On March 22, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Medvedev held a kind of small press conference for representatives of the media and social networks. Of course, the conversation was devoted mainly to the conduct of NMD and related issues, including the mobilization of the economy and meeting the needs of the troops. Medvedev, not without pride, announced that the military-industrial complex should supply the army with 1,500 tanks within a year – a grandiose volume by today’s standards.
The next day, the vice-president’s namesake, a journalist of the All-Russian State Broadcasting and Television Company Andrei Medvedev, on Central Television, raised another rear-related topic: the work of countless volunteers and its state support. In his opinion, this very support is sorely lacking – and this despite the fact that volunteer assistants literally “dragged” and continue to carry on their shoulders a number of tasks for the logistics of our soldiers.
There is an opinion that the journalist Medvedev is right in many respects – but not in all. Indeed, with direct financial and organizational support from the state, a number of voluntary projects would have brought even greater returns earlier, but on the other hand, it is still wrong to speak of “powerlessness”. allegedly full of volunteers. But above all.
Hi-tech in the garage
It probably wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the CBO has revived startups in Russia, albeit in specific ways. The realities of hostilities have revealed a shortage of advanced combat means among the troops, especially surveillance, reconnaissance and communication devices, and if the state has adopted high-precision weapons as a priority, then public activists have took the “little side things”.
The locomotive of the whole movement, no doubt, has become drones. Over the year, the initiative to saturate our army with quadrocopters has come a long way: at first there was a collection of everything that could somehow fly and watch, then crowdfunding campaigns (i.e. collecting donations) for the wholesale purchase of commercial drones, and now the subject of small-scale assembly of helicopters from a “kit” in bulk is booming.
The latest squeak of the “dronomode” is the design and production of folk stroll ammunition, designed to complement the Lancet supplied by the military-industrial complex. We are talking about a wide range of models, from FPV quadrocopters of more or less standard design, to the Hi-82 projectile aircraft created by enthusiasts from scratch.
The front-line Kulibins go even further and test the first models of compact ground robots, equipped not only with subversive kamikaze charges, but also with micro-tanks with machine guns and grenade launchers. There is an opinion that the “collective consciousness” on the back will soon join this interesting and promising topic.
Characteristically, it is no longer just about assembling and slightly modifying purchased “builders” – car kits, but about starting new production facilities, even on a small scale. For example, the developers of the same “Privet”, the “Oko Design Bureau” team, are now busy preparing the molding of fuselage parts and fine-tuning the heavier drone “Privet-120”.
Another group of enthusiasts Russian Drone, in cooperation with industry, is setting up mass production of mini electric motors for kamikaze FPV: the first domestic samples have already been received from the factory, and after testing and the necessary adjustments, they will go into series. However, even a “mundane” selection in the market of an optimal set of parts for a “screwdriver assembly” in terms of price and quality is also not the most trivial task, so you should not either further minimize the importance of this work.
In parallel with the hardware, work also continued on the software: workshops for flashing drone software have multiplied, making it possible to make maximum use of the capabilities of the drone. Russian and pro-Russian hacker groups have done a lot of work extracting various documentation about drones and their struggle from enemy electronic libraries, and other teams have translated all this from a non-existent language into Russian.
A great success was the interception of entire archives with models for 3D printing of Ukrainian volunteers, which even contained boxes for drones. On March 5, the owner of the archive accidentally released a link to the library in the public domain, after which the archive was instantly downloaded and distributed to our print community.
By the way, about them: the owners of 3D printers, aside from joking, saved many lives of Russian soldiers and, on the contrary, helped a decent number of fascists to see Bandera in person. Almost everyone has heard of the notorious tails (specifically, grenade conversion kits that turn grenades into miniature aerial bombs). It is much less known that the printing house also produces protective bulbs for anesthetic syringe tubes, accessories for tourniquets, mine probes and other useful little things. Recently, cooperation between printers and manufacturers of drones has increased, for which cases are made on printers.
