kimbosbread

Altitude first: Orlan-10 has 100km effective range. At 50km, your UAV needs to be 650ft above the ground to have LOS to the control station. Mix in terrain and whatnot, and you are looking at a thousand feet minimum. Even if you can stick your control station antenna high up, you aren’t talking tree level. Clutter second: You are looking for a control signal on known frequencies. Orlan-10 operates in 900mhz range for the control signal, so that’s cheap and easy to detect. And there’s the video signal too, which is gonna be microwave. Most of these things are using omnidirectional antennas too, so it’s not like you have to deal with a much weaker signal from most directions.

Sorry, but you keep on repeating the endurance thing, and it’s wrong unless your universe is limited to battery-operated quads. Battery operated fixed wing can go 100km for 30+m no problem. And if you use gas, figure 5x the endurance. Small gas engines are cheap and well understood.

I wonder if some sort of small calibre necked down cartridge might work, say 5.7x28 (200m effective range out of a 10” barrel)? Low recoil, long enough range, light, etc. As much as I like the Ender’s game suggestion, video links are the death of these systems due to bandwidth and transmitter constraints. Yeah. As said above, your defense cannot be expensive because it’s going to have to likely scale linerally with the number of drones.

Just use dinosaurs, solves the problem. Orlan-10 and similar have loiter time in excess of 12 hours. Don’t be like Amazon’s drone program and insist on electric-only. Yes, and no. Orlan-10 is pretty speed at 110mph. However, the current and next generation of these things aren’t maneuverable (especially the pusher prop ones), and have no capability to detect something targetting them. Detecting, targetting and taking down these things without spending $1m is the real problem. You almost need something like an Orlan-10 itself that can loiter for a while and cover say a 40km square area, with some sort of micro missile optimized for cost and small targets, and a series of spectrum analyzers on the ground listening for control signals that are linked together. Your air-to-air mini missile is not going to be expensive as far as real missiles go, but can you keep it under $50k? It needs to go in excess of 200mph (which has been done), and have 10km range, and have some sort of sensor head that can track the target. So yeah, that last one is the problem. Optical might not do it. A book I recommend to everyone is “Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development” about how they developed Sidewinder on the cheapo.

I’m not bullish on super long range tube artillery if just alone for the barrel wear problem you get with faster moving projectiles (no shade intended on the patron saint of ultra-high velocity cannons). Same issue you see with the new US infantry rifle in 6.8mm, or a modern round like 6.5 Creedmoor. Or a railgun. Heat dissipation is a pain. As is pointed out above, guidance is kind of important too, and is expensive ($100k for an Excalibur round). Once you have added all these costs to the system, are you really better off than just having a bunch of micro-cruise-missile drones with similar or better range, plus loitering, which are likely much cheaper too, and can be launched from any old pickup truck or speedboat? Or the nastier underwater variant…

Mmmm, I don’t think you can build a bubble around that sort of assault. So the question becomes, what kind of assault would be less susceptible to eyes in the sky? Option 1 is stealth: Especially at night, your electrically powered robot dog will be quite stealthy if moves slowly enough not to raise it’s ambient temperature enough and uncover too much soil, especially if it also has some thermal camouflage. Or fancy ghillie suits. Option 2 is speed: Disposable heavy lift quad copters can move your assualt units through no mans land very fast, preceeded by a swarm of drones/mini-cruise missiles/etc. If you an move a 100-200kg payload 20km at 60kmh, that might be enough to negate the enemy’s response time. Option 3 is corrupt the enemy’s data: Hack their computers, drones, beam the wrong signal back to the base station. And/or decoys and jamming. Option 4 is universal anti-radition counterybattery: Hunt down everything emitting an electronic signal with your swarm of drones. Well, stealth ghillie suit, and more “active” measures, such as fooling the enemy computer and sensor networks. For example, if we talk about Watling’s sensor-infused battlefield, what happens if you are able to physically compromise a bunch of them? That’s a laser microphone, and that’s old hat. As long as you can aim the laser precisely over 30km, and you know what frequency a pidgeon heartbeat should be (vs say a rat) you can do it. I did some research in this area in undergrad 20 years ago and this was already possible then, through some feet of concrete if you traded off distance. The real magic is when you have small phased arrays with precise beam steering. Well, until we have powered armor we we’ll just have the camouflage. But yes, once you have powered armor, the person inside may be superfluous in some situations, and you might as well go with your robot dog.

I wonder what navies will learn from this, both USN and PLAN. IIRC a nice conductor, say wire wrapped around an explosive cylinder, detonating at one end, should generate an EMP as the wire expands. But that’s poverty. In America, we have masers, and a sufficiently strong directed signal at 2.4GHz will fry the living **** out of many things. Obviously you can shield things against this, but it will fry sensors. Even cooler would be a lightning gun like in video games, or using your Halliburton weather machine to generate a thunderstorm. I wonder if there’s a way to basically create an ionized pathway to every conductor in a localized area and cook it?

I can’t second this enough. If Russia was confident, they wouldn’t be wasting precious treasure on something that doesn’t change their strategic position or as some people would say, expand their option space. If Russia was confident, they’d be improving their fortifications and blunting Ukraine’s offense while clevely husbanding their resources for the spring.

