How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kimbosbread]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Micro-missile might work, but I suspect a shotgun would too if one could get in range.  That or you simply go with ramming.  But as you note.  The solutions are pretty damned expensive, while the threat gets cheaper.

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.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

It's really not viable to have a $50m defense that can only engage targets in flat deserts or open seas.

Yeah. As said above, your defense cannot be expensive because it’s going to have to likely scale linerally with the number of drones.

[kimbosbread]

27 minutes ago, hcrof said:

They need to be aimed at least vaguely in the area of a known or suspected target or even $500 drones will become uneconomic.

Edit: to expand, either the drones need to fly from a launch site, likely 10-20km away from the target, in which case they will be at the limit of their endurance just getting there so they can't search for too long.

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.

[hcrof]

6 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

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.

Genuine question: how small and cheap can you make a gas engine? 

And fixed wings are possibly a way forward, but they can't maneuver like a quadcopter. When you are relying on hitting the back of a tank turret or trying to stay very low through complex terrain that might be important, especially if your control system is a bit dumb and needs to make last-minute adjustments.

I would not be surprised if both types are useful though. The Russian Lancet certainly seems useful, if much easier to shoot down with a RWS than a quadcopter. 

[The_Capt]

35 minutes ago, hcrof said:

They need to be aimed at least vaguely in the area of a known or suspected target or even $500 drones will become uneconomic

I don't think "knowing where the enemy is" is a problem if this war is a demonstration.  The ability to push small lethal drone swarms around on the battlefield only need to happen as fast or faster than your opponent can drive...or launch their own swarms.  Many ways to do this because each individual system is so light.  This means one can drop kill boxes at range and essentially deny an area.

As to sensors and processors.  Well we will have to see won't we.  Being able to fly through a bamboo forest autonomously looks pretty sophisticated to me and we are only getting started.  I honestly only see range and endurance as a local tactical limitation.  Operationally they can be packaged and projected at very long ranges by any number of systems.  A HIMARS cargo shell could carry a hundred of these small systems and deliver them 100kms away.  In place the little buggers could just sit on the ground until a target comes by and within range.  Trading off who pops up to take a peek or linked to other sensors that came with them (pigeon hearts anyone?).  5 fly up and overwhelm the target.  The other 95 stay in the grass.  I only need the little bugger to fly maybe a km.  Give them solar panels and they can recharge in place.

That is a major military problem. 

[The_Capt]

7 minutes ago, hcrof said:

Genuine question: how small and cheap can you make a gas engine? 

And fixed wings are possibly a way forward, but they can't maneuver like a quadcopter. When you are relying on hitting the back of a tank turret or trying to stay very low through complex terrain that might be important, especially if your control system is a bit dumb and needs to make last-minute adjustments.

I would not be surprised if both types are useful though. The Russian Lancet certainly seems useful, if much easier to shoot down with a RWS than a quadcopter. 

Pretty damned small apparently.  This guy comes in at about a pound.

https://www.rcgfusa.com/product/stinger-10cc-re/

Has 1.9 hp.  Probably looking at a combination of these and battery.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

I think the maneuverability is bad enough especially for the quadcopters.  It is the altitude.  These things can fly really low so line of sight is problematic from the ground.  If you put C-UAS drones above them, one now has to find and track the system against ground clutter.

Micro-missile might work, but I suspect a shotgun would too if one could get in range.  That or you simply go with ramming.  But as you note.  The solutions are pretty damned expensive, while the threat gets cheaper.

 

51 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

And we also just saw one playing peeping-tom in an urban area before entering the room and blowing up an ISR system.  Yup, drinking heavily and snorting lines off a hooker's backside seems to me just as likely to defend against drones as spending billions of Dollars.

Right, except you don't need to have secondary spotting drones.  All you need to know is where the target is and a Human or AI can get a drone to that location without any aid.  Obviously the less mobile the target is the easier, but it's already pretty easy.

Spotting drones are mostly there for BDA and monitoring mobile targets, not targeting in and of itself.