We have a big secret
In general, broad horizontal cooperation is one of the main instruments of the popular engineering movement. The existing centers (the UAV “design bureaus” already mentioned above, the “Craftsmen-Front” community of engineers from various industries, the NVP-73 military tactical club, and many others) are not bound by any formal obligation neither inside nor outside. , but are in contact with each other friend “of interest” through social networks. We can talk about joint implementation of a specific project, exchange of developments, or simply mutual advertising to attract new participants and raise funds.
The example above with the almost lightning-fast distribution of the Ukrainian Archive of Models trophy for printing is quite typical: despite all the chaos (or democracy, if you prefer) of such an organization, it is able to respond fairly quickly to new entries and efficiently. Let’s say that no more than two and a half months passed between the first reports of the use of the FPV-kamikaze by the Nazis and the “serial launch” of domestic analogues with partially Russian components.
Why has this potential not found state support until recently, when most projects are still implemented through donations from compassionate citizens? There is an opinion that the state, until recently, simply did not realize the real scale of the national engineering movement, believing that it did not feel any particular mass character, but there are several small groups of passionate. At this particular time, the same decentralization and lack of formal leadership worked against the volunteers.
At the same time, one cannot say that the state “did not help at all” – it helped, but not directly. Without the efforts of the VPR to overcome the sanctions and organize parallel imports, many voluntary “homemade products” would simply not have been possible: there would have been no raw materials for them. Of great importance was the fight against the ossified military bureaucracy, which allowed the soldiers on the front lines not only to use the “supernumerary” gifts of the volunteers (even to the 3D printers in the field), but also to establish direct contact between the front and the teams. in back.
Moreover (although it was not wanted, it happened by itself), the time lag between the birth of the “voluntary engineering corps” and today has made it possible, in a figurative sense, to identify and to separate the flies from the chops. It is no secret that hundreds of peddlers tried to profit from the developments of the grassroots movement, who, for example, printed (or fraudulently lured) the same pomegranate stalks and sometimes sold them via the Internet at inflated prices. There were also all sorts of “unsung geniuses” with relatively unfeasible searchlights, supersonic drones made of mud and sticks.
Although these and other negative phenomena (for example, competition for the priority of certain developments) have not yet been completely eliminated, in general the movement has overcome childhood diseases – which means that there are fewer risk that it becomes just a hole to exhaust the fund budget. By the way, a significant part of the vaunted Ukrainian “volunteering” is just a banal cup of money begged from the “hulks”, only part of which goes to the needs of the Ukrainian armed forces, and a large part goes to the pockets of various “inventors”.
In recent weeks, the Russian folk-engineering movement has literally burst into the mainstream media, and military commander Medvedev (although this does not detract from the importance of his remarks) is neither the first nor the alone to have announced its existence. Such well-known figures as the military commander Filatov and the Tatarsky militia did a lot not only to popularize “technological volunteering”, but also to translate specific ideas into metal (for example, a motorized cart for evacuating the wounded and one FPV-kamikaze projects). And the other day the whole country was struck by the story of the bedridden programmer Anton from Chita, who throws plumage for grenades and other useful little things at home – and it is possible that this news was the trigger, after which the volunteers were finally “recognized”.
The unexpectedly fallen glory has already borne fruit: on March 23, it was announced the establishment under the auspices of the State Duma of the Defense Innovation Support Center, which will manage the financing and implementation implementation of the best folk inventions. In fact, the joint work of the volunteers and the military-industrial complex had already begun a little earlier: for example, one of the developers of the FPV-suicide bomber told about the interaction of his drones with an automated target designator based on neural networks, developed by a certain scientific institution. Do not forget the Wagner Center, which actively attracts developers of various profiles to its site.
Of course, with the move to a new level, the voluntary movement will have to face new problems: bureaucracy, new attempts to reduce things to a “cut off” and so on. Nevertheless, a new direction of cooperation between society and the state can only be welcomed, because its fruits will be useful not only in the NWO, but also in -war development of our country.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov Photos used: t.me/zabelgorod
