kimbosbread

I image this capability will be bifurcated; ie the drone will consist of sub units, perhaps the main one capable of diving, the others for flying, for that nice one too punch. As always, range and payload don’t favor flying unless it’s on a suborbital trajectory! Expense/lack of off the shelf components. All of the sudden it’s not just hobbyist parts, but fancy antennas/SDRs/EE degrees etc. Radios is not a simple domain. This is where cyberwarfare will really come into it’s own. We need to basically figure out whatever Bloodhound + etc are, but for autonomous warfare. Maybe once I finish my current gig in 3 years, I’ll start a company doing drone network risk analysis.

Frequency hopping is great, but all the sudden you the benefits of all the ICs and antennas for the normal frequencies used this stuff and you start needing custom silicon. At scale, not horribly expensive, but starting out, there’s a serious investment needed. Software defined radios aren’t cheap or easy across wider frequency bands, and especially not in higher frequencies. Basic autonomy is likely much easier, cheaper and more effective in every way. You can’t jam it, there’s no last mile guidance interference, you don’t need a transmitter, and your machine learning training can immediately be applied across the entire fleet.

What do you mean by “cost effectiveness”!???? Airborne lasers and associated power systems are never cheap nor light! I think very small missiles are the best bet: Basically a small, optimized drone with limited endurance (or even a little solid rocket motor) that can be fired off your bigger platform. Unit cost needs to be on the order of $1000 or less. Big challenge in my mind is the missiles targeting system. Ghetto thermal is probably not enough range or resolution at missile speeds, radar is presumably too heavy and complex, and optical seems like it wouldn’t give you range or resolution either. Starstreak’s laser grid approach seems like it might be economical, but it requires more complexity on the launch platform presumably. If your micro missile was two stage: Electric prop until target acquisition by sensor, and then solid rocket boost for last 0.5-3km, would that work? Or is pure electric prop fine?

The critical limitation is range/power. If these are battery or fuel powered, and they wanna fly, there’s a serious issue with persistence.

That’s not a bad idea, but I don’t think you’d have the battery power (or room for gas + generator) in a 40mm grenade. Maybe a fixed wing UAV would flying an orbit would work better? Obviously directional vs omni-directional antenna is a big question; the former is more efficient, but you need to aim/steer it for it to be effective.

As you ascend from depth, your buoyancy increases. If you add a little populsion and blow your tanks, you can really get quite far out of the water. That’s how you see killer whales and sharks jump 10+ ft out of the water. If it is electric for last km, it doesn’t need a snorkel. If it has last mile autonomy, it doesn’t need an antenna. But sure, a little periscope and antenna if you want FPV. WW2 tactics. Well yeah, that’s basically where this is of course headed.

Maybe in 2024. I don’t think that’s an assumption we can make in 2025 and beyond. There’s a very real possibility spotting drones get distributed too, ie more of them, smaller, cheaper, passively watching vs an active emitter.

That’s expensive. Easier to have the drone be semi-submersible, with an electric motor for last km propulsion. And then have a few drones attack on the surface, while the underwater ones either attack from other side, or wait in the path of where the ship is expected to move, kind of like a dynamic mine. If the drone was submersible, you could do a very neat trick and go full Shamu and have it jump out of the water. Imagine having a Sea Baby jump on top of your VLS as it pops up from 50m down.

Re claymores/grape, think bigly please. Just stick some autonomous quads on the boat (a few extra kg), and launch them when you are with 1km of target and have them hit the bridge or crew served weapons or people shaped heat sources on deck (or lifeboats).

Haven’t they stripped some of those to get blown up in trenches though?

That’s why Ukraine is building their own Surovkin line. I think we can confidently say that Russia will be even worse at breaching a km or five of minefields than Ukraine is. If China get directly involved, well, that’ll be interesting, because they are awfully dependent on trade. Wouldn’t want naval drones to start hitting their cargo ships would they?

Compared to the US, it boils down to valuing and trusting the captain and crew. The US believes the crew is the most valuable part of the ship, and considers one of their main jobs to be damage control (one of the things the US is best at). Automation in the US military is in principle designed to augment soldiers, reduce their exposure, reduce medical costs etc. USSR never trusted or valued crew, and considers ships to be disposable. Automation is a way to remove need for pesky crew who might not follow orders.

No, I do not believe Russia is in better shape than 2 years ago, no way. Yes, on one hand Russia has adapted to the means at their disposal (lots of mines, lots of meat willing to die, refurbished 100 year old tanks, dumb glide bombs, weapons from Iran and DPRK). On the other hand, Russia’s political edifice is more brittle than it was; we had a pseudo-kind-of-coup-attempt last years, which could have easily succeeded. We have the nationalist true believers in jail, dieing or killing themselves. Russia is out of well-trained soldiers and a lot of modern equipment, and is very close to air power hunger. Ukraine is at the cusp of a revolution in drone warfare, and is amassing extreme long-range strike potential. If you think Russia is stronger, then answer me these questions: What does Russia do if Ukraine takes down another 25-50% of their refining capacity? Where will the spare parts come from? Where will the money appear from? What does Russia do if they lose another 20 SU34s and an A50? If they cannot drop glide bombs, what’s their next option? How is Russia going to mobilize another 400k soldiers and train and equip them?

As has been pointed out, the weird thing is that it’s very much an older man’s war. What do you do as a country if much of the younger generation prefers to flee and would rather be refugees than soldiers? For the next set of wars, what will the US do if it can not recruit enough volunteers? We’re seeing huge problems on this front already, and if the conservative half of the US more or less gives up on military service after the middle eastern mess of the last 30 years… that’s our main soldiering pool. Do we just go full terminators all around?