As The_Capt just pointed out... we just saw a drone flying around individual trees to get a single soldier.  Not autonomous, but we all know that capability already exists.

 

Steve

 

37 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

So you fill them with thousands of them.  Hell you deliver them via artillery and have them just sit like a minefield.  People are thinking "platforms", these are munitions.

Counter?  Cheap UGVs with swarms of their own.  Cloud fight out front before humans even get engaged.

So some more random thoughts on the subject. First of all lasers are worth a ton of development effort, because whatever there land based uses, you simply will not be able to have a "ship" bigger than a row boat if they can't get them working at sea.

Clearly a real drone defense is going to require a layered system. It will be an entire IADS architecture in miniature. I think the there is a lot of options to be explore on what part of that miniature IADS systems have to very smart, and expensive, and what parts can really cheap and expendable. It might be possible to have a very techy spotting/targeting system with a low power laser designator that very cheap drones missiles home on that cue. That is just the first idea that occurs to me. But one way or another it is almost certainly going have be a multi layered defense of some sort.

One low tech idea that occurred to me watching the bamboo video is that in forested or built up areas nets are going to be needed in vast quantities. In particular really fine nets that are are hard to see/sense. A high tech version might also have the nets act as distributed acoustic sensors.

[kimbosbread]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

It is the altitude.  These things can fly really low so line of sight is problematic from the ground.  If you put C-UAS drones above them, one now has to find and track the system against ground clutter.

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.

 

[The_Capt]

3 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

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.

 

I am confused.  Are we just talking about the Orlan?  Or the entire future of UAS?  I suspect the Orlan will be seen as a bi-plane by 1945 in a few years.

[kimbosbread]

12 minutes ago, hcrof said:

Genuine question: how small and cheap can you make a gas engine? 

Look up Toyan. 4 stroke menthol or gas engines for RC applications weigh 400-500g.

MIT or someone related had a micro-gas-turbine that was the size of a penny in the late 90s that could power a small drone for an hour. This is an ongoing field of development. Look up “shirtbutton-sized gas turbines”.

[Battlefront.com]

54 minutes ago, hcrof said:

I agree that they can be used en Masse but even the Russians don't shoot artillery at empty spots on the map just in case (at least deliberately). 

They need to be aimed at least vaguely in the area of a known or suspected target or even $500 drones will become uneconomic.

Adding to The_Capt, there's plenty of capabilities that exist today to solve for this.

For example, radar emissions can be detected from long ranges.  Systems already exist to identify what the source platform might be and roughly where it is.  Pop a GLMRS rocket loaded with autonomous drones set to home in and kill the specific system identified, and there you go... no need to know exactly where it is.  Spoofing needs to be solved for, but that's a hurdle that shouldn't be too difficult to overcome.,

Another example is anything that is directly engaged in land warfare.  The ranges are necessarily short, therefore you can send your autonomous or semi-autonomous drones into an area of front and be pretty much assured of hitting something of value.  Might be as little as an SUV moving some food up the front, but even that comes out favorably in a cost/capability calculation.

I'm not arrogant or stupid, therefore I'm not saying that there is NO viable defense against these sorts of things and we should not bother trying.  What I am saying is that the traditional NATO approach of procuring a limited number of exceedingly expensive systems which can only defeat a small subset of threats is not going to be part of the overall solution.  The sooner the Western defense industry starts acting like this is true, the sooner we can find counters to the existing and (shudder) emerging threats unmanned vehicles poses to national security.

Steve

[kimbosbread]

2 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I am confused.  Are we just talking about the Orlan?  Or the entire future of UAS?  I suspect the Orlan will be seen as a bi-plane by 1945 in a few years.

Anything that requires an operator/sends video back to origin. I think that will last a few years still.

By the end of the decade, you can imagine it’ll only phone home if sees something of interest. That I have no idea how to detect in a practical, cost-effective way!

[hcrof]

2 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Look up Toyan. 4 stroke menthol or gas engines for RC applications weigh 400-500g.

