chrisl
-
Posts
2,080 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
2
Posts posted by chrisl
-
-
1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:
I dunno, what about this?
Send a drone withe a room service tray cover to drop on it?
-
6 minutes ago, panzermartin said:
I suspect the main problem for Russians are the myriad simple FPV drones that Ukraine is using. These rely on plain cameras mainly. Smoke can make them less effective at some percent. Guess that would be small. They seem to be producing the smoke on ground level.
I think it could be more effective perhaps with real time satellite intelligence the UA is getting from the West. But I have no accurate idea how "real time" it is in a moving battlefield.
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.
-
15 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
Traditional laws of logistics do not apply to America! But yes, modularity would be good in general, unless it makes the whole system 10x more expensive.
As an aside, it’s gonna be interesting if we adopt suborbital rockets as rapid logistics; one wonders how the weapons systems will have to be adapted to handle Musk’s rather interesting landing profile.
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
-
1 hour ago, danfrodo said:
Vertically oriented solar panels are a thing, I just saw a whole video about it (w manufacturers/installers/users being interviewed). They are not installed as fences, but can double as fences. Installing solar panels as fences would be really stupid & expensive, unless these are old, worn out ones that don't work anymore.
edit: By the way, california generated enough renewable energy to provide 100% of grid demand for for 30 of last 38 days. That's california, the 6th largest economy on earth.
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.
-
4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
That is one hopeful theory but I think history is not entirely onside. As we see in Ukraine, warfare is not simply political, it is personal. So if/when an opponent’s unmanned bubble collapses they may very well refuse to accept defeat and fight on. They will do so by various means that will cause you casualties. There will be a lot of pressure to reduce those casualties. Autonomous weapons will be one of the best ways to do this. So I do not see a winning side simply switching modes mid-war. In fact attacks on the will to fight are very often pointed directly at populations…we are literally seeing this unfold everyday in both Ukraine and hr Middle East. So fully autonomous as terror weapons against civilian populations is tragically predictable.
Further, just because one can collapse an opponent’s unmanned systems bubble does not mean it will stay collapsed without destroying that opponent’s ability to access/produce more systems. That will mean attacks on deep industrial infrastructure and varying degrees of resistance. Trying to managed semi vs full autonomy based on ethical grounds in this sort of environment is a challenge few nations will do and even fewer will do well.
And this assumes the war stays a clean standup fight and does not go hybrid. Insurrection, partisan resistance and guerrilla warfare will ensure that fully autonomous stay on the forefront of any modern force. But it will also be very attractive to hybrid resistance for all the same reasons - can’t jam/EW easily, faster and more lethal, range.
The advantages are too strong, the effects too deterministic, the stakes too high.
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.
-
23 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
R&D and procurement of new/upgraded tank related stuff runs into huge numbers of billions over the course of a few years. The failed FCS program had a budget of $512 BILLION in inflation adjusted Dollars. Can you imagine that amount of money plowed into unmanned systems? I can't, because I don't think the military industrial complex would be able to figure out how to request even a fraction of that. Gold plated toilette seats and $1000 hammers wouldn't even get them to that amount.
Which is to say... money isn't a problem. It's politics and small minded thinking that will hold back unmanned.
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.
-
16 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Correct. And the dictionary sets that standard:
autonomous /ô-tŏn′ə-məs/adjective
-
Not controlled by others or by outside forces; independent.
"an autonomous judiciary; an autonomous division of a corporate conglomerate."
- Independent in mind or judgment; self-directed.
- Independent of the laws of another state or government; self-governing.
Though to be fair, this is from American Heritage Dictionary. Maybe Kiwi Heritage Dictionary has a different definition
For me, it's simple to draw the line. As soon as the system ceases communicating with a Human, it is autonomous. A Javelin missile is a great example. It can't get itself anywhere, it can't position itself to fire, it can't select targets, and it can't make a decision to fire. Therefore, it isn't a fully autonomous system. But once it's fired, it is 100% autonomous.
One might quibble with the above definition of what "outside forces" actually is, though. Personally, a swarm is a singular element of many individual parts. Therefore, as long as no part of the swarm is communicating to something outside of the swarm, then it's autonomous.
Steve
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.
-
Not controlled by others or by outside forces; independent.
-
11 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
RUSI is usually right on the mark, but not with that commentary. I think these guys are still conceiving of systems that can't be developed by anybody but General Dynamics, Raytheon, BAE, etc. What they seem to be missing is high school teachers are already doing this sort of stuff with students on public and standard range private school budgets. I know because I have a good friend in each environment. Sure, they aren't building killer drones, but they are doing robotics that involve similar tech that 10 years ago would require an MIT level of education funding.
Aside from The_Capt's comparison of costs for a military (1x Tank Platoon vs. whatever we can think of for UVs) is only part of where this is headed. The other is with groups like Hamas, AQ, and ISIS. Think of how expensive it was to do the 9/11 attack or to have thousands of rockets to launch into Israel. What do you think they are going to switch over to? An autonomous swarm that is deliberately created to NOT care about who it kills is a no-brainer. Unfortunately.