Yuuup. I think sending T-series of various flavors was definitely the right decision from a logistics perspective; I’m not convinced Abrams were a good choice ever based on the maintenance burden and fuel consumption. Similar to the argument “Send Apaches”. People don’t realize how much maintenance and specialized parts these things require. They don’t just operate by the grace of god! Bradleys in mass quantities, however, was a giant missed opportunity; same with all the luxury F150s Americans were no longer buying. Pure stupidity and no good excuses.

Less interesting than the personal watercraft + ATV discussion, but more important: What are Russia’s options for long range fires if the glide bomb approach is no longer viable because too many of their planes have gotten shot down? Push more artillery forward, and hope UA counterbattery has shell hunger/drones aren’t flying that far in?

I bet you could get a quad (Grizzly) into a zodiac or even a bigger jon boat. They only weight 320kg. No problem. Obviously the mini landing craft/work boats you see all over the PNW would be better; they even have a ramp: https://www.silverstreakboats.com/boats/20-landing-craft-centre-console/. I bet two guys in a canoe could tow a raft with that kind of weight reasonably quickly too as long as the current isn’t too bad. The sxs (Viking) is at least 600kg and quite bit bigger, so that’s probably out of the range of just shoving it into an easily procured small boat and saying yolo.

If 80%* of the materiel sent over pre-war hadn’t dissappeared in the morass of corruption, maybe more would have arrived on day 1. The reality is that a lot of things went wrong in the run-up to this mess (including pre-2014), and as much as I’d have liked more support to given faster, Ukraine has had missteps on their side too. *Secondhand, but trustworthy source who was involved pre-war.

To give some perspective on the supplies needed, lets look at fuel consumption and payload: Yamaha Grizzly - 1 pax, 17L fuel tank, 160km range, 2x1.2m footprint Yamaha Viking - 2-3pax + flatbed, 37L, 300km range, 3x1.5m footprint Absolute efficiency isn’t great; we are talking 11L of fuel per 100km, so about double that of a Humvee, but these things are light and small. Even with cutting the range in half due to payload, that’s a lot of range given the terrain in Kherson, and carrying another 10-20L of fuel is no big deal. If two boats successfully landing per week can supply fuel and ammo for your raiders, that’s pretty awesome. On the other hand, fuel and ammo and food are relatively compact; the stupid vehicles are the bulky things to fit on boats, so you’d need a decent amount of boats if you wanted to load 20 of these things in any one spot. Manpower shortages aside, I don’t think it is necessarily cynical, especially if it is wating for a Scipio moment (F16s, more weapons, more trained troops, freeing up troops from borders and pow duty when euros step in etc). If Russia can be induced into multiple major phyrric victories a year, that is probably the most efficient way to win the war.

I was asked to investigate auto-charging a while back. In combat conditions, I think you want battery-hot-swap. Otherwise it’ll take too long to charge, unless you have a lot of drones. And realistically, you don’t want to drain your batteries past say 70%. Plus, rare earth metal batteries burn rather nicely so they add some extra flavor on top of the regular boom. I wonder if there would be a way to blow the battery into small pieces and mix with fuel droplets to create a more powerful thermobaric warhead?

See this is what I disagree with. I think the likely mode of failure we’ll is Russia grind to a halt and collapse in slow motion. What happens when they can’t muster up enough fuel, or vehicles, or shells or bombs or mobiks? What happens when they are at < 50% refinery capacity for domestic use? 100% this. But once you run out of gas and can’t swing anymore, you don’t have as many choices. I think 2025-2026 is when we’ll see that, based on Russia’s stubborn refusal to collapse.

FT Digital used to be $99 per annum 2 years ago. Looks like it is almost $300 now!??? Highly recommended still; they have an excellent gardening column if nothing else.

To elaborate on why Kryki is a great spot for another Russian phyrric victory: Obviously it’s a pain for Russian logistics, but it’s hard to get their artillery in range without getting hit with all of Magyar’s pain/HIMARS. Because of this, glide bombs. But apparently roaming Patriot/whatever batteries are a thing in this area, hence all the losses we see. So they have to use meat, which unsupported, in a nasty slushy marsh isn’t going to do so well. So, ending the glide bomb threat: Russia started the war with ~150 SU-34 and has lost close to a quarter. If they are losing another 3-4 per week, that’s going to get real interesting. I don’t know how many were serviceable to start with, but what happens when there aren’t enough to go around and they’ve lost most of the pilots too?

A sustained commando raid? Piracy? Honestly if it isn’t too muddy, ebikes with trailers might be the ideal option. Good speed, good range, low signature, tiny logistical footprint. The trailer could hold a dozen or two FPV drones, or a mortar/AGL. Not sure how casevac would work though.

Oh I was always hoping for Valyuki (sp?) or whatever that little railway junction/military base town is just a bit past Kupyansk. Nothing much more ambitious than that; just force Russia to push the logistics back another 100km. Especially after the whole Russian Freedom Legion thing, I thought it would make sense to nibble a bit and establish some fortifications 1km into Russia proper, and mine the **** out of everything. Sure, it might force a mobilization, but the mobilization might force a bigger social collapse. Meh? Orlan 10 is already the right layout for maneuverable fixed wing drones (prop in front, vs in the back which lends stability). Maybe the Russians have had too much vodka.