Tux

Ah ok. Yes, me too but it seemed even more counterintuitive that a panel standing upright would be as efficient as an angled one. That’s why I wanted to check. Even more interesting!

Interesting. By “vertical solar panels” you presumably mean panels laid flat (so ‘pointed’ vertically upwards)?

Ok, well I will have to take the hit on not being fully understood. I will think about it some more. I’m not entirely sure the idea I’m trying to communicate is valuable enough to justify the thread-space it’s consuming, at this point.

I appreciate the challenge but their utility doesn't have to be in question any more than any other weapon system. It's their deterministic necessity that undeniably will, one day, be questioned. Not all unmanned systems - I am not saying we try to "go back to the way things were" - but the most egregiously dangerous and offensive ones. My very first point was a reflection of the fact that C-UAS will absolutely be highly competitive, dynamic, and ever changing. So I mentioned that it might be an idea for forward-thinking nations to focus on autonomous C-UAS now, even more than on autonomous ground-attack drones. Get ahead of the game. Establish and then try to maintain C-UAS superiority. Lead everyone to question the deterministic necessity of these things as soon as possible. Once you do that the imperative to develop and use them is weakened and maybe people will fear the systems more than they will the consequences of not having them. Because, let's be honest, fear is always the arbiter of this kind of thing. I understand that this has been and still occasionally is challenged, even on this thread. It is not the target of my argument, though. Please, yes, let's navigate this new reality. As a starter for 10, how about we give absolute priority to autonomous C-UAS?

I totally agree and am focusing on nightmare weapons which hunt down individual human beings in order to kill or maim them. Autonomy against vehicles, factories, equipment and other unmanned systems will be ubiquitous and I think relatively uncontroversial. It's when these things start being used specifically to kill people that the world will cry abomination, just as they have done in the past with other systems that lead to outsized (even if unintended) risk to civilians (cluster munitions, AP mines, etc.) or which offend one too many animalistic sensibilities when they are used (flamethrowers). I understand that none of those weapons were considered deterministic at the time but it's the reaction they induce which I think they will share with human-targeting drones. So, once such drones can no longer be considered deterministic, the momentum could gather to outlaw autonomous targeting of human beings. All very hopeful, for sure. I am just raising the possibility in light of the fact that the most offensive type of UAS won't be deterministic (and therefore necessary) forever. I agree but don't think it will impact the weapons that people try to regulate, once they are not really necessary. Many of the attacks you are referring to are already considered warcrimes, after all... Granted. No argument from me against autonomous attacks on infrastructure, etc. My suggestion is that semi-autonomy *could* be reserved for targeting humans in the long term and once C-UAS has become deterministic to the point that whoever wins the C-UAS fight can maintain that dominance and effectively choose whether they use fully-autonomous-hellborn-head-poppers or not. This is similar to paxromana's point. Someone, somewhere, will try to autonomously attack men, women and children who wear the wrong type of clothing or use the wrong vowel sounds. I get it. However, if dominant and widespread C-UAS systems exist, then that needn't be a weapon of choice for whichever corner of humanity ethics end up sheltering in. That's all. My prediction? None of the above will matter and people everywhere will have to live with a permanent new mortal threat vector in their lives. My hope? Once these systems are routinely countered then we'll find a way to discourage or prevent their widespread use in the first place.

This is true of absolutely everything. If you want to you can argue against trying to control any hazardous substance or unethical weapon based on the argument that ‘the North Koreans won’t listen’. It gets the rest of the world nowhere.

I don’t think I expressed myself clearly enough. I fully agree that the best C-UAS is likely to be an autonomous C-UAS drone. My point is, if and when you can field such an effective C-UAS design that the enemy’s UAS are effectively nullified, you have stopped their autonomous attack drones from being deterministic weapons. The ‘do or die’ argument for unrestricted targeting of enemy soldiers, etc. has disappeared. C-UAS is now (arguably) the deterministic system since it basically grants the successful user the choice of how to prosecute the rest of the war. That is when it would be viable, imo, to eschew autonomous targeting of human beings and promote global abandonment of such an idea. Autonomous targeting of other enemy equipment (ships, aircraft, UGVs, etc.) would still be fine - that’s not the animalistic nightmare-inducing stuff. Autonomous targeting of individual people/crowds of people is what could be abandoned and there’s a chance the world might hurry to agree, for once.

