Tux
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Posts posted by Tux
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3 minutes ago, Carolus said:
Ah, sorry. With vertical panel I meant 90° to the ground.
A panel that is parallel to the ground would be "horizontal" for me.
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!
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54 minutes ago, Carolus said:
It was found in experiments that vertical solar panels offer basically the same energy output as an angled panel.
The reason is that although the panel receives less solar radiation energy, the generated heat can dissipate better, which results in increased efficiency, which brings them up to the same output as an angled panel.
Interesting. By “vertical solar panels” you presumably mean panels laid flat (so ‘pointed’ vertically upwards)?
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10 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Ok, I am still not entirely clear on your theory of change here to be honest. We can focus on C-UAS but then why would we not also focus on UAS themselves for offensive operations as well? Superiority means “freedom of own action while denying same to enemy”. We want to stop their autonomous systems cold and allow ours to maul them with impunity. This gives me deterministic options for both deterrence and compellance. Otherwise I am stopping their UAS cold and then still have to risk human lives to finish them off which is not going to be politically acceptable.
Now if I can demonstrate autonomous unmanned superiority from the outset the war doesn’t even need to start (I.e. deterrence)…no? But superiority has to be for both offence and defence. And offence is going to involve those nasty ones. Fear is the arbiter of these things and our fear of losing lives will likely drive us toward more fully autonomous solutions as opposed to regulating them.
We will likely try to manage these systems under existing LOAC frameworks and create collateral damage calculus to mitigate. Outliers and rogue actors will of course let the damn things off the leash and do all sorts of bad. I honestly do not see a total weapons ban standing (the existing one or a new one) based on the wind direction. Super C-UAS will spin off more super UAS that can go in and do the killing at a distance. The quest will be to the badest complete system on the battlefield.
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.
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22 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I think the major flaw here is that somehow we can “routinely counter” unmanned systems to the point that their utility comes into question and therefore the moral ethical “rightness” can hold sway. Like other disruptive technologies unmanned will go far and wide (already has) and likely remain a competitive space for decades, if not centuries. There is no “whelp that was unpleasant” followed by “now we can go back to the way things were”. It does not apply to military application nor regulation.
We cannot unsee or unknow what has already happened. There is no magic wands to make it all go away. Even unmanned counters will remain a highly competitive space where arms races to counter-counters will occur all the time. Hoping that unmanned weapons will somehow disappear is like hoping bullets disappear because we invented body armor.
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.
22 minutes ago, The_Capt said:This paradigm shift has been decades in the making. This war has only demonstrated that it has arrived. We will likely try to regulate - hell we try to regulate every new weapons technology, but like air power, cyber and space the punchline is inevitable. So what? Dive into the game and be better and faster than opponents. Blunt the effects and understand what unmanned superiority means. Shape future battlefields now through rapid smart adoption. Not military cultural conservatism or pinning hopes on the “better angels”. We are in a new age of warfare, there is no getting past that. All that remains is how well we can navigate this new reality.
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?
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
That is one hopeful theory but I think history is not entirely onside. As we see in Ukraine, warfare is not simply political, it is personal. So if/when an opponent’s unmanned bubble collapses they may very well refuse to accept defeat and fight on. They will do so by various means that will cause you casualties. There will be a lot of pressure to reduce those casualties. Autonomous weapons will be one of the best ways to do this. So I do not see a winning side simply switching modes mid-war.
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.
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:In fact attacks on the will to fight are very often pointed directly at populations…we are literally seeing this unfold everyday in both Ukraine and hr Middle East. So fully autonomous as terror weapons against civilian populations is tragically predictable.
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...
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:Further, just because one can collapse an opponent’s unmanned systems bubble does not mean it will stay collapsed without destroying that opponent’s ability to access/produce more systems. That will mean attacks on deep industrial infrastructure and varying degrees of resistance. Trying to managed semi vs full autonomy based on ethical grounds in this sort of environment is a challenge few nations will do and even fewer will do well.
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.
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:And this assumes the war stays a clean standup fight and does not go hybrid. Insurrection, partisan resistance and guerrilla warfare will ensure that fully autonomous stay on the forefront of any modern force. But it will also be very attractive to hybrid resistance for all the same reasons - can’t jam/EW easily, faster and more lethal, range.
