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Is the attack helicopter dead?

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Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#351

Post by siliconc0w »

karaterobot wrote: post #152
siliconc0w wrote: post #32

Whoever can most cost effectively put explosives on target wins. The future will be annihilation at a distance with cheap standoff weapons followed by swarms of cheap drones loitering over battlefields to clean up.

Due to the nature of their deployment (ad hoc, improvised, crowd-sourced) swarms of quads in Ukraine didn't have much of a counter. Nobody had thought enough about it yet. All the work had gone into developing really sophisticated, cheap drones for consumer use, and strapping a bomb on them was all it took to weaponize that consumer technology. Nobody had spent a similar amount of time developing an equally sophistic…

Lasers and microwaves can be mitigated, jamming doesn't matter if they're autonomous(and can also be mitigated), bullets have a hard time with fast and stocastic movement.

It's gonna be done on drone. And they can lie in wait in low power mode and navigate buildings so, yeah better hope you get all of them.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#352

Post by paganel »

ponector wrote: post #124
paganel wrote: post #61

A BS article if I ever saw one. Take for example this: > Moreover, the threat is not the organic air defences of battlegroups or a Soviet Motor-Rifle Regiment or Brigade, but dispersed and well-hidden infantry and special forces units equipped with modern MANPADS missile systems. Furthermore, because the enemy forces are operating over the defenders’ own ground, the defence can be cued and alerted to approaching heli…

That counter attack was more than a year ago. Now Ukrainians have drones capable of intercepting slow air targets like drones or helicopters. And they are ten times cheaper than manpads.

They don’t, plus Russia’s EW capabilities are now so good that stuff like HIMARS has now only a 10% chance of hitting its target (from a recent Western article on the issue), so there’s no chance in hell they’ll let some drones fight their attack helicopters and them (the Russians) not doing anything about it.

Which is to say that these delusions won’t help the Ukrainians one bit, nor any other Eastern European army that will possibly fight the same Russians in the near future.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#353

Post by guappa »

theelous3 wrote: post #169
rolandog wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing commonly left out of these napkin math scenarios is cyber security risk... it may make sense to cut down on human resources, but you better make sure your drone fleet won't be commandeered by an adversarial nation-state's script kiddies. Cheaper to make, but perhaps also cheaper to have them turn on you.

Considering we're looking at an adversarial nation state (famously full of script kiddies) which is absolutely hell-bent and motivated to tackle their drone problem, and not once has that state or its script kiddies commandeered a single drone - nevermind a fleet of them - (nor are the script kiddies even remotely in range?) I don't see this being a problem now or in the near future.

Yes, not a problem at all. It never has happened before. Oh wait!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#354

Post by guappa »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #173
OrigamiPastrami wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis assumes collateral damage is irrelevant.

Russian military doctrine favors collateral damage. I think part of the US's love of precision weapons comes from the fact that they media will go nuts if the US kills non-targets. 20 civilians dying in Iraq to a helicopter that thought their camera was a gun was a national embarrassment. For Russia, 100 civilians dying in a mass artillery bombardment is a normal workday.

USA doesn't kill many civilians because Obama defined that "if you die in a drone attack you weren't a civilian".

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/opinion/2012-05-29/ana...

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#355

Post by guappa »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #329
rjurney wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you topple a foreign government, destroy all the infrastructure for pointless "shock and awe" and then send the ethnic majority but recently oppressed armed forces home... you bear responsibility for the millions of extra deaths that follow when traumatic civil war rocks the nation. You are the exact example of the delusional American he means.

You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible. If you are going to blame every single death in a conflict, including indirect deaths (eg excess heart attacks) and deaths at the hands of the other party (IEDs laid by the other side), on the US, there's no reason to give you any more ammunition or make your argumen…

I mean, USA could stop doing wars everywhere in the world no?

It's not like iraq had tanks by the USA border, ready to roll in no?

It also didn't have any of the terrible weapons that USA claimed they had.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#356

Post by Log_out_ »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #298
throwup238 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? A helicopter is on the order of 75-80 decibels at 1000 feet. That’s the equivalent of a giant flying stadium speaker consuming kilowatts of power, that has to catch a much smaller 200mph drone while being just as cheap. The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.

