Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ Poor-quality Chinese-made lithium batteries for drones are exploding in frontline dugouts, endangering their occupants, according to a Russian warblogger. He highlights Russia's failure to find viable alternatives to Chinese components of dubious quality. ⬇️

2/ Platon Mamatov writes:

"I won't delve into the depths and abysses of import substitution, the agony of choosing between a "domestic drone that doesn't fly at all" and "something assembled from Chinese components that somehow works," or other pressing issues of our time.

3/ "Instead, I'll give a very simple example from my personal biography.

Look, there's a dugout. Six people are sitting in the dugout. Husbands of their wives, fathers of their children, sons of their parents.

4/ "Valuable military specialists, each with a personal cemetery behind them. And the dugout is also full of explosives, flammable materials, and materials that emit toxic substances when burned.

5/ "Accordingly, any fire in the dugout means a choice between "suffocating in toxic chemical smoke, then burning" or "burning, then exploding."

6/ "This dugout also charges lithium-polymer (high-voltage) batteries for attack drones. Chinese, of course. There are simply no other batteries in the Russian army, no matter what the stickers say.

7/ "We have old-style batteries; we've been using them for years. And we have new-style batteries; they've only recently started including them in drone boxes.

8/ "The new-style batteries, when charged above 4.35 volts per cell, have a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting. They emit a bright chemical flame that can't be extinguished by water or by cutting off the oxygen supply to the combustion source.

9/ "We were extremely lucky that one of the batteries caught fire BEFORE we went to bed. It swelled before the flash, giving me five seconds to throw it outside.

10/ "We also had the good sense to take the remaining new-style batteries outside and carefully place them in the shell craters. To discover in the morning that EVERY single one of them had spontaneously caught fire overnight.

11/ "So, now we have to choose between "charging the batteries to 4.35 and not reaching the required striking range" and "charging as usual and burning up along with all the junk." And it's good that we have a choice, yeah?

12/ "What am I talking about?

Oh, yeah. It's clear that our beloved Motherland hasn't solved the problem of "establishing mass production of cheap batteries" in four years of war and is unlikely to solve it in the foreseeable future.

13/ "It's clear that the army's need for batteries is enormous and constantly growing. More precisely, two armies. The Ukrainians also buy from China. And the supplier covers these needs with products of increasingly questionable quality.

14/ "But can we please not buy such outright fire-hazardous crap?

It's quite a shame to repeatedly dodge bullets, shell fragments, mines, and firebombs only to die because of a battery that blew up at the wrong time.

15/ "That's all I wanted to say about the prospects for import substitution in domestic drone manufacturing.

We'll talk about motors, video cameras, and the quality of the reel housings next time. If we live that long. :)" /end

Source:
t.me/diomeddog/4779