kimbosbread

Traditional laws of logistics do not apply to America! But yes, modularity would be good in general, unless it makes the whole system 10x more expensive. As an aside, it’s gonna be interesting if we adopt suborbital rockets as rapid logistics; one wonders how the weapons systems will have to be adapted to handle Musk’s rather interesting landing profile.

Here’s a question: Of the truck-based artillery, which is better, Caesar or Archer? Archer sounds great from the whole shoot and scoot perspective and automation (and thus less injuries carrying stuff and TBI), but Caesar appears to cheaper and lighter.

Well, I am red-green colorblind, and I have a lot of family there.

The silly picture that kept being posted in the thread.

In what universe is Switzerland not considered to be a “Full Democracy”? It’s literally a confederation with direct democracy, and has been for longer than most countries have even had the concept of elections. EDIT: I also do wonder about Japan being considered more democratic by some numeric ranking than the US, when Japan is basically a one party state.

If you have a lot of wire, make a bunch of fake positions too. Plus some old school booby traps with Punji sticks, if all else fails.

What’s with the reports of the Krynky bridgehead being expanded? That seems like a bright spot of good news.

What the extreme fringes do and say affects regular people, at least in rich coastal cities. It’s certainly not just idiots screaming at each other online. One ridiculous example of this is hosptials at least where I am no longer can say “mother”, but have to use the word “birthing person”. Remember the Stanford guide for acceptable words? It does bleed into our lives. More practically, at my previous employer, a major software company, anything but the most progressive political stance was unacceptable to voice- and that stance was voiced quite a bit- much to the befuddlement of all the foreign employees. This is not atypical at large, well-paying software companies.

With respect to social issues, I think it is worth mentioning that attitudes to all sorts of stuff have shifted massively in the last 30 years, and even the last decade. I don’t think we can criticize other countries for staying on top of the latest stance that some portion of the US population holds to LGTBQIA2+.

Yeah, we gotta have cost-effective drone interceptors. Missile interception is gonna just be more expensive just by nature of the speeds and energies involved, unless we put a bunch of orbital nuke-powered platforms up, ie your jewish space lasers.

I’d love to rag on Imperial Drone Laser Excelsior, but I feel like that’s just cruel and unusual. So let’s talk about realistic, 6-36 month CUAS systems, specifically defense against Orlan-10 and the like, which I think is the number 1 ISR threat from the Russians. The numbers, as I understand them: Unit cost of $50-150k. The solution needs to have a marginal cost of that or less for 99% hit probability. Even if you save targets worth a lot more, the proliferation of cheap drones means your solution needs to be as cheap. Service ceiling of 5km, but it sounds like they are often deployed around 1-2km. 150kmh top speed, sounds like cruise speed is 120kmph or so Size is about 2m x 2m. Control link is around 1GHz, not sure about video but I assume it’s 2+GHz (or maybe analog!?) My assumption is omnidirectional antennas from photos; I doubt Russia has the capability to produce cheap variable directionality (sp?) antennas. China probably though, but still not that cheap. Has a waypoint mode and active mode, presumably latter is used more. Can use another Orlan-10 as relay. As we discussed many pages ago, a little MOLLE mounted frequency detector is cool, but probably won’t detect one of these guys. I think what you need is either: A decently sensitive antenna on the ground, briefcase sized maybe that can scan and detect ISR drones without need for an operator (other than having power). A fixed wing drone that silently listens for signals, kind of like a Rivet Joint, but not expensive. If you are flying at 2-3km, no reason you need that much in terms of big fancy antennas. A few SDRs is probably enough, especially if you are hunting a noisy relay. I think the second one is the better solution for ISR drones, as it could protect a larger area of front, especially if it’s static, and we aren’t talking about a big drone necessarily. It doesn’t need cameras, it doesn’t need a big fancy transmitter, just some SDRs and associated antennas for passive listening, and some loiter time. The second, probably the better long term solution as you deal with smaller, cheaper and more numerous drones (coexists with first though). So what happens if you detect an Orlan-10 20-40km away? How do you shoot it down, cheaply. How do you ensure you have a weapon close enough to engage? Ideally, once you detect the damn thing you’d like to be able to shoot it down within 3-4 minutes. One could build a lightweight missile that fits on the EW drone, but this imposes a constraint I think of max engagement range of 15km or so, because otherwise the munition will be too big. Max speed needs to be around 200kmh, or slower with some sort of sprint capability. I don’t think a big warhead is needed; just create a cloud of splinters. If the EW drone is cheap enough, maybe you pack them dense enough up high. Diamond Age it is. For example, if these things are re-useable and cheap (ie last 2-3 days for $50k cost), and you basically pack your 40km front with 10 of these in the air at once, you just don’t need as much range. Loitering munition that can take signals from EW drone, and “transform” into sprint mode by shedding wings and engaging a solid rocket motor. But you need more of these, and they need to be deployed somehow, and are likely disposable. Maybe you launch of package of ISR drones and interceptors off your Hilux in tubes, and they provide 2-4 hours of coverage with say 40km front with 3 minute interception time covered with 1 EW drone and 6 interceptors. Go full Diamond Age, with EW drone and interceptor being one and the same, which might be cheaper, and just pack the front densely, denying ISR drones the chance to operate. This means re-useability and/or cheapness. It’s much hunch this is the best long term bet. Ground based launcher, which means it needs longer range, and you might need several of them. You aren’t as constrained in terms of weight, which means solid rocket boosters and thus high speed. A point defense solution seems like it’s gonna have to be developed, but I think it might be an evolutionary dead end compared to loitering interceptors. For terminal guidance, I think radar + SDR + optics are needed. I don’t think we can assume near future ISR drones will have much radar signature, if any. Maybe projecting a laser grid like Starstreak and correlating that with what the SDR and AWACS drone say? Or just SDR homing and camera??? EDIT: I say this with the perspective of what I think I, a software engineer specializing in distributed systems, but with some EE/embedded experience, and few friends with a good mix of EE and software could do in our garages, or at a cabin with 100 acres of flying range. EDIT2: Could one use quadcopters within 2km range or less to intercept an Orlan-10 at 1km altitude 1km away? Some of those little racing/speed optimized drones can go quite a bit faster than 150kmh, so you stand a decent chance of intercept I guess. That seems like the absolute cheapest solution, though it provides the least coverage/range.

