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.

Each of those little drones in the living room full of drones looks about like the one we saw in the IEEE article carrying an rpg warhead that can penetrate 300+ mm of armor. I was being conservative in picking big ones. The little ones lack range for now, but wait til you see a bunch burst out of an ATACMS and go all murderbot.

Note that the "launch system" in one of the pictures is a couple of bricks on the ground to keep it off the snow. The launcher can also be used as a CIWS against infantry in a pinch. The drone also looks like a pretty light weight model carrying a round that can probably penetrate ~300+ mm.

That's a mighty big pickup truck with a 1500 cm bed. You need a little over 120 cm for a 4x8' sheet of plywood, which is one of the drivers of bed size in US pickups. But many drones can travel folded and might go from being 15 cm x15 cm x 100 cm to 150x150x15 cm for a fairly large quadcopter. Or something comparable but a little different layout if it's fixed wing. Probably no tools for assembling either one - maybe some hex keys, but most of that should be done back at the factory and any field operations are just unfolding and clicking past latches. And the simplest launch system if it's rotary wing is to just turn on the motors and start flying. You don't need any catapult at all. Maybe hold it off the ground to avoid ground effect.

How's it been working in modern Ukraine?

I think almost anything you're seeing now was in development pre-2022 and pretty far along even then, and they're just trying to get some early money while there's nothing visibly on the market. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of more likely usable ideas out there but the people who have them and the wherewithal to implement them are in the shop doing exactly that and won't tell anybody about it until whoever they get their money from wants to talk about it.

It's still a cult classic in Pasadena. A few decades ago I went to visit a small aerospace company that's since been bought up by one of the giants. In the lobby they had one of those standup vinyl promo poster things that companies put at their booth at trade shows and it had what was then the standard picture of the James Webb Space Telescope on it. Except it was pointed down at Earth. And had a big beam of light projecting out from it. And the caption said "Space Based Laser" instead of JWST.

That's what aircraft and long range missiles do already for technical countries that have generally nice neighbors but expeditionary tendencies. Got a problem with someone halfway around the world? Send some bombers and a refueling plane from home and be there in a few hours, or a bunch of fighter/bombers from an aircraft carrier halfway between home and the target, and be there in half the time. Or a bunch of cruise missiles from subs and cruisers a thousand miles away and don't even put any trained monkeys at risk. A drone is just the aircraft with a good enough computer that replaces the monkeys, or a cruise missile with better software.

You can disperse the tubes, but they're still huge visible targets to the ISR. With drones you can disperse the munitions and they don't need a big delivery system. And the popcorn gets delivered in unpopped form and popped in place from the sky.

I wouldn't dismiss artillery, but a lot of its applications can and will be replaced by higher precision drones. Much like a lot of what it used to do was replaced by aircraft. At least for now, artillery has an advantage in both range and speed of delivery, even if it doesn't have the precision of drones.. But if you have drones where you need one tenth as many munitions as artillery shells to get the same effect, each munition weighs 1/3 as much, and you don't need a 4000 kg M777 to launch them, that's a big advantage in logistics while doing a lot less collateral damage. And you can disperse the lot of them and don't have to bring them back together to a launch site (artillery battery) to launch them. C4ISR is only going to get better for the technically advanced countries, and it will get hard to even drive a bunch of Caesars around and keep them hidden from CB. As for area denial? Sure, you can plaster a field with 152/155 for days, mostly shredding nothing, or you can keep some spotter drones in the air and a handful of munition drones as loitering and have them come flying in at anybody who tries to enter. Area denial with drones will be a thing in the near future. Trenches? WWI was famous for the enormous volumes of artillery and enormous systems of trenches. That was a whole different scale of artillery and it didn't ruin the trench systems. Compare it to a drone munition that can fly into the trench and blow the door of an enclosed area with a second one right behind to go inside. Yes, we've seen more Russian columns taken apart by artillery than by drones, but that's because there's been more artillery than drones. But they're short on artillery shells, so we're going to see less of that. With Ukraine's current rate of production of drones, they now have enough that they're comfortable sending one drone chasing after one guy. If you want psychological effect - that's a bullet that's chasing you around.

Sure, but if I can deliver it up close and personal with a drone, I need a whole lot less frag, too. And I can deliver it like a pizza through the door of your dugout.