kimbosbread

What about a small drone with a shaped charge, that can burn through a helmet and thus “blow the mind”? EDIT: I still think less-than-death, or alternatively horribly painful death is better: Eunuch-make drones, or aiming for legs and feet deliberately to cripple.

Combo drone attacks; one can very well imagine how these work against an APS: Attack from two directions at once with two drones each, first drones deploys a cloud of chaff/aluminum powder, second drone punches through.

To be fair, many Germans marched to Moscow and back on foot due to lack of vehicles, and as we know the front within 10km is considered dangerous for vehicles. If there are no minefields and sparse defenders, it’s not a bad choice necessarily. I do wonder how re-supply will work if they push more than a few km on a broad front.

Yeah, the US in particular is incapable of doing anything for a reasonable price, be it infrastructure, weapons, transit etc. I stand by my claim if the US withdraws from this, Europe will give up in short order.

I assume some of it got blown up at the very least; at lot of this sort of aid is highly consumable unfortunately. At least for munitions, we regularly see scenarios where two squads fighting run out of grenades, and I assume that extends to grenade launchers, machine guns, and fancier things as well. Radio shortages are well-known. Sure, there will be your vanilla corruption, but I imagine that’s only a small part of it. EDIT: Oh, and replacements for infrastructure getting blown up etc. too. We haven’t had a war like this in a while in an industrialized country, so we get to see how expensive it is.

It depends on what you think the force composition is. Is the primary killer drone swarms, and then infantry to hold ground, and the vehicles merely exist to ferry infantry around? Maybe at the squad level an MRAP or UGV will have a 50cal coax with a few of these cheap missiles on it, but a little mortar robot won’t have room… you’ll need another robot with the fitty. Yeah this 100%. The radars/EW can be on your CAP drones orbiting at 1500m; your vehicles probably just need short range sensors.

Dude. Go buy a hobby drone. These things have much different flying characteristics than a helicopter. A quadcopter can travel in power under any direction. It can go up and down fast. They can dive, as well as just go straight down because that’s what happens when you have 4 props. And a fixed wing FPV drone like Lancet can in fact dive quite well. Have you not watched any videos?

No, you don’t seem to get it. For point defense, you want a much smaller, lighter and cheaper weapon with plentiful ammo. A giant 30mm turret is not going to provide cheap defense. You can’t mount this turret on any small vehicles, and it’s a big giant target that is hard to hide, and it won’t be able to do anything about the purpose built combat drones that will pop and fire NLOS munitions like Brimstone once their picket drones get downed. Air defense is a series of bubbles, and for 200m-2km, a lightweight fast moving munition makes a lot more sense, and will likely be cost-competitive with 35mm smart shells (not to mention the whole stupid turret). See China Lake’s poverty missile for $5k with a 1lb warhead at 5lb weight, or any FPV drone being used in Ukraine. For longer range, we already have missiles. If Rheinmetall was so confident, they should build a bunch and send them to the front lines, or ship one to the US where we have test ranges that are as big as entire EU countries, and go against a few Ukrainian drone operators. But no, they built a 90s weapon for a 2030s fight.

So yeah, why not just have paper targets and some schnitzel and riesling and be done with it. This is a convincing sales pitch to absolutely nobody. Some duck hunters could do about the same in the same time. And dropping grenades and whatnot from the top. This is a ****ty demo. It’s worse than the homebuilt RC turrets people stuck paintballs and airsoft guns to 10-20 years ago that were computer-vision driven. Those things could at least track fast moving targets.

I want to watch that video with the drones coming in not as a giant bunch. I’d pay money to watch several Ukranian drone operators vs a few of these Rheinmetall units, and I know who I’d bet money on.

Unfortunately, pretty much all future munitions, especially the really cheap ones do in fact perform diving attacks. Actually, they can attack from any direction they choose, at any speed they choose. What if the APS doesn’t handle a target going slower than 20mph? Every single small drone will be programmed to reduce speed on final approach. Based on what we are seeing in Ukraine, you will need APS turned on if you are within 20km of the front line. Otherwise, what’s even the point of having it in the first place?

