Richard Lloyd's Trajectory Analysis

If this is your first time here, I recommend starting from the conclusion page.

Richard Lloyd of Tesla, who previously published a widely-reported estimate of 2 km for the UMLACA/Volcano's range, and confirmed the Syrian Army's report of a rebel CW store in Jobar, has recently published an analysis of the sarin rocket trajectories.

The analysis reaches very similar results to those published here and in other blogs, indicating a launch source to the north.

However, Richard points to an interesting finding: A Syrian Air Force Intelligence facility located on this trajectory, at a distance of 2.8 km from the farthest impact site. (Note: For some reason, the diagrams show the base to be exactly on the trajectory. However, the impact sites provide an accuracy of only around 20 degrees, which covers the entire field west of Irbin).

This is of course a very important finding, since so far there was no evidence of government activity near the launch site (despite numerous reports of such activities all over Damascus).

However, there are a few obstacles before this could be used as evidence:

1. The base is beyond the UMLACA/Volcano range. The report does not provide any explanation why a range beyond 2 km is considered (which was previously defined as the "upper possible range"). In any case, our more detailed model puts the upper limit at 2.5 km.
2. Air force Intelligence is an Internal Security and Counter-Intelligence service. It is not involved in military operations, rocket artillery or chemical warfare. More specifically, this facility seems to have civilian cars parked outside and no military equipment.

Nevertheless, some scenarios could benefit from this new finding: For example, if we are to assume that the government had specific interest in targeting the civilian neighborhood of Zamalka, it is definitely conceivable that they brought the launcher and support truck to the facility, drove them after midnight to the nearby field to launch the attack and then retreated back.

The problem with this scenario is that it doesn't provide any significant military advantage over the alternative of driving the trucks directly from the nearby highway into the field. It of course still doesn't explain the many other discrepancies with such a scenario.

During the writing of this post, Mr. Lloyd published another report, which makes two claims:

1. The wide distribution of impact sites could not have come from random dispersion around a single target, implying multiple launchers.
   The estimate of this blog is that a single launcher was used, each time rotated to a different azimuth. It is unclear why this simpler explanation is ignored.
2. The range of the chemical Volcano is longer due its smaller mass.
   This blog's model has already examined this and found the difference to be negligible, since the lower mass also results in lower resistance to drag force, which in this case has significant effect on range.

Conclusion: The Air Force Intelligence facility near the launch location could have provided some cover to a government operation, but since it is beyond the Volcano range, its contribution is negligible compared to the alternatives. Therefore, this finding, while interesting, does not have significant implication on culpability.