chrisl

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.

The endpoint: https://youtu.be/CZ1CATNbXg0?feature=shared

If you have enough lift you can even strap a javelin to the bottom of a drone.

Looks like it probably hit the vehicle anyway - the second one looks like it's coming in right behind and the vehicle from the first one is on fire, so it switches to follow the one on the road.

the smart choice makes for a not very fun scenario... Bad weather drones is just a matter of time. They'll end up larger to deal with rain and wind, but for -25C you just have to bake them in the fire like potatoes and keep them wrapped in foil and a sweater as you send them off.

Two of the things I've usually considered an advantage of artillery over drones is speed of arrival and saturation. But that was sort of based on relatively small numbers of drones, where one spotter could call in a ton of artillery to arrive from 40 km away in a few minutes. But if there's enough spotting you can put a cloud of FPVs up in the path of an arriving convoy and pick them off like that, one by one. It mitigates some of the range and arrival speed limits. And they seemed to have plenty of FPVs to pick off the vehicles, and close enough range that they didn't have to get them in the sky in advance. What they really need is enough of them with enough range to destroy the rear echelons and reinforcements before they even get close.

From what I could sort through last night, it does sound like control signals for many (most?) drones are encrypted. It's a lot less bandwidth, for sure. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't really true and that a lot of them are encoded so that drones and bases don't get crossed up, but not actually encrypted, and the marketing people don't know the difference. And I agree that putting together a map of every drone in the sky is probably not that hard, even for hobbyists. I have a cheap SDR mounted on my garage to pick up ADS-B, along with 50,000 of my closest friends around the country. It all goes to a server and I can look anywhere and see a map of every aircraft in the sky over the US with a lag of a few seconds. I know it's a few seconds because when there are brushfires I can watch the trains of planes coming and then know exactly when to walk into the backyard with binoculars and where to look to see some cool old aircraft that have been retrofitted for firefighting. And it doesn't matter if they're actually transmitting ADS-B data. The ones that only send a hex code are accurately located by MLAT. And that's just a bunch of hobbyists with $30 SDR dongles and Raspberry Pis. If you're a military, you know your opponent isn't going to be nice enough to transmit hex codes in the clear, but they will have some repetitive features of the signal that you can use to generate positions with MLAT. And it's all done with small passive antennas that just need rough LOS to the area and computers that fit in the palm of your hand and only pull a few watts. The endpoint is full or nearly full autonomy with minimal transmission. Any high bandwidth transmission will be optical or relayed through a high altitude relay aircraft (or low satellite constellation)

I think it's only going to be reasonable to leave suicide drones unencrypted for a little while longer. If you're facing a force that has NATO-like SIGINT capabilities, it won't be long before the guys in the back office watching all the friendly drone feeds also have a "red desk" watching all the enemy drone feeds to both guide the anti-drone activities (that still don't really exist) and warn people to duck. There are going to be data siphons in back, and they'll be hard to hit because they can be entirely passive. If you want fine guidance to the target but want to keep the target secret, you have two modes - encrypted "cruise" mode where you move the cloud of FPV drones into position and then when Serhei is ready to drive one onto Private Conscriptovich he picks an available drone from the cloud (and there will be a cloud of them) and gets it pointed in the right direction, and then flips it into "low lag" that sends him an unencrypted low-lag feed for the last 20-30 seconds of its trip. And any drone that's going to hit a static (or big and predictable) target won't even need that - it will start with "last 500 m autonomy" where Serhei picks his cloud drone, picks the target with a cursor, and it just goes there. That's really not far off at this point, and probably closer than dual-control mode. Fancier countries will also have the drones networked so that they can transfer target information either directly or with a couple clicks from the back office controller. The overwatching hi-res encrypted drone with optical comm back to HQ picks out targets and then transfers coordinates (and possibly images for image matching) to the kill drones that then don't round trip realtime video, or at least not for most of their trip.

