chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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11 hours ago, Kinophile said:
A50 strike video with eng translate/
Looks like it fired off all its flares, 1, maybe 2 missiles were deceived but the rest of the salvo kept going.
Did they leave the radar on while the missiles were incoming?
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16 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I don’t think anyone has invented cheap/expendable/replaceable mine clearance that can be done quickly. The old way was to use people but they are too slow. Those minefield really remain a tough riddle. The only other way I can see around them with the current forces is to attrit the RA until it is so brittle that it collapses. But that takes time, and we are not even sure what that will take.
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.
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2 hours ago, Butschi said:
@Battlefront.com@Kinophile Thanks for the additional ammo.
Absolutely true. It's not for their benefit. I like to (repeatedly, sign of getting old?) tell people what John Ellis (see e.g. here: https://physicsworld.com/a/a-life-after-cern/ looks like Gandalf so has to be right...) said back when I was at CERN as PhD student. We were about to switch on the LHC and all the conspiracy theorists went ballistic because people at CERN were all mad and evil scientists that wanted to destroy the earth with a black hole. John Ellis said, we have to go out there and keep telling the facts and proving those people wrong. Not to convince the hardcore conspiracy theorists who 4 or 5 or 6 sigma away from normal people. We will never convince them. But to convince the people who are 1,2,3 sigma away, who listen to the 6 sigma people but still can reasoned with.
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"?
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
But F#ck is so over used in the English language, to the point it loses nuance. Goat Rodeo? Dumpster Fire?
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)
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2 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Ahh Delboy. So damn funny.
Still, I think Clusterf**k is the closest English version, to wit:
Seems accurate.
As a minor aside, I've started abbreviating that now as C9K, as a play on IT world abbreviations like I18N, L11N
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5 hours ago, Butschi said:
FOV is never variable in our setups. The camera position is fixed, no (dynamic) zooming or swiveling whatsoever. So basically a pixel always covers the same solid angle. Makes sensor fusion (e.g. with lidar) easier. For us, detecting and classifying objects beyond 100m is a real challenge.
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.
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26 minutes ago, Butschi said:
Fair enough, I hadn't considered optical zoom.
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.
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19 minutes ago, Butschi said:
Do you think? According to my very crude calculation, given full HD you have 1 pixel per 40cm at 1km distance with a FOV of 45° (which is the minimum we are using in automated driving). Usually the FOV should be larger, I think, so resolution is worse.
Add to this that Ukraine has a rather diverse fleet of DIY drones. You have many different camera configurations with different resolutions, FOVs and calibrations. That makes applying AI complicated as detection models are often sensitive to these differences. Not impossible but not something I'd expect to give good results out of the box.
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.
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On 2/19/2024 at 7:59 PM, LuckyDog said:
Have we discussed the possibility of AI analysis of the drone camera feeds to complement other intelligence feeds? Good enough data could even track vehicle and soldier movement. The geolocation and time stamps could enable predictive observation (resupply/build up) and potentially predictive artillery fire. The feeds don't look very high resolution but I've seen AI pick out PPE use on similar sized (relative to the screen) objects. Any thoughts?
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.
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Just now, sburke said:
damn and I was gonna go with "Alex I'll take submarines for $200" in response to his technology statement. either that or the internal combustion engine.. gawd there were so many choices! sigh.
Your internal combustion engine is just a screaming target for my IR sensors...
Submarines, though, remain super cool.
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41 minutes ago, FlemFire said:
Please direct me to a single military advancement not named an intercontinental ballistic missile which has perpetually remained as nakedy powerful as it* was at its first introduction.
How about aircraft? And they've only gotten more powerful if you have money.
Space-based ISR?
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1 minute ago, The_Capt said:
We have been watching the unmanned space accelerate for over a decade now. The bottom line, no matter what arm chair experts are saying, is that this is an emerging competition not simply a blip where we will go back to having assumed dominance. It is lazy and dangerous to consider this a "blip" when all evidence is pointing in the other direction.
In the end, strike is one thing but it is the C4ISR implications that are really bending things. I can now see that AFV 15kms out as it is trying to form up to attack, which means I can hand off the actual strike to any number of possible shooters - artillery, NLOS ATGM/loitering, conventional direct fires, or UAS. The fact that these UAS can strike with effect too is just the icing on this particular cake.
But hey, this guy who clearly has it all figured out tends to do these drive bys every now and again.
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.
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1 minute ago, kimbosbread said:
And here I thought the mention of SAT was gonna lead into an interesting dicussion of formal methods for ISR…
You mean like HUMINT at cocktail parties?
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7 minutes ago, zinz said:
Sure driving faster is not keeping you completely safe. But that was not my point. The counter measures you suggested certainly work but are making the whole targeting process a lot more complicated. The relative speeds and distances mean that being able to go faster on the road does matter.
