Kropyva

"Nettle" — the volunteer-built Ukrainian software that turns an ordinary $150 Android tablet into an artillery fire-control computer, a live battlefield map and a unit-to-unit command tool. Where the Soviet method took up to fifteen minutes of hand calculation with paper firing tables, Kropyva takes a coordinate from a soldier, drone or radar, runs the ballistics, and pushes a firing solution in seconds. Built not by a defense ministry but by a volunteer charity, Army SOS, it is — with GIS Arta and Delta — one of the homegrown apps that let an outgunned army out-shoot a larger one.

Overview

Kropyva (Кропива, "nettle"; also transliterated Kropiva / Krapiva) is field software that installs on a commercial Android tablet and converts it, in the words of Al Jazeera, into "a basic unit of an automated precision guidance system." The tablet displays accurate modern maps, lets the user measure distances and drop target coordinates, ingests positions from drones, radar or forward observers, and computes a firing solution for whichever Ukrainian artillery type is being used — factoring wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity and even the curvature of the Earth. The result is transmitted within seconds over web or, where there is no connection, portable radio. Beyond gunnery it is a command-and-control and mapping tool: it tracks friendly and enemy positions, maps minefields and safe medevac routes, and logs the location of the fallen for later recovery. It is frequently mentioned in the same breath as GIS Arta, but the two are distinct — Kropyva is the tablet-resident fire-control/mapping app; GIS Arta is the network that matches a target to the best-placed gun.

Development

Kropyva is a product of Ukraine's volunteer movement, not its procurement system. Its maker, Army SOS, was founded in 2014 by activists from the Maidan protests — among them Oleksiy Savchenko and Artem Palyutin — initially to buy body armor and supplies for under-equipped volunteer fighters, per Al Jazeera and UNITED24 Media. When front-line troops asked for usable maps to replace 1980s Soviet sheets, Army SOS instead loaded satellite maps and military data onto tablets, then — at soldiers' request — added distance measurement, coordinate entry and artillery-fire calculation. That bottom-up feature accretion, from roughly 2014–2015, became Kropyva. Army SOS handed the source code to the Ukrainian military free of charge in 2018. By 2024 UNITED24 reported nearly 200,000 installations across the Armed Forces. The organization is unusual in operating independently of government oversight and shielding the identities of its developers and users.

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