chrisl

Drones reduce the mass of steel that you have to haul around that's only there to make the ammo survive the launch, even if you assume the same number of drones as artillery shells. They also precision deliver the HE so that you need less of it. So instead of 50 kg of shell and propellant, you've got 17 kg of R18 drone+5 kg explosive, so there's a factor of 2.5 per munition, and you don't need a big 4200 kg launch system. But if you get 1 kill for every 10 drones (reasonably consistent with how Ukraine is doing) vs 1 kill for every 200 artillery shells, the drones get another factor of 20. You can make all the shells be PGMs, but then they need a spotter (drone), maybe a targeting laser (on a drone) and the shells are basically just drones with longer range and limited maneuverability because they're ballistic. I'd be more inclined to stuff autonomous drones into 155 mm shells to get the extra range, then let them fly around and do their precision autonomy thing far away from any friendlies.

And for modern naval vessels packing a single 5" gun, I imagine if things got hot they'd get used much like the guns on WWII era submarines. For an isolated, unarmed ship (or small hostile scout vessel) they wouldn't want to use their equivalent of a missile (a torpedo), especially for small targets that might not even trigger it. They'd sneak up and cut loose with the deck gun (or guns, sometimes they had a 20 mm and/or .50 cal too). Sometimes you need to be able to deliver an explosion from moderate range and don't need a whole missile for it.

I think you're still one dimension away, too. You're starting from "How does my thing work, what can I shoot it at". From a battlefield perspective, the problem is more of "what am I facing and how do I keep it from getting anywhere near me". And then you develop the ISR and precision to vaporize anything you don't like that acts like it wants to get to close based on what's out there. In doing all of that you're constrained by conservation of energy, but there's a lot of room to work with if you start before anything gets you into its range.

What? No. I want a radio. A tank is only good if it sees the other tank first and can get the first shot off and has a sufficiently good targeting system to get a 1st-shot kill, and the range is short enough that the other tank doesn't get a round in the air ensuring the near simultaneous death of both tanks. No thanks. With a radio I can hide in a little hole and call my friends who deliver action at a distance to make the tank go away without the guys inside ever knowing I'm there. But I don't even want to let things get that far. I'm a geek, I enjoy the comforts of my home office. I'll take space-based ISR for $1000, Alex. And the questio to the answer is "What do I have to build so nobody will bother trying to sneak up on me, lest they end up suffocating in a cubic mile of popcorn, and they know it?" (edit: and I see @The_Capt ninja'd me on this. I need to try to keep more caught up.)

I think the first couple paragraphs of your response are a version of the "XY problem" that's usually a form of: non-expert asks expert "how do I do X" or "can you help fix my thing that's supposed to do X", when the only reason they're doing X in the first place is that they really want to do Y and X is the only way they know how to do it. An expert will tell them how to do X. A system engineer will poke at their brain for a while to understand why they want to do X and figure out that the real goal is Y, and there are three other ways Z, A, and B to do Y that are all more effective and less hassle. I don't think the energy thing is a red herring, so much as system energy comes in complicated ways. Energy arguments are very useful in all sorts of things, including physics based sensors, function of biological systems, logistics, and weapons systems. For a given volume you can pack in some amount of energy if you're working with readily available sources - petrochemicals, batteries, and high and low explosives are probably the main ones here. How you choose to spend that energy is a discriminator among systems. Artillery, for example, uses most of it in two big (and short) bangs - one of propellant to get the shell moving, and another to make a mess at the other end. But with modern ISR, electronics, sensors, and control systems you can use some of the energy of that initial propulsion bang to maneuver the shell in the air - either to extend its range or to fine guide itself to a target. But you have to be careful spending that, because every maneuver to change direction costs you some of that energy. Hypersonic missiles have the same limitation - sure, they go stupid fast. But every time you try to change direction of something going that fast you have to stick a finger out in the wind and use up some of that energy (and speed). And the maneuvering cost is very non-linear in how fast you're going, so a just few maneuvers at high speed gets very expensive. And pretty soon you just look like another dumb glide or ballistic missile and get shot down by some borrowed Patriot system.