MIT or someone related had a micro-gas-turbine that was the size of a penny in the late 90s that could power a small drone for an hour. This is an ongoing field of development. Look up “shirtbutton-sized gas turbines”.

Interesting, but between that and the one The_Capt posted, that is still the entire weight of a FPV quadcopter. 

They are surprisingly cheap though - maybe they could be a larger class of winged drone, assuming they have the power to also carry a battery, sensor, processor and payload.

[dan/california]

5 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I am confused.  Are we just talking about the Orlan?  Or the entire future of UAS?  I suspect the Orlan will be seen as a bi-plane by 1945 in a few years.

Orlans were theoretically obsolete when they were designed by a lot of standards. They have also been one of the two or three most effective Russian systems of this entire war. It makes me absolutely crazy that they are not a 99% solved problem. A laser or other high tech system that could just shoot down this class of drone and keep moving fast enough to dodge the artillery that would surely come its way would meaningfully move the needle in this war, even if it was just as obsolete as the Orlan in the next one.

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Look up Toyan. 4 stroke menthol or gas engines for RC applications weigh 400-500g.

MIT or someone related had a micro-gas-turbine that was the size of a penny in the late 90s that could power a small drone for an hour. This is an ongoing field of development. Look up “shirtbutton-sized gas turbines”.

Yes, and this is a whole different form of threat.  Nano tech.  Want to see how small motors can get?

Steve

[hcrof]

10 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Adding to The_Capt, there's plenty of capabilities that exist today to solve for this.

For example, radar emissions can be detected from long ranges.  Systems already exist to identify what the source platform might be and roughly where it is.  Pop a GLMRS rocket loaded with autonomous drones set to home in and kill the specific system identified, and there you go... no need to know exactly where it is.  Spoofing needs to be solved for, but that's a hurdle that shouldn't be too difficult to overcome.,

Another example is anything that is directly engaged in land warfare.  The ranges are necessarily short, therefore you can send your autonomous or semi-autonomous drones into an area of front and be pretty much assured of hitting something of value.  Might be as little as an SUV moving some food up the front, but even that comes out favorably in a cost/capability calculation.

I'm not arrogant or stupid, therefore I'm not saying that there is NO viable defense against these sorts of things and we should not bother trying.  What I am saying is that the traditional NATO approach of procuring a limited number of exceedingly expensive systems which can only defeat a small subset of threats is not going to be part of the overall solution.  The sooner the Western defense industry starts acting like this is true, the sooner we can find counters to the existing and (shudder) emerging threats unmanned vehicles poses to national security.

Steve

So Watling's book (which I have not finished yet) imagines the battlefield of the future to be extremely distributed with very low force densities due to the risk of concentration. EW emissions will be a constant low level "hum" of tiny encrypted data packets that make it hard to discern what emitter is important and what is just a decoy. In this environment, passive radar is used to pick up any movement and drones or dismounted recon troops are used to confirm genuine targets. A section of recon vehicles might occupy a frontage of 3-6km so there is a lot of empty space!

This is obviously a bit different to Ukraine today, but that is what I have in mind when I say stuff will be hard to find. Even in Ukraine, you have a known trenchline (which may or may not be occupied) that is hardened, then a small number of fast supply runs at irregular intervals from depots far in the rear - deliberately not a target rich environment. 

[The_Capt]

42 minutes ago, kimbosbread said:

Anything that requires an operator/sends video back to origin. I think that will last a few years still.

By the end of the decade, you can imagine it’ll only phone home if sees something of interest. That I have no idea how to detect in a practical, cost-effective way!

I disagree.  I think we are already there.  https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/5/23058160/drone-swarm-autonomous-navigation-dense-forest-person-tracking

The Orlan is kinda big.  We could see ones like that as stand-off mother-swarm nodes.

