chrisl

He sent the alien bacteria. It's not clear that they were attempting to invade or had an alien encyclopedia with them so much as were lax about planetary protection.

This one fires the net from a moderate distance, but it could almost as easily be deployed hanging from the anti-drone and dragged over the target to take it down (either casting the net free or going down with it). Use it with an RF sensor to home in on and take down FO drones - they have to be radiating kinda loud to send back real time video.

And the net doesn't even need to be connected across spans to foul a propeller - there just needs to be a bunch of threads hanging down that can get wrapped around the axle as it spins. So you really have to make an actual hole through the net - you can't just cut a bunch of junctions like a raccoon cutting through deer fence.

Plus the aliens have to travel really, really, really far, so it's a major pain to bring a lot of mass. There was a paper in PNAS (open sources, so anybody can read it) a couple years ago that estimated that the total mass of coronavirus at the time (around peak pandemic) was less than 10 kg. That's not a typo. Ten. And that was an upper limit. 10 kg of virus particles on the whole planet, distributed among all the people on earth, caused a huge disruption to human society. And the aliens wouldn't even have to deliver 10 kg - the vast majority of those 10 kg are virus particles that people manufactured themselves from the instructions provided by their infections. I've been advocating for a while that all these people with the idea that we'll send people to other stars is silly. It's more effective to send E coli, or a mixture of various bacteria that can survive a range of conditions. Eventually they'll evolve into something that's customized to wherever it lands, and if it evolves enough to be able to read, you make sure there were a bunch of indestructible "books" (information storage devices) sent along with it so they don't have to reinvent physics and chemistry.

Yes - for static close-by nets, that's definitely an issue. I'm thinking more deployable nets on the anti-drone-drones to entangle and crash the explody drones far from their targets (people have even done shotgun shells that deploy nets, gladiator style). Then they can explode all they want with minimal effect. They can be fairly low mass relative to an explody thing, and releasable, so that the anti-drone-drone can carry several and take out multiple drones before it's spent or needs a refill if it's reusable.

M1 Candygram

I think I've been advocating nets (and even just hanging lines, like used to keep birds in an aviary) since we started talking about anti-drone things. All you need to do is foul the props and they'll fall, or at least become uncontrollable.

You either need very accurate pointing (i.e. sensing) so you can hit it in a single burst, or you have to haul around an enormous mass of ammunition. And you need very fast bullets if the thing is zig-zagging unless you're at very close range. Anti-drone-drones are among the best solutions, but they need a bunch of work so that you aren't killing your own drones with the drone-killier-drones. (drone drone drone, he droned on...)

The kind of thing you'd see in a US made eastern European road-trip comedy of the 80s. Parody is dead.

Precision munitions aren't even that useful without precision ISR. Without the ISR you might get nice bombardment patterns, but no guarantee you're hitting anything useful. With the precision ISR you can much more effectively use less precise artillery (and other stuff) as long as you account for the limits of your equipment.

Needs a better aspect ratio. And maybe some blockchain...

I was imagining a whole bunch of them slaloming through a minefield blowing up all over the place. Big, cheap, stupid, and would make a good cartoon. A more clever approach would be ground skimming drones (not necessarily autonomous) that drop little detonators on any mines that they detect. They won't do well on buried mines, but would at least get the scattered ones.

Reading that inspired me to think of an alternative. Giant rolling drum full of water with rockets on the ends oriented to make it spin on its own and roll a path through the minefield. Dump a bunch of them off the back of a dumptruck, like depth charges from a rack, and let them roll a bunch of paths. It could also be powered from an internal motor, but it wouldn't be as dramatic and would cost more.

Needs a bit of Bondo first.

The Abrams would have each needed to come towing a train of MICLICs to deal with the minefields. Otherwise it would have just been a bunch of detracked Abrams getting towed back alongside the Bradleys. The small, low flying helicopters noted a few posts back might arguably be more effective than tanks for a mechanized attack. They sort of approximate landspeeders in being able to move rapidly over any terrain without being close enough to the ground to set of magnetic or pressure sensitive AT mines.