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.
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2 hours ago, paxromana said:
North Korea? Iran> Nutjob Terrorists?
Good luck with that ...
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.
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10 hours ago, The_Capt said:
And here we have the downward slope. A cheap and effective C-Unmanned system is most likely other autonomous unmanned systems. Having a person in the loop for every c-drone drone, is just going to slow things down and likely give advantage to an opponent.
So my guess we are looking at a fully autonomous forward edge (in 3 dimensions) of fully autonomous systems for peer sides. Those edges will collide and supported by other legacy systems will try and knock each other out. Deep strike plays in here etc. Once a sides bubble collapses...they are dead. Collapse enough bubbles and they lose the war.
So we are back to fully autonomous race to the bottom. A lot of friction in warfare is human-based. Remove the human with a good enough AI and lose the friction. The moral high ground will always give way in the face of existential threats...this is why nukes work.
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.
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14 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Unmanned systems of all types are deterministic of outcomes.
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.
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3 minutes ago, squatter said:
Yes of course that is true. But unmanned does not equal autonomous. And yes, of course autonomous weapons will offer huge advantages to those who employ them, but at what cost (see video I linked to above.)? Due to the cheapness and ease of manufacture of autonomous killer drones (once the tech has been developed), the implications of their use by bad actors are horrendous.
The world did manage to get some level of control over nuclear proliferation (somewhat latterly and post-hoc) - should we not at aspire to learn the lessons from the successes and failures of nuclear non-proliferation and at least attempt to limit autonomous weapon development?
If we don't then we are heading into an utterly terrifying world, and one most on here seem to have just shrugged and set off down the road towards at the first fork in the road.
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.
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2 hours ago, chrisl said:
If I send up a swarm of drones that are capable of communicating with each other, while not taking input from me, are they not autonomous? If I send up a drone that picks what it's doing based on some pre-determined guidelines and then communicates what it's doing back to me, is it not autonomous?
Autonomy evades certain countermeasures, but doesn't preclude communication. Wouldn't a clever drone herder develop a swarm of drones that had some diverse capabilities? Maybe give 10 or 20% of them a suite of RF sensors and autonomy to go hunt radars and EW systems, while the rest were capable of picking targets on their own, but also at least some rudimentary communication to keep multiple drones from picking the same target if they happen to have comms with their neighbors?
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.
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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?
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7 hours ago, chrisl said:
I think you're still one dimension away, too. You're starting from "How does my thing work, what can I shoot it at".
From a battlefield perspective, the problem is more of "what am I facing and how do I keep it from getting anywhere near me". And then you develop the ISR and precision to vaporize anything you don't like that acts like it wants to get to close based on what's out there. In doing all of that you're constrained by conservation of energy, but there's a lot of room to work with if you start before anything gets you into its range.
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.
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15 hours ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:
Where did you get the idea? They were very effective as tactical bombers, only vulnerable to interceptors due to low speed. Where the enemy air cover was absent or not effective, StuKas worked very well.
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.
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29 minutes ago, Holien said:
Gun boat diplomacy against an non peer threat...
Cheaper and a shot across the bows tends to make non peer ships stop...
Yup. Guns don't even have to be fired to have an effect.
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24 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
There are two issues here.
Ju-87 were not military next-to-useless. This is not me being contrary - its well established and researched that in the initial years of the war, and when the Luftwaffe in general was dominant, that the Stuka was highly effective and useful in its intended role - striking enemy strong points and armor formations. They were very effective in France, Greece and the 1st-2nd years of Barbarossa. As the war went on pilot attrition, increased enemy AA and better Allied planes, tactics and numbers all forced the Stuka out as a viable platform. Even so, the weaker skilled Soviet Airforce meant that Stukas were viable for longer than in the West.
This wasn't just an Axis issue - dive bombers in the Pacific gradually faded back as surface warships increased their AA weaponry, specialist AA Cruisers came into being, as the Japanese surface navy was attritted into a glorified armed coast guard and as better weapons came online.
