chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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9 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:
That’s the frustrating thing about a lot of the tech that we have discussed: You don’t even need a lab; between a buddy and me we have enough electronics test equipment and spare ics and breadboards to put a demo together.
I’m curious about using one of the 9dof sensors (used in VR goggles, watches, phones) and how you’d zero it for whatever weapon you attach it to. It really does seem like a long weekend project to get an MVP working.
x,y,z,t and time derivatives of position you get for free from GPS. I think all you need from there is compass (needs to be calibrated periodically like when you use your phone for a compass) and level (needs to be calibrated periodically like using your phone as a level). Tie that to a GIS model (and maybe have people set zeros at known physical locations on the map) and I think you have everything you need. If you're networked and have some base stations with known precise locations you can use MLAT to improve your calibration dynamically.
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4 minutes ago, Joe982 said:
The explosions are obviously the ammunition inside the tank. I have seen videos of Russian tank design and yet I cannot see how the round from the drone can penetrate the armour.
Shaped charges and thin top armor?
(eta: randomly googled site says hull roof armor is 20-30 mm on a T-80 BVM. Small shaped charge will do fine)
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36 minutes ago, danfrodo said:
ChrisL is kind of a badass. He actually knows things.
As far as I know, neither of those space missions ever flew, but the same capability exists now by other means.
And for the second, I suspect kids in a college robotics class could do a demo using cheap hardware and open source software. It's sort of a basic surveying thing. Electronics have gotten small, cheap, and available.
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
Well that makes sense. They probably know where to hit on the T72 as well. One thing is definitely becoming clear - tanks and AFVs were never designed for this type of environment. An opponent is not supposed to be able to pick which square inch to hit.
Many years ago I worked on a space mission concept that was doing super high precision astrometry, that is, measurement of precisely where all the stars in the sky are and where they're going (because they're moving and we can measure sensitively enough to care). It was science driven, but the Navy was working on a competing concept and I had to think for a while about why. But it was a little after Gulf War 1, with all the precision bombing, and when I did the math on mapping the precision back to a sphere the size of the earth, it amounted to being able to aim not at a door (as they did in GW1, mostly with laser target painting), but at the doorknob using mapping and nav without needing a SOF guy with a laser. And that was decades ago.
ISR+massed precision == just don't even try it
On 1/13/2024 at 1:48 PM, kimbosbread said:We have a common rail system, thankfully!
Protocol is un-necessary for MVP: Just have the drone guy tell you the GPS coordinates, and plug those into your universal firing computer. Drone-controlled firing and bracketing is version 2.
I like the idea of the cell-phone that attaches to the rail. User interface is easy:
- Enter GPS coordinates of weapons system, or use onboard GPS
- Enter type of weapons system
- Enter target GPS coordinates
- Aim weapons system, and the phone display shows you crosshair representing aim point of weapons system, and then another crosshair representing aim point to hit target. Line them up, phone makes a sound or flashes and you pull the trigger.
EDIT: So here’s the challenge: How do I zero our cell-phone firing computer? Do I need to have a known zero? Can I just estimate things based on accelerometers and a laser level and say “meh good enough” and hit stuff 5km away?
EDIT2: Is this even worth the effort of developing and building, when I could just have more kamikaze drones?
All of this is within the capability of existing technology. Aircraft systems have been doing essentially this for kind of a long time (see above) with less compact equipment. You can put a little LIDAR rangefinder on a rifle or a drone and couple it to precision GPS and compass. The thing that makes your phone big is the need for you to see it and manipulate things on it with your fat fingers. The size limiter on your proposal is probably the GPS antenna (small) and the laser optics (small). It probably all exists in prototype somewhere, maybe linked to a VR goggle set that's linked to a local server so a whole squad or platoon can spread out and have borg spotting that's delivered to each other and the rear echelon with the action-at-a-long-distance stuff.
(ETA: you're not just coupling the GPS+compass to other hardware, but also to a detailed GIS model of the area that's enabled by the massive ISR cloud watching the whole thing)
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1 hour ago, Zeleban said:
This is not true, at the moment Russia is keeping most of the world in fear. How can Russia be called a secondary state after this?
Because their sustainable military budget is maybe 1.5x the budget of the University of California. Not the state of California, just the larger of the three state university systems.
