4 ms·

I'm skeptical you could get a hobbyist-size RC airplane to fly with a big enough bomb to take a tank out of action.

by gozur88 10y ago

seiferteric 10y ago
TFA says the drone dropped a bomb into an open hatch with the guy standing in the open hatch, killing him.
- gozur88 10y ago
  Which they could have done a lot more efficiently with a rifle. Guys on the ground don't need anything fancy to take these things out. A medium machine gun would be just perfect.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    The difference is that dropping a bomb involves no risk to the drone pilot. Shooting at a main battle tank with a rifle? Another story.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    Did you watch the video? The advantage is that you can get over walled-in-areas and that even people on watch seldom look above.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Guns need line of sight. The drone operator here could have been safely ensconced in a house behind a hill a couple of blocks away and doing it all via first person camera view.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I heard similar arguments assuring me that nobody needed cellphones, and then that they didn't need smartphones. If drones are superfluous why do we use them, mmm?
    - gozur88 10y ago
      We don't use drones like this.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        In terms of targeting, no. In terms of killing people, yes.
        gozur88 10y ago
        By that I meant this drone is far to small to carry a useful payload.
ioquatix 10y ago
That's a reasonable opinion. But it doesn't need to take out a tank to be effective against infantry and moral.
exabrial 10y ago
It was just the commander. But a 1 lbs charge behind a copper cone could easily penetrate the hatch...
alphabettsy 10y ago
Maybe not, but clearly they were able to drop an explosive onto an unsuspecting soldier.
gpm 10y ago
Aside from the fact that the video's demonstrated that their plenty effective even if they can't currently take out tanks. I notice that RPG's don't look that big (when you ignore the "rocket" part) and can apparently do so. Drone's also get to attack from above while typical RPG's have to attack the better armored sides.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ralfd 10y ago
Did you see the video? The dropped bomb exploded beside the soldier standing in the open hatch.
stcredzero 10y ago
I've commented here on HN on a few occasions, that swarms of drones could be challenge to tanks. (Every time, I've been pooh-poohed.) While it might be a challenge to penetrate the armor of a modern main battle tank with explosive charges that can be carried by a drone, there are many parts of a functioning tank that are vital to its combat value, which aren't nearly as tough. With a little bit of AI, drones could specifically target these parts. There's also the well-being of the crew to consider. Forcing a tank crew to remain buttoned up makes them less aware of their environment.
cyberferret 10y ago
As a psychological weapon, this has changed the rules dramatically. You can imagine that combatants in the firing zone now have an added thing to think about. Not just watching buildings for snipers and scouring the road ahead and beside them for IEDs, they now have to have attention aloft to see/hear drone activity as well. Spreading (the) enemy attention is highly effective. And don't discount low power explosives. A couple of friends of mine who are in the army have said that most weaponry is designed to maim rather than kill. They explained that if you kill a soldier, you take one man out of the battle (and make his comrades angry & vengeful to boot). If you wound him badly - you take two men out - the wounded soldier, PLUS the guy who has to stop what he is doing to care for and patch him up.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  Very true. Plus don't underestimate the disastrous effect on morale of having 'your' weapons turned against you, and finding yourself in a victim position that you have indirectly imposed upon others on many occasions. Once American soldiers start coming under drone fire regularly, they will be massively demoralized by the realization that much of the world considers the US to the be The Bad Guys.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    I agree with your assessment here. However, I didn't want to voice it because it would lead to a less that savoury place, like other drone threads have. But I do appreciate the irony that a weapon when wielded from one side is an effective platform for swift and immediate justice & retribution, but when eventually wielded by the opposing side, is suddenly an evil, sneaky and underhanded thing indeed.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      I've got very conflicted feelings about it myself. On the one hand, precision drone bombing is preferable to the older approaches of using bombers or conventional ICBMs. The ideal would be to simply stop bombing people, of course, but that would only last until such time as there were a substantial terrorist attack on American soil. As long as military engagement remains a political reality, I prefer it come in as low a cost in human life as possible. But it's arguable that the second-order costs end up being higher. At the same time I think it's inevitable given the available technology.
paulddraper 10y ago
You're not going to blow a hole in the armor of a modern tank, but a grenade can damage peripheral systems, and it's a hell of a hit to morale. And of course, most soldiers don't drive around in Abram's.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  Often the attack vector isn't "blowing a hole", but rather causing a shockwave that turns the interior face of the armor into shrapnel (technical term - spalling). Of course, modern tanks are designed against this to some degree. And definitely the danger is much higher for the less-armored trucks and the like.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    Composites and anti-spall liners have rendered that kind of attack almost entirely obsolete against modern armor. The Challenger II was designed with a rifled gun barrel so it could use HESH ammo, and the Brits have been trying to scrounge up the money to replace it with a smoothbore for decades now (I see they finally did last year).
anigbrowl 10y ago
As if people couldn't possibly build larger ones.
jerf 10y ago
This is only one data point on a line that's already moving very quickly for this data point to have showed up in the first place. What is today one drone is tomorrow two, and in a few months, dozens at a time. And they can get larger, too. And, yes, absolutely, defenses will be devised and the arms race will march on. In fact, once the US military gets really serious about this it could well swing back to advantage industrial-era military again; I'm not convinced this is a permanently-leveling sort of weapon. But at the moment it's at least a bit of a shakeup on the field.
dkbrk 10y ago
You can with an explosively formed penetrator [0]. In fact, I don't think it would be all that difficult. Take, for example, the BLU-108 submunition [1] [2]. It deploys four independent "skeet" submunitions, each of which weighs 3.4 kg. The warheads themselves weigh less than 1kg. The skeets are ejected from the BLU-108 dispenser with a high angular velocity, resulting in precession. They also deploy a retarding parachute. The precession causes them to "look" in a cone-shape of decreasing diameter as they descend (using passive infra-red and active laser sensors), and when they detect a valid target they fire. These are designed to destroy tanks. You couldn't just drop a skeet submunition from a drone -- you would need some way of giving it the required angular velocity. But if you're prepared to sacrifice the drone (which seems reasonable for destroying a tank), you could fix the explosively formed penetrator to the bottom of the drone along with a sensor package. Then you use the drone's own control authority to aim the weapon and detonate it when it's pointed at the target. I'm not sure what the warhead's effective range would be, but probably somewhere between 10m and 100m. The payload for the drone would be around 3kg. It should be noted that explosively formed penetrators don't require much technical sophistication to build and a cheap digital camera could be used for aiming. It may seem seem surprising that such a small weapon can destroy a tank, but tank armour is optimized according to the expected threat environment, so armour is much thinner on the roof. Explosive reactive armour could probably defeat it, though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-108 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuZUxS3Uww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuZUxS3Uww
- gozur88 10y ago
  Yes, I'm familiar with the BLU-108. I doubt you could get a 3.4 kg submunition on that particular airplane. That's about twenty times what a grenade weighs, and that explosion was definitely more grenade-sized. They're going to have to scale this up quite a bit for it to be effective against armor. Not to mention a high tech submunition like that costs about eight grand in bulk and has to be spinning to work. And they're not really designed to destroy tanks so much as render them combat ineffective by damaging the engine. You're not going to destroy a tank with something that small.

