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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

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

#131

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #96
varjag wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.

So what about the AI part that has been mentioned by several outlets?

there was this German talking head "Nico Lange" who made this claim first without providing evidence for it. He is an ex politician and a regular in the Munich Security Conference and I assume this is who was (mainly) responsible for spreading it.

AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.

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

#132

Post by Retric »

numpad0 wrote: post #53
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #3

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.

It still takes few seconds per target with technologies available right now. That's likely the reason why an operational anti drone laser turret is not a thing yet.

> operational anti drone turret is not a thing yet.

I’ve read about a bunch of these systems even if they aren’t in widespread deployment some are still being tested in real world conditions.

What about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)

“The Silent Hunter has been used by Saudi Arabia to guard against Houthi drones and missiles.”

“During the World Defense Show in Riyadh the February 05, 2024, Poly Technologies announced the first hard-kill engagement of a one-way attack drone.[6]”

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

#133

Post by ivape »

ajross wrote: post #118
Ciantic wrote: post #19

The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4] [1]: https://ardupilot.org/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk... [3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot [4]: https://www.404media.co/ukra…

To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.

So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.

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

#134

Post by technofiend »

Mossy9 wrote: post #120
lenerdenator wrote: post #78

Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this. The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery. If middle powers like…

Apparently the final tally was 12 planes, but still, an impressive display

Depends on whether you mean damaged or destroyed. Ukraine reports 41 damaged, 12 destroyed.

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

#135

Post by masom »

ajross wrote: post #118
Ciantic wrote: post #19

The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4] [1]: https://ardupilot.org/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk... [3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot [4]: https://www.404media.co/ukra…

To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.

I remember NodeCopter and running OpenCV to control them years ago.

https://gist.github.com/andrew/2f81952f4867d1b200bb

The big difference is they can now run this on the copter instead of being remotely controlled; a 100$ raspberry pi has enough processing power for this, and so does several other off-the-shelf mini computers powered by lithium batteries.

Crazy times.

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

#136

Post by glitchc »

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.

Lasers aren't effective. Most of the drone is just an empty frame. The control board is pretty tiny, as is the ordnance. Targeting those or the propulsion systems is quite difficult. Sure, you can punch holes in the chassis but it takes a lot of guesswork to hit something vital. It's the wrong weapon. Something with an area of effect, like a shotgun or a net is much better suited to stopping drones.

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

#137

Post by dboreham »

boxed wrote: post #100
ladyanita22 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what about the AI part that has been mentioned by several outlets?

I would assume someone speculated and then the hype brain took over and everyone reported it as AI. I've had that happen to the company I work at and we literally have zero AI stuff.

Hype Brain :) And the language changed just a little bit..

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

#138

Post by masom »

ivape wrote: post #133
ajross wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.

So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.

OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags.

Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.

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

#139

Post by falcor84 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #70
netsharc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now we know making an ersatz cruise missile in the garage is possible...

True, though (so far) range, velocity, and payload are far smaller than what we expect for a "cruise missile".

Well, this week proves that range and velocity limitation can be overcome if you ship them near to their destination in small boxes ahead of time. This wasn't really an option with cruise missiles.

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

#140

Post by _verandaguy »

XorNot wrote: post #110
_verandaguy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this oversimplifies the matter. At a micro level, sure, you could argue that kill/no-kill decisions are being made by frontline enlisted soldiers, but the stress, the exhaustion, and being able to see your enemy downrange add a degree of humanization and discretion. Wars are brutal. Some warring factions are incredibly brutal. But taking a human life can't be reduced to a `KILL? [Y/N]` decision made by some M…

You could start by not inventing vague hypotheticals to argue against, and instead engaging with observable, measurable strategic and tactical reality? War is studied. There are journals, papers and research on war fighting at all possible levels. In the most recent action by Ukraine you can observe actual reality: what did they attack? Military equipment of the enemy. Why did they attack it? To degrade the enemy's a…

In this specific case, I agree that it was fine -- using drones with limited decision-making ability to strike targets like parked aircraft is okay, as long as there's an overwhelming likelihood of the drones not getting false positives from invalid targets.

My response was more aimed at the parent comment to my previous one, which seemed to paint delegating kill/no-kill decisions with a brush of "I don't know why this is such a big deal."

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