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The future of air defense must be smarter, more affordable, and reusable
- phero_cnstrcts 3y agoSpending will be the same or more but they want more bang for the buck.
- mlindner 3y agoThis is about the new release of Anduril's new Roadrunner drone that has multiple uses. Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-01/anduril-roadrunner-drone-killer-could-change-tactics-in-iraq-syria https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-01/anduril-r... Video of a demonstration strike against a drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al9ITeP4fUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al9ITeP4fUA One way I could personally see this being used is pre-launching a bunch of the drones in an area to orbit and wait for incoming drones, or launch several of them per target. Only one is needed to actually destroy the target. Once the targets are destroyed they can return and land, refuel, and then launch again to try and target additional incoming objects. I can also see it having uses outside of attacking targets as the payload is generic and can be mounted with cameras or sensors instead of an explosive for mid-range target photography (the range is unspecified but just assuming based on size and speed) or as non-military use for surveilance of nearby areas for forest fires or weather investigation.
- corethree 3y agoMore efficient to have the drones launch from the ground rather then loiter. Eliminates the need for the vtol too which is just a lot of extra effort to get right. This is sort of like the segway, the loitering/vtol tech is more for marketing: https://maddox.xmission.com/segsuck2.jpg https://maddox.xmission.com/segsuck2.jpg And cheap? I saw carbon fiber on that thing. The article says an Iranian drone might cost 10,000 right after it says that one of these things costs over 100k. It's def better than a patriot but still stupidly expensive.
- _ea1k 3y agoI've seen some three wheeled segway-like devices. They compromise stability, because the third wheel lifts if one wheel goes over an object that is taller than the other. Similarly, they end up leaning backward or foreward over slanted terrain and are easier to tip. IMO, other two wheeled scooters were more practical, but the segway combined their benefits with the ability to be handsfree.
- paganel 3y ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al9ITeP4fUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al9ITeP4fUA I see, another Wunderwaffen coming from the West, they never learn. I've also Ctrl+F-ed for Lancet on both this thread and on the dupe thread posted earlier, nothing, so, yeah, people here are living in a different reality when it comes to modern drone warfare. This [1] information posted by an Ukrainian guy now actually fighting a war drone is a lot, a lot more interesting and on point than whatever this SV money-grabbing vehicle is up to. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/178npoi/ua_pov_interesting_information_about_1001/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/178npo...
- mlindner 3y agoWhat does Lancet have to do with this?
- paganel 3y agoCheap thing that works in the here and now and which this other thing presented here, which I gather is an order of magnitude more expensive (if not more), is supposed to be taking down (among many other things). I’m saying that the West hasn’t learned the lesson of price control when it comes to the war of attrition, they’re still going with the “with this wundervaffe the war will be won by us in two weeks max, so no need to look at the prices”. Ukraine is paying for that wrong way of looking at things just now, because at some point the money does run out.
- mlindner 3y agoThis is exactly price control though? It reduces the cost of maintaining the defense.
- RandomLensman 3y ago(Automated) AA guns have been around for a while with low cost per intercept - no need for missiles. Edit: looks like Gepard ammunition is actually surprisingly expensive based on some contracts in the press, but still...
- foota 3y agoI don't think they're cheap per installation though due to radar, are they?
- rocqua 3y agoYou need radar to detect incoming things anyway, and radar can be re-used.
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- RandomLensman 3y agoBefore they were falling out of fashion, there were relatively "cheap" versions produced in larger numbers (like 400+ Gepards for Germany, for example, no idea how many of the 35mm guns were made), if I recall correctly, also, you don't need thousands of AA guns to protect an object. The current skyranger 30 system is $5+M I think, but I don't think you need necessarily luxury systems to defend against rather simple drones (and it has low production numbers, I believe).
- corethree 3y agoPut a turret on a vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_anti-aircraft_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_anti-aircraft_w... Also the state of the art for this kind of thing is the phalanx I believe. They have it installed on carriers. https://www.armyrecognition.com/united_states_us_army_artillery_vehicles_system_uk/centurion_c-ram_land-based_weapon_system_phalanx_technical_data_sheet_specifications_pictures_video.html https://www.armyrecognition.com/united_states_us_army_artill... It can definitely go on vehicles. I would say China can easily bypass this tech with hyper sonic missiles and even just launching 10 missiles at one carrier at the same time can probably fuck it up. Just even getting one missile with a system such as this is a miracle. Anduril is far away from having the know how of building any system to the level of the phalanx.