I'm skeptical you could get a hobbyist-size RC airplane to fly with a big enough bomb to take a tank out of action.

by gozur88 10y ago

I'm skeptical you could get a hobbyist-size RC airplane to fly with a big enough bomb to take a tank out of action.

seiferteric 10y ago

TFA says the drone dropped a bomb into an open hatch with the guy standing in the open hatch, killing him.

gozur88 10y ago
Which they could have done a lot more efficiently with a rifle. Guys on the ground don't need anything fancy to take these things out. A medium machine gun would be just perfect.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  The difference is that dropping a bomb involves no risk to the drone pilot. Shooting at a main battle tank with a rifle? Another story.
- ralfd 10y ago
  Did you watch the video? The advantage is that you can get over walled-in-areas and that even people on watch seldom look above.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Guns need line of sight. The drone operator here could have been safely ensconced in a house behind a hill a couple of blocks away and doing it all via first person camera view.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I heard similar arguments assuring me that nobody needed cellphones, and then that they didn't need smartphones. If drones are superfluous why do we use them, mmm?
  - gozur88 10y ago
    We don't use drones like this.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      In terms of targeting, no. In terms of killing people, yes.
      - gozur88 10y ago
        By that I meant this drone is far to small to carry a useful payload.

ioquatix 10y ago

That's a reasonable opinion. But it doesn't need to take out a tank to be effective against infantry and moral.

exabrial 10y ago

It was just the commander. But a 1 lbs charge behind a copper cone could easily penetrate the hatch...

alphabettsy 10y ago

Maybe not, but clearly they were able to drop an explosive onto an unsuspecting soldier.

gpm 10y ago

Aside from the fact that the video's demonstrated that their plenty effective even if they can't currently take out tanks. I notice that RPG's don't look that big (when you ignore the "rocket" part) and can apparently do so. Drone's also get to attack from above while typical RPG's have to attack the better armored sides.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ralfd 10y ago

Did you see the video? The dropped bomb exploded beside the soldier standing in the open hatch.

stcredzero 10y ago

I've commented here on HN on a few occasions, that swarms of drones could be challenge to tanks. (Every time, I've been pooh-poohed.) While it might be a challenge to penetrate the armor of a modern main battle tank with explosive charges that can be carried by a drone, there are many parts of a functioning tank that are vital to its combat value, which aren't nearly as tough. With a little bit of AI, drones could specifically target these parts. There's also the well-being of the crew to consider. Forcing a tank crew to remain buttoned up makes them less aware of their environment.

