kimbosbread

RF-kamikazes still need some optical guidance if they are going after things on the ground. That’s why I proposed train hunting (and it’s cousin truck hunting) as good first steps. Known routes, easy objects to detect/hard to disguise. The feedback loop is a really interesting problem. For all the military men out there, what’s the minimum that is acceptable? If you are ok with a text message “I found a buk and am going to blow it up; here’s the gps coordinates check it on the next satellite pass” that is way less bandwidth than video plus can be sent from much further away on a lower frequency. A video feed is just so much more expensive in terms of power and emissivity and range.

Here’s the shopping list for ghetto autonomy: 1) Jetson Nano SBC (but a Rasberry Pi could serve in a pinch for very simple object detection algorithms) 2a) Infiray thermal camera (384x288@25hz with 1km detection range) 2b) Stereo camera with distance/depth sensing (per another forum member’s recco) You just aren’t spending that much money on the hardware.

Mmmm, thermal and optical sensors are quite cheap, and much of the capability comes down to the processor behind it. For example, the Infiray thermals we’ve talked about for $600… sure they are great, but when you back them up with a Jetson SBC and fuse them with optical, you start having something significantly more powerful. Remember, just because you see a ****ty video feed from an FPV drone doesn’t mean that the camera sucks, just that your bandwidth sucks. By another day, you mean somnetime in 2024. Yeah, it’s not all or nothing. First step is autonomy where compute is still at the base station, but one operator can now designate targets for many drones at once.

Among my many side projects is writing a game like Civilization (I’ve written the hex tile layout engine and menu system, but new job got in the way of further work). A friend and I always though political systems like Communism should come with a trade-off: You may order that factory to be built, as you have top-down control, but that does not mean it actually got built, or that it can actually build things properly.

Yes, cheap and low power. Basic image recognition does not demand a lot of computing power for many tasks. Nvidia has cheapo small board computers (used on Lancet) that is excellent. In a pinch other SBCs work, and a bunch of other companies make cameras with chips included in-camera that do all the recognition. As Butschi said, it comes down to willingness to tolerate false positives and false negatives in terms of what you hit. If you are ok with that, you can go very cheap, like $100-200 for the computer cheap. Nvidia Jetson nanos are $100-200 IIRC.

100%. You can literally order parts by the hundreds of thousands straight from our lovely Chinese brothers and sisters, and set up an assembly line and just churn these out. As we’ve discussed a while back, the total footprint of small drones in terms of cost per casualty is just so much lower than every other weapon. I’d be shocked if Russia didn’t go all in on small drones and forgo artillery in many situations and no longer need to worry about counter battery and lugging shells around. Ukraine obvs has some counter-battery-but-for-drones techniques ie intercepting the video signal then figuring out where the operators are and then hitting them, but a more automated SDR-based approach is the only way to scale this to work across the front.

I wonder how much fuel it takes to deliver a tank or ifv or truck of soldiers to Kherson for the Russians? That’s pretty much the farthest point on their logisitics chain, right?

Because China is ROC x 1000 at manufacturing. Infiray can presumably outproduce FLIR by several orders of magnitude just for thermal modules alone, let alone the rest of China’s excellent small drone industry. God it grinds my gears that we essentially gave Russia enough time to figure out what works, while cutting support to Ukraine.

Yeah, this smells like “Oh crap, our hope of Russia not losing too hard was stupid and wrong, we didn’t send Ukraine enough weapons, and we lost an election, and now we are trying to look like we are competent”. Kimbo’s razor: Never attribute that to strategy that can be explained by a complete lack of strategy.

Yeah I don’t understand how the US hasn’t basically said ok, we’ll supply 1m small drones a year to Ukraine. Buy up all FLIR Lepton production, etc, make it happen. It’s not like we cannot manufacture things, right? The problem is in Shenzen, all the manufacturers are right there, in the same area. We have nothing like that for electronics anymore. EDIT: And Jetson SBCs, obviously.

It’s like expendable workers during the pandemic… wait I thought I said essential… Meanwhile schmucks like me are working from tropical islands drinking light beer and diving.

I mean, my bingo cards for big new wars prior to 2022 was Turkey vs Greece and Egypt + Sudan vs Ethiopia. Spain vs Morocco? I had no idea!