Yeah if you have to scan actively, it won’t work. An optical/acoustic auto-shotty turret for $150k, that’s at least passive. But if you are constantly emitting, anything with some antennas and software (say an RTL SDR and some antennas for $60) is gonna know where you are immediately. That’s no bueno.

Yeah, we gotta be realistic about what works, and what is delivering kills per total $ (inclusive training, logistics, medical issues due noise, blasts etc) while not being killed. Dismounted infantry is definitely still in. Stick them in powered armor and combine with UGVs, and we have something that pack a lot of boom while being hard to kill en masse, and that can dig in. Consolation for the tanks- mortars are may also be obsoleted in favor of more precise, longer ranged and more flexible weaponry.

I agree with the sentiment that APS is really hard, especially against a variety of threats (fast moving missiles, vs slow drones, or combinations of drones), and that it is likely to be too expensive to be economical. Shotgun phalanx, that might be doable though, but I doubt it would cost less than $100k per unit. You need a little turret, you need something like a belt fed shotgun, you need sensors, you need software to detect the target.

If I were the Russians, I’d do my best to make Kharkiv not worth holding for Ukraine. Completely level it a la Grozny. I don’t know if they have enough KABs or artillery within range to do it, but I guess if they were able to hit power and water and take it offline reliably, that would go some towards achieving the effect.

I could see Western Europe throwing in the towel pretty easily, honestly, in the same of “oh the humanity” and cheap gas. In fact, I’d bet even if Trump was willing to sell weapons, the Germans would fold and push for “peace”. They’d be happy to get more non-African young population for sure. That said, I’m not completely convinced Trump would abandon Ukraine, and I’m also not convinced Trump has that easy a path to winning, since probably 25% of his own party will not vote for him under any circumstance.

Don’t kink shame me.

The China Lake boys just put together a $5k missile (“Spike”?) with a 1lb warhead and 5lb overall weight. That seems like the ticket. Just make it a bit smaller again, and you have an air-launch anti-drone missile that won’t break the bank.

Yeah, people forget that the advent of cheap, powerful and energy efficient computing is upon us. This is what enables quadcopters to fly, cell phones to do all sorts of fancy image processing, etc. Whenever someone questions cheap precision, I gotta wonder if they’ve ever touched a smartphone in the last decade.

This is a hack to survive the current cycle. For the specific conditions the Russians face- numerically inferior enemy with lots of FPVs with small warheads, and lots of Russian meat and ****ty old armor- this works fine.

If all your opponent has is FPVs, is that not good enough? As I understand, Ukraine simply doesn’t have enough heavy weaponry capable of destroying “shed-on-tracks”. Previously small drones were good enough for wiping out all manner of vehicles, but this requires something with a more substantial amount of boom-boom, which is not available. I disagree that this is any sort of the victory. The Russians are not stupid, and realize that bolting sheds onto their tanks is a viable strategy for getting infantry to Ukraine’s defensive positions, and that’s all that matters to them. They believe they can seize 50-100m at a time, and make attrit the Ukrainian defenders, while being able to sustain the Russian effort. EDIT: If it’s a victory at all, it’s for those who fetishize tanks, and point out what happens when you run out of fancy ATGMs.

IIRC I read an interview with a member of a Stugna squad maybe 10 months ago and ATGMs were in extremely short supply.

Does a modern AT weapon cost more or less than the cope-barn?

With the caveat that Ukraine is not able to conduct this kind of campaign against Russia at present, and western weapons have been taken off the table for this. That’s why I think the focus on critical, hard-to-replace infrastructure assets is key. If they can take all of the refineries within 500km of the Ukrainian border offline, more or less permanently, there’s just no way for Russia to fix these. Same with substations; there just aren’t spares for those kinds of transformers. Same with locomotives, though those are something that can be built.

That’s why the oil and electrical infrastructure has to go. Russia can survive with these, but it will be progressively harder to wage war.