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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#3

Post by FirmwareBurner »

Oarch wrote: post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#4

Post by fredthestair »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #3
Oarch wrote: post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

It's extremely easy to make surfaces partly reflective and extremely hard to make lasers outside of labs more powerful.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#6

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Oarch wrote: post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

There's a few, but they're large, expensive, require a lot of electricity and have limited range; there's the Silent Hunter [0] which is 30-100 kilowatts max power but which has a range of up to 4 kilometers. Raytheon has a 10 kilowatt palletized version that can go on a truck bed [1]; I can't find any numbers but it's listed as short-range, so I presume it's only effective at distances of less than 1 km, probably only tens or hundreds of meters. Plus they need to detect the drones first, but there's multiple ways to do that. It likely needs a network of detectors though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)

[1] https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#9

Post by AnimalMuppet »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #3
Oarch wrote: post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

Maybe not completely, at least not for the camera sensors. If it has good enough initial targeting data - or a good enough last image from the camera - it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there (depending on laser range, of course).
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