Spectacular opportunity for our intelligence agencies to insert people into the Russian military and cause chaos behind the front lines. Hopefully we are using it. EDIT: We don’t even need to insert people, but just loudly announce we are doing it.

Secondhand, from a friend who was on the ground! EDIT: If I was better connected, I’d be the next Gerard Villiers. I don’t know if I could come up with a better start to my series of books than “le long coque noir” though.

1000 times this. The intelligence agencies had a better idea partly because of their not insubstanial presence on the ground near the front.

A while back somebody wondered if it the autonomous drones should be programmed to play cat and mouse with their targets. I wonder if there’s a similar argument about killing or injuring or damaging the target from a psychological perspective. For example, if you could make drones reliably target a man’s balls, what that do to the opposing force? Would codpieces come back into fashion with a quickness? What if the drone basically would spray a bunch of napalm on your face, just enough to make your life extra ****ty, but not kill you?

Yeah I made so much fun of my Chinese acquaintances over this. They agreed and were pretty butthurt about it. My one coworker (one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met) went to Vietnam with his Korean wife, and the wife made him pretend to be Korean the whole time. He was like “Wow I had no idea the Vietnamese hate us this much”.

And make them autonomous, at least at some level (hunting trains and loitering 40km behind enemy lines and waiting for trucks or military vehicles) . The Nvidia SBCs seem super well suited to this. The guy in the hidey hole doesn’t matter as much if half of the men and equipment coming to the front lines are destroyed before they ever gets there.

And jet engines. Not gonna have a long flight time.

Absolutely. Also remember that Asians have slightly different hair genes, and a reasonably bored government biolab could have some fun making every Chinese women extremely hirstitute (sorry about the collateral, rest of Asia). God I’m looking forward to smart bioweapons. Sure, and that’s why the sabotage of trains and signal cabinets in Russia is one of the most important efforts in this war. Obviously locomotives and rolling stock need to get taken out too. Start taking out some fiber junctions too. I remember when a few years ago when a Google datacenter had a fire on the 2nd floor, and then the fire trucks sprayed the hell out of it, and then the water went down to first floor network switches and took out a lot of GCP. That was a fun time to be their an infrastructure engineer for their main customer! There are so many soft targets there for the taking. Think about poisoned luxury goods for the Russian elite. Or even just go for champagne that has too high pressure (like what killed some Chinese guy a decade ago with a cork to the temple).

Then Ukraine should go blow them up on the sly as soon as possible. Meh, I think going after Russian power plants, data centers, fiber junctions, chemical factories, any sort of warehouse, any and all rail and shipping infrastructure, trucks, that would do it pretty fast. Disagree. I don’t think the West is in general aware of the amount of control Russia has over the minds of its citizens. My Russian coworkers always mocked our Chinese coworkers for thinking their authoritarian state was so all-powerful. Maybe once their will and spirits are sufficiently demolished we can rebuild them in America’s image as a monument to how awesome we are. That is a very clever idea. I would go for all sorts of enterprises though, the more digital the better, and make their lives hell. Make Russia depend on paper. Corrode the way they operate.

Maybe he’ll break out of jail and run off to North Korea. The entertainment factor of having our president hiding from his own government in another country would be off the charts.

Well, per the ongoing discussion (and demonstrations) of Americans being idiots, can we be surprised? Anybody who has had to deal with the American intelligence agencies, their conferences and their minions is not surprised. Transnistria and Kaliningrad (and Dagestan and whatever the Chinese part of Russia is) are such obvious, squish soft targets with high payout for low reward I can only imagine terminal idiocy and pussilanimity (sp?) are preventing us from taking advantage.

Any thoughts on Ukraine opening up an alternate front, ie Transnistrya? Surely they have the manpower to do that (or borrow it, as it would be much easier to hide super special friend casualties). It would make Russia look bad, and close down a giant security hole they currently have.

On the other hand, we have to remember that Russia and China have perhaps different winning conditions than we do,. Perhaps Russia is content to trade relations with the west for a land bridge to Crimea and becoming a vassal of China. Perhaps China (really, Winnie the Flu) is willing to risk economic ruin and starvation in return for Taiwan. I assume a dictator has much more asymmetric victory conditions than a democracy, if we would phrase it that way.