Comment on Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future
dragontamer@lemmy.world 8 months agowww.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let’s say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That’d be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict – you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker’s aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It’s cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
dragontamer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Did you see the Youtube link?
This is a lightweight AA Gun that can be mounted on a cheap pickup truck. This isn’t a “Static” defense, this system is more mobile than infantry.
tal@lemmy.today 8 months ago
It’s static from the standpoint of being required to meet an incoming Shahed-136, which can move more quickly than it; you cannot substantially reposition vehicles on ground-based vehicles to meet incoming attacks from the air. The critical factor is whether you can concentrate your defenses in time to meet an attack.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Force concentration is a job for fighter jets. Most jets can fly at Mach 1, or even Mach2 (700mph to 1500mph). At which point, a 120mph Shahed-136 is worthless.
cynar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The game will iterate further. A machine gun works against current drones. It can be countered however. E.g. use a ducted drone, with a few layers of Kevlar facing the gun. It doesn’t need to win, or even survive. It just needs to soak up the fire. The other drones rush in, either behind it, or from various angles.
Even things like chaff and smoke can mess up targeting for long enough to rush in.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
perestroika@lemm.ee 8 months ago
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in 300 km/h, one or many truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.