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> I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again. That's hard t

• rr808 4y ago
  Right now they're shooting down small drones with $100k manpads. I'm not convinced drones are sensitive to ECM.
  • tazjin 4y ago
    Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver. Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)
    • javajosh 4y ago
      >Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt. BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.
      • the_snooze 4y ago
        >it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. Israel demonstrated that capability earlier this year. https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-130044341.html https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-13004...
      • dTal 4y ago
        Sounds like a fantastic way to rapidly maim a hawk.
        • doodlebugging 4y ago
          I think the goal with this method could be to train the hawk to carry an object such as a net or dangling string that the hawk would drop into the propellers of the drone, thus disabling it. One could also use a hawk as a platform to carry electronic means of disabling drones. The problem with hawks and drones becomes one of teaching the hawk to recognize enemy drones since it is likely in future wars that all sides will use drones and that it may be difficult to identify who controls a particular drone without monitoring that drone to map its communication path. It's cool to use a bird that instinctively hunts other birds but we need to understand that hawks are not hard to see and to eliminate so their utility on a battlefield is limited.
        • javajosh 4y ago
          I upvoted you because you may be right. I don't really know if people are IRL training hawks for this purpose, but if they did maybe they could give them protection of some kind, like articulated metal "shoes". It's also possible that smaller drones' propellers just don't have the kinetic energy to damage a bird in any meaningful way. It's all speculation, but I still think it would be very cool.
      • trasz 4y ago
        Weaponised hawks have many interesting properties. They don't emit radio waves, and not much infrared either, so are hard to locate and shoot down. They can loiter forever (well, limited by hawk's lifetime, whatever it is), are self-refueling, and, to some extent, also self-repairing and self-replicating.
        • javajosh 4y ago
          Hawks also can't be suborned.
    • toss1 4y ago
      The problem with laser weapons so far is that they have insufficient power and are fighting the inverse square law. Heating to create sufficient damage takes multiple seconds in good conditions. They work great in field tests where the operator can keep the target aligned exactly for a while and the target operator isn't evading. Add mirror finishes, thermal shielding, automated detection and evasion, much of which is cheap, and that'll stay a demonstrator weapon for a long time. I don't think anyone is worried about the claimed Russian lasers against drones (particularly since Russia tends to tout a lot of vaporware), but I'd be worried that since Russia is already happy to systematically commit and even advertise their war crimes, that they'd start using the lasers as blinding weapons despite the fact that it is also a war crime.
      • XorNot 4y ago
        Mostly the use of laser blinders is uncommon because a laser which can blind a person will also happily do that to you from a reflective surface or down a military sighting optic.
        • toss1 4y ago
          Good point - tho if you are wearing protective optical gear and you can expect the enemy is not wearing it...
      • tomatotomato37 4y ago
        Lasers also suffer from easily deployed countermeasures. Anyone who has been passed by some truck rolling coal can attest to how trivial it is for anything running a combustion engine to be modified to foul the air around it to the point of zero visibility. In addition, flying projectiles like missiles, mortars, or ICBMs can simply spin such that the laser has to heat the whole circumference of the body rather than a single point in order to be effective, which they may be doing anyway for stabilization
      • chipsa 4y ago
        Laser weapons of this sort aren't manually operated. They automatically track the target while they are firing, and they are normally pulsed to allow higher instantaneous powers, which make mirror finishes useless (the pulsed power is high enough that the amount of power that isn't reflected is enough to heat the surface of the mirror finish enough to make it non-reflective). The target also becomes very bright while it's being engaged, making it much easier for electro-optical systems to track. The multiple seconds to kill is dependent on the laser power, the higher the power, the longer it takes to kill. The LaWS tested by the USN was 30kW or so, but they're looking at lasers with 10x the power for operational use. So the 2 seconds to down a UAV turns into 2/10s of a second, which is probably beyond reaction time, even for automated detection and evasion.
  • SCHiM 4y ago
    Just shoot some stringy gel into the propellers. I'm sure a material exists that can both tangle the propellers or block the inlets of jets which would make it effective against a variety of types.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      You have to get the stringy gel to the propellers, which is most of the cost of a MANPAD. The warhead doesn't cost all that much, whether it's explosive or silly string.
    • the_snooze 4y ago
      >Yossarian sidled up drunkenly to Colonel Korn at the officers' club one night to kid with him about the new Lepage gun that the Germans had moved in. "What Lepage gun?" Colonel Korn inquired with curiosity. "The new three hundred and forty four millimeter Lepage glue gun," Yossarian answered. "It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air." -Catch-22
      • doodlebugging 4y ago
        Thanks for this. Catch-22 is my all-time favorite war related book. There is so much in there to take in and enjoy. Absurdity, off-color humor, puns, social commentary. Heller was magnificent in this book.
