Droni Ucraini Wild Hornets FPV dotato di un lanciatore di granate ha colpito soldati russi. Bulava Unit, 3a Btl., Brigata presidenziale. Direzione di Zaporizhzhia. Maggio 2025

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What a shot!

This shit is so terrifying … Fuck the Orks, I know what they do and have no pity, but as a former service member the thought of being under this lind of spontaneous death is unimaginable: anyone who actually survives to see the end of this will be haunted by drone induced PTSD.

What we appear to be seeing is a multi barrelled arrangement each with its own single shot.

Maybe 2 to 4 on each drone.

If you don’t see recoil it’s likely that it uses an enlarged propeller charge in a modified rear facing chamber. Whilst the charge mass has no mass to propel, it travels faster so creates an equivalent force, cancelling recoil.

These as I have loosely anticipated are appearing as shot gun barrels, usually two to 4 per drone.

My earlier concept was multibarrell, single shot designs using automotive engine block aluminium as the barrel. It’s been demonstrated to work on rifles. If there is no rifling barrel life would be increased, as in a shot gun.

But even with rifling aluminium itd good for 20 to 30 shots at least.

But in my design the gun is mounted in another tube like a syringe plunger, to achieve recoil control. These systems we are seeing go a step up and use the reactive mass recoiling method of rejecting mass the other way from a larger propellant mass.

I think this is the method used here with the grenades, due to the way it’s shooting and we only see two shots.

As another user here points out with the Milkor 40mm revolver grenade launcher lowers mass and offers the option of more shells and lower overall mass per shell due to reduced barrels.

But it would need optimising to reduce recoil. You can partially reduce recoil without needing extra propellant mass, by about 50%, using the rarefied wave principal. Essentially this is a more effective muzzle brake, is opens a channel at a point along the barrel which allows gas behind the bullet to redirect backwards to a point behind the gun and breech.

With a recoil damper system on top with a few cm’s or recoil travel, such as a gas piston, the whole thing can further be cushioned, and as the barrel or entire gun recoil it can activate the revolver to rotate and load the next shot.

Alternatively you need to design a gun with a revolver that has larger propellant charges and a means to vent some of this energy backwards, clearing important system.

This especially would be important using faster longer range grenades which would have much larger recoil.

If you want to maximise payload to mass, the most effective solution would probably be a revolver system with single barrel, and some excess propellant mass used to create an opposing force to minimise or elininate need for typically quite heavy recoil management.

Such a system would also have the advantage that if it’s recoilless then it can queue up and fire multiple shots more quickly without having to adjust the aircraft between them.

A multi barrelled and recoilless system like that could also fire simultaneous salvos, you could even aim each individually, this would make it harder for the target to evade.