The Russian navy isn't doing particularly well against a country that has no navy.
The Russian army is stalled out with what it's currently holding against, as has been repeatedly pointed out, a country that was expected to last a week at most. It's closing on 2 years, and they've pissed away the better part of 50 years of soviet production.
Russia has no tech industry and depends on China for any tech. Russia is a tiny customer to China compared to the west.
The main thing that keeps Russia on the world stage is the leftover nukes from the USSR. I don't think anybody really expects that Russia would use them unless directly attacked by an overwhelming force, but if Russia collapses in a chaotic way those nukes could get scattered to a lot of places that we would be a lot less happy to have them.
Russia needs to lose badly in Ukraine, but not collapse internally to the extent that nuclear materials get scattered around willy nilly. The west needs to support Ukraine in winning for the same non-proliferation reasons that they want to avoid Russian collapse: we promised protection in return for giving up the legacy nukes. Ukraine gained independence as the 3rd largest possessor of nuclear weapons on the planet and gave them up voluntarily. If you still had them, none of this would be happening now, and every little state with nuclear aspirations is watching closely. If we abandon you there will be a mad rush of nuclear proliferation among much less stable countries.
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7 hours ago, Carolus said:
This will not go to Ukraine.
Australia is moving the E-7A to Europe where it will become part of the ISR network that provides target information to Ukraine, but it will not belong to Ukraine. It will not enter Ukrainian airspace. The base of operations will be Germany.
https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/news/2023-10-25/continuing-support-ukraine
And this has been going on with NATO air assets since day 1. It’s just ok now to talk about it publicly.
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4 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
As opposed to being in a vehicle full of diesel and a big hot thermal signature? We saw how well that worked out on both sides. Take my chances with the jet pack…at least you get one cool ride.
Trick will be setting pre-conditions and to keep the jump short. Like 60 seconds. Do it at night and with smoke and you might stand a chance of getting a recon force across.
But hey if someone else has a better idea…mutant badgers? Water cannon?
If you're big and hot, night and smoke aren't going to do anything for you against somebody with thermal imaging.
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Both of those jetpack-y things are going to be big, loud, noisy, and hot enough that they're really more for getting people into a spot where there's little or no opposition, but there's some sort of difficult barrier (river, cliff, minefield, etc.) and you need to get people over there to rig a bridgehead of some form. If you try to make an army of flying monkeys with them, it's not going to go well.
Even with turbofans, which are way more efficient than jets, the available flight time is going t be pretty limited if it's hauling a full grown person with full kit. When you're doing stuff that leaves the ground and has to stay off the ground, mass (the kg kind, not the mongol hordes kind) drives everything.
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11 minutes ago, JonS said:
Unlike, say, flying across a minefield with a backpack full of Jet A1 and a big hot thermal signature?
That's not high on my bucket list, either.
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6 hours ago, JonS said:
Jet packs don't need to use actual jets
Yeah, so all they need to do is target your turbofans and the uncontained blade failure will take your head off.
That would be ok for crossing a minefield at low altitude if you have full cover, but if anybody's able to take shots at you, it could go very badly.
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9 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Why would anyone take hydrological advice from a guy whose toilet spins in the wrong direction?
Leaving me with the mental image of a toilet that's mounted to spin like an old Tilt-a-Whirl carnival ride.
9 hours ago, OBJ said:Would that be standing looking down drain or up?
If you're looking up drain you're in the wrong place.
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5 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Well now we got a ballgame, or what could be one. The AI might be in networking all these drones together. Human operators at 1:1 or even 1:5 is likely too many people having to fly this thing. So swarms of fully autonomous systems. They not only would have to sanitize, they would need to keep sanitizing and then move with ground forces. Above 2000 feet Air Denial would need to be sustained.
If some defenders have to hide in holes that is a workable risk. What cannot happen is enough of them with UAS of their own are able to dial in ATGMs and artillery or the breaching efforts could die.
UGVs are an obvious answer but I am really not sure the tech is there yet.
Defenders hiding in holes get covered by their own drones that wait around. If they're controlling their own drones, they're also radiating, and you just need to hit the antenna to render them hors de combat, and let the backfield drone operators/AI/UGV take care of them when they get thirsty.
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2 hours ago, OBJ said:
Really appreciate the thoughts on this by @chrisl and all others after.