Edited October 23, 2023 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

18 minutes ago, hcrof said:

So Watling's book (which I have not finished yet) imagines the battlefield of the future to be extremely distributed with very low force densities due to the risk of concentration. EW emissions will be a constant low level "hum" of tiny encrypted data packets that make it hard to discern what emitter is important and what is just a decoy. In this environment, passive radar is used to pick up any movement and drones or dismounted recon troops are used to confirm genuine targets. A section of recon vehicles might occupy a frontage of 3-6km so there is a lot of empty space!

This is obviously a bit different to Ukraine today, but that is what I have in mind when I say stuff will be hard to find. Even in Ukraine, you have a known trenchline (which may or may not be occupied) that is hardened, then a small number of fast supply runs at irregular intervals from depots far in the rear - deliberately not a target rich environment. 

That is massive denial in play.  The game will be to collapse an opponents denial/ISR bubble, and only then can one do manoeuvre.  That is huge if it comes to pass.  We built entire libraries on manoeuvre warfare and now it may become the punctuation mark, not the forcing function.  This is essentially the death of conventional mass as we knew it.  Mr Tankie taking a back seat will be the last of our problems.   

[Battlefront.com]

25 minutes ago, hcrof said:

So Watling's book (which I have not finished yet) imagines the battlefield of the future to be extremely distributed with very low force densities due to the risk of concentration. EW emissions will be a constant low level "hum" of tiny encrypted data packets that make it hard to discern what emitter is important and what is just a decoy. In this environment, passive radar is used to pick up any movement and drones or dismounted recon troops are used to confirm genuine targets. A section of recon vehicles might occupy a frontage of 3-6km so there is a lot of empty space!

This is obviously a bit different to Ukraine today, but that is what I have in mind when I say stuff will be hard to find. Even in Ukraine, you have a known trenchline (which may or may not be occupied) that is hardened, then a small number of fast supply runs at irregular intervals from depots far in the rear - deliberately not a target rich environment. 

This is no doubt going to be the norm out of necessity.  Easiest way to not be destroyed is to not be there to be destroyed   However, loitering munitions, autonomous hunter-killer drones, etc. can effectively patrol large sections of front right now.  Given enough of them and they WILL spot those couple of recon vehicles.  This is the thing about FPV kamikaze drones... they can return home if they don't find anything to strike.

As stated above, very smart and extremely well funded companies are figuring out how to do more with less from an energy standpoint.  I just saw DARPA (IIRC) gave out awards for 3D printed energy storage devices.  Yup, that's almost a thing:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep42233

I tried to buy Watling's book the other day and was too stupid to find an easy way to purchase it directly from RUSI.  Do you have a link?

Steve

[JonS]

58 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Pretty damned small apparently.  This guy comes in at about a pound.

Glow plug engines can be even smaller than that (very noisy though)

[Twisk]

When talking about major anti-drone systems being a waste I wonder how much of this is an over focus on land warfare due to this being a ground war and also a ground simulation forum. A laser based system seems like it would be very useful in a naval context and within the U.S. military context naval capability is huge. After all the putative "next war" for the U.S. being a naval/air/strategic war in the Taiwan Strait. With all the advances in drone usage if you removed the nuclear umbrella NATO would roll over Russia in a matter of months and it would only take that long because NATO wouldn't be rushing things. And even without drones a NATO (SEATO?) invasion of mainland China would probably approach Operation Downfall scales.

 

Again not saying that the discussion about land warfare usages isn't useful or interesting to read. But a lot of the discussion seems to be eliding the naval requirements. Granted I don't know much about naval warfare but it seems the requirements to win Coral Sea 2.0 would be significantly different than the 6th Battle of Karhkov or the 3rd Invasion of Iraq.

 

[poesel]

1 hour ago, sburke said:

Russian population set to decrease by more than 7 million in next 2 decades (yahoo.com)

The one item in their projection I find questionable is an increase in life expectancy.  I'd actually think you'd see a decline as the overall social/economic situation continues to decline.

Since many of those who are dying now are from the 'undesirable' class which have a lower life expectancy. Over the long run, this may actually cause an increase in average lifespan.
Also, mostly men are dying and these have a shorter lifespan anyway.

