4 ms·

> Their limited mobility in comparison to UAVs for ISR operations UAVs are highly susceptible to wind and drift, especially indoors with no GPS, and while DJIs

> Their limited mobility in comparison to UAVs for ISR operations UAVs are highly susceptible to wind and drift, especially indoors with no GPS, and while DJIs collision avoidance is pretty good, any land based vehicle won't (fatally) crash if it touches anything.

jpt4 3y ago
"Hopping drones", with movement akin to the hunting method of robins [0], will be used as a kind of living minefield in military operations. When anti-air is absent/suppressed, they will engage in high energy aerial maneuvers to cover as much ground, with as little contest, as possible. Once emplaced, they will lower their signature and engage in low energy defensive fire/ambush behaviors, to hold territory. The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example. [0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.
- eszed 3y ago
  I hadn't thought of that, but it's terrifying. Like, far more nightmare-inducing than a conventional minefield. How would you counter? Up-armoured bipedal robots with roughly human-shaped heat-signatures is the only thing that would defeat easily-implemented automatic counter-measures. But if the "minefield" is under surveillance + command and control, then that goes right out the window. Besides, the cost-benefit (let alone logistics) is firmly in favor of the defender's "robins". I suspect attackers will try jamming signals and then send in the meatshields. Ugh.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Why, a "vacuum bomb", that is, a large-volume detonation of combustible spray, could give a serious kick to anything and everything within the area. (If not that, a small nuke can generate enough heat and gamma rays to burn everything near the point of the blast, but the military escalation hasn't reached this point just yet.)
    - eszed 3y ago
      Not a bad thought. (Your first one: if we're throwing nukes around I suspect minefields will be the last of our worries.) The complicating factor would be how widely they can be dispersed, and how quickly they can converge. It might take more vacuum bombs than is feasible to clear even a small area. I had another thought. There's a tried and tested method for knocking down bird-sized moving objects. So, what about shotguns? (Yes, I know they're currently banned for combat use. I think something like this would override that, at least de facto.)
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > How would you counter? With something cheaper that you spread around. Drone grenades?
tamimio 3y ago
That’s because you are not following the industry; denied-GNSS navigation has been a thing for a while. I have also seen several drone designs that can attach themselves to the silo steel wall from the inside for inspection jobs. UAVs aren’t perfect; their biggest drawback is the battery endurance before jumping to an airplane scale, but they are effective, efficient, and reliable for all their applications, even more than UGVs (UGVs have been used in real-life applications since the 90s or even before, yet drones took over in the last decade). QUGVs, on the other hand, are merely a toy, for education, or marketing purposes. The only purpose I can see for QUGVs, or even UGVs in the future, is interoperability with drones, but definitely, drones are and will be the dominant force in the field for the future.

jpt4 3y ago

"Hopping drones", with movement akin to the hunting method of robins [0], will be used as a kind of living minefield in military operations. When anti-air is absent/suppressed, they will engage in high energy aerial maneuvers to cover as much ground, with as little contest, as possible. Once emplaced, they will lower their signature and engage in low energy defensive fire/ambush behaviors, to hold territory. The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example. [0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.

eszed 3y ago
I hadn't thought of that, but it's terrifying. Like, far more nightmare-inducing than a conventional minefield. How would you counter? Up-armoured bipedal robots with roughly human-shaped heat-signatures is the only thing that would defeat easily-implemented automatic counter-measures. But if the "minefield" is under surveillance + command and control, then that goes right out the window. Besides, the cost-benefit (let alone logistics) is firmly in favor of the defender's "robins". I suspect attackers will try jamming signals and then send in the meatshields. Ugh.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Why, a "vacuum bomb", that is, a large-volume detonation of combustible spray, could give a serious kick to anything and everything within the area. (If not that, a small nuke can generate enough heat and gamma rays to burn everything near the point of the blast, but the military escalation hasn't reached this point just yet.)
  - eszed 3y ago
    Not a bad thought. (Your first one: if we're throwing nukes around I suspect minefields will be the last of our worries.) The complicating factor would be how widely they can be dispersed, and how quickly they can converge. It might take more vacuum bombs than is feasible to clear even a small area. I had another thought. There's a tried and tested method for knocking down bird-sized moving objects. So, what about shotguns? (Yes, I know they're currently banned for combat use. I think something like this would override that, at least de facto.)
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > How would you counter? With something cheaper that you spread around. Drone grenades?

tamimio 3y ago

That’s because you are not following the industry; denied-GNSS navigation has been a thing for a while. I have also seen several drone designs that can attach themselves to the silo steel wall from the inside for inspection jobs. UAVs aren’t perfect; their biggest drawback is the battery endurance before jumping to an airplane scale, but they are effective, efficient, and reliable for all their applications, even more than UGVs (UGVs have been used in real-life applications since the 90s or even before, yet drones took over in the last decade). QUGVs, on the other hand, are merely a toy, for education, or marketing purposes. The only purpose I can see for QUGVs, or even UGVs in the future, is interoperability with drones, but definitely, drones are and will be the dominant force in the field for the future.