- rightbyte 3y agoSo the Occulus guy, after selling his soul to Zuckerberg, pivoted into making weapons?
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- mlindner 3y agoAfter he got fired by Zuckerberg you mean, after the media lied about and dragged his name through the mud. He's recently called that company his "life's work" https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1729781270572413123 https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1729781270572413123 > Palmer you’re above seeming paranoid about reporters all the time > > I am not, I promise you! > > Getting fired from your own life-work company after egregiously false reporting from hateful journalists really changes your perspective.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe well honestly I feel he was crushed. The "no need for Facebook login" and things. I don't think I had realized exactly how bad for humanity Google, Facebook et alii was in 2015, so I shouldn't be to judgemental about working for Facebook at the time.
- dylan604 3y agoi hope you were only a teenager in 2015 to feel this way. if not, i guess better late than never! welcome to the club
- ignoramous 3y agoGot fired for his alt-right affiliation, apparently: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/facebook-reportedly-fired-palmer-luckey-for-political-views/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/facebook-reportedly-... (unsure if it was a defamation / cancel-culture campaign against him, tbh)
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoDiscussion earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483353
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xnx 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483353 (215 comments)
- brindlejim 3y agoIt's hilarious that Anduril is proposing "more affordable" defense gear. They are a prime wrapped in VC funding, and like most defense contractors, they are egregiously overpriced compared to the cost of materials. I can see them capturing US DOD budgets, but predict that much more cost effective competitors emerge internationally.
- inamberclad 3y agoThe DoD will never go overseas for their most important equipment, that's what these primes are based on.
- bluGill 3y agoThe DoD often goes overseas. Most navy ships are built in Italy (the big ones are built in the US, but most are smaller). Even when things are built internally, the DoD often looks to various allies for critical parts.
- mlindner 3y agoThe US DoD is not buying any naval ships from Italy. In fact I'm not aware of a single ship in the US Navy that was built outside of the United States.
- defrost 3y agoSplitting the difference to reach the true situation: * The US Navy contracts for shipbuilding outside of the USofA, and * The foreign company builds for the US Navy take place at shipyards within the USofA. eg: “Austal’s Alabama-based shipyard is currently contracted on 11 different vessel programs for the US Navy and Coast Guard, and it is a source of pride seeing this vessel visiting our home. Plus, its Australian and historical heritage makes it all the more special.” * https://www.austal.com/news/arrival-austal-built-us-naval-vessel-uss-canberra-sydney-harbour https://www.austal.com/news/arrival-austal-built-us-naval-ve... The U.S. Navy said on Thursday it awarded a contract worth more than $5.5 billion to Italy's Fincantieri to build its newest class of warships, known as frigates. The contract is for detailed design and construction of the lead ship, with an option to buy nine more. If the navy exercised all options on the contract, delivery of the 10th ship would occur in the mid-2030s. The ship will be built at Fincantieri's Marinette Marine shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin. * https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-frigate-idINKBN22C3UB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-navy-frigate-idINKBN2...
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI imagine little laser equipped bots that zoom up and down rows of crops on little rails, blasting caterpillars and other pests. When a military target shows up, they point at the sky instead. Sure, atmospheric abberation means that you can't hit easily hit a plane with a single beam, but I expect the situation changes when you've got millions of beams to command. Of course this fails if you're the occupying force, rather than the defender, but maybe that's for the best.
- dylan604 3y agojust cover your plane in mirrors so the lasers are sent back to where they originated. boom! it's the high tech version of "I'm rubber your glue". that just means we need to research how to make radar absorption materials reflective in laser wavelengths.
- FredPret 3y agoRadiation weapons don't have to radiate visible light - we could pick any practical wavelength
- dylan604 3y agowho said visible light?
- FredPret 3y agoYou said "laser wavelengths". Any wavelength can be a "laser wavelength" if we understand a laser to be a beam weapon.