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.
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16 minutes ago, FlemFire said:
You're not seeing anything because currently it's almost entirely based in EW, which your two eyeballs will never see. When the EW matches up with the physical, those drones will lose effectiveness quite quickly. How and when that happens is another matter. Countries like the U.S. and China have billions of dollars of budget and the brightest minds watching this conflict like a hawk. Of course they're brewing up counter-measures. How long does it take to research, test, manufacture, and deliver something to a battlefield? Drones could be a nuisance for years to come, or they could get swatted down pretty easily, or go back and forth on that front much like tanks and anti-tank weapons. Note, I was a huge proponent of drone warfare and said very early on in this conflict that drone swarms would likely make tanks outmoded. I am very aware of their capabilities and I think their effectiveness hasn't even capped out yet.
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.
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Just now, FlemFire said:
You're right. Military solutions usually surface instantaneously, especially when it concerns newfound technology. That it hasn't happened yet proves that it never will. These tautologies make perfect sense, as they tend to do.
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.
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1 minute ago, FlemFire said:
Despite your tangent here, I don't know what you're disagreeing about. Yes, it's a technical marvel. Yes, technical marvels tend to invite military investment and with that comes counter-measures. We're currently in the midst of it, so like you said the gulf of firepower has shrunken. In my expert opinion smaller nations or sub-factions (like Middle-Eastern terrorists or clans), do not have the firepower to match modern weaponry. They must devise themselves advantages. With drones, as it currently stands, there is parity, because everyone is on the same level. When the advanced militaries figure out how to counter drones, then these same non-advanced fighters will find themselves further behind the 8-ball than they ever were before. I pointed out the machine-gun because, for a spell, they also briefly put rebels and standing armies at positions of parity -- until the latter got access to tanks and airplanes. Something is always coming down the pipe. How this is controversial to you is beyond me.
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.
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6 hours ago, billbindc said:
A notable detail in this video that’s gone viral this morning is that every single drone feed shows that each on is down to about 3% of power. It’s a fair guess that the Russians imagined this warehouse to be beyond the range of FPV:
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.
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1 hour ago, zinz said:
I just wanted to point out how much ISR value these drones give by not being autonomous.
As long as you can send a video back you want to do that.
Adding to the discussion about the speed of those drones. Imagine if the drone goes with 80km/h and the vehicle at 40km/h. If the vehicle is 5km away from the drone and both start moving at the same time the drone catches up to the vehicle at the 10km mark from starting point of the drone. If however the vehicle is going 60 km/h the drone would catch up only at the 20km mark. In this example a 50% speed increase is a 100% increase of distance to catch up. So going faster absolutely makes sense as a defense against drones. It also decreases the time you can get detected.
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.
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2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
We know what happens next. More autonomy and flexibility for drones and better munitions.
Here’s a question: What would it take for drones to mostly replace artillery? There are obviously huge advantages in production, flexibility, lack of TBIs/concussions, logistics, training, autonomy add-on etc. But what is missing? Bigger boom? Faster boom?
Related question: If you were outfitting a military from scratch, would you have more drone units than artillery? Would you have any artillery?
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.
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9 hours ago, dan/california said:
this is an escalation by the Russians but all the coverage does a lousy job of pointing out that this is not a technical breakthrough of some sort. It is just just a violation of a fifty year old treaty. The treaty is fifty years old because the technology to do it has been around for at least that long. The U.S. should be very clear that the first two things we will do if the Russian were set actually set thing off is kill every Russian soldier in Ukraine, and their entire surface navy.
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?
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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.
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10 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:
At the risk of being over my skis yet again here, can 152/155mm tube artillery be largely superseded in frontline use by a combo of:
-> drones for swarming or hunting mobile targets, and for nearly all forms of precision work and harassing fire
-> mortars for plastering attackers driven to ground by the drones. Are there cluster rounds for 122mm mortars?
-> heavy rockets mounted on a variety of mobile launchers, for demolishing fixed positions once identified
... with the other systems (HIMARs, ATACMs etc.) being used for more 'operational' targets. And remaining heavy tubes joining them in the long range PGM delivery category, ceding their longtime role as the high-volume 'fire hose' of the artillery arm?
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.
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5 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
I wonder if its not possible to stage several drones at the end of a runway and simply fly them directly at whatever starts to take off, like mechanical bird strikes.
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.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Starstreak is hybrid. The missile itself rides a laser beam (actually a projected pattern) from the ground station so it can't be jammed or easily spoofed. But the launcher/guider does have thermal IR sighting for effective use at night. And since it's on the human-operated sighting/guiding system, flares don't really provide protection as long as either the detector or operator can keep the bright flare from blooming on the detector (maybe just by having a reduced field of view) and making the target hard to track.
So maybe not the most likely scenario, but not impossible.