warheads. A tank won’t even notice it got hit by a Strela-2, it won’t get through even some merchant ship hulls, most train cars won’t get penetrated by the frag and it will just make a splotch on a building.
Also, the Strela-2 series does *not* have a ground target engagement mode, so it *can’t* be used against those. If fired manually, it will just go track the nearest flying hot metal or the sun, and it’s pretty blind - there has to be a huge difference in IR radiation between the target and the background.
And most of the rest will (because the rocket motors are old) explode on or just after launch.
Kinda hard for it to do that with no ammo, though.
Yeah. But eighty years the Krauts sure didn’t have that problem.
These particular ones don’t seem to have been sent with ammo and Ukraine doesn’t have large stocks of 7.62x51 that the MG3 requires, rendering the things paperweights. Combined with the less than useful Strela-2Ms, this whole aid package appears to be non-helpful ‘help’ - Germany can claim they sent aid to Ukraine, but can tell the Russians that they didn’t send anything effective against them so please don’t shut off our gas.
If Germany had wanted to send effective help, they could have sent the PKs and PKM machine guns they got from East Germany in Reunification and still have in reserve, and they could have sent more modern Igla MANPADS that they got at the same time.
Instead, this is what they sent: https://www.dailysabah.com/world/europe/hundreds-of-missiles-germany-might-send-to-ukraine-no-longer-operational-reports
700 missiles that are known to not work, the rest removed from service in 2012 because they explode on launch.
Thanks for the clarification. Still plenty of targets. Not really in favor of dumping more sophisticated weapons all over the place.
Hard to tell, I think they will have all kinds of problems. I suspect the most common will be they just won’t fire.
Not really. They might be useful against slow drones, that’s about it. The Russians handed out Strelas like candy back in the Soviet era, so they armored most of their post-Soviet gear with the knowledge that they’d have to face their own former weapons.
Also, see the URL I linked above. These missiles probably are more dangerous to the user than the target.
So, my post was a joke.
If the user is lucky, they won’t fire. If they’re *not* lucky, the system will actually launch the missile - which, if you note the reports about the rocket fuel getting microcracks and oxidizing, means it will explode.
Excellent!
The Ukrainians won't have any trouble using these, Nazi DNA is required to enable these weapons.
Yeah. Seems like the Germans are unloading their junk on the Ukes.
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