cyberferret 10y ago

As a psychological weapon, this has changed the rules dramatically. You can imagine that combatants in the firing zone now have an added thing to think about. Not just watching buildings for snipers and scouring the road ahead and beside them for IEDs, they now have to have attention aloft to see/hear drone activity as well. Spreading (the) enemy attention is highly effective. And don't discount low power explosives. A couple of friends of mine who are in the army have said that most weaponry is designed to maim rather than kill. They explained that if you kill a soldier, you take one man out of the battle (and make his comrades angry & vengeful to boot). If you wound him badly - you take two men out - the wounded soldier, PLUS the guy who has to stop what he is doing to care for and patch him up.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Very true. Plus don't underestimate the disastrous effect on morale of having 'your' weapons turned against you, and finding yourself in a victim position that you have indirectly imposed upon others on many occasions. Once American soldiers start coming under drone fire regularly, they will be massively demoralized by the realization that much of the world considers the US to the be The Bad Guys.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  I agree with your assessment here. However, I didn't want to voice it because it would lead to a less that savoury place, like other drone threads have. But I do appreciate the irony that a weapon when wielded from one side is an effective platform for swift and immediate justice & retribution, but when eventually wielded by the opposing side, is suddenly an evil, sneaky and underhanded thing indeed.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I've got very conflicted feelings about it myself. On the one hand, precision drone bombing is preferable to the older approaches of using bombers or conventional ICBMs. The ideal would be to simply stop bombing people, of course, but that would only last until such time as there were a substantial terrorist attack on American soil. As long as military engagement remains a political reality, I prefer it come in as low a cost in human life as possible. But it's arguable that the second-order costs end up being higher. At the same time I think it's inevitable given the available technology.

paulddraper 10y ago

You're not going to blow a hole in the armor of a modern tank, but a grenade can damage peripheral systems, and it's a hell of a hit to morale. And of course, most soldiers don't drive around in Abram's.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
Often the attack vector isn't "blowing a hole", but rather causing a shockwave that turns the interior face of the armor into shrapnel (technical term - spalling). Of course, modern tanks are designed against this to some degree. And definitely the danger is much higher for the less-armored trucks and the like.
- gozur88 10y ago
  Composites and anti-spall liners have rendered that kind of attack almost entirely obsolete against modern armor. The Challenger II was designed with a rifled gun barrel so it could use HESH ammo, and the Brits have been trying to scrounge up the money to replace it with a smoothbore for decades now (I see they finally did last year).

anigbrowl 10y ago

As if people couldn't possibly build larger ones.

jerf 10y ago

This is only one data point on a line that's already moving very quickly for this data point to have showed up in the first place. What is today one drone is tomorrow two, and in a few months, dozens at a time. And they can get larger, too. And, yes, absolutely, defenses will be devised and the arms race will march on. In fact, once the US military gets really serious about this it could well swing back to advantage industrial-era military again; I'm not convinced this is a permanently-leveling sort of weapon. But at the moment it's at least a bit of a shakeup on the field.

dkbrk 10y ago

You can with an explosively formed penetrator [0]. In fact, I don't think it would be all that difficult. Take, for example, the BLU-108 submunition [1] [2]. It deploys four independent "skeet" submunitions, each of which weighs 3.4 kg. The warheads themselves weigh less than 1kg. The skeets are ejected from the BLU-108 dispenser with a high angular velocity, resulting in precession. They also deploy a retarding parachute. The precession causes them to "look" in a cone-shape of decreasing diameter as they descend (using passive infra-red and active laser sensors), and when they detect a valid target they fire. These are designed to destroy tanks. You couldn't just drop a skeet submunition from a drone -- you would need some way of giving it the required angular velocity. But if you're prepared to sacrifice the drone (which seems reasonable for destroying a tank), you could fix the explosively formed penetrator to the bottom of the drone along with a sensor package. Then you use the drone's own control authority to aim the weapon and detonate it when it's pointed at the target. I'm not sure what the warhead's effective range would be, but probably somewhere between 10m and 100m. The payload for the drone would be around 3kg. It should be noted that explosively formed penetrators don't require much technical sophistication to build and a cheap digital camera could be used for aiming. It may seem seem surprising that such a small weapon can destroy a tank, but tank armour is optimized according to the expected threat environment, so armour is much thinner on the roof. Explosive reactive armour could probably defeat it, though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-108 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuZUxS3Uww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuZUxS3Uww

gozur88 10y ago
Yes, I'm familiar with the BLU-108. I doubt you could get a 3.4 kg submunition on that particular airplane. That's about twenty times what a grenade weighs, and that explosion was definitely more grenade-sized. They're going to have to scale this up quite a bit for it to be effective against armor. Not to mention a high tech submunition like that costs about eight grand in bulk and has to be spinning to work. And they're not really designed to destroy tanks so much as render them combat ineffective by damaging the engine. You're not going to destroy a tank with something that small.