- dylan604 3y agoright, but laser wavelength does not mean visible wavelength. that's why i specifically didn't use visible in the comment. microwave weapons don't have the same meaning as laser. pew pew. nobody has ever said "friggin' microwave" as they point their pinky to corner of their mouth. not sure why you feel the need to get to whatever pedantic level you're trying to go when the conversation was clearly talking about lasers. we can redirect lasers with mirrors. covering a military plane in mirrors to deflect lasers is clearly something in jest. but sure, let's turn it into a pedantic conversation.
- renewiltord 3y agoThis is good stuff. I wonder if there's going to be some startup that's like "M795-compatible shells but mass-produced rather than constrained by one factory in Stranton". I suppose the DOD contacts must have been through Peter Thiel. Very cool stuff.
- voz_ 3y agoWeapons are a good thing, in the hands of our liberal democracy. Any leg up we can get on the evil regimes of Iran, China, and Russia, along with the rest of their pathetic "axis" (self named), is a good thing.
- zabzonk 3y agoi take it there was a /s missing here?
- knofe_lofe 3y ago[dead]
- berserk1010 3y agowhat? are you not aware of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supplied by China and North Korea? (Ukraine JUST blew up a supply railway between China and Russia today) And Iran supported Hamas distracting that war effort?
- briantakita 3y agoBefore act 3, there was act 1 & act 2. These conflicts were at least decades in the making, if not over a century. Best option is to seek peace & seriously understand & respect the terms of the "enemy". Better than perpetual conflict that only seems to benefit the Billionaire class. Trade > war
- analognoise 3y agoWhat? You’re not seriously saying to make peace with the Russians who invaded Ukraine?
- MyFirstSass 3y agoIts a US proxy war pushed by the empire. Its about geopolitical power like most other wars in history. So yeah no. Don’t be a war fan, it’s rich people playing you.
- dylan604 3y agoOff topic question about the site vs linked content, but is there a defined description for the style used so that the last sentence in a graph is double spaced like this? The markup does not have any tags to spread them out. I'm at a loss for how it's even done, let alone why one would want it this way.
- alienasa 3y agoThis looks to me like the effect of a non-technical user using a CMS and hitting "enter" twice in the edit box after each paragraph. There's no "style" being used - it's probably a purely human enforced convention. (there are tags, there are <br>'s between each paragraph inside the <p>)
- dylan604 3y agobut those <br>s are in between the graphs, and they line up with the layout. the last line of the graph does not have those breaks. i just looked at the site on a different browser, and the anomaly i'm seeing in FF does not appear in the Safari. in Safari, it just has double spaced graphs. in FF, the last line in each graph is also separated by a double space. in 2023, and we still can't have consistent layouts across browsers. FML
- mlindner 3y agoIt's some kind of rendering issue difference between Firefox and Safari/Chrome. Safari/Chrome don't have the extra newline there.
- zabzonk 3y agohave they cleared this with the tolkien estate?
- adolph 3y agoProbably have the same law firm as Palantir. Just take the accent off and its all good.
- RecycledEle 3y agoThis was all proposed when DARPA first looked into Network Centric Warfare. It was rejected, which was a mistake. When defending against small drones, the scaled down equivalent of a combat air patrol (CAP) would work. That CAP can be extended over enemy positions as well, like air superiority with scaled-down aircraft. I can imagine one side having air dominance in the large & manned air domain, while the other side has air dominance in the small & unmanned air domain. These small jets are also a great way to keep track of enemy activity. Having a payload on it makes sense for the same reason it makes sense for a forward observer to also be a sniper.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- briantakita 3y agoThe war of attrition involves bleeding out the empire with cost differentials. The MIC needs to provide more value for its weapons or the imperial outposts will become cost & geopolitically prohibitive. The US has lost much stature among the global south. As the so called "adversaries" understand how to effectively drain imperial status & resources. The exceptionalism position does not help in light of regularly bombing civilians & making the world a more dangerous place by flooding weapons into conflicts. And the quality of life of the people in the US & Europe is falling...fast.