This is only true until they are countered. The real power play in all this would be to focus almost entirely on an affordable and extremely effective C-UAS system. Once western armies can reliably counter an enemy’s drone fleet then they could take the moral high ground by eschewing autonomous human-hunting killbots (FPVs and autonomous targeting of enemy vehicles are still fair game) and driving a worldwide conversation about everyone else doing the same.

I think many countries were probably quite happy to sign up to nuclear non-proliferation given the difficulty and expense involved in setting up your own nuclear arsenal. Also, if anyone tried to breach non-proliferation treaties then there existed the legacy nuclear-armed powers who were able to carry out enforcement. There will be basically no significant cost/difficulty barrier to establishing an autonomous killer drone fleet, once the technology exists. That means any country will be able to do it almost at will, and, if they do, who would be able to stop them? I think it'd have to be someone with an even bigger fleet, no? Which means that, in this case, I don't think a treaty can work in the way we'd like it to. Maybe the real answer is to stop thinking about developing multi-layered C-UAS as a way to free up areas to manoeuvre in southern Ukraine and to start considering it a matter of humanitarian necessity.

Every time your autonomous drone tries to communicate, my C-UAS system is ready and willing to listen. I know we've been round the loop a few times but I, for one, enjoy thinking through this puzzle and reading others' thoughts as well. Keep it up.

Just riffing a little off what @sross112 was saying, in all these scenarios there has to be some thought given to where we think the UAV-war will find a balancing point. That means that c-UAS is the key. If we allow ourselves into the world of autonomy making EW all-but ineffective, there are a couple of options with regards to what form c-UAV ends up taking: Autonomous c-UAV drones ('fighter' drones) are effective against enemy UAS which fly above the treeline (or any other appreciable ground clutter) but everyone struggles to make them effective against those which are small and/or agile enough to travel amongst trees, hop over people's garden fences, etc. This world means that the compromising effect which UAVs are currently having on efforts to employ legacy systems (towed arty, MBTs, etc) will persist as long as the enemy have low-flying attack UAVs. This, I think, is the world most people on this thread are talking about and is the most likely to result in the most UAV-heavy future force compositions. Autonomous c-UAVs quickly gain sufficient sensor/AI levels to be effective against basically all enemy UAVs. You now have a world similar to the WW2 air war where the main battle is for air superiority and then your land forces can engage however they see best. At this point, once you have won air superiority, you ask yourself how best to attack the enemy: other drone designs? HIMARS? any old towed arty lying around? All those will have their pros/cons but you don't need to worry about the enemy UAS threat, at least, so some of them might remain on top tier TOEs. If ground-based anti-drone sniper units work, then see @The_Capt's thoughts, above - it will compromise UAVs but might do as much or more to compromise other legacy ground units, as well. If innovative forms of camo and concealment prove widely effective against future attack drone AI, that will also change the game. I think what all of the above probably hinges around most is the size, sensitivity and reliability of passive sensors of all relevant parts of the EM spectrum. If your autonomous UAVs can reliably see your chosen EM frequency at sufficient resolution, then I don't see what will stop AI getting us all to #2, above, pretty damned quickly (as well as probably enabling The_Capt's, nifty ground systems). Perhaps some of our resident subject-matter experts can opine as to whether there are any serious blockers to sensor design in certain parts of the spectrum which could then be exploited as UAV 'blind-spots' by both sides and result in a situation closer to #1?

I think I did start from the right place: the "effect" I proposed starting from was intended to mean any relevant effect, including your example of preventing a threat from reaching the battlefield. I admittedly did then leap to a projectile solution due to the nature of the discussion up to that point but I would wholly support your suggestion that the most powerful effects that a weapon designer may seek to achieve are often much further upstream than on the frontline.

Yeah, I went in a little heavy on the Stuka. When left alone to do their job they... did their job. They were good for hitting 100m targets relatively accurately, provided there was no modern or competent airborne opposition. As mentioned in a previous response my point was meant to be that the Stuka's reputation far outweighed its actual effectiveness relative to any other aircraft of its type and I believe that was due to the psychological impact its sirens (and partly its attack profile) had, early war.

Yup. Guns don't even have to be fired to have an effect.

Heh, I knew as soon as I posted that I wouldn't get away with the Ju-87 one. As much as I'd genuinely enjoy a discussion of the effectiveness of various WW2 aircraft designs I know you'll agree it doesn't belong on this thread. So, I will grant that it had military utility as far as any aircraft of its type had (although I think it lost its real utility long before it was phased out of service, even on the Eastern Front). Sooo, I should have written that the Ju-87 was militarily no more useful than a Dauntless or a D3A and was probably substantially less useful than a Typhoon or an F-series Fw-190 but, and this was my point, there's a reason the Stuka gained and retained such a terrifying reputation where those others didn't. It was the noise. Regarding V1s, absolutely they can't and shouldn't be compared to Stukas. My intention was to point out the effectiveness of the noise they made vs the destruction they caused and the fact that that led to their gaining an outsized reputation in the (certainly British) cultural consciousness. All this in the context of wondering why, for example, Russian terror-attack drones don't try something similar. Thanks for keeping me honest though - always appreciated.

