dan/california

Is there some law of physics that prevents the creation of gps guidance kit for 122mm rockets? Seems like someone should have have done that by now.

A conversation withe the Commandant of the Marine Corps that includes a very extensive discussion of wargaming. Including the ability they give to learn and iterate new ideas before spending billions. Could I be so bold as to point out that BFC is in a literally unique place with regard to changing the discussion of drones and really expensive combat vehicles. Release the next game with appropriate point values for for both things, and the discussion will change overnight.

It is the ability of various artillery, and soon if not now drone, deployed systems to throw mines into a lane even before the clearance has finished that makes the problem almost completely unsolvable.

It is interesting that in section of the front where you would expect absolutely maximum efforts to jam FPV drones there seems to be an awfully lot of them flying, and hitting things. This seems to lean in to the idea that all the EW in the world isn't going to solve the FPV drone problem. Much less the militarized version, autonomous or not, that are surely coming rather quickly.

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-says-israel-hamas-war-shows-west-must-ramp-up-arms-production/

Now we just have to finalize the negotiations for Orban's bribe. Nothing for it but to pay the man, sadly.

The three day SMO has become the voyage of the D#%^&*d

No significance, just too funny not to share.

So if we grant that lasers are less than perfect for killing FPV/or similar drones, I still don't think that makes them useless. The problem they might still solve is the much higher flying, mostly fixed wing systems like the Orlan, Zala and similar. They seem to be able to kill those now, but the cheapest AA missile that will go that high is at lest five times, and in some cases twenty five times as expensive. If a laser can do that for even fifty dollars a shot across a reasonably broad front it might have a real role to play, even if it has to play hide and seek as much as the HIMARS do.

So since you are burning through coasters, what is the approximate energy/time to blind the optics. Because the quad copters are currently all camera based guidance yes? At least for moving targets. I think is true even for near term attempts at autonomy. The Shaheed style fixed wing drones would be vastly easier targets, yes? I mean they could make better ones, but that would probably cost more.

First round caught them upright and still walking, not really sure they needed to spend the second one...

A little surprising he hasn't already been bought out/hired by defense contractor

Orlans were theoretically obsolete when they were designed by a lot of standards. They have also been one of the two or three most effective Russian systems of this entire war. It makes me absolutely crazy that they are not a 99% solved problem. A laser or other high tech system that could just shoot down this class of drone and keep moving fast enough to dodge the artillery that would surely come its way would meaningfully move the needle in this war, even if it was just as obsolete as the Orlan in the next one.

So some more random thoughts on the subject. First of all lasers are worth a ton of development effort, because whatever there land based uses, you simply will not be able to have a "ship" bigger than a row boat if they can't get them working at sea. Clearly a real drone defense is going to require a layered system. It will be an entire IADS architecture in miniature. I think the there is a lot of options to be explore on what part of that miniature IADS systems have to very smart, and expensive, and what parts can really cheap and expendable. It might be possible to have a very techy spotting/targeting system with a low power laser designator that very cheap drones missiles home on that cue. That is just the first idea that occurs to me. But one way or another it is almost certainly going have be a multi layered defense of some sort. One low tech idea that occurred to me watching the bamboo video is that in forested or built up areas nets are going to be needed in vast quantities. In particular really fine nets that are are hard to see/sense. A high tech version might also have the nets act as distributed acoustic sensors.

An anti drone drone must be harder to do than I think it is, or we would see them already. If one side fielded them en masse it would basically run the other one right off the battle field. This is so obviously true there must be a technical reason it hasn't happened yet. Why isn't there something that looks exactly like an Orlan 10 up there hunting Orlan 10s?

Actually NAMMO is getting the range by building a ramjet into the round. So all the actual gun has to do is get it up to a mach number where that works. Do drones and rockets fired from completely disposable launchers make more sense? In many cases they probably do. A great deal depends on how defensive systems develop. I can see it being much less expensive to intercept a low speed drone, than an artillery shell that is probably doing mach 2. Details matter to the final math. There are enough open questions on what lines of development are going to really work that the Pentagon probably needs to at keep doing some development work in a bunch of different areas. I am also strongly of the opinion that the cost of things like Excalibur would come WAY down if just committed to buying enough of the things to automate many of the production processes.

My big question about the new super long range 155 is can they get some sort of guidance on it besides GPS. Because at the ~100km plus range these guys seem to be shooting for suddenly barrel artillery has a real contribution make in making the Taiwan straight a truly unhealthy place for the PLA Navy if it can hit moving targets. https://www.nammo.com/story/the-range-revolution/ There is also some need to think about the possibility that the laser physics people have a real breakthrough or two. Multi megawatt laser systems with high rates of fire would be a very bid deal for legacy everything.

I suspect something similar is making a comeback in Southern Ukraine as we speak.

I have been pondering what happens when a ship is attacked by literally a thousand FPV style drones. They would probably have to be autonomous, due to band-width. But how may RPG-7 class hits could a ship take?

It could get unpleasant if two units using different languages suddenly needed to communicate. Also how much actual education is done in languages besides Russian? I have great many questions, but most of them are probably a distraction.

Watling discusses them at length, along with the AI/computer architecture to make sense of the data. I just grabbed the sentence that seemed the most like science fiction.