Malaysian plane crashes on Ukraine-Russia border - live

[Paul Rigby]

This appears to be pretty conclusive: MH17 shot down by Ukie fighter

http://guruinterneta.livejournal.com/32590.html

Pin warhead! Missiles USED to hit air targets use a special warhead, which is only characterisitc for them with very specific traces. It consists of a bundle of sharpened pins, which are sometimes welded together (sometimes not). An opening charge is installed behind this bundle, this is basically what the "pin and shrapnel" warhead consists of. When it approaches the target at the minimal distance the warhead explodes the opening charge and this bundle of pins flies to the target at almost cosmic speed. When hitting the target such pin - only by its kinetic energy - is capable to shoot through the plane destroying the internal structure of the aircraft and completely crashing the on-board equipment. The pin kinetics is so powerful that it can even split the titanium spar in halves. Such warhead has one big advantage - the missile does not need to be perfectly accurate - it explodes before contacting the target and the pins are shot in the direction of the airplane na cone. Even if only 2-3% of these pins hit the target, the plane is doomed - a hole in the wing or fuselage, or simply damaged cladding of the plane flying at trans-sonic speed the enormous relative airflow will destroy the damaged wing up to the very spar in less than a minute. If there is a dozen of such holes - there is simply no chance for anything.

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But this is not the main point. Pin and shrapnel warheads are mainly used on air-to-air missiles because of their compact size. The anti-aircraft defense systems prefer to use high explosive and shrapnel warheads, because in a number of cases they are more efficient than pin and shrapnel ones. The picture we have here shows cladding damage characteristic for pin and shrapnel warheads. High explosive and shrapnel warhead damage looks different. This means that no BUK system hit this aircraft. Here we are dealing with either R-27 Topor or R-73 missiles, which Ukrainians have plenty of and which are installed on MIG-29 and SU-27