Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the attack helicopter dead?

hushkit.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 650 posts

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#271

Post by debo_ »

navbaker wrote: post #154
OliveMate wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now. Worth mentioning that this already happened to an attack helicopter 20 years ago! The Comanche[0] was a revolutionary recon/attack helicopter with some mental stealth engineering behind it - everything from limiting sound profile via blade design & fenestron, a radar presence a frac…

I spent tons of hours as a kid playing Comanche on our old 486!

Comanche, LHX Attack Chopper, Gunboat and Wolfpack. A handful of military sims meant hundreds of pages of specs to sift through -- best copy protection I ever had to deal with. I probably spent more time reading the manuals than I did playing the games.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#272

Post by foota »

hagbard_c wrote: post #42
foota wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem right to me. The limiting factor here is the ability of an air to air missile to hit a target (and to find the target in the first place). A drone might be more survivable (if it's better at avoiding missiles because of the G-forces etc.,.), but it shouldn't be any better at destroying an enemy jet, right? That theoretical highly maneuverable drone with a highly advanced sensor suite isn't going to…

> what's the advantage? You wouldn't be bound by the number of pilots You gave part of the answer right there. Not only would you not be limited by the number of - hard to replace and time-consuming and expensive to train - pilots but you don't run the risk of losing them either. > but if the drones are too expensive it doesn't matter. The large expense for fighter aircraft tends not to lie in the actual production c…

Hm... I guess the argument here is something like: we don't build 10,000 F-35s because we can't train 10,000 pilots. But with drones, the pilots are no longer a limiting factor so we can plan to scale drone production beyond what we do airplanes?

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#273

Post by nine_k »

bluGill wrote: post #211
nine_k wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Israel's "Iron Dome" is supposed to include lasers, and they did use lasers to shoot down incoming rockets. In a stationary setting, like a factory or a bridge, lasers can be hard to overload, with their fast targeting, straight-line shooting, and the cost of a shot measured in single dollars. Small / cheap / slow drones with 1-2 kg payload would be an easy target. Tanks / APCs / IMVs / other armored devices that…

Tanks and the other things you list do much better when used by well trained troops in ways that the trainers tell you to. russia isn't doing that so they look bad but that is russia not the concept

Russian troops are definitely poorly prepared. Likely Saddam's troops were in a better shape in 1991, when the same tanks clashed in Kuwait: Abramses and Chieftains vs T-72s and T-80s. Then the Western tanks showed an overwhelming advantage. Now about a quarter of Abrams tanks in Ukraine were rendered inoperable, some of them plainly destroyed. Tanks did become more vulnerable to anti-tank weapons.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#274

Post by debo_ »

alisonatwork wrote: post #243
the_af wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gunship 2000 here! I loved that it had a dynamic campaign where the frontline moved according to how well you did. Before that, I also enjoyed LHX. > Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game. Do you remember what the copy protection was for MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter? It was the silhouet…

If you remember LHX fondly, there's a new game out with similar aesthetic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1906230/Thunder_Helix/ Still EA for now, but it looks promising.

Wow, it looks almost exactly like LHX. You weren't kidding. But can I watch from the viewpoint of my TOW missile camera, I wonder...

Thanks for the link.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#275

Post by JohnBooty »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #263
Teever wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't small, cheap drones do to the modern fighters what they're doing to modern tanks?

Truly modern fighters have advanced defenses across the EM spectrum. Hardening a drone against those defenses makes them no longer “small” and “cheap”. Also, drones typically have much lower speed than a modern fighter. An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone where a key property is that it is much faster than the fighter, but this makes it expensive.

    An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone
Yeah.

And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#276

Post by jandrewrogers »

wisty wrote: post #198

It's always worth remembering that a soldier who costs a million dollars to train can be killed by a 20 cent bullet. But soldiers still exist. Everything in a war will involve losses that appear asymmetric if you consider losses in isolation. War is a horrible affair. Helicopters won't disappear because they can be shot down, but if UAV, communications, plus artillery can replace them. Communication is the most likel…

FWIW, the US communication systems are designed to work in insanely degraded EM environments, they push the bounds of information theory. Bandwidth won’t be great but they will work. The other side of this is that any system that can degrade the environment to that extent is painting a giant target on itself, and the US has purpose-built “seek and destroy” platforms for anything that is aggressively limiting available bandwidth.

A lot of US systems are designed to be functional with bandwidth that is significantly less than an old dial-up modem. In the average case that doesn’t happen but it is an explicit design target to enable operation in severely compromised environments.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#277

Post by nradov »

MarkMarine wrote: post #218

In the war I fought in, there was a markedly different approach to combat air ops between even just the different service branches. The Army tended to use the Apache like it was a flying tank, hovering and delivering ordinance; the Marines (which is where I fought) flew as low and as quickly as possible even while sending rounds and hellfire missiles downrange. The marines were not losing aircraft in anywhere close t…

Attack helicopters might still have a limited role in some theaters. But the Marine Corps seems to realigning to fight China in the Western Pacific where, regardless of survivability, regular attack helicopters lack the range and speed necessary to be relevant. They might also face a threat from manned fighters which are potentially very dangerous to helicopters, even those flying evasively at low altitude. Thus the shift in force structure away from attack helicopters and towards the F-35B.

I'm not trying to argue with you and I appreciate you weighing in with firsthand expertise. It's just that current USMC leadership seems to be focusing on different priorities.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#278

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

anonylizard wrote: post #251
karaterobot wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There were no counters to cavalry for like 1000 years. The only generalized countermeasure to cavalry was cavalry of your own. This led to the dramatic territorial and genetic expansion of nomadic peoples, such as the Arabs and Turks. There are specific 'counters' like pikes, fortifications etc, but they only trade effectively against head on charges. Cavalry still held the advantage of tactical mobility, which meant…

Great historical context, ty.

You're right that you may only find a counter to the latest tech once you've lost the war, or you may never find it and you'll only see the victors over you displaced by someone who does find a counter and now rules over you instead of your first enemy.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#279

Post by JohnBooty »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #238
Teever wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know more about this. Can you provide more details?

TSMC is building significant, cutting-edge fab capacity in the US at present

It's very, very unclear to me what would happen to TSMC's American operations if China invades/seizes/blockades Taiwan.

How independent would TSMC's American foundries be if cut off and forced to operate autonomously if US/China war breaks out?

I am sure that the goal is full independence but I have no idea what the current state of that is, what the state of it will be in 5-10 years etc.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#280

Post by andrewflnr »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #233
Loughla wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? In what world is hand to have combat the nature of war anymore? I don't think I understand what you're saying here. Also, I would argue that winning battles is about numbers and advantage. Winning wars is about effectively reducing supplies and support.

Somehow, it hasn't gone away. There's a disputed border region between China and India where at least 24 soldiers were killed in Jume 2020 in hand-to-hand fighting between the Indian and Chinese militaries.

To be fair, that situation is an extreme outlier even by most pre-modern warfare standards. Exceptions don't prove rules, but they sure highlight the common case.
Post reply on HN