[Yet]

2 hours ago, hcrof said:

To play devil's advocate, you don't need to hit the fpv drone (or it's autonomous successor) with a laser. It's probably good enough to hit the recon drone guiding it to the target, which will be by definition in line of sight. 

Having said that, if your enemy is willing to send autonomous drones to investigate radar returns then you are in big trouble because you can't hide a moving vehicle (or person really) from radar.

Jack Watling in his new book talks about using spoofing aand decoys to create "ambiguity" but while the book is excellent I don't think it really grapples with the concept of a lot of cheap autonomous drones hunting down anything that moves. 

If i am asking here: how to destroy a bomber? i can get a swarm of good answers. 

If im asking how to destroy a small bomber with rotors we get all -lasers, -spacey, -swarm, -must-kill-everything, -must be 1 solution. 

If i am asking how to destroy satellites and awacs? everyone sais 'dont get scifi'. But surveillance drones must at all cost be taken out! 

for everything offensive there are multiple specializations on different platforms to destroy or at least deny its mission success. 

it seems logical to me that a combination of systems is needed. And on different platforms and locations. think about every step that is needed to take ou det an enemy bomber. detect-identify-chose platform availability-hunt-destroy(or deny).

why would a series of optimised radar systems, jammers, frequency scanners, pigeon-shooters, defence-drones, ERA with wings (would make a nice Ukr meme),  hunter drones, bugs-in-a-shell and concealments in a network be out of the question? (and booze the solution;))

 

[Haiduk]

Russian tried to disembark own small assault group close to slage heap, but their BMP-1 was hit by drone in the same place, when previosly was destroyed large column - at the end of the video you can see the same known capsized BTR-50. Russian infantry fall one by one from top of armor.

The video begins with a joke "Ukrainian ABC for kids" - "P" (Pinguin) - "Pikhota - Pryishly - Pomerly" (eng. Infantry - came - died)

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Haiduk

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Russian tried to disembark own small assault group close to slage heap, but their BMP-1 was hit by drone in the same place, when previosly was destroyed large column - at the end of the video you can see the same known capsized BTR-50. Russian infantry fall one by one from top of armor.

The video begins with a joke "Ukrainian ABC for kids" - "P" (Pinguin) - "Pikhota - Pryishly - Pomerly" (eng. Infantry - came - died)

 

Maybe the Soviet era preference for riding on top of IFVs to be safer from mines might need to be reconsidered.  That FPV would not have done the same thing against infantry riding inside.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

25 minutes ago, Twisk said:

When talking about major anti-drone systems being a waste I wonder how much of this is an over focus on land warfare due to this being a ground war and also a ground simulation forum. A laser based system seems like it would be very useful in a naval context and within the U.S. military context naval capability is huge. After all the putative "next war" for the U.S. being a naval/air/strategic war in the Taiwan Strait. With all the advances in drone usage if you removed the nuclear umbrella NATO would roll over Russia in a matter of months and it would only take that long because NATO wouldn't be rushing things. And even without drones a NATO (SEATO?) invasion of mainland China would probably approach Operation Downfall scales.

 

Again not saying that the discussion about land warfare usages isn't useful or interesting to read. But a lot of the discussion seems to be eliding the naval requirements. Granted I don't know much about naval warfare but it seems the requirements to win Coral Sea 2.0 would be significantly different than the 6th Battle of Karhkov or the 3rd Invasion of Iraq.

When I was disparaging the $50m laser defense system I mentioned that it would be useful for ships and fixed bases.  Then later I said that the number one problem with directed energy weapons is needing LOS which is only practical for ships and nearly flat desert.

Which is to say, I agree with you about naval vessels having their own advantages and disadvantages. 

However, I also said in an even earlier post in this discussion there's no way a laser system can track, stay on target for a kill, and switch targets fast enough to handle a swarm.  All you have to do is aim a swarm at a ship's sensors and enough will get through to turn the ship into a floating bathtub.  From there your options for sinking become plentiful.  Even if you don't, the ship is out of the fight for months.

Steve