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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

spectrum.ieee.org

121–130 of 454 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How close are we to making a system that can have multiple counter measures autonomously deployed? (1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props (2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser (3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers (4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ... etc, etc.

Mirrors are not an effective defense against military lasers. The power levels are too high and dielectric mirrors only work over narrow wavelengths. In the specific case of US military tech, some of the platforms use white lasers such that even dielectric mirrors are pointless.

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

#122

India used oldschool L70 Guns, zu 23 and ZSU-23-4 Shilka against pakisthan's drone swarm attacks. They are modernized to track, lock, and fire automatically. But they are cheap.

What kinda targeting system do they use? Probably no significant IR signature and radar one's pretty small aswell?

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

#123
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 think you'll probably see mini flak guns, lasers, microwaves, and defensive kamikaze drones as the main defensive tools

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

#124
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.

Best-case scenario: The expensive laser system just became the most obvious and highest-value target in the area.

Take 5 drones, sneak from other directions and simply overwhelm the system. If in pair, multiply the attackers via some decoys, it becomes just a statistics game.

I can imagine this protecting some future US bases in same way C-RAM is used. But from what I read from ie Iraq veterans they had it turned off most of the time for the fear of shooting down its own planes. So much for trust in high tech if its too powerful and automated.

Chinese have some systems, but from demo I've seen the laser beam took some serious time to shoot a single missile. Drones are smaller and way more fragile (so also harder to hit) but this ain't Star trek or Star wars.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 gauge would be fairly strong medicine, but it has to be close in. If the drone is a stabilized gun platform with the ability to aim decently well (<4 MoA @ 100 yards) that's not going to be a winning battle.

That’s assuming there’s a single drone and not an intelligent swarm that will circle around you.

Yes, I'm assuming reality.

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

#126
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”

That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't AI do that? It's better than any human at this stuff.

Sometimes I feel like the entire AI field just never watched The Terminator.

Whether it should is a different question. It certainly can.

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

#128
post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

> tired front-line private

It's hard to imagine there is a military in the world that would put something so important in the hands of a private. Yes the drones in this war are relatively low cost but they are also so vital to both sides' war effort that there is inevitably more command and control over their use.

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

#129
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

Also this: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po... "ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost." So it is not fully autonomous.

Not for this task, but could be used autonomously. If they trusted that these planes were still in the same spot, and their GPS coordinates were accurate to 10 cm, then what they could do is just program the drones to fly a preset route at preset heights, stop over the plane's wing and then descend all the way to 0 meters.
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