Aren’t they supposed to explode just prior to contact? I.e. they aren’t flying hammers? So was this missile not armed or what happened, it’s difficult for me to see on mobile.
It's not that simple. Some are designed to fly alongside the target and send a shrapnel ring blasting out. But the ballistics are a complex problem and they can sometimes physically impact the target in certain intercept geometries. You also may not be able to distinguish a direct hit from a shrapnel blast kill in a recording of a FLIR display from a distance, since the shrapnel may not show up well in the IR spectrum + the display is much lower resolution than the camera. (e.g. if you take a photo with a high end camera, but look at the photo on the LCD on the back of the camera, you won't see all the detail captured by the system.) Anecdotally I've heard that pilots can see their targets in far better detail using the debriefing tools after the flight than they can with the cockpit displays.
> It's not that simple. Some are designed to fly alongside the target and send a shrapnel ring blasting out
Yes many air target missiles do just that but this is a hellfire, normally used for ground targets. So there is no flying alongside its intended targets, it's just a big boom warhead.
Because it's meant for ground targets I could imagine the detonator needs something really firm to hit in order to detonate though. A drone might not suffice in all circumstances
Hellfires have a selection of available warheads. The newest ones have multi-purpose warheads that have different selectable explosive patterns for different types of target. Even physically twisting the missile to get better hit probability on an air target:
This area of defense technology has been moving very quickly in the past few years, many assumptions the general public holds about military weapons and tactics are long obsolete.