Imo you're one order away from the truth, here: the hard requirement is the effect (including the type of effect). You'll probably need to transport an object to the target to cause the effect but that's not the start. Again, I think you're one dimension away: you want to "delay the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space" not necessarily as long as possible but at least until the point at which the target can no longer avoid being hit and there is therefore no longer a need to re-target. The rifle bullet is fine if fired from close range. The FPV drone is stuffed if the target drives away from it at 100km/h. What matters isn't the energy profile of the weapon system per se but its relationship to the intended target. If you start from an intended effect, you can decide what the best target will be and what the best type of effect would be (chemical, kinetic, phonic, electromagnetic, etc.). You can then work out the best way to apply that effect to that target (i.e. the type of warhead) in order to achieve the intended overall effect (I'll google synonyms for "effect" in a minute, don't worry). The mass, volume and fragility of the selected warhead will be the main things that dictate the achievable energy-time curves for your weapon system. Then you can start worrying about things such as launch signatures or changing trajectories post-launch and whether you can realistically do anything about those things. I've already written about the "as long as possible" point but you mention retaining energy here and that's important. Retaining energy is physically expensive and should always be seen as a compromising factor. All else being equal you want to retain as little energy as necessary after launch in order to achieve your desired effect at the target.

If we are trying to learn how to do war better, though, I don't think we can ignore the "soft and fuzzy" stuff at all. You have been among the first to remind people on this very thread that the world doesn't stop turning when the war ends and there are many very recent examples of it all going Pete Tong when people have forgotten that. You have to have a lasting relationship with the people you just finished fighting. How much harder is that going to be if you spent the whole war doing everything you could to terrorise them in ever more imaginitive ways; drilling right down into their amygdalas with screaming drones and running spider-mines to teach them an instinctive loathing of contact with your forces? As I said, I'm really surprised that some people don't do this stuff more. I would however advise caution if we were to think of doing it more. At least I would if we ever want to be welcomed anywhere as "liberators", again.

Cultural block, 100%. Once a weapon system has achieved such an exaggerated cultural profile the system itself almost becomes a psychological heuristic towards achieving the effects associated with its success. As far as I can see it gets even worse once people start assuming they want to apply certain effects because that's what their favourite weapon system can do, because then you've blinded yourself to the possibility of the system's obsolescence. It takes time and energy to occasionally reconsider what effects you want to apply and then work backwards to establish the best way to actually achieve that. It always blows people's minds when you do it well, though. I think what photon is admirably trying to do is observe the new, successful weapon systems in Ukraine and, instead of just deciding that "dronez rule every1 must has dronez!", extract the secret sauce of their success in more general, physical terms. Unfortunately I (so far) think that the e-t profile and/or integral of same is a red herring; I think it's an emergent property of weapon systems that are able to lean into precision vs. brute force, rather than a deterministic property that can be used to decide the effectiveness of a weapon.

It's confused me for a long time that combatants don't focus on applying pyschological effects more often, at least on the battlefield. I can kind of understand why western forces might shun the idea (good luck being seen as 'the good guys' if you try some of this stuff) but, for the sake of some extra weight, why don't Russian drones and missiles emit an inhuman screaming noise (for example) as they approach their target? Especially those being used for terror attacks on civilian targets. Ju-87s were militarily next-to-useless but their psychological impact on the enemy was out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed, almost entirely due to the sirens that sounded as the early models attacked. V1s were militarily next-to-useless but people feared them far more than they needed to because you could hear them coming and you could hear when the motor stopped. That was what people feared.

I follow but I think there might be too many variables in play, at the moment. Does your idea assume constant energy applied at the point of impact by two projectiles with different e-t curves or does it assume a constant effect applied to the target? Do you want to keep the energy imparted to the projectile in order to get it to the target constant and just play with the shape of the e-t curve (launch signature vs. changing trajectory vs. "reserving energy for effect", etc.)? Or do you want to minimise the energy absolutely (i.e. reduce the integral of the e-t curve)?