I just started looking but haven't found anything that looks like force structure or doctrine for massed use of drones. Maybe not surprisingly there does not yet seem to be a 'FM 7-7X, the Drone Platoon in the Attack.'
The impression you get is field practice in Ukraine is way ahead of published military thought. Maybe someone here knows the Ukrainian or Russian drone equivalent of JFC Fuller or Immelmann/Boelcke.
I might differ with others on AI. I think the integration of autonomous AI into conventional war kill chains in recon/strike complexes is inevitable given the advantages in response/decision cycle time.
I did find this interesting, thoughts on drone 'swarm tactics.' Author is an Italian Air Force Lieutenant attending USMC U.
I think you need to look in the Science Fiction section of the library, but you very well might find something there that's not far off.
I agree that use of "AI" is inevitable. I just don't think we'll see it in Ukraine. I'd be more surprised if there weren't prototypes than if there are. But figuring out how to implement them en masse in the field with a mix of drones and without accidentally sterilizing the wrong side of the FEBA isn't something that I'd want to bet a couple battalions of the UA on. But I think there's enough autonomy available now that there could be "drone prep" crews sending drones into the rear to replace the ones that are getting used up and handing them off to operators who are using drones like the UA rambo video was using guns some months back, except they'll be pro video game players with high SA pulling reserve drones from the bottom of the screen. Sounds kinda like Ender...
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Hm, let me take a shot, but honestly we are on the edge of the map here.
1. This is a really tough one. In a magic land of unlimited resources one could set up several of these attacks simultaneously to overwhelm an opponents defensive ISR capabilities. But given the current realities, I don’t think one can mass all the bits without being detected. Feints and decoys might go some distance but one would need to rely on a lot of firepower. The opponent might be able to see but would not be able to do much about it.
2. I simply have no idea. This might be a force density number that shifts with terrain. Or it might be entirely contextual. My sense is “a whole buttload” and then see if it works. Risk will be depleting UAS along the other parts of the line.
3. My best bet is a combination of more unmanned and light, fast infantry. Once they can get through the minefields they are likely going to meet RA conventional c-moves, so PGM and ISR will be key. Along with AD. No point breaking through if RuAF just smack them 30kms in. Light infantry come with the benefit of the lowest logistics footprint. One could bomb them up and do a modern flying column thing. Big and heavy would then come last. Once a protected corridor/bubble is in place and the enemy is starting to react. Save the mailed fist for a coup de grace type strike.
4. Scheme of manoeuvre. Good question. Do they go really deep? Go for short gains and encirclements? I think it would be situational dependent. Short gains would make the breaches larger. Deep could severely dislocate a sluggish RA.
5. My bet is the RA would try heavy c-moves and surging artillery. “Attack!” That is textbook. This is both risk and opportunity. Opportunities include killing a lot of RA hardware as it rolls forward. Risk is getting caught outside the bubble. The bubble itself would have to move.
6. EW would be critical. Shutting theirs down and pushing UAs forward. This is like a creeping barrage. In fact the whole damn thing would be a creeping barrage of EW, unmanned and artillery. And then it had better be able to run. Cyber is likely too far back (or forward). Anything that could hack or disrupt RA C4ISR would be priority follows by anything that flies. AI - better be as far forward as possible on those drones. Creeping kill boxes of autonomous systems with enough brains to kill anything that looks like RA.
Big questions are: Can they build it? Can they project it? Can they sustain it? Can they exploit it? No one has ever done this sort of operation before so what it would take to realistically pull it off is basically a mystery. A lot of moving parts and would take months to try and out into motion - assuming one could get enough unmanned systems in the first place.
This sounds crazy but I am pretty sure tanks also did at Cambria. And of course Cambrai did not work, or at least not all the way. So the UA would need to be ready for failure and not overreach.
1. Without some level of autonomy, the C2 seems to be the main barrier to a massive drone swarm. You can plop enough bandwidth in a small area to support tens of thousands of drones, but unless they each have some level of autonomy, you also need one person per drone (or maybe per 2-3) to drive them. With a steady stream of drones getting fed into at the back you could maybe do queues and handoffs or tradeoffs, but you probably are still talking a battalion of drone drivers at the prickly edge.