Correct. If there was a will, there would be a way… but that would require a will to be present.

For small drones, obviously due to weight concerns each will be specialized. As soon as you get a bit larger- I suspect 5-10kg is the minimum weight- you’ll get modularity. COTS sensors are remarkably cheap, and a lot of this can be simulated in software, and I feel like the cost of doing an actual field exercise will be brutally cheap. Just a bunch of bros and drones in a field, with a bunch of computers and antennas and beer. Yeah, you minimize communication, and use IR, acoustic or laser links. Yeah, I feel like $100m budget will get you plenty of compute and good software engineers who can build this for you. And you can be sure Israel and friends will be offering this software for $$$.

I think that’s a dangerous assumption to make, and I think anybody designing a drone swarm would be stupid not to make them communicate. No reason a drone can’t identify a target, and then ask peers if anybody else is tracking this. Notice how I said peers? This is a classic distributed systems problem where you want to decide who does what task while minimizing the amount of communication needed. It’s not going to be 100% foolproof, but this stuff works well in practice (see consenus protocols, eventual consistency etc).

Please explain what means that is.

Don’t discount vastly reduced medical bills due to ear damage, concussions, TBI etc. from being exposed to boom boom. These are accumulated in peacetime too!

That is totally fair and I at least appreciated the ammo fort picture, but I think you are wrong and I have numbers. For reference, Switchblade 600 is almost 20kg (and almost 50kg with tube launcher + fcs), and is 15cm diameter x 130cm long. I couldn’t find a reference for the launch tube, but it looks to be ~30cm diameter from photos online. Definitely not 50cm. See attached photo. I think we can agree that you could pack a bunch of these sized tubes vertically, so 30x30 cm in a 5x10 grid in a pickup truck bed, for example. Or you could angle them a bit, if space permits. Unless you have LC70 pickup, you couldn’t have 50kg tubes of course, but a real truck can hold more weight. EDIT: This packaging extends to all sorts of things, for example packing Stinger and Javelin and Spike in vertical tubes. These systems are all similar sizes, really.

