chrisl
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Posts posted by chrisl
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Just now, Kinophile said:
Didnt Michael Crichton do this, with the Andromeda Strain? If you're sending bacteria, then you code in messages into its dna that are obviously artificial in nature, have no biological purpose and do no degrade over iterations. Then your communicating with an alien race with 20th cent level tech and things will move a lot faster.
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.
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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.
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2 hours ago, JonS said:
Nets are pretty resilient though - because of their inherent flexibility in 3D-space it's hard to reliably cut wires/strings with explosives (see: British artillery floundering around in WWI trying to figure out how to reliably cut barbed wire entanglements) and you only need a couple of strands to survive to make a hole un-navigable to a drone.
If instead of an old barracuda cam net you started using a spec-built 'anti-drone net', with braided carbon fibre threads - or heck even just braided thin wires - now you're talking.
This is hard to reliably fully cut with an explosion and frag:
Deform? Yes, easy.
Cut some of the wires? Of course.
Cut enough wires to fly a drone through the resulting gap?...
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.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
As someone who has been studying the progression of this stuff CLOSELY for professional and personal curiosity reasons, I can say that most science fiction is less imaginative than what we're seeing now.
As much as I like an alien invasion movie or book just like the next (smart and interesting) person, the bulk of what I've consumed over the years falls back on cold war concepts of warfare. Only exceptionally innovative writers, such as Gibson and Brinn, have really examined where all this tech is headed.
It's a pet peeve of mine, in fact, but I do understand it. The most likely alien invasion would be wave upon wave of viruses and fungi that are genetically aimed at killing or sterilizing Humans. The thought of F-16s being able to dogfight with alien fighter craft makes for much better cinema, but that's about as realistic as the Red Barron taking on a F-22 and coming out ahead.
Steve
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.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
We have seen extensive use of nets and chain link fencing around artillery positions, in particular. They do work, provided there's no gaps. We've all seen how nimble drones can be when they want to.
The counter to the nets is pretty simple. Existing grenade based kamikaze drones that are controller detonated. Fly one of those into the net, detonate, and chances are there's now a big hole in the net for a FPV drone to sail right through. Wouldn't even have to be immediately following as it would take the crew some time to patch the gap. Especially if they took casualties when the grenade detonated.
In fact, the breaching grenade could damage critical systems on whatever is being protected, such as tires, hydraulic lines, optics, sensors, etc. Might not put whatever it is out of action for long, but the disruption could be critical to some sort of tactical action.
Steve
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.
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3 hours ago, acrashb said:
Closer and closer to slaughterbots.
Those who enjoy war porn (i've had my fill) will be engaged by the bradley shooting up the town - but wait for the end where the drone flies into the shelter entrance and blows it up. So make that a small swarm with some autonomy, and fly instead through the shelter with communications relay drone remaining at each corner to allow the mini-swarm to act as a unit and send BDA back to headquarters. Then the shelter isn't a shelter, it's a pre-dug graveyard.This is right around the corner. With the current rate of AI development and drone innovation (driven by the Russo-Ukraine war) I say eighteen months or so.
Can't tell you how glad I am to be living in a mostly-peaceful country with a friendly neighbour.M1 Candygram
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22 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Drone v Drone
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.
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12 hours ago, chuckdyke said:
Mini Gatling guns which can spew 6000 .22s a minute could be successful against drones. But we don't see anything new from that direction.
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...)
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4 hours ago, Harmon Rabb said:
Bizarre does not begin describing this. Those kids do not look very excited. I just hope they are not forced to die for this nonsense when they are older, by someone else in the Kremlin.
The kind of thing you'd see in a US made eastern European road-trip comedy of the 80s.
Parody is dead.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
Anyhoo, my point is you don't need precision munitions if you have precision ISR and the ability to effectively leverage it.
Steve
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.
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1 hour ago, JonS said:
Needs a better aspect ratio. And maybe some blockchain...
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38 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Heading in Hobarts Funnies here. How do you keep these guys in a straight line? First strike and they are pretty much done so you would need to follow up with more in a breaching lane. And then there is the terrain problem. The divots from artillery and just plain old rocks will knock these off course. I think you would wind up with lanes all over the place that follow on troops would have to try and follow. This would likely see them slaloming through the minefield, which is bad.