And it sounds like DJI is also backdoored so that anybody who has their Aeroscope system can spy on them. Ukraine has disabled some of that access because they knew at the start that the DJI systems were backdoored. Encrypting also consumes more energy than not encrypting. So if you're in an environment where you know Pvt. Conscriptovich doesn't have an aeroscope and probably doesn't even have a radio to hear from someone who has one, then you can eke out a little extra range without encryption. It also simplifies your conops if you're working with all ad hoc equipment so you don't have to worry about the handshaking of the controller/drone pair to sort out keys. A lot of what Ukraine is using are drones that are literally homebuilt by people who have boxes of various COTS parts. And after a bit of poking around (certainly not comprehensive) it seems like hobbyists have mostly not cared about encryption. Some commercial drones, mostly for gov't, law enforcement, and big corporate clients who can afford to spend a lot of money for a small number of drones with data security seem to have it, but it's not widespread beyond that. I'm sure we'll start seeing at least moderate encryption of the video feeds in Ukraine. It's not a hard thing to do, but it's not the default for hobbyist drone kits. This video has some recent discussion on how widespread data security is for drones (it's not), and commercially available ones are expensive and not what you want to use for FPV bombs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5-wF63lCXw

Not really a radio grog but I've taken a few E&M classes... Back in the day, most of the internet wasn't encrypted, either. It cost computing power to do that, and it's relatively recent that everything travels with TLS/SSL. Most of the drones on both sides seem to be either consumer drones or built with consumer parts, and there has mostly not been a lot of incentive to make the video feeds encrypted. Strong encryption requires computing power, and that takes energy from the battery that could be used to fly longer. And at the start of the drone war it's likely that that neither side had a lot of people or equipment available to eavesdrop on drone transmissions. March 2002 was like the beginnings of WWI aviation where enemies could just wave at each other, or maybe fire a pistol. Even adding some relatively weak encryption (that maybe requires less compute) would probably be sufficient for tactical security as long as the keys are unique and random for every flight - it only has to be secure against being broken in an hour or so to keep eavesdroppers from seeing what it's doing in realtime. A reasonably capable attacker could record all the encrypted signals and break them later to look for patterns, but that doesn't help them dodge any FPV right now.

On a clear night you don't need GPS over water - you can use stars. It's a little trickier to do with the amount of extra optics you might want to put on a drone (vs a ship, a plane, or a cruise missile), but detectors with lots of pixels are cheap, and if you're a quadcopter you can pause periodically to stare at the stars and orient yourself. Terrain relative nav has to be much easier now than the early days of cruise missiles - both space imaging of the earth's surface and the quality of image sensors for mobile devices have gotten orders of magnitude better. Along with *way* faster computers for doing the matching. The recent Mars landers do terrain relative nav from a couple miles up *on another planet* and they're using a computer that's equivalent performance to a 1998 low-end mac laptop. A couple models down from the one I started playing the CM:BO demo on. More modern cell phone processors with dedicated image processing can do *way* better at still very low power.

Here are the key parts. Basically Scholz may come across as waffling on materiel support to Ukraine, Germany is the second largest supplier after the US and Macron doesn't want to be shown up. I think this gets Germany a handful of get-out-of-bashing-day cards.

Non-operational aircraft can be useful for spare parts to keep others running. This one not so much anymore.

I don't have a sub either, and it let me see the whole article. If there's a monthly limit try using a private browser window or clearing your cache.

Even slow boats have fast screws - little propellors don't move much water per turn, so they need more turns, and you have to stay ahead of the currents and wind. If they want slow drive noise they'd have to go with big paddlewheels, or robotic rowboats that have big flat surfaces that move a lot of water per stroke or per paddle board in the water and probably have a big reflective radar signature. You can do steam or compressed gas powered for the final couple miles, but those will also have an acoustic signature.

The underwater USV problem is basically what it's been for at least 80 years - listening for the high speed screws of torpedos with passive sonar. And watching for their wake if they're near the surface. I don't know that there are a lot of other options - RF won't work through the water. Active sonar won't have the speed or spatial resolution, and advertises your position. Navies have done various things to make active and passive sonar more effective, like using towed buoys so they're spatially separated from the ship, and helicopter dropped active and passive buoys for the same reasons. But water sucks to look through. Maybe sharks with laser beams.

the funny thing is that they refloated the fleet (because he destroyed it on the first day of a two week exercise) and he did it again. Then they just kept changing rules until they validated that they could defend themselves from conventional attacks that they were designed for and pretended attackers would do what they were asked. Or something like that. Fixed targets like the kerch bridge are somewhat easier to defend against drones. Basically a lot of nets. Torpedo nets to several meters deep and up a few meters above the surface for the speedboat drones, birdblock/deer net for the aerial drones (probably so much plastic it will consume a month of russian oil) and radars/missiles for ships and planes. Like a huge aviary. Ships basically have to be turned into minesweepers/fishing trawlers with nets hanging from bow mounted cranes to get the same kind of net coverage. On the positive side, they can probably feed the crew from all the sea life they sweep up in the nets.