I think you might be getting at energy efficiency. A creepy-crawly mine first of all adds energy to the curve, so the integral is larger: the mine's creepiness (motors, power source, etc.) adds mass to the mine and the mine therefore requires more energy to manufacture and deploy and then uses more energy during its 'attack phase' (creeps towards the target vs. staying still and blowing up). However, let's say your dumb mine can destroy anything up to an MBT which drives over the top of it. Now, if you reduce the mass of the warhead to compensate for the mine's added creepy energy, you might end up with a mine that doesn't use any additional energy but can kill anything up to an MBT (let's say it knows how to hit weak spots) that drives within 100m of it. You have a larger option space by using your energy more efficiently while not necessarily having reduced the integral of your energy-time curve. Again, explosives in the example I gave don't reserve energy, they add it. If two ballistically-identical projectiles strike a target with the same KE, one with an HE warhead and one without, the explosive one will deliver more energy to the target. That potentially translates into a larger option space while not changing the integral of the pre-impact e-t curve. noted noted Noted and agreed. However let's combine this one with your drone launch/ missile launch/ 155 firing examples: the energy spikes you describe at the launch of each projectile (and for use of the DEW) are energy wastage. Generally the more power you need to apply to a projectile the harder it will be to avoid losing large amounts to waste heat, light and sound. That waste heat, light and sound is the signature that the enemy may detect. A lot of it is easier to detect and tells the enemy that a powerful launch system is at the location of the signature. If you can apply energy more gradually (i.e. apply less power) then your energy losses will reduce and, if you can do that without a loss of lethality in terms of finding, hitting and destroying the target then your overall energy efficiency has improved and you're onto a winner. I think that's where the advances in weapons that we see today stem from: they use energy more efficiently. modern, small and light-weight electronics, computing and ISR allow drones to attack enemy weak spots with unprecedented precision and reliability. The fact that they can hit weak spots means less energy needs to be applied in order to destroy the enemy. Drones (airborne and seaborne) can therefore carry smaller warheads at lower speeds (which also helps with targeting reliability, when controlled by a slow-thinking human being). Less mass accelerating more slowly to a lower attack velocity means much less powerful launch systems (if any) and so launch signatures (energy loss) are basically not there for the enemy to detect.

I like your thinking but maybe it's missing some dimensions (or maybe I'm misinterpreting you use of the phrase "option space"). Certainly, the goal of a weapon system is to deliver sufficient energy to a particular place at a particular time in order to destroy or degrade the enemy's will or ability to fight. I'm not sure about the focus on kinetic, though. How do you account for mines? Zero energy-time curve until the point of explosion (analagous to the point of impact of the projectiles you describe) but I wouldn't consider them to have a particularly large "option space". How do you account for explosives, generally? Two projectiles with identical energy-time curves apart from at the point of impact (i.e. one has an explosive warhead while the other does not)? Materials matter: If two projectiles with identical energy-time curves are made of hardened steel and tungsten, respectively, there are conditions involving armour plate which will cause the former to shatter on impact while the latter does not. This means the latter has a larger option space (i.e. can be used to successfully attack certain targets which the other cannot)? Shapes matter: two identical e-t projectiles but one is optimally shaped for target penetration while the other is not. The better-shaped one has a larger option space? How would you account for a directed-energy weapon? I think maybe 'retaining maximal option space for as long as possible' (by which I assume you mean retaining the ability to manoeuvre and refine a targeting solution) helps humans to guide relatively small amounts of energy (kinetic and/or chemical) to enemy weak points, so probably adds efficiency to the energy applied in that sense. In a lot of other scenarios though I think it takes a bit of a back seat versus the nature of the projectile itself.

The thing is all falsehood goes through the first two stages, as well. Unfortunately some even makes it to the third, even if only to a minority of people… Come to think of it, the reason we value the scientific method and rational argument is because it forcibly applies the first two stages to information and so we hope that only truth makes it to the third. Perhaps Schopenhauer should have added the word “thankfully” in there, somewhere.

So the West lost in 2014, then. Someone aught to tell the Russians.

sfhand, I was going to try and apply a scalpel to your posts to see if I could extract a point but then maybe we should address the below two items first: Steve asked for your views but implicit to that request was that you also add arguments and reasons for why you hold such views. That is the only way in which someone would be able to reasonably engage with you, really. You didn’t provide any such grist for the rational mill that this forum tries to be, so it has started to chew on you instead. So… would the following be a fair summary all of your posts so far: ‘I partially disagree with some stuff but I’m happy with that and don’t want to discuss it any further.’?