2. What's the current kill efficiency for drones? Given that sometimes a drone gets multiple guys with one drop, and sometimes one drone takes a few drops of separate munitions to hit one guy, and that some are single-use, you could probably shred a defender badly enough that they'd want to leave if you have somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 drones per defenders, as long as there's good enough ISR that the later drones to enter aren't using up battery looking for targets (this maybe argues for staged drivers - someone flies a group of them from a launch location to the prickly edge and hands them off to guys who already have a good picture of what's going on and where they want to put a drone next. Or maybe they're all in a room with a shared overview display and don't have to do handoffs.
3. yeah, small and fast. ideally with drone dogs to haul extra equipment like MCLC cord that more drones could lay.
4. Ideally you'd hit a large 2-D region almost simultaneously everywhere so that the back is disintegrating at the same time as the front so there isn't any help coming to anybody. You'd probably need to launch drone bundles with rockets, artillery, or aircraft to do this though. Basically the goal would be for drones to try to sterilize area, or at least be dense enough that it looks like that to the defense.
5. At a tactical level , the best defense is probably to be in a hole with dirt over your head and a heavy door or labyrinth so the drones can't hit you. But as long as they have you pinned there, the attackers can follow the drones in. At a battlefield level? The best move is probably to move forward so that the defenders are intermixed with the attackers and there's more confusion on the ground to make the drone pilots hesitate. They could turn on a bunch of RF noise generators, but those should have very short term usefulness, since they're basically bright light up targets.
6. There is no AI. At best there might be some autonomy in moving clusters of drones thorugh clear space to get them quickly to where they can be actively controlled. The main thing is having some set of drones/artillery/missiles that homes in on EW generators that might interfere with the drone control. There does have to be some high level (literally, as in high altitude) observation looking for warm things on the ground and integrated with the tactical drone pilots. The same or similar platforms should be sucking up RF signals for triangulation, and some more platforms should be acting as relays for the drones. Since the primary attack is drones, it can also be done in huge volumes late at night/wee hours of the morning to increase the thermal contrast between the ground and the defenders.
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4 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
This video, on top of many others, has convinced me that one of the reasons Russia has managed to recover from its shortage of personal kit is because the "body armor" is fake or of exceptionally poor quality. I've suspected this for some time now because there used to be plenty of videos of Russian soldiers taking multiple hits from grenades and still being functional. And then there are videos of large numbers of "sleeping" Russian soldiers that are intact. It seems to me if the body armor was up to normal Russian standards (which appeared to be decent, surprisingly!) there wouldn't be so many casualties in one place.
Compare the state of the bodies in the above video (unknown cause of death) with the ones from the Kherson convoy and (known cause of death).
Obviously this is just selective observations, but as I said... I've been wondering about this for a while now.
Steve
The body armor situation also shows some of China's ambivalence toward Russia. China is a huge supplier of the boron carbide used for ceramic plates, and it's apparently not showing up in Russia.
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6 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Well I suspect that “yes” the RA have gotten a better grip on C4ISR. I am not sure that has translated into tactical offensive effects - eg we have not seen stream after stream of UA soldiers getting chased around trees yet and Russia would be posting that with glee. So we have what both the Ukrainian CHOD and president have admitted - a somewhat static tactical/operational battlefield. No one appears to have figured out how to break this deadlock and I am not sure we can in a short term as the technology really does not exist en masse yet.
This is a good clue as to whose side China isn't on. Even if you're not talking about pre-built DJI drones, China can supply all the various control parts and lightweight batteries, transceiver pairs, controllers, displays, etc. that are going into the local custom built drones. But either they're not, or they are and Russians still have too much vodka to be able to do anything useful with the parts. I'd bet on the former, since they do manage to get Shaheds off the ground and pointed at Ukraine.
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1 hour ago, sburke said:
LOL That was one of the reasons I retired. I just couldn't handle spending one more minute of my life trying to figure out how to make a binary choice into three options. That was a McKinsey thing, they always had to have 3. I wondered if some high level partner had simply read Rendezvous with Rama* or something.
*the big line for the sequel was "The Ramans do everything in threes."
It's just like image processing. Oversample your option space into 6 options, then average each of the two adjacent pairs. Voila, two options resampled into three.