Secondly, V1s (but really V2s later) were never intended as battlefield weapons, so we cant don't an apples-to-apples comparison here. They were a long range strategic terror weapon, intended to flatten London, terrorize the British into negotiations and thereby buy Hitler time. He personally held the idea that the UK might actually cease fire but AIUI I don't think anyone else shared that as a real possibility.
Just o=some nitpicky stuff to keep us honest
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.
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6 minutes ago, photon said:
The hard requirement is that you must physically transport some physical object to your target to deliver whatever effect you're hoping to deliver. Mostly I'm thinking about kinetic effects, but maybe others too?
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.
7 minutes ago, photon said:The thing you want is to delay, as long as possible, the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space. For a thing like a rifle, that space collapses as soon as the bullet leaves the barrel. For an FPV drone, that targeting time and options space remains uncollapsed until either your battery runs out or you hit something. Because the energy isn't put into the weapon system all up front, you can use that energy to retain the targeting option space for much longer as the weapon moves from launch to target.
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.
10 minutes ago, photon said:I think when we talk about "precision", we're mostly talking about delaying the collapse of the targeting choice space as long as possible (which requires the weapon to retain energy as long as possible).
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.
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23 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I think we have gotten far too comfortable with our “superiorities” over the last 30 years. To the point they stopped being a factor and simply became basic assumptions. Cam-paint for example. When I first joined up we were always wearing cam paint in the field because we trained to both hunt and be hunted. Then we got rid of cam paint and frankly I only just saw it for the first time in a long time in training ex pics in Latvia.
We assumed levels of superiority that are unstable. We cannot always have air or firepower superiority. If we believe that we always will, then why even bother with psychological operations? Or we box up psychological operations into “hearts and minds” soft and fuzzy stuff that does not jive very well with killing people. This essentially alienates psychological to a weird niche when before, as you note, it was all over the place. I think it is on a long list of things we need to re-learn as we head into far more competitive warfare environs - right along with capacity and attrition.
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.
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24 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
The why do we still hear this mantra coming out of western militaries today? We had a MGen declare this exact statement at the opening of an Operational Symposium last month. I have heard this mantra as the primary reason to have tanks for years now.
I agree entirely that history - and this war in particular - clearly demonstrate that 100 years of worrying about tanks has created a world where tanks are being hunted into extinction by a multitude of systems. I also think we have a cultural block we cannot get past.
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.
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49 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
I think we still do because of the slippery concept of effects. The primary purpose of employing weapons systems is not to destroy or damage - the main purpose is to deliver an effect. The effect of a naval gun is the threat of damage more than the damage itself. This can shape the battlespace by forcing an opponent to manoeuvre or avoid certain conditions.
The reason for all that volume of fires was more than simply to kill other ships. It was to get them to do what we wanted to do. So the employment of all this energy is to create effects options spaces, which I suspect may be much more complicated than energy-time.
For example in your dive bomber example, the dive bomber has both fewer and greater effects options depending on when and where that dive occurs. In the dive, they have very limited targeting effects flexibility coming in at those speeds, less after weapons release. But before final attack the very presence of dive bombers creates an effect - ships must be looking up, AD manned and ready, and at speed to avoid. Add sirens and one can get a psychological effect.
These options are less about the energy over time being applied, they are about the potential energy being applied. The potential energy of those bombers is higher earlier, which creates options spaces. Once committed, those option spaces appear to shrink.
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.
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30 minutes ago, photon said:
Really appreciate your comments. So, here I'm thinking about HEAT and APFSDS rounds. Their time-energy curves look really different.
For APFSDS, the object that delivers the effect is the arrow, it receives all its kinetic energy as it leave the barrel. It gradually loses energy in flight - your note that much of that energy is waste energy is right on - until it transfers the kinetic energy to the armor of whatever you're shooting at.
Compare that to HEAT. the object that delivers the effect is the copper liner of the shell that's (at the last possible moment) formed into a penetrator. At firing, the shell can have much less kinetic energy because it's carrying with it a reserve of chemical energy that, at the last second, gets converted into kinetic energy in forming the penetrator.
So the energy for the same(ish) effect is distributed differently along the energy-time curve, and for the HEAT shell, much of the energy is provided to the actual penetrator when it is literally touching the target. Because of that, as you rightly note, you have much less waste energy, so less signature. And it's more controllable, so you can use fins and whatnot to steer it in the terminal phase (like the modern Javelin).