Steve
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.
-
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
Uneconomical compared to what?
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.
-
6 hours ago, JonS said:
human autonomous, I suppose, but not machine autonomous. The point, and Tux noted, is that the purpose of autonomy is not to show off how l337 ur hax0rz are, but to preclude the need for comms which can be jammed, spoofed, and targetted.
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.
-
4 minutes ago, Tux said:
Every time your autonomous drone tries to communicate, my C-UAS system is ready and willing to listen.
I know we've been round the loop a few times but I, for one, enjoy thinking through this puzzle and reading others' thoughts as well. Keep it up.
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.
-
38 minutes ago, JonS said:
Ok, there's a couple if things to unpack here.
Firstly, if they're communicating then they aren't autonomous. Heretofore autonomy has been touted as the nirvana to avoid countermeasures, and therefore assumed as a feature. I'm not going to say the autonomists are right and the communicators are wrong, or vice versa. What I will say - again - is that drones will continue to be full of compromises, will not solve all problems, nor invalidate all existing capabilities.
Secondly, "designing" is carrying a bit of weight. My beaver-tailed compadre just recently got a bit pissy about historical precedents because apparently we're only allowed to talk about *this* war, and yet here you are talking about the *next* war, or at least this war next year. More seriously: yes, you probably could improve both accuracy and precision that way (although you seem to be trying to avoid over-killing each targets be avoiding multiple drones attacking the same target, rather than reducing per-drone aiming errors?), but 'we could' is not the same as 'we are.'
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?
-
1 minute ago, JonS said:
Yeah, nah. I'm assuming accuracy as a given
(I'm not sure precision is relevant here)
Accuracy and precision together are important if you want to reduce the payload requirement.
-
48 minutes ago, JonS said:
This feels like one of those "pick two" triangles.
Range, size, payload.
Pick the two you want to optimise carefully, because the other one is going to suck.
You left out precision.
With high precision & high accuracy you need less payload.
-
3 hours ago, JonS said:
@The_Capt take it up with chrisl. I already halved the size of his 22kg drone and you're quibbling with *me*?
Also, those cute little whirrwhirrs you keep referring to are *extremely* handy at the tactical edge as mobile mines and for battlefield assassination, but I believe (because physics) they lack the payload, range, and endurance to be much use as part of a fire plan supporting go-forward combined arms maneauvre.
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.
-
1 hour ago, alison said:
Loving the drone party on the thread the past day, thanks for contributing everyone!
I noticed the IEEE blog also got in on the action. Don't think anyone posted it yet, so here we go: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-hackers-war
It takes a bit of patience to wade through the usual tech blog PR hype-fest, and there isn't a whole lot of new information for people who have been following this thread, but it does go into some more depth on the technologies being used in drone communications and EW, including mention of encrypted video and other topics we were discussing last week.
The "meta" of this war spilling out into tech blogs is interesting to me. It feels a bit different from previous wars I've lived through. Not because this is really the first "hackers war" (cyberwar has been a reality at least since Stuxnet), but because this time it's out in the open. Instead of shadowy figures employed by three letter agencies, it's soldiers in trenches who are hunching over laptops, which I think makes the conflict feel more personal to white collar folks who normally wouldn't see anything they identify with in pictures from the front lines.
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.
-
1 hour ago, kimbosbread said:
I’m assuming each drone fits in a 50cm x 50cm x 150cm box. Even a pickup truck bed is 1500cm wide, so we can just fit the raw drones in our favorite truck of any size no problem. Lots of room for everything else, clearly.
It’s a fair point on launch systems, and I’m implicitly assuming one of two real world examples:
- The simplest launch system is a catapult, which takes 2 guys to set up in less than 5 minutes. Pop the drone of the box, throw it on the catapult and tell it where to go. Targetting step could literally be that simple if this thing has the heart of a modern cellphone. I’m assuming they can launch one drone per minute, and targetting is automatic for all drones in hearing range (or they can be told on the ride)
- Slightly fancier is the mortar (ie what Switchblade comes in). Again 2 guys in truck take box off truck, fold down tripod legs, tell drone where to go, and that’s it. Let’s say it takes 30 seconds to launch per drone.
If we go further with the mortar version, and we pack our boxes vertically, and stick a bit more boom in the mortar, we have VLS-but-on-a-truck, for very very cheap. The only telling the drones what to hit in their boxes, so each box can just plug into port, and that port puts all the boxes on the same network (revolutionary tech, we have this in every home). And then it’s a puff of data and all the drones know where to go. Don’t even need your two schmucks in the back.
The more I think about this, the 16 tons of Himars with 3 crew is competing against one ton of drones stuffed in the back of the smallest truck you can find, or say towed in a sawed out camper by a Lada Niva with a crew of 2.
EDIT: 50cm is probably really generous even with sytrafoam padding. Your ****ty box truck can fit a hundred, but it’ll be a tight fit. If you go down to a 30cm container, it’ll be a lot easier and a large pickup could hold a 40 pack of these things vertically (5 x 8).
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.
