The equipment appears on or close to a Ukrainian border, and is moving at high speed... that's an instant request to turn it off.

The equipment appears in Ukraine, and is stationary, and then starts moving at high speed... that's probably the Ukranians.

Neil Barnes,

That's assuming Russian forces aren't launching their Starlink-equipped drones from inside Ukraine.

Even if not, they could easily program the drone to fly in slow, tight circles while it turns on its starlink antenna once inside Ukraine's borders. Which I suspect would be much harder to distinguish from stationary from a constellation of moving satellites.

It would be interesting to know the purpose of using a piece of a Starlink router/access point, or whatever it is exactly, inside a missile ?

Can Starlink equipment actually receive a signal when travelling at several hundreds of KM/h ?

I don't know. Perhaps the Russians don't know either.

As it's been installed on more and more passenger aircraft to provide on-board Wi-Fi, definately.

Considering United Airlines are rolling out Starlink to their 1000 odd airliners - yes.

SpaceX and others have tested the terminals in various aircraft and Starship.

The problem is the 'wack the mole' Starlink have to do to identify and disable the terminals which the orks are getting via third countries.

Khaptain,

The Shahed 136 drone is a loitering one-way attack munition - so can hang around waiting for a suitable target to become available. I remember reports from 2022 of them having cameras and so wondered if they were also re-usable. But a quick Google suggests my memory is wrong. Which means they must either be programmed for particular targets or there are other drones with cameras to provide targetting for them.

Some have been found with 4G modems, which allows in-flight targetting.

There's also a story from last year of one being used at sea - which suggests that one must have had a camera specially fitted - or that again there was another drone that wasn't spotted.

The Russians now manufacture them as Geran-2 - and have been modifying them. They've apparently now got electronic warfare snooper ones, that can fly ahead of a strike to avoid any EW or radars that might attack the strike drones. It would make sense to also have camera versions - and seeing as they're making one type of special, why not several?

At which point Starlink becomes a cheap and easy way to send back the video feed from your drone - which is something the Ukrainians have been doing since soon after the war started.

The only downside is that you can't get the drone (and therefore the kit) back. As they get captured, you'll lose access to those accounts - but I'm guessing they're confident they can create them faster than Starlink can play whack-a-mole?

It's not exactly hard to determine that the equipment is used on a drone, as stated above by Neil Barnes. So what exactly is the space Karen playing at? Whatever it is, it's usually for political gain of his mate trump.

" So what exactly is the space Karen playing at? Whatever it is, it's usually for political gain of his mate trump."

I don't understand the point of your remark.

Would it have been acceptable for you if the technology had been built by someone on the democratic side of the balance ?

"Whatever it is, it's usually for political gain of his mate trump."

I think Musk is like a small child at a grown-ups dinner party showing off to get attention. He has no loyalty to anything other than the spotlight and in any situation he'll say and do whatever he thinks will get him the most likes or dislikes - he doesn't care which as long as people are watching him perform.

Elon the Magnificent had a hissy fit over not being invited to some forum here and has declared that no one should go to the UK.

As Elon and the Orange Jesus are besties, perhaps that is why 'Two-faced' Starmer had dinner with the Orange Jesus yesterday?

I say ban both Trump and Musk from these shores.

anthonyhedgedus,

Given the satellites are in low, fast-moving orbits, it's probably not all that easy to exactly work out the speed of the target. The Shahed is a pretty slow drone, so it might not be all that hard to tell it from a terminal in a moving car.

But the main problem is going to be telling the Russian drones from the Ukrainian drones.

I belive there's been some sort of consolidation of Starlink accounts for Ukraine. In the early days of the war, all sorts of governments, support groups and just random people were buying Ukrainian frontline units drones and Starlink accounts. I very much doubt that's stopped, and the Ukrainian army is still suffering from a lack of central organisation - there's still an awful lot of frontline units organising their own logistics via swapping with other units, capturing stuff or just plain buying what they need.

I've read reports from Gaza of Israeli units shooting down their own drones, because even in a single army (that's a hell of a lot better organised) it's sometimes impossible to work out who's operating a drone and better safe than sorry.

Ukraine's army was tiny in 2014 - when Russia first invaded. A lof of the fighting in 2014 and 2015 was done by locally organised militias and semi-official local territorial units. I think all the militias were incorporated into the army as territorial defence units by about 2020 - but then in 2022 when the invasion went full-scale the territorial defence units all got loads of volunteers and were just handed tons of newly delivered Western weapons like NLAWs and. Ukraine's army have done wonders with an underfunded force that was barely organised at the start of the war (their 2021 defence budget was under $6 billion) and I've read plenty of stories of even frontline units getting their drone operators by the commander phoning someone he knew from the days of 2014 working in IT and asking them to set up a drone-team.

Russia's logistics are more centralised and organised. But also much more corrupt - and so a bunch of Russian frontline units are also having to bodge-it-themselves if they want drone kit.