And those are all effective now vs 50 (or even 30) years ago because of precision targeting combined with maneuverability after launch. Two of them (artillery and FPVs) are BVR, and we'll probably start seeing BVR tank-on-tank using drones to provide the direction shortly over the horizon, like Apache Longbows, and similar with ATGMs, limited by how much propellant it's reasonable to make infantry haul around on their backs.

So that's almost @The_Capt's creeping mines. Put each deployable mine on a string and put springs instead of explosive charges in the bottom of each tube, along with a little motor to wind the strings back and you're there.

An offensive war where there won't be relatively easily repaired railroads, or dirt roads through vaguely screened areas. But instead everything has to move over air or sea, where it's *really* easy to get a high signal-to-noise ratio for targeting, unless the owner of the target has spent F-35 money on being invisible.

It looks like they have the armored clown car bug from CM:BO. Please fix or do somefink!

We're at the very, very beginning. As far as I've seen so far, both sides are doing all this with a very conventional sensor set (Vis/IR cameras and GPS, mostly) and and haven't really ventured into RF or chemotaxis. And we've seen only tiny bits of autonomy where it looks like it's "last 100 meters" kind of autonomy, more than "deny this volume indefinitely". There have been a few US/European demos of RF-chasing drones. Once those sensors and autonomy get more widely distributed it's going to be massive swarms of drones against drones.

And the lead tank was basically screaming "shoot me first! shoot me first!" on every frequency. Anything using its radio for target homing instead of communication will make a beeline toward it. So if it wasn't an optical/AI drone, it could have been an anti-radiation drone.

MS is still basically a cipher. Unbelievably mysterious and bizarrely correlated to the latitude where you grew up. Biology is insanely complicated. I spend a lot of time among physical scientists who fancy themselves to be doing biology research (a description that fits me a lot of the time, too). Many of them don't have any hands on bio experimental experience and you end up with people who think that easy (and solved) things are impossible, and that things that are currently well beyond our knowledge and available data are trivial. And that's in research labs where you can isolate questions reasonably well. Doctors are basically working with horribly complicated systems that are hard to understand and have huge variations when functioning normally, and can break in a unbelievable number of obscure ways.

Getting good RF in buildings can be a pain. It's why I still have a desk phone at work - I'm in the middle of a building and my cell reception sucks there (though VOIP mostly mitigates that now, so I could probably let it go). Cell reception sucks in my house that isn't even all that large and is all wood, but is surrounded by hills and trees and things. And that's with trying to get reception. Effective drones much beyond the entryway of buildings is still DARPA Grand Challenge territory. They'll get there, and probably sooner than we think, but that's where you really need to have a lot of autonomy. Even if you have decent reception in the building sometimes, it can easily disappear in good sized regions and you need the drone to be able to take care of itself without comms and not be taken out by a bunch of curious cats.

That's the thing about diseases and medicine in general. Doctors are usually pretty good about telling whether you're alive or dead. Usually. In between is an extremely sliding scale, and if you can feed yourself and make to the bathroom on your own most of the time a lot of doctors will say you're fine. Even if you won the a Nobel prize the previous week. And the problem with biological damage in general is that we have terrible resolution on a lot of things, and things at very tiny scales can matter a lot in how your body functions. Other tiny things (like a virus) can do microscopic damage and then be cleared from your system so they're undetectable. But you're still messed up because maybe a whole bunch of capillaries aren't acting the way they're supposed to. Or your clotting system is doing weird intermittent things in your organs. Or some intermediate chemical process that people have mostly ignored, except for maybe one poorly paid graduate student, is completely broken and we won't learn that it matters for another decade. But there's nothing chemically or macroscopically detectable (at least not without slicing you into thin sections, which would probably annoy you) because your body cleared out the actual virus a long time ago. To get a sense of how tiny things can be and matter: at peak covid there was probably about 10 (or maybe a few tens) total kilograms of virus on the entire planet. Biology is complicated stuff.