-
4 minutes ago, JonS said:
WWI? WWII? Korea? Falklands? GWI?
How's it been working in modern Ukraine?
-
2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I think 5 years is optimistic. Related to the post I just made, the thing that really concerns me is that nobody has any ideas that are even close to figuring out how to reach equilibrium. Not big military industry, not pithy startup companies, and not volunteers putting stuff together in their basements. But all three are coming out with even better and more robust versions at a rapid pace.
To stick with the airplane analogy, it is if the Fokker Scourge came 2 years ago, last year Stukas, this year we're seeing F-4 Phantoms, and F-16s are already being tested in limited quantities for next year. Meanwhile all I hear from the people working on the counters saying "we have a very expensive and limited way to tackle Fokker's sometimes".
Put more succinctly, the counter proposals we're seeing aren't even up to the task of solving last year's problems, not to mention this year's, and absolutely no clue about how to deal with what we know is coming next year.
I'm normally a glass half full guy, but when it comes to counters I view the glass as half empty. And if it has beer in it, I'd chug it to see if that helped my disposition any.
Steve
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.
-
7 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Yes. When comparing capabilities of two systems it is always, always, important to look at them side by side. As this war goes on the things which differentiate legacy systems from UVs is getting smaller and less significant.
"Self propelled tracked artillery can go anywhere it wants, anytime, and quickly". True statement and definitely a leg up on towed artillery. But a drone team with an ATV and a trailer can go pretty much anywhere they want, any time, and even quicker, so in context SP artillery comes up short.
Oh man, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that ever saw that movie. IIRC I saw it in the theater!
Steve
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.
-
2 hours ago, Tenses said:
What drones can't do:
- Have better time to deliver(if not planned upfront). When you don't have drones already in the air, artillery will always be faster. In theory one could create a FPV with jet engine enabling it to reach the same or even better time to deliver than tube artillery but this is just not economically/logistically feasible anymore. Such drone would have to go supersonic very fast to reach target before artillery shell so this kind of weapons will be rather restricted to much longer ranges(strategic fires, something like currently developed hypersonic munitions).
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.
-
5 hours ago, JonS said:
Artillery can can fire from dispersed positions. C2 is a lot easier (a LOT easier) when all the guns are within shouting distance of each other, but there is no technical reason they can't be dispersed from each other by 100s or 1000s of metres.
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.
-
28 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Cmon, you can't gave your cake and eat it too. Or whatever that stupid phrase means. There's a narrative growing that drones are the future be-all and end-all. That feels very binary and overwhelmed by the excitement of a new weapons system coming into its own.
Sure 155 arty relies on radio coms (degradable) - and so do drones. Arty will always have the grid square fires advantage.
Autonomous drones are not flying witches - and for sure there will be counters. I read articles several years ago about encoding lasers to hack the system behind optical sensors. These were simple brute force attacks, scrambling the input to DDOS the system. It required LOS to the hostile lenses but not 90*. It's not a stretch to extrapolate this idea to be effective against autonomous drones.
Sure Trucks etc etc don't like mud - so what? Ukraine has had Caesars for at minimum 1.5 years now, and two winters later I havent seen any videos of bogged down Caesars. Or HIMARS. Or Archers. And even if someone can find such videos, again - so what? It certainly won't be at the occurrence rate to signify Crap Don't Use Caesars Coz Mud. I've seen plenty of MBTs and BMPs turning into land submarines, though...
Sure the trucks weigh 4.5 tons, so what? It's disengenuos to say it's only there so the shell will survive launch. Its there to move the shell, aim the shell, fire the shell, track the shell and fire the next one in rapid succession in relation and correlation to the first shell.
With firing on the move either just around the corner or already being implemented the mobility, the utility and effectiveness increases yet further, and that's because of the 4.5 ton truck.
Sometimes you don't need precision or can't guarantee/achieve it - you need area suppression, denial. Even a dumb western 155 is reasonably accurate (Eg front line accounts thatvcompare Soviet 152 from Msta v US 155 from M777) and can suppress/scatter any human formation very quickly. It doesn't need to be perfectly aimed to do the job. But a drone not perfectly aimed, either autonomously or directed, is pretty useless.
There will always be a need for rapid effects at long distances, using large scale area effect munitions that can ignore weather, strip terrain cover, ruin trenches, suppress infantry and generally **** things up over a wide area for days.
Every single destruction of RUS's armored columns has used artillery. There's some examplrs of drones alone picking apart a column, but also plenty of Artillery doing the same with nary a FPV drone in sight.
I'm very suspicious of using a new tech's promises to blanket kill/dismiss existing capabilities because they don't share the same characteristics. We haven't seen much counter-drone systems at scale - yet. But there is already work being done and it will only accelerate.
We have seen zero instances of successful interception of plunging 155 HE, guided or not.
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.
-
Just now, JonS said:
Not exactly - the steel alloy used (high carbon and brittle) is chosen so as to create fragments which themselves contribute to the effectiveness of the weapon.
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.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Yeah, basically stick a little primer shell onto each mine with a cheap timer or some kind of short range remote control trigger.