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To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

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Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#191

Post by jobigoud »

imtringued wrote: post #179
sliken wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, do agile rockets dodge? Or just follow a simple preprogrammed patterns (like low, then pop up to attack from above)? Not sure a CIWS system that can hit a mach 2 missile that doesn't dodge would necessarily handle the same $$$ spent on a N cheaper drones. How many minutes of firing do modern CIWS systems typically have? Loitering at max engagement range and dodging might well end up using ammo at a rate that t…

How do you "dodge" airburst ammunition? Can your drone instantaneously change direction at the speed of an explosion? What the hell am I reading here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag Edit: Look they even made a smaller system! https://youtu.be/Drm3kdDYBI4

This seems to aim by calculating the trajectory of the target. How will it fare if the target is flown in first person perspective by a human in an unpredictable way?

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#192

Post by saargrin »

sliken wrote: post #60
hungryforcodes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against. The fact is the "killer bot" scenario is just a one time thing. After it happens, all cities or armies or whatever, will have very solid defences installed against swarming or even just loitering bots. Flying drones are incredibly fragile and exposed. They are slow and easy to kill.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

what does a done race have to do with a loitering munition ?

have you seen a harop? its huge,its built to fly slow and for a long while and carry big payload and has zero evasion capability

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#193

Post by [deleted] »

sliken wrote: post #60
hungryforcodes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against. The fact is the "killer bot" scenario is just a one time thing. After it happens, all cities or armies or whatever, will have very solid defences installed against swarming or even just loitering bots. Flying drones are incredibly fragile and exposed. They are slow and easy to kill.

Slow and easy to kill? Seen a drone race? At what range and with what weapon would they be easy to kill? How long would the kill take? At what range could the drone be killed at? Sure often drones fly in straight lines or hover. But in an adversarial environment they could easily move pseudo randomly and be quite difficult to kill.

[deleted]

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#194

Post by dsq »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #51
coderintherye wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict Drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive advantage in the recent conflict with Armenia: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...

Only once. Everyone has paid attention, and the next drone attacks will be suitably defended against. The fact is the "killer bot" scenario is just a one time thing. After it happens, all cities or armies or whatever, will have very solid defences installed against swarming or even just loitering bots. Flying drones are incredibly fragile and exposed. They are slow and easy to kill.

They are very small, and high up. As the AI gets better they will also become better at evading fire, just as mosquitoes are really hard to get. Try catching a cat that doesn't want to be caught. Equip the cat with an explosive warhead and make it a thousand cat swarm.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#195

Post by dsq »

bob33212 wrote: post #151
lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space. Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distrib…

If you mass produce these things you are going to leave traces of your logistics supply chain. Even if you brought them into a staging are one at a time your frequent trips would lead back to where they were made or by whom.

At some point 3d printing will make localized offgrid drone production entirely feasible.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#196

Post by ermir »

dsq wrote: post #195
bob33212 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mass produce these things you are going to leave traces of your logistics supply chain. Even if you brought them into a staging are one at a time your frequent trips would lead back to where they were made or by whom.

At some point 3d printing will make localized offgrid drone production entirely feasible.

The chips, PCB, and all electronics have their embedded serial number in them. It's very likely many of these will survive a direct explosion, and once these identifiers are extracted from them, the supplier/manufacturer/vendor/customer will be identified using standard investigation methods. So while there's little possibility of some unknown Unabomber-style decade long rampage using this tech, they could be very destructive in the short-term.

My nightmare scenario is someone flying hundreds of these in formation on a stadium full of people. They could be launched from a parking lot from a single van or pickup truck. If you sacrifice the ability to hover by giving them wings, you might get very high range and not have to risk yourself at all while launching a devastating attack.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#197

Post by blueblisters »

jobigoud wrote: post #191
imtringued wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you "dodge" airburst ammunition? Can your drone instantaneously change direction at the speed of an explosion? What the hell am I reading here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag Edit: Look they even made a smaller system! https://youtu.be/Drm3kdDYBI4

This seems to aim by calculating the trajectory of the target. How will it fare if the target is flown in first person perspective by a human in an unpredictable way?

It’s airburst ammunition which can be fired faster and travels faster than a human can react. The airburst is timed to trigger at the calculated intersection of trajectories (or somewhere in that neighbourhood), significantly improving your chances of scoring a hit even with a high circular error probable.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#198

Post by lazide »

imtringued wrote: post #178
lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space. Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distrib…

>Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that i…

That is not true. Existing technology can take out remote controlled conventional drones with EW.

I know of no existing (human proximity safe) EW that can handle optical based or internal (IMU) inertial autonomous flight, and both of those are more than good enough in this scenario (though optical may limit the upper speed bounds depending on the onboard processing capabilities). IMU based (pre programmed) could easily allow no active sensor mode, though would require pre-scouting the route.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#199

Post by dogman144 »

floxy wrote: post #144
dogman144 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd back up and say it might be even more simple from a cybersec perspective, holding off the military drone capabilities and related hardening. Embedded consumer electronics/IoT generally have awful security configs and an internet connection. Consumer-grade, and I bet a fair bit of the more high powered drones, are vulnerable to this same risk. I'd love an educated opinion on this, but to the extent I've thought ab…

>People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors I'm interesting to know what kinds of crimes people are commiting with quadcopters. Is it more of a spying/industrial espionage thing? Or stealing Amazon packages off of people's doorsteps? Arsonists?

Sorry, crimes is a too generic term!

Counter-drone fight in Iraq/Syria includes consumer drones dropping what are basically grenades.

Another recent example was a souped up quadcopter that scouted out a mil base in AZ and then outran a few LEO rotary wings recently. But, if it was that modified of a drone, it's possible other aspects of the connection/remote access were hardened as well.

Re: To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths

#200

Post by jvanderbot »

kragen wrote: post #182
jvanderbot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tech power fantasy. Its not at all representative of the state of the art and disregards a lot of difficulties. Massed drones absolutely can wreck terrible destruction, death by a thousand cuts to any facility or base or airfield. But the kind of amassed yet precise strike against a hundred targeted individuals, with smart targeting and somehow knowledge of their career status?! Come on. I wouldn't even fin…

smart targeting is clearly crucial, yes. but the objective of warfare is not to wreak (or wreck, heh) terrible destruction; it is to break the enemy's will to resist. by themselves, drones don't tell you who to target or where they are; they just gather surveillance data and deliver munitions, very precisely and in a way that is very difficult to stop. in combination with things like facebook data and cellphone subsc…

I'm challenging the supporting assumptions you described. Real time career knowledge, real time non visual person tracking, real time coordinated search across cities, real time IFF, lethal payloads on them all, real time localization. There's a lot of requirements there. An alien invasion would probably use clouds of drones in this way. The US could. Russia, China. After some testing. But not the next ISIS. And those states that can already have better options for targeting at range on a battlefield. And I'm challenging the use case. Are they within US borders? How? Flew in? Launched from within? How did they get close enough? A ship? Infiltration?

Pearl harbor was easy, required no new tech, just will. And Pearl Harbor was well known before the attack, had been demonstrated years before. This isn't that.

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