Does that make sense? I might need to draw some of what I mean.
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)?
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27 minutes ago, photon said:
Ok - those are all really good questions. Let me try and tackle them.
1. I have no idea. They're some sort of boundary case. But the creepy-crawly mines that @The_Capt has occasionally described seem like an attempt to save some of the time-energy curve to the last possible minute.
2. So, I'd say that what explosives to is they reserve available energy to be applied much later in the time-energy curve. With explosive weapons, the shell itself is not the thing that delivers effects, but the fragments and gasses. By retaining that energy until late, you can choose when to apply it for maximal effects. Think solid shot vs. mechanical time vs. proximity fusing for anti-aircraft guns. If you have a reserve of chemical energy to convert to kinetic, you can apply it in a much more precise and effective way.
3. Agree. My theory doesn't speak to this.
4. Agree.
5. So, a pulsed directed energy weapon would have (functionally) a zero time-energy integral, because the time to target is effectively instantaneous. If you need to hold the beam continuously, your time-energy integral will be large, you'll have a huge signature, and it's counter-fire time.
It's both retaining maximum option space as long as possible, and minimizing the time-energy integral to minimize signature. The launch of a drone is a lot harder to detect than the launch of a missile, which is itself harder to detect than a 155 firing. The much larger energy spike for the 155 means the whole system has to be much larger (to contain and direct that energy). The more gradual energy spike for the missile means you can use a smaller system to launch it. The effective non-existent energy spike for the drone means the launching system is basically non-existent.
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.
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15 minutes ago, photon said:
So, I've been thinking and reading, and want to advance a thesis for folks to hammer apart. It's a combination of @The_Capt's language of option spaces with battlefield physics. Maybe this is well known, but it's new to me. Here it goes.
The goal of a weapon system is to deliver kinetic energy (in the physics sense) to a particular place at a particular time. Let's gloss over how you pick that place and time (which is in its own revolution right now). You could think of each weapon system as having an energy-time curve that represents how much energy the killing bits have at a given moment. A couple of exampled:
1. A javelin. The tip has very low energy until thrown. Steep curve (maybe < 1s) to get to maximum energy when just released, gradual decrease in energy as it follows a ballistic trajectory (maybe 5s), then it delivers its energy to the target.
2. A naval artillery shell. The case fragments have low energy while in magazine. Very alarmingly steep curve (< 1s) to get to very large maximum energy when exiting barrel. Gradually losing energy during long ballistic flight (30s+). Loses huge gobs of energy penetrating deck armor (< 1s). Shell explodes imparting large kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to target.
3. An air launched cruise missile. The warhead has low energy on runway. Jet engines being to gradually impart both kinetic and gravitational potential energy (minutes to hours). The turbojet motor lights imparting a steady stream of kinetic energy as the missile travels (minutes to hours). The warhead explodes imparting large kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to the target.
4. A grenade dropping drone. The drone takes off using the minimal energy necessary. It cruises to the target area using the minimal energy necessary for level flight. Grenade falls, explodes imparting kinetic energy to fragments and gasses delivering energy to the target.
Here's my thesis: the flatter the energy-time curve (i.e. the slower its area integral grows), the larger the option space for the weapon, and consequently the harder it is to defend against he weapon. Additionally, the flatter the energy-time curve, the smaller the signature of the weapon system, and the less it attracts counter fires.
I think we're seeing this dynamic in all theaters and modes of warfare in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are putting on a master class in developing weapon systems that retain maximal option space for as long as possible. It's just precision that is changing the battlefield dynamic, it's weapons that retain their option spaces much longer than even a decade ago.
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.
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6 hours ago, Erwin said:
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer got it right, saying, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
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.
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1 hour ago, riptides said:
I'll start.
Russia wins by Putin remaining in power and occupying portions of Ukraine.
The collect west loses by the above. It loses more if and when sanctions are lifted in a return to "normalcy". Normalcy being defined as business as usual with Putins Russia.
So the West lost in 2014, then.
Someone aught to tell the Russians.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Yeah, it is ambiguously worded, isn’t it? Unfortunately the interviewer doesn’t seem to have asked for a clarification.