You might get away with advance laying AT mines a few times, but eventually they'd start running smaller vehicles (service locomotives, or even trucks with train wheels) pushing a sacrificial train car or two (maybe with a very low plow, too) ahead of the trains. It would certainly slow things down, but not necessarily bring it to a halt. But drones that drop AT mines just a short way in front of the moving train? You'd take advantage of the extemely long stopping distance and make it a lot harder to sweep the tracks. And maybe easier than hitting the moving locomotive.

The Ukrainian drone hordes will be the most effective thing for finally restricting the rail network, but I suspect they still have to deal with range limitations. Taking out track is very temporary - it's not hard lay new segments of track quickly. But taking out locomotives and leaving a pile of rolling stock on the track adds some complication. Locomotives are also something you could attack very effectively with a not-very-clever autonomous drone if you need to hit them beyond effective RF control range.

Via ADS-B? It's not perfect. In an area where there aren't a lot of ground receivers feeding your map you're dependent on them being picked up by Iridium. And depending on what system you're using to watch aircraft, the lag between transmission and display can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. And the easy defense for russia is to squawk civilian airliner codes so that whoever wants to shoot at them would need visual confirmation to have confidence that it's not.

Oftentimes the reactions are very predictable and pretty obviously the goal of the attackers. The Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber are examples of that. The two guys who got caught trying to blow things up may have thought that they were going to damage something and kill a bunch of people, but whoever set them up wasn't expecting that. Neither one of them was going to damage anything - they were set up to get caught hiding explosives in ways that would cause the US and much of the world to inflict all sorts of disruption on itself. Had they actually blown up the aircraft over ocean it's likely that the root cause would have never been found. But by under-arming them and making sure they got caught, they gave the DHS another thing to freak out over and add ineffective disruptions to try to mitigate. That would have failed the goals of whoever set them up. The reaction to both of those was entirely predictable and we still disrupt our air travel to try to detect copycats to this day.

It's the modern military version of "you can't outrun motorola", and it's the kind of thing anybody who's watched broadcast TV in Los Angeles is familiar with. Somebody in a car is trying to get away from police and as soon as the helicopters show up it's over, but they usually drag it out for another couple hours on live TV thinking they can get away. Followed by a police helicopter and 3-4 news choppers, all with searchlights and Vis/IR cameras. Replace the helicopters with 2-3 overwatch drones and the squad cars with a half dozen FPV munition drones and it's Ukraine.

Most of the people I know who do this stuff tend to call it "Machine Learning" rather than AI. It helps avoid getting caught in the AGI hype and is more accurate. Precision mass will beat dumb mass and leave less of a mess (in every respect) to clean up. Star Trek covered this - the endpoint came to basically rolling dice and then each side would send the number rolled into the people shredder. Leading eventually to the better solution of "just don't get into it"

And for FPVs to take out a helicopter you don't need a lot of bang. If you can get ingested into a turbine or hit the rotor hub you can make their day a lot less pleasant.

It's a pretty obvious solution. I suggested it as an app that people can run on their phones way back in Fall 2022. It's the same as locating a radio transmitter with multiple receivers, but using sound waves instead of radio waves. Sound has a lot shorter range and detectors aren't nearly as sensitive as for radio, so you need a whole lot more of them.

We really haven't seen much in the way of standoff EFPs dropped-from/carried-on drones yet, have we? A former USAF tech development guy I know thinks the CBU-97/BLU-108 is the greatest thing since sliced bread for dealing with armor. The Javelin packs something similar into a missile transport, but the rocket equation makes it kind of big to haul around. Drones give up the Javelin's speed for range, stealth, and smaller mass and could become an even bigger AT nightmare with sensor fuzed EFPs (either as FPV suicide drones or as EFP taxis with multiple warheads).

Once again proving that everything is funnier when there's a duck involved, no matter how unfunny it is at its core.

They're trying to show off their abilities so they can get set-dressing jobs in Hollywood and get out of Ukraine.