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1 hour ago, dan/california said:
So Ukraine needs SOMETHING to break, or at least degrade, the Russian C4ISR system to unstick this thing. There need to to be smart people in quantity, with money in even greater supply, throwing rocks, laser beams, and autonomous drones at this problem until they figure it out. And when they do figure it out, it needs to be built and shipped in a truly crash program.
Given the density of listening antennas flying around over and and adjacent to Ukraine (and presumably all over the ground, too), I'd be surprised if the higher levels of the UA don't have a very good idea of how any new Russian ISR system works. Simply blowing a few drones out of the sky is a short term solution to it - they'll just tweak something and start the cycle over again. As @The_Capt alludes - the UA may be baiting the RA with stuff in front of those eyes so that the RA either exposes high value forces that the new ISR capability is supporting, or exposes the brains so they can be destroyed. It's probably better to leave the capability in place for a while and feed it disinformation (one way or another), rendering it useless, while the RA thinks it's still providing value, so that the RA will use the bad information to get itself killed.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
I think this is a viable tool to combat "cruise missile" type drones as their trajectory is likely more predictable than a copter type drone. But then again, if you can see where the Shahed is wouldn't it just be easier to shoot it down? Seems Ukraine has had great success downing them in that way.
Steve
I’d lean towards having the net stay attached to the anti-drone until it makes contact and fouls the victim. Then it can either be hauled in or jettisoned somewhere. I’d lean towards jettisoning in some kind of drone dump far from any humans so it can’t be used a a trap to provide target coordinates.
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16 minutes ago, JonS said:
Lol, true. But is that really any different to the freight-haulage service they're already providing for JTACs?
When it's actual pallets of freight it will be more obvious to them.
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1 hour ago, Fenris said:
I imagine tactical glasses or goggles doing augmented rather than full virtual reality could be helpful. Have to keep the HUD very simple, compass at the top of the viewed area, red dots show range/direction of enemies etc. Most games have stuff like this already so no need to re-invent the wheel. I wouldn't be surprised if we see things like this is our lifetime with a human operated drone per squad to start with and then eventually autonomous drones and finally drone networks doing precision weapon guidance at range with human infantry only moving in to mop up.
Edit to add - the precision weapons will include swarms of available killer drones waiting to strike, like the allies did with the cab rank system after Normandy. The beginnings are here, I'll just link this, the second clip is longer and includes the first. It's graphic footage of drones striking infantry as seen from another surveillance drone.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1725921479882101234
The air force isn't going to like being reduced to freight drivers delivering pallets of drones (that deploy on the way down) for the guys on the ground to direct and eyes/ears providing operational and theater scale ISR. That's probably a bigger barrier than the technology.
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58 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
In close contact, taking your eyes off your environment is likely unwise, but perhaps provide some kind of feedback from drone spotters via a weapon scope or NV goggles, showing bearing and distance to enemy positions? A year ago I would have said that's sci-fi, but now....
That's why it's AR goggles (as @Fenris points out). It would be an overlay of the stuff you can't see through the smoke and terrain, like a heads up display. So it wouldn't be taking your eyes off anything - it puts your eyes on things behind obstacles when you look that way. There were people already developing this more than a decade ago.
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9 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Interesting pairing of CM Level 1 and Level 4 tactical assault footage, for the first minute anyway. Hopefully there's a longer version out there.
Now put a fast computer and data link in the drone and give the guys on the ground (or at least their non-com) AR goggles connected to it and you've got borg spotting.
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3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
This is a good reminder (as if we need more!) of how screwed big ticket vehicles and infrastructure are. Sure, it's pretty bad when a $500 drone can take out a $5m tank, but if it takes a $100k drone to take out a $5m tank that's still a pretty damned good exchange.
My point is that the entry level for destroying a $5m tank is so low that you can increase the costs by orders of magnitude and you're still at a fraction of the cost of what it can destroy. If there is to be an arms race to see who can come out on top, drones or drone defenses, the easy bet to make is on drones. Which means the other easy bet to make is that expensive AFVs have already lost the race.
Steve
And the R18s are reusable - you're not expending the $100K drone every time you take out a tank, you're expending 1 to 3 $100 munitions. (edit- the RKG-1600 are closer to $100 than $500)
And maybe most importantly - unlike the guys in the tank, the drone operator is at essentially zero risk during the operation. If something goes sideways and you lose the drone, the operator just goes back to base and picks up another one.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Or dive underneath with the shaped charge pointing up.