chrisl

Did they leave the radar on while the missiles were incoming?

I think we've seen some hints of what could become an approach for the surface scattered minefields. The different heating/cooling rates (and probably reflectivity, too) makes them very visible with the right camera. For a planned breaching op you might want to do something like map one day and then have a truck full of those dragofly/sparrow sized drones that are much dumber (and cheaper) than the US ones that are basically fed the coordinates of the mines and go land on them with small charges to detonate them. Sort of like a smart line charge.

Plus if you switch it on and it creates a black hole that instantly destroys the earth it's not like they'd have time to notice... (btw - have you read "A Hole in Texas"?

I think my employer owns most of the IP around the use of "Dumpster Fire", including an emoji of an actual dumpster fire on our own site. (eta: and goats are too cute for a goat rodeo to be a bad thing)

As a minor aside, I've started abbreviating that now as C9K, as a play on IT world abbreviations like I18N, L11N

You have to do it all in realtime, probably with an underpowered computer (even if it's pretty powerful by 2 years ago standards). Drone cameras are primarily intended for drone operations and there's not a lot of reason to constrain them for sensor fusion if it doesn't have to be realtime. Slurp it all up, send it all to a data store, and some combination of people and computers can chew on it at their leisure.

And I just gave a WAG. I'm sure there's a lot of variability in what's on the drones, and that's probably about the best that any but the most expensive will have. If you have a few billion dollars you can do ~10 cm from space.

FOV is variable if you have a optical zoom. The best you can do with an optical system is lambda/D, where for visible lambda is ~500 nm and lens diameter D for a typical camera that will fit on a drone is ~1 cm. Even you you have more apparent magnification it doesn't give you any better resolution.

Many (most?) of the feeds we see are downsampled/lossily compressed by the social media sites that they get posted on. The original feeds are probably HD and have a few cm resolution at 1 km, and better at closer. So if they have a data clearinghouse it's probably possible to extract quite a bit of intel. There are lots of other things sucking up intel, like babushkanet, cell networks, various NATO planes covered in antennas that circle along the borders, a zillion satellites that passively look and listen in the visible, IR, and radio. Synthetic aperture radar sats. If someone had enough money to buy up all the commercial space data over Ukraine, they could probably get a nice picture of where small units are moving on relatively short time scales.

Your internal combustion engine is just a screaming target for my IR sensors... Submarines, though, remain super cool.

How about aircraft? And they've only gotten more powerful if you have money. Space-based ISR?

And the ISR is going to get more bonkers, too. Be glad you can retire to an island with a bunch of cheesy DVDs from the 80s.

You mean like HUMINT at cocktail parties?

Said everybody who ended up live on Los Angeles TV for a two hour car chase before ending up spreadeagled on the hood of their car.

You need to read further back in the thread. EW is at best a stopgap against drones, because autonomy is also advancing rapidly, and if they don't need a two way comm link, EW does nothing for defending against them.

Tactical drones have gone through a few generations of development in those two years and we're still seeing nothing to counter them. It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's not an easy problem and it has to be cheaper and more plentiful than drones.

The two most technologically advanced MICs on the planet have been watching this go on for two years now and would no doubt love to use Ukraine as a test environment. In that time, the drone problem has only gotten worse, with no real sign of effective anti-drone capability at the tactical level.

I don't spend time with drones, but I do spend time using the "wrong" type of batteries in things. It's possible that the drones are all on low battery, or it could be that they're using batteries that run at a little lower voltage than whatever the drone was designed for. There are lots of batteries that are "direct substitutes" with slightly different chemistries that run at lower cell voltages. Some devices care a lot and won't work, while other devices just say "low battery" from the time you put it in to the time it runs out.

You can be autonomous and send video back. It's a useful mode to have if you're concerned about someone using the radio signal from your controller as a target - it can just act as a passive listener. Speed helps in outrunning one drone, but you can't outrun motorola. If you're made by one drone that can't catch up, another drone may already be positioned along your path to intercept unless you're running directly away from the lines.

You can send more bang farther and faster than with drones. Drones can make up for some of the reduced bang with precision - if you can always be sure you can target a weak spot you don't need nearly as big of an explosion. Artillery sends stuff with a speed that you're not going to see in drones unless you start using the shell as a sabot for a smart submunition. Laser guiding is a sort of in between thing - you can use a spotter drone (the one who's already calling in the artillery) to paint the targets with a laser.

I'm sure there are Russians who want to talk about doing that, but China has a substantial amount of stuff in space that would be just as thoroughly effed as the US stuff, if not more so. Which would leave Iran as Putin's remaining friend, and maybe North Korea. And separate from that, unless they're going to make it go "bang" right away, it's not *that* hard to render a satellite inoperable, push it into a higher orbit, or bring it into the Pacific without making a big mess of LEO. What are they going to do? Lodge a public complaint that someone moved their nuke from the orbit they parked it in?

I finally checked out the propaganda page for the Apple Vision pro AR system, the next generation in True Borg SpottingTM. At least as advertised it's the AR system I've been wanting for a while - effectively a 4π (or something like that) steradian workspace with reality visible through the goggles. And it's networked with the ability to create a 3D VR world of stuff. Now imagine instead of powerpoint and MSword expanded into unnecessary 3D, it's got a whole squad or platoon networked to each other and some next level of command, with the 3D world for each person constructed from what everybody else is seeing, plus GIS data and realtime ISR from other sources, with each wearer properly located and oriented within the AR world. I need to get my eyeballs into one and see how well the reality matches the propaganda. Given that it's apple, it probably looks and works pretty well now, but won't be really useful until they hit v3.0, but 3.0 will be really good.

Small drones don't really have the kind of range to replace 152/155 mm tube artillery. But something I can imagine happening as an intermediate development, once some level of autonomy is built in, is that the tubes will launch shells that have drones inside that deploy a few hundred feet up and then go full autonomous. Like a VT shell that only has one bit of shrapnel that has a mind (and shaped charge) of its own. But from the west you might be more likely to see that happen in HIMARS type rockets, with multiple drones (essentially MIRVs, but without the "reentry" part) that go targeting things. It gets the autonomous drones far enough away that they'll be out of battery before your own people might run into them. From a "what if it blows up the wrong target" perspective: you were launching essentially random explody things into an area. If you'd done it the conventional way you'd have made a moonscape and killed indiscriminately. If your drone isn't perfect it's not any worse than a heavy arty barrage.

You probably want them along the sides somewhere around the 2/3 point where jets start to get off the ground. But yes. And they wouldn't consume much power while they're waiting for a victim aircraft.

Or dive underneath with the shaped charge pointing up.