Use your imagination. The counter-drone doesn't have to output the exact same energy profile as an attack helicopter, just close enough to trigger the anti-helo-drone's activation. Examples: the counter-drone outputs only a specific frequency (the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range). It outputs that at much lower decibels (the anti-helo-drone just thinks the helo is farther away…

But counter drones are weight eating into mission range and payload. And even then, i only see helicoptera survive as unmanned drone mothership.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#357

Post by jabl »

bluGill wrote: post #206
shiroiushi wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that was an amazing helicopter, and it's really too bad it was cut, but as you say, it just didn't make economic sense any more when UAVs were invented. I guess it's something like the Japanese battleship Yamato, with the largest guns ever installed on a warship. It was amazing, but easily sunk by airplanes flown from aircraft carriers, so it was already obsolete when it was launched.

aircraft carriers are even more vulnerable. battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes. When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.

> battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes.

The main reason really is range. A battleship can obliterate a target within about 25 km (yes, I know the guns can shoot longer than that, but practical accuracy against a moving target such as another ship..) whereas an aircraft carrier can launch strikes from hundreds of km away. Further, the carrier can launch reconnaissance aircraft (nowadays with radar obviously, but thinking of the WWII era when battleships were obsoleted) so it's aware of what's happening around it. So it can, say, stay away out of range of enemy battleships, as well as detect enemy targets at long range to launch strikes against. Yes, mistakes can still happen, see the battle of Samar. And yes, the battleship likely has floatplanes, but compared to a carrier, few of them, shorter range, and needs relatively calm seas to recover them.

All this being said, yes it took a lot of planes launched from a lot of carriers to sink the Yamato. But due to the range issue explained in the previous paragraph, the carriers could safely do this well out of range of the massive guns of the Yamato, whereas the Yamato could do nothing more than sit there impotently taking hit after hit until it finally succumbed.

> When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.

In principle, yes. But to do that the battleship needs to get awfully close to whatever it's going to shoot at, running the risk of hitting mines, or being targeted by shore-based anti-ship missiles etc. And if you already have the overwhelming superiority to get rid of all such enemy systems before bringing the battleship in, why not use those same assets to hit the same targets the battleship would hit in the first place?

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#358

Post by khuey »

nine_k wrote: post #232
SR2Z wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine. Yes, but the defining attribute of the Ukraine war seems to be CHEAP precision - the ability of drones to respond and attack car-sized targets in real time is what has turned this war into a slog. The American-made stuff is great, but I've seen multiple examples of Ukrainian missile crews reacting contemptuously to the idea…

OTOH the highly precise HIMARS played a crucial role many times. Regular artillery has to shoot dozens of shells before it hits the exact high-value target. This betrays the position of the cannon; if it's close enough it will be fired at. HIMARS is precise so it can pack up and leave before the projectiles even reach the target. FPV drones are precise because they're remotely piloted by experienced pilots. This allo…

HIMARS is highly effective exactly because it's cheap precision. An air force capable of executing the missions that HIMARS can would cost Ukraine many many billions of dollars. HIMARS clocks in at $5M per truck and $200k per rocket.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#359

Post by killingtime74 »

throwup238 wrote: post #254

We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly. For example, aluminum air batteries are perfect for this use case but havent been developed because until now single use batteries haven’t seen any demand. Those will at least double or triple the range…

I think the speed will be what protects the helicopters from the drones. The drones can't sustain 200 miles per hour for long while the helicopter can do it for literal hours. The rocket motor is a good idea, probably the most likely to succeed

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#360

Post by jychang »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #329
rjurney wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you topple a foreign government, destroy all the infrastructure for pointless "shock and awe" and then send the ethnic majority but recently oppressed armed forces home... you bear responsibility for the millions of extra deaths that follow when traumatic civil war rocks the nation. You are the exact example of the delusional American he means.

You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible. If you are going to blame every single death in a conflict, including indirect deaths (eg excess heart attacks) and deaths at the hands of the other party (IEDs laid by the other side), on the US, there's no reason to give you any more ammunition or make your argumen…

> You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible.

Wait is that a good thing or a bad thing?

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