chrisl

Yeah, basically stick a little primer shell onto each mine with a cheap timer or some kind of short range remote control trigger.

Send a drone withe a room service tray cover to drop on it?

There's not really "real time" continuous satellite coverage. When satellites pass over a region, the data can be sent down in near real time. Orbits of optical satellites (and essentially all satellites) are generally known, though fields-of-regard aren't necessarily, and people worried about space-based ISR have long kept track of when they'd be under a ground track or not. Smoke during an optical pass will provide obscuration, but will be transparent to SAR.

Probably gentler than getting shoved out of an airplane on a pallet with 2-3 parachutes. Or bounced for 50 miles in the back of a truck on a washboard road. Launch vehicles are high vibration environments, but I suspect combat transport environments aren't that different, if not worse

If your panels aren't on a 2-axis gimbal you probably want to install them tilted at the same angle as your lattitude. Germany is far enough north that it will put them 45-50 degrees-ish, so they'll be high enough to be a fence and at about the right angle.

I'm going to go hang some bird block around the yard now to keep our future drone overlords from getting too close to the house.

I work closely with the MIC and I can assure you that they'll find a way and won't be hurting for money. As I recently told a project manager - There's no amount of money I can't find a way to spend.

One thing that is sort of a fuzzy point of contention in robot-world is automated vs. autonomous. Something that operates on its own deterministically based on on predetermined responses to inputs and outputs is usually automated/automatic, rather than autonomous. Even if they have a ton of conditionals (if this changes, do that thing) and closed loop control around setpoints they're usually considered "automated" but not "autonomous". Factory machines do this. Aircraft autopilots do this. Once they get outside their programmed range they stop and wait or throw an error and ask for help. Autonomous is generally where you let the system loose in an environment where it doesn't necessarily have prior information about and let it sort out how to act. Usually for autonomous systems you're giving fuzzier instructions and they wing it when they get outside their training. Graduate students are like this, at least after their second year or so. Javelins might be on the borderline for this. They're certainly automatic once you pull the trigger. They may have some agency in how they get from trigger to bang.

We're all arguing this on a board that's dedicated to a wargame that has implemented at least some level of autonomy at the small unit level for 20 years. And made it work in reasonable compute times for battalion sized swarms on computers that were nothing special. The only thing it doesn't have is the physical sensor inputs, and those are pretty straightforward. And it was all implemented by Charles and maybe a helper (I haven't kept up). Charles himself might even count as an autonomous biocomputer, since he's really just a brain in a jar.

You can achieve swarming with very limited neighbor-neighbor communication. And if things are cheap to build you don't care all that much if it's not perfect. Neither of them sits around all day with people who do nothing but think about how to build robots. What we're seeing implemented in Ukraine has changed incredibly fast and is only going to get weirder faster.

yeah, right. If it's all machines being autonomous with each other, they're autonomous. You might have a personal definition of autonomous that requires complete isolation, but it's not shared with the rest of the world.

Yeah, that's why you might want to keep the communication rudimentary. If the transmissions are short enough and infrequent enough, you can be somewhere else by the time most C-UAS systems are able to repond. In a target rich environment, the comms would have to happen only very briefly and just before they all went in for their kills. If there aren't a lot of targets, it wouldn't need to bother.

If I send up a swarm of drones that are capable of communicating with each other, while not taking input from me, are they not autonomous? If I send up a drone that picks what it's doing based on some pre-determined guidelines and then communicates what it's doing back to me, is it not autonomous? Autonomy evades certain countermeasures, but doesn't preclude communication. Wouldn't a clever drone herder develop a swarm of drones that had some diverse capabilities? Maybe give 10 or 20% of them a suite of RF sensors and autonomy to go hunt radars and EW systems, while the rest were capable of picking targets on their own, but also at least some rudimentary communication to keep multiple drones from picking the same target if they happen to have comms with their neighbors?

Accuracy and precision together are important if you want to reduce the payload requirement.

You left out precision. With high precision & high accuracy you need less payload.