    • rr808 4y ago
      Yeah you kinda expect a swarm of drones like a small ocean fleet. With smaller drones to protect the main cruiser.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    Can manpads lock on 400$ DJI style drones ?
    • rr808 4y ago
      I purposely left that detail out because I dont know. They have been hitting those junk Orlans which is what I meant. I guess you can bring down the mini drones with a rifle? Like OP says there are a bunch of radio jamming guns around which probably confuse DJI. This post says they downed 65 "targets" in one day so I'm guessing they're the cheap drones. https://t.me/LastBP/9398 https://t.me/LastBP/9398
• baq 4y ago
  for quadrocopters, you want a hunter-killer drone with some kind of a net or tape to jam the propeller. for plane-like drones... guess something similar. gliders may be super hard to spot and will still be somewhat effective without a working propeller, so tough luck.
  • Steltek 4y ago
    Net or tape? In a war? Why not suicide your drone into the target drone? If you want something reusable or longer range, a shotgun-like apparatus. Gliders will be easier to spot because they won't be able to actively navigate through trees for cover the way the way a more nimble, powered drone could.
    • gpderetta 4y ago
      Ramming seems the most practical and cost effective solution.
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to catch a sparrow with a drine? Imagine how hard it is to hit a target that is actively avoiding you
    • baq 4y ago
      A suicidal drone is a guided missile. There are many options on the market for these already. They’re universally way more expensive than necessary to combat a cheap swarm. You want something that won’t bankrupt you while you’re mounting a defense.
• trashtester 4y ago
  What I've imagined for the past decade or so, are spotter drones that are about the same size as the drones they are design to shoot down. These spotter drones could be built much like WW1/WW2 aircraft, just much smaller, with top speeds between 50-200knots for the smaller versions. As a weapon, they could carry weapons similar to submachineguns, shotguns or light marchine guns, depending on the size of the target. Add an AI of about the same level of sophistication as the "autopilots" in cars, and they should be able to identify and shoot down hostile drones relatively cost efficiently. Produced at scale, the smallest versions (designed to shoot down comercially available drones, for instance), would not have to cost all that much more than the drones they are designed to shoot down, if produced at scale. I'm imagining at least 3-4 size categories, lets say. 1) Tiny, able to shoot down most quad copters. Top speed of 50-100knots. Price needs to be low enough to allow tens of thousands to be produced. Could potentially also double as anti-infantry weapons by strafing. 2) Small. Able to shoot down switchblade-sized drones. Top speed of maybe 200 knots. Can be produced in numbers of thousands. 3) Medium. Sutable to hunt small UAV's, such as Buyraktar. Top speed of several hundered knots, maybe just below Mach 1. Somewhat more expensive than the Buyraktar, but can also carry some of the same ordanance, like a tiny fighter-bomber. 4) Full-sized, possibly supersonic. Basically the same as the Loyal Wingman concept. Designed to counter other full-sized drones as well as manned aircraft. Basically, the removal of a pilot, allows aircraft to span a wide range of sizes, and I would expect all sizes to be produced, as it is uneconomical to hunt quadcopters with full sized aircraft, while it is impossible to hunt supersonic aircraft with switchblade type aircraft. In a way, this would be analogous to naval vessels, with different sizes serving different roles, from corvettes, MTB's and attacks subs, through frigates and cruisers, to WW2 style batlleships or carriers. Now, for the AI researchers out there, imagine the careers that can be built around providing AI's for these vehicles. To see your own AI locked in a WW2 style dogfight with a similar drone from another country, in a real-time feed.....
  • hooande 4y ago
    Human drone pilots are cheap and reasonably easy to train. The "AI" that you need is the targeting and guidance system. If I can see any enemy drone on a camera, all I need to do is get a lock and fire. The problem is that precision guided munitions are fairly expensive. Drones are cheap, but giving them any kind of offensive ability increases the cost significantly. A switchblade drone only costs about $6,000 and there still aren't swarms of thousands of them. Maybe once the economics enable massing hundreds of thousands of drones, autonomous control will become more reasonable.
• cesarb 4y ago
  > No piece of autonomous weapons delivery hardware in the modern world exists with a price tag less than 100x that amount. Drones are simply too cheap. I recently found a video at https://twitter.com/FortemTech/status/1526925732122968067 https://twitter.com/FortemTech/status/1526925732122968067 (source: https://twitter.com/TomReiner4/status/1528214932461846528 https://twitter.com/TomReiner4/status/1528214932461846528) which shows an anti-drone drone. Unfortunately, I couldn't find its price tag, but looking at the images in the manufacturer's site, it doesn't look like it would be much more expensive to manufacture than an equivalent-sized DJI drone.
• robotnikman 4y ago
  A good old fashioned flak cannon would do the trick, except now with modern targeting systems