Man am I excitied to start reading tonight. But a better strategy would be to hack the sensors, or replace them, or feed them bad data!

If your pontoon bridge is out of artillery range, and there aren’t fighters with glide bombs nearby, yes. So you’d want a Patriot system and some HIMARS nearby for sure.

I didn’t realize how fast a duck can fly: 40-55mph for most species, but 70-100mph for the faster ones!? However, they can’t maneuver like a hummingbird, which is the real strength of quads, plus it’s harder to hit something coming at you at speed. At 60mph, you only have ~4s notice if object is 100yds away.

As I’ve posted a while ago, that only works if you can see the thing. Better is a mini-SDR drone detector that clips onto your vest, and then auto-launch a little interceptor on a squad basis, and then counter-battery, but for drones, that hunts the control signal. EDIT: I doubt you can hit a small drone moving at even 25mph with a pistol at 12y. Or a rifle at 100y. No way. Shotgun you have a chance, but a small one.

Ooof, that’s what I’m talking about. The future autonomous drones could be playful with their prey, I guess?

Very well put! When people complain about Bakhmut, this is a useful way to think about it… Russia burned through some of their better offensive forces, and lots of artillery, thus reducing their options for offense in the future. And the political option space unfortunately got bleaker as well, with Putin getting rid of a potential Rival. My copy just arrived!

Unrelated, does anybody have any idea how badly a cope cage or improv drone armor affects fuel efficiency? I know at over 30kph 80% of effort is overcoming air resistance, so I assume it’s pretty awful.

That was pretty interesting. One benefit on the unmanned side he doesn’t mention is the ensmallement opportunities. If you can figure out useful payloads for them (sensors, high yield explosives), the whole we can’t make enough of them for the larger platform argument goes out the window. The capability to make small, relatively high-endurance drones has existed for at least 25 years (4” long, 100kph for 1 hour, tiny gas engine). Quasi-related, given the distance to the South China Sea, should the US consider a building an expo-atmospheric bomber (that stays below 100km so no weaponization of space)? You could do some sort of boost-glide mechanism using a scaled down version of SpaceX’s re-useable rockets. Probably signficantly cheaper than our programs, if we got SpaceX to build it for us.

I wouldn’t call that a renewable resource. Vast, maybe. Economic collapse is an interesting one. What does economic collapse even mean if Russia goes full North Korea where all the important people keep the same level of luxury? I maintain that we need better sanctions (plus luxury Eldest Son) on the rich, and really seize all their stuff, ban the Muscovites from Thailand, make them unable to enjoy the rest of the world.

This would be a glorious opportunity for American pick up truck manufacturers, who with the end of ZIRP are sitting on lots of inventory they can’t move. They could get probably get uncle Sam to comp them a bit too. Not as good as a Hilux/LC70, but better than nothing. Also American-size means lots of room for body armor and cupholders for energy drinks.

I think it’s a combo of several things: Range is the big one for your transmitter. If you go autonomous, that’s no problem anymore. For the ranges currently possible for small drones, might as well just stay quad if it’s < 10km. VTOL (though hybrids exist), so no hands launch standing up, or slingshot. Can launch from enclosed space or trench. Less off the shelf small durable airframes for fixed wing. Hobbyist ones are styrofoam/wood and presumably get trashed fast too. In terms of disposability, there is minimal extra cost for disposable electronics. Sure, better camera and gimball, but otherwise same chips and whatnot for small cheap stuff. EDIT: From a philosophical standpoint, there’s a divergence here for our drones in the future. Do we have an autonomous drone bomber with dumb (or less smart) munitions, and all the operations (launch, reload, maintenance) that this requires? Do we have a ****load of autonomous micro and mini cruise missiles that are disposable? Drones don’t last that long anyway, so make your COGs low and mass produce, and rely on software updates to give you power. Do we do some sort of combo?

Fortunately, some of stuff that is really effective is not only cheap but has high production rates: Artillery shells and small drones. I personally am optimistic that Ukraine’s long range drone program will really kick up during the winter. I wouldn’t want to be a Russian power plant near Moscow or St. Petersburg, that’s for sure.

Yes, and no. Ukraine was basically #3 in the world for software engineering before this conflict, after US and China. A lot of that talent has been channeled into armaments, ISR, drones etc., and Ukraine will have the world’s best dataset on small drone usage. There is a significant amount of money in this as the US gear up for the war with China. We are fortunate that god loves us so much that he gives us a practice war for warmup where we get to test out all the small drone stuff we suck at and that our enemies are good better at than us.

I gotta imagine those batteries are easy to spot for Ukraine and receive some HIMARS loving, unless there’s so much aviation that this is not safe to do.

You should really write romance novels, or at least fan fiction. You know that Fifty Shades of Gray started out as Twilight S&M fan fiction (hence being set in Seattle, which is relatively near Forks)?

You mean “most battery-powered loitering munitions”. Range increases dramatically if you do three things: Fixed wing (ie not a quadcopter) No transmitter that is sending video Use a little gasoline engine Not if you are autonomous and don’t rely on GPS/etc. EW is going to drive autonomy as much as anything.

Rail should be trivial to hit with loitering munitions. This is literally the easiest target for an autonomous UAV to hit. Just follow the rail line, it’s not like it’s gonna move. Follow it till you find a locomotive, and boom.