Ukrainian drones now spray 2,500° C thermite streams right into Russian trenches
- Thread starter JournalBot
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A little goes a long way and magnesium burns bright enough that it looks like more is there than you think. From what I remember of the reaction the last time I saw it made at scale, that looks like they may have made a fine powder and dispersal pattern to widen the area. The thermite reaction is a pain in the ass to control at that scale too, this chemist finds it both horrifying and clever.
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I wasn't aware "a trench along a treeline" was "infrastructure"
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Military "drones" AKA UAVs can get rather large, the Northrop Grummin RQ-4 Global Hawk is appoximately the size of a small commercial passenger aircraft.
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You’re also not supposed to use incendiaries for defoliation, but there’s an explicit exception for if an area of vegetation is being used as cover for military units.
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Tucker, Vlad, and Apartheid Clyde ...er Elon, thank you for your service.
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All Russia has to do to spare its troops this horror is leave ukraine
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I mean, yes, but we defoliate with much more interesting things than incendiaries, now don't we...
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Because of the wildfire risk, I presume? Or do military incendiaries tend to leave a lot of long lasting contaminants behind?
I guess I'm just hung up on thinking that incendiaries would be generally LESS harmful than something like good ol' Agent Orange.
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loginnombre
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The only thing more horrendous is invading an innocent country and trying to commit genocide there.
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https://geneva-s3.unoda.org/static-...certain-conventional-weapons/PROTOCOL+III.pdf
Incendiary weapons are covered under Protocal 3. They are not banned from use, only restricted. Basically, you can't target civillians, civillian buildings, or general vegetation (ie you can't intentionally cause a wildfire). As described, targeting enemy trenches, these weapons would not violate the convention.
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No they can't. If they attempt to leave, they're likely to be shot by their own side. And you are assuming that they are there by choice in the first place. And there have been stories of Russian deserters being sent to the front lines as punishment for trying to leave.
Putin is a brutal thug who doesn't care about his own troops, and is engaging in this war to satisfy his own ego. And while I decry the invasion in the first place, the loss of life on both sides is criminal and all the deaths in this war should be laid squarely at Putin's feet.
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Agent Orange would have been human-safe, if the production process hadn’t inadvertently resulted in small amounts of dioxin in the mix. I’m sure we could find problematic unintended health hazards from purposefully burning similarly large swathes of vegetation. (For avoidance of doubt, not meant to imply a defense of the defoliation program in Vietnam, in any way.)
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Initially because you're not supposed to use that kind of stuff to deny the enemy (and civilian population) food.
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Seems like the psychological effects alone make their use worthwhile! But how long until Vlad's forces start using the same (or worse) in a much more indiscriminate manner?
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No more so than Russia dropping anti-personnel butterfly mines in playgrounds. Or launching rocket attacks on civilian homes. Or the 465 recorded uses of chemical weapons on civilians and combatants alike. Or the Bucha massacre. Or the deliberate targeting and wanton destruction of civilian energy infrastructure. Or the deliberate and wanton destruction of civilian medical facilities. Or the deliberate and wanton destruction and theft of items of cultural significance. Or the kidnapping and torture of civilian journalists. Or the use of civilian human shields by the Russian military.
But given that these drones are targeting military resources, particularly stockpiles of ammunition, it's not actually a war crime, unlike just about everything Russia's done to Ukraine as detailed above.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
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Aluminum and iron can be ground into a very fine dust, which is easy to set on fire. It doesn't take much to rain down and keep burning, since they oxidize energetically, but comparatively slowly, consuming almost all the mass. Explosives only do it very, very quickly. You can pack a hell of a lot of bang into a 1 lb satchel of C4. Get a 1 lb can of aluminum and iron powder, and that shit can burn for several long seconds.
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Depends on who you ask. The MAGAts are certainly allied with Putin.
ETA: ? I must have quoted the wrong post. Anyway, the point stands.
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Thermite is Aluminum and Iron Oxide dust, not magnesium, though your points about magnesium itself aren't wrong.
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The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict previewed this trend in the years leading up to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
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And Tucker strikes again
Tucker Carlson Hosts Nazi Apologist Who Makes Heinous Claim About WWII
Hitler wasn't the bad guy, it was Winston Churchill all along!
You really can't make this shit up.
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mostly seems to be used to defoliate cover. thermite is hard to put out but it doesn't stick on its own like napalm so its unlikely to directly kill.
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Probably. But it's hard to get worked up over it considering that Russia has treated a list of war crimes more like a checklist in this invasion, which, I will remind you, is genocidal in aims, through the mass killing of Ukraine people as well as the goal of destroying the nation, language, and culture of Ukraine.
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Most of the Russian troops in the invasion aren't conscripts, and if you were as knowledgeable about this war as you are acting like you are, you would know this. Russian law doesn't even allow conscripts to be used for this sort of war, and Putin has actually been very leery about using conscripts in his "special military operation"--not because he's not a vicious and fundamentally lawless thug (he absolutely is a vicious and fundamentally lawless thug), but for his own reasons of domestic politics and his own calculations about "regime security".
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Yes. I've seen YouTube videos of it burning though stuff but never realized it could spread out so well. Scary.
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Not to make too light this situation that Ukraine finds themselves in...
But if they dont have Ride of the Valkyries blasting from these drones as the pass over they are doing it wrong.
But if they dont have Ride of the Valkyries blasting from these drones as the pass over they are doing it wrong.
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Where do I sign for world peace? I really, really would like to see all violence, oppression, suffering and plain disrespect for life stop at once.
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Aluminum and iron oxide is just one type of thermite. A test of 25 metals and 32 metal oxides found that 288 out of the 800 binary combinations were thermites that burned at a temperature of 2000 K or hotter.
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