19 ms·

The really cool thing, especially for a ship, would be a dome of drones. They could come back to the ship to recharge and fly out again, and even, depending on

The really cool thing, especially for a ship, would be a dome of drones. They could come back to the ship to recharge and fly out again, and even, depending on weather, travel with the ship. Each one could sense incoming ordinance and move to pre-explode it well before it hit the ship. Of course, this wouldn't work against some things, like heavy kinetic stuff, or really fast stuff. But ordinary missiles? Other drones? Sure.

afrodc_ 6y ago
Why use drones in this missle defense system your describing? Drones are incredibly slow and missiles are INCREDIBLY fast. If you have the trajectory of the missile enough to put some sort of drone or hard object on it, why not just shoot it. That's what the phalanx missile defense system does.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Well this is an interesting question, and there's a good answer: because if you make the drone dome dense enough, the drones can be so slow they don't move. So, the less dense you make it, the more they have to move, so there is a nice optimization problem with the lower bound of density given by the speed of the drone, and the upper bound based on cost and complexity. It also matters how big the dome is - you want a big one, but if its too big density goes down again.
  - fock 6y ago
    so let's build armored hulls above our ships. oh, wait...
VLM 6y ago
Interesting thought experiment, a single Arleigh Burke destroyer has 96 vertical launch cells and can trivially be arranged to fire to a time and incoming bearing on a target. So if an enemy ship, perhaps an aircraft carrier, really pissed off a single US destroyer, it can decide to send all hundred supersonic anti-ship missiles in from the same direction at the same instant of arrival, or from every point on the compass, or maybe three directions at once or who knows what kind of crazy four dimensional incoming attack pattern, like waves of ten missiles at a time every second for ten seconds from ten different directions. So how do you distribute your drones so as to soak up a hundred incoming from one direction while not getting sneak attacked by say five from every 30 degrees on the compass at the same time? Its like say you have a Greek Phalanx, that's pretty well defended over a couple hundred feet, but try to use the same one phalanx spread out to defend all one thousand acres of city-state farmland simultaneously and its not going to work out well.

afrodc_ 6y ago

Why use drones in this missle defense system your describing? Drones are incredibly slow and missiles are INCREDIBLY fast. If you have the trajectory of the missile enough to put some sort of drone or hard object on it, why not just shoot it. That's what the phalanx missile defense system does.

javajosh 6y ago
Well this is an interesting question, and there's a good answer: because if you make the drone dome dense enough, the drones can be so slow they don't move. So, the less dense you make it, the more they have to move, so there is a nice optimization problem with the lower bound of density given by the speed of the drone, and the upper bound based on cost and complexity. It also matters how big the dome is - you want a big one, but if its too big density goes down again.
- fock 6y ago
  so let's build armored hulls above our ships. oh, wait...

VLM 6y ago

Interesting thought experiment, a single Arleigh Burke destroyer has 96 vertical launch cells and can trivially be arranged to fire to a time and incoming bearing on a target. So if an enemy ship, perhaps an aircraft carrier, really pissed off a single US destroyer, it can decide to send all hundred supersonic anti-ship missiles in from the same direction at the same instant of arrival, or from every point on the compass, or maybe three directions at once or who knows what kind of crazy four dimensional incoming attack pattern, like waves of ten missiles at a time every second for ten seconds from ten different directions. So how do you distribute your drones so as to soak up a hundred incoming from one direction while not getting sneak attacked by say five from every 30 degrees on the compass at the same time? Its like say you have a Greek Phalanx, that's pretty well defended over a couple hundred feet, but try to use the same one phalanx spread out to defend all one thousand acres of city-state farmland simultaneously and its not going to work out well.