I’m assuming each drone fits in a 50cm x 50cm x 150cm box. Even a pickup truck bed is 1500cm wide, so we can just fit the raw drones in our favorite truck of any size no problem. Lots of room for everything else, clearly. It’s a fair point on launch systems, and I’m implicitly assuming one of two real world examples: The simplest launch system is a catapult, which takes 2 guys to set up in less than 5 minutes. Pop the drone of the box, throw it on the catapult and tell it where to go. Targetting step could literally be that simple if this thing has the heart of a modern cellphone. I’m assuming they can launch one drone per minute, and targetting is automatic for all drones in hearing range (or they can be told on the ride) Slightly fancier is the mortar (ie what Switchblade comes in). Again 2 guys in truck take box off truck, fold down tripod legs, tell drone where to go, and that’s it. Let’s say it takes 30 seconds to launch per drone. If we go further with the mortar version, and we pack our boxes vertically, and stick a bit more boom in the mortar, we have VLS-but-on-a-truck, for very very cheap. The only telling the drones what to hit in their boxes, so each box can just plug into port, and that port puts all the boxes on the same network (revolutionary tech, we have this in every home). And then it’s a puff of data and all the drones know where to go. Don’t even need your two schmucks in the back. The more I think about this, the 16 tons of Himars with 3 crew is competing against one ton of drones stuffed in the back of the smallest truck you can find, or say towed in a sawed out camper by a Lada Niva with a crew of 2. EDIT: 50cm is probably really generous even with sytrafoam padding. Your ****ty box truck can fit a hundred, but it’ll be a tight fit. If you go down to a 30cm container, it’ll be a lot easier and a large pickup could hold a 40 pack of these things vertically (5 x 8).

Well, how about if you can have two trucks full of drones (say 2 tons of the suckers), or a truck of drones and one HIMARS? I suspect that right now the answer is the latter, but very soon it’ll be the former because autonomy. We’ve gone over the math before, but we’ll do it again. Our little folding fixed wing ghetto GLSSSDB has 2kg HE, and 2h range electric at 140kmh (say 10kg weight) and is completely autonomous. Tell it to go somewhere, give it a target priority list, that’s it. That means you have better range than GLMRS (albeit slower), and you have 100 of these per ton => 200 per truck. You are now looking at 400 ultra-precise 2kg explosives with 250+km range (and they can loiter). And remember, the other guys have these two, and they are hunting for all of your assets within 100km of the front line, so Mr HIMARs may not last that long!

By “same”, do you mean total $$$ value or total warhead weight, or total weapons system weight? I suspect those comparisons are not nearly as favorable to legacy weapons systems (especially the delivery system). The drones ukraine has cobbled together for long range are nothing more than poverty cruise missiles, same as hobbyists have been building for 2 decades minus the boom. Where drones are very quickly going is autonomous targeting and prioritization at scale for relatively little money. More autonomy means less boom is needed for same terminal effect. I guarantee we’ll see full autonomy entering the area this year for certain target types; we’ve already seen last mile.

They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

This is exactly why a few us of think 120mm breech loaded mortars are the right way forward in the short term. Yeah, I don’t think that will change. However, I’m not convinced big long tubes are here for that much longer. Rocket artillery, especially in the GLSDB direction (ie more drone, more submunition) seem like the right choice in terms of cost/precision/range. Exactly. We have a set of capabilities that overlap for intersect in part, but I suspect sooner rather than later the drone circle will overlap everything but sheer throw weight. Checkmate!

5. Information Scalability. How easy is it to add new software capabilities on the fly to the entire fleet?

Yeah, the calculus has definitely shifted. Plus Starship test flight 4 will be next month, and as soon as booster re-use works, the US can rebuild satellite constellations literally overnight. And presumably Kawaski and Hyundai can crank out jetskis by the thousands per months (sorry, USVs). I for one am excited to see what their damage control is like. Maybe they figure ok we can lose 400 ships, and land 400. The problem is no matter how good you are at building ships, USVs are way cheaper. I think the “energy” needs to include the computations needed to target and get a hit, plus the energy involved in logistics. Maybe training too. Under that metric, as we’ve discussed, FPV drones are literally almost zero energy.

Hopefully it will be easier to husband this resource on defense, with proper fortifications. I am optimistic Syrkski has learned a lesson here. So far, as Capt has said, they can deny ground but not hold it. Basic last-mile autonomy is coming extremely soon, and it’s going to hurt badly for the Russians when their EW can’t stop a certain fraction of drones that could be stopped before. As we’ve discussed, having all 3 is likely a fantasy. That’s a problem, because all 3 are easy on the drone side when you talk about autonomy or most other soft-ware driven features.