My personal favorite would be UGVs with GPR that have a bunch of small little spider buggers with shaped charges to find and then lay down over top the mines. Detonate all in sequence and then you have a safe lane...right up until the enemies little spider bastards crawl back into the safe lane or they just drop more FASCAM n the safe lane.
Best way to avoid minefields is to kill an opponent before they can lay them to be honest.
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.
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5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
First problem is power. Mine breaching rollers weigh a lot and need a powerful prime mover to push them cross country. Second is likely survivability. If an MBT is taking punches, how long is a truck with a water barrel going to last? Third is exploit. Tank has nice big ol gun which can provide cover to bridgehead force. Truck with barrel has an AM radio, which troops can dance too but doesn’t do much in the way of hurling explosives at counter-attacking forces.
There are other solutions but they are not designed for this war:
Example. That is for AP mines and maybe IEDs. It might be able to take a single AT mine strike which is no good for a high density minefield. Biggest problem is all the money and energy went into IED and route clearing. Our conventional mine breaching has not changed much in 30 years (kinda like engineering in CM).
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.
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56 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
...It'll buff right out
Needs a bit of Bondo first.
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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.
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5 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:
I am not so sure.
While we might see more wars like Ukraine son, so far it really looks like the next decisive "world war" will be between "West and Allies" and China - and while that one would have ground component for sure, I think the decisive parts would be questions like "can China effectively hit continental US and EU", "can the Allies effectively blockade China into submissions or will it have built enough energy and food capacity to avoid that", "can the allies replace ships faster than China can replace missile factories", and so on.
Now I am not military strategy mastermind like rest of the people here, and I'm sure lot of the lessons from Ukraine can be useful, but unless someone can make FPV drones go thousand kilometers, I'm not sure everything is directly applicable.
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.
QuoteEDIT: while I'm happy to see another Russian ship promoted into submarine, I was wondering why the Ukrainians bother with hitting them, since the grain corridor seems to be going well, the threat of the missiles seems to be enough to keep Russians at bay. Wouldn't it be better to
I suppose maybe some of the ammo is just allotted to navy and they hit ships, or they want to have at least some good news.
But also I guess they are hitting Crimea while they still can - if they will be pushed to negotiate away the claim to Crimea soon, they will probably be forbidden to hit it with Western weaponry like mainland Russia.
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.
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4 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
What is preventing the breakthrough? ISR, small drones, artillery, minefields and infantry manning fortifications. If it was possible to step 3 of these things, in order of hardest to easiest, I think a breakthrough would have a chance:
- FPV drone operators
- Artillery
- Trucks
- Locomotives (and trains in general)
I submit that a single autonomous loitering munition platform is the near-term solution for all of these, and that it could be designed, tested and built at scale in a year’s time:
- Gas-powered, so that it can loiter for 12+ hours
- Thermal + optical plus some zoom
- Substantial onboard processing power (equivalent to a modern smartphone)
- Autonomous, so it goes to a designated area and hunts in that space, or along a route
- Similar or smaller size to Lancet
- Similar or lower cost wrt to Lancet
Except for the “Autonomous” bullet point, one of these capabilities are anything special. Everything exists. And for the “autonomous” part, I think most of it is pretty simple image recognition tasks that could be run on an Nvidia Jetson or similar. Now that my big work project is done, I’ll see if I can toss together a poc and put it on github as demonstration for train hunting over the next few weekends.
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.
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3 minutes ago, sburke said:
For folks freakin out about the expenditure from the west, it might be good to have perspective,
In Afghanistan the US alone spent some 2 TRILLION dollars. The gov't sitting in Kabul right now is the umm err Taliban. As of July we had spent about 76 billion in Ukraine..... For the return on investment, it is hard to say the West hasn't got a financial windfall in kneecapping the Russian military.
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.
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2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:
A good amateur cyclist can do 300W sustained per hour. A properly doped up Grand Tour winning cyclist does 500W sustained. A sprinter is doing about 2000W, but over 10-20 seconds only.
Tesla batteries (Panasonic laptop batteries last I checked) are 250WH per kg.