Like the various US/NATO high altitude drones with ~12+ hour dwell times and long range that can be controlled from Florida while they fly anywhere in the world? And are armed with guided missiles? They're not quite disposable-cheap at current prices, but many (if not most) of the tech needed to enable them has come down in cost since they were developed and could be a lot cheaper if produced in large quantities. You'd probably want to have the driver a little closer to the theater, and maybe have a high altitude relay instead of space relay for latency, but it's very doable. Eliminate most of the Russian vessels from the Black Sea and there's not a lot of point to them holding Crimea, other than national pride.

To hit FPV drone operators you probably need something that triangulates on an RF signal, but applies geo-constraints - the source would need to be in a geofenced area so you don't hit your own operators and would have to be within some distance of the surface of the earth so you aren't chasing the drone. If you have a stationary reference, you might also require that the target be stationary or slow moving so you don't chase a drone that's skimming the grass.

And much of those $76B are dollars that were spent in previous years to build equipment that was sent and won't be directly replaced by new production of the same or similar equipment. That's some value that's being carried on the books for that equipment, and most of it won't be replaced by new orders. Most of it will likely be replaced on a schedule similar to when it would have been replaced by new designs/technologies anyway. The artillery shells and recent model rockets of various sources are the things most likely to be replaced by new spending.

And if you've ever given someone a little push to get over a hill while using a power meter, or been pushed, a few tens of watts can make a huge difference in your fatigue and recovery by keeping you from having to go over AT and recover repeatedly.

Those older systems are really automation, rather than autonomy. The systems are given explicit instructions on route and destination and they follow them based on their navigational sensors (dead reckoning for the older ones, GPS and maybe terrain relative nav and star trackers for some more recent ones). They're not making decisions about anything other than where to turn, and those are based on either something really simple (clock time and airspeed or groundspeed) or something slightly more complex like error signal relative to external nav information (stars, GPS, terrain maps). They might have an IR sensor that turns on at the end so that they get into the general neighborhood of something big and hot, then target the first hot thing (like a tank or a ship) that they see. They're not really making independent decisions. These systems don't need trust - they're point and shoot, where the pointing is a little fancier than LOS. Autonomy is more mission oriented and you give a thing some general goals and it makes some sort of decisions based on a merit function: "I see a TOS and a T-72, I'll blow up the TOS", or "I see a bunch of vehicles, and based on some fuzzy training I have, I'm going to take out that one that looks like a command vehicle". These systems need trust (or a human in the loop) because you're just sending them out on their own and don't want them to decide to specifically target civilians or friendlies out of all the stuff they see. And what you describe is one of the first levels of autonomy that we use even for non-deadly things - let the robot sift through enormous amounts of data that may not be familiar and present what's likely the most interesting thing to the human operator for evaluation. It typically also will send other samples (at regular intervals, or random, or from particular clusters) as a secondary check that it's doing the right thing and not missing things.

Yeah, but those are old tech. The new version will be artillery launched like that, but be able to loiter until a target is visible in case it has the ability to pop out, shoot, hide faster than you can get shells there. Like in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Fixed that for you. In the limit of perfect ISR and "if I can see it it's dead" combined with autonomy, you start to only need a maximum of one munition per opposing "unit" where "unit" is one vehicle or person. The way it gets hard is where each of the units is a difficult to detect autonomous UGV/UAV itself. I think in Star Trek the society that could do that just gave up and rolled dice and sent people into literal meat grinders.

That results in denying yourself space-based ISR, too. Anti-satellite without making a big mess is possible, and for most satellites (i.e. those not designed to avoid a predatory satellite) probably not really much more difficult than doing it the messy way. Possibly easier, because you can do it with higher certainty. The problem with the pre-war Russian attempt is that they wanted deniability with respect to taking out US/NATO allied satellites and so they had to make a big mess out of one of their own so they could say "oh, noes! we didn't mean to make that big mess that took out all your fancy electro-optical systems. We were just trying to remove our sad, useless satellite from the sky so it wouldn't bother anybody else, but Igor grabbed the wrong jar, and now here we are..."

Borg vs Matrix, like the old monster movies.

So basically the Borg.