- bluGill 3y agoThe future of air defense is made in Ukraine or Israel. Buy their systems - both are under attack and so have reason to innovate in ways that matter. Better for other countries to focus on things that are not needed in those particular conflicts (or are needed but not as critical a priority and so they are not putting limited resources on).
- justinator 3y agoI was under the impression that Ukraine's air defense is just our air defense, just 20 years out of date. And I'm also under the impression that what needs defending from isn't going to look like what Russian does now, as Russia is essentially a failed state, using tech that's even older.
- z2h-a6n 3y ago> I was under the impression that Ukraine's air defense is just our air defense, just 20 years out of date. My impression is that Ukraine's air defence is whatever they can get their hands on (and rightly so). This (I think) includes everything from old Soviet and western systems to relatively new western systems. From the fairly-recent essay [0] by General Zaluzhnyi*: The number of anti-aircraft missile systems was significantly increased mainly due to Western-made assets, in particular, "Martlet", "Starstreak", "Javelin", "Piorun", "Mistral", "Stinger", "Grom" man-portable air-defence systems, "Gepard" self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, "Skynex" air defence gun systems, "Avenger", "Stormer", "Patriot", "Hawk", "IRIS-T", "NASAMS", "SAMP-T", "Crotale-NG" air defence systems. > And I'm also under the impression that what needs defending from isn't going to look like what Russian does now, as Russia is essentially a failed state, using tech that's even older. Whether or not Russia is a failed state is a very different matter than the current state of Russia's missile/artrillery/drone stockpiles. As I understand it, what Russia does now is not hugely different from what Ukraine does now as far as air attack is concerned (cruise/ballistic missiles, drones, artillery, bombs, etc.), though there are of course differences in the details and the amount of ammunition available, and these change over time. I don't have a non-paywalled link to back this up, here are some (approximate) quotes from a recent episode of a podcast conversation between three defense analyists who seem to be pro-Ukrainian, but mostly not at the expense of accurate analysis [1]: The Russians do things at scale pretty well. Right, so they're slow to adapt, but when they get hit once or twice in the face, they do adapt. And then they do things at scale pretty quickly. ... when we talk about drones, you know FPV, Ukraine was the first to really adapt and experiment with FPVs, last winter, maybe last fall. They did this before the Russians did this in any numbers, but ... a lot of production is still on a unit-by-unit basis, individual guys building stuff in apartments. The Russians waited, but now they are producing them at scale, and so now on multiple parts of the front line the Russians have a quantitative advantage in FPVs. And so basically when we talk about the Russian military, they're slow to adapt, but when they do adapt, they then produce things in large numbers, pretty quickly, and they become more resilient than some people imagine. There is a danger of wishcasting. There is a danger, and this has been present from the start, even before this war, of these stereotypes about the Russians, and maybe some stereotypes too about the Ukrainians, ... and it's not actually beneficial to the Ukrainians to have this ... 'Russians are clownshoes' narrative out there. Defense establishments do not do nuance. They understand that the adversary is either twelve feet tall or four feet tall, but they are not good at ... understanding that forces evolve over time, the relative balance between them, the militaries change. You don't have the same forces fighting in 2023 that you had in 2022, or fighting in the same way. * Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine [0] https://infographics.economist.com/2023/ExternalContent/ZALUZHNYI_FULL_VERSION.pdf https://infographics.economist.com/2023/ExternalContent/ZALU... [1] https://warontherocks.com/episode/therussiacontingency/30005/a-post-mortem-of-ukraines-offensive-part-i/ https://warontherocks.com/episode/therussiacontingency/30005...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Apocryphon 3y agoUSAF vet defense blogger Mike Black getting into a dogfight with Palmer Luckey himself: https://twitter.com/mikeblack114/status/1730453326817276026 https://twitter.com/mikeblack114/status/1730453326817276026
- dsq 3y agoSome comments mention making the attacking missile laser proof by covering it with mirrors,adding stealth, etc.. The thing is, these measures all greatly increase the cost of the missile, making it worthy of a kinetic interceptor.
- dsq 3y agoLaser defense against swarms of cheap missiles and drones, reserving expensive kinetic interceptors for the larger, more expensive incomers. Today's leaders in this are the US, Israel, and maybe one or two large East Asian powers.