If you can give a soldier for the cost of say 5kg in batteries an extra 50W for 24h, that’s actually a lot of power.
EDIT: This obviously implies 100% efficiency, but even at 50% this is not an insignificant benefit.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.
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Automation is yet another thing that needs to be broken down into sub components.
Navigational autonomy has existed since WW2 in some sense (I'm thinking of the V-1) but certainly since the early 1980s (Tomahawk). This allows the weapon to navigate to a designated target without reliance upon Humans or disruptable navigation aids (GPS).
Targeting autonomy comes in two forms; smart and dumb. Dumb is just something that is flung with no guidance, smart involves some sort of sensors that guide the munition to a target. Cluster munitions, for example, started out being dumb but have gained capabilities to be guided by light and/or heat.
When you think of it, we've already had these technologies in use. A 1990s era Tomahawk could be armed with 1990s era "smart" munitions normally packed into cluster bombs. It would be a fully autonomous "smart" weapon in that it could get to a specific point on the map and target objects with a particular signature.
We've moved away from this sort of stuff lately because adding a Human back into the loop provides a LOT of benefits. And it would have been incorporated into V-1s and Tomahawks back in the day if the technology had been available.
Now that "Human in the loop" and satellite guidance are being countered it's sensible to look at improving the "smarts" to the extent that a drone can get to and find its own targets so as to strike them precisely using advanced sensors and AI in combination. This is what gives people, smart people at least, cause for concern.
One thing that could help bridge the gap until we have AI we can "trust" is to revisit the older types of autonomous systems, add better sensors, and call it good enough for now. Think a drone with LIDAR and a range of targeting sensors that can reasonably identify whatever it is tasked with destroying. It wouldn't be able to go after Humans unless authorized before launch, but there are circumstances that would be perfectly fine. For example launching the drone against an enemy training base or a frontline position.
Just thinking that full autonomy doesn't necessarily have to be the super scary stuff that we have every right to be super scared about.
Steve
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.
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12 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I was thinking more of that SMArt strike we saw yesterday. But the point still stands. One cannot "fix" on threat without becoming highly vulnerable to another. It is a confluence of Illumination, Precision and Persistence - all at a much cheaper cost than anything that can be fielded to break that confluence.
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.
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3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
It isn’t the bullets. Drones are cheaper than the things firing all them bullets to sweep the sky clean. And firing all said bullets at the Face of God is going to leave an ISR signature that will ensure retribution. Same goes for lasers or EM.
It is classic military dilemma. If I stay quiet my opponent will hunt and kill me with UAS. If I blaze away at them, my opponents artillery launched UAS will
targethunt and kill me.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.
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4 hours ago, acrashb said:
Weight appears to be more of an issue than power. Ground pressure goes up and soldiers sink into soft terrain; stairs built to code are designed for (in the US) 510 lbs, which assuming that the soldier weighs 225 leaves less than one would like for exoskeleton, power source, full-coverage armour, weapons, ammunition, and a 3-day pack.
There could be breakthroughs in armour weight.
How about an angry, murderous sumo wrestler? Nuclear EFPs could be built today, and will be when someone thinks it is necessary, although more likely in the space domain than ground, sea or air.
"a 1 kiloton yield warhead could propel more than 21.7 tons of metal at the target at 9 km/s."
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html
We talk a lot about near-real-time ISR from satellites. In the next peer-to-peer war, space will be a warfighting domain. Which will likely cause a Kessler syndrome, and we'll go back to communicating with tin cans and string.
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..."
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5 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Agent Smith from the Matrix would be even better, but the Borg could work as well.
Steve
Borg vs Matrix, like the old monster movies.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
It's not just the low velocity - lots of things you want to see with radar (like tanks, trucks, ships, and periscopes) aren't moving at 200+ mph relative to their background. Drones just plain have a small radar cross section - somewhere between a barn owl and a vulture, and much lower than typical big metal things of a battlefield. They're also small enough that even if you're able to detect one at significant range, it could be smaller than the resolution of your radar system. So you'd know it's inside of a particular volume, but if you're shooting at it you need to fill the cross-section of the volume with anti-drone projectiles separated by a spacing smaller than the drone.