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This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone?
[...] Here is just a short sample of the more out-there anti-drone tools: net guns, drones carrying nets, squads of drones with nets, drones with net guns, and a smart anti-drone bazooka that fires, you guessed it, a net at a drone (we liked that last one). There was a vaporware drone concept that ensnared the propellers of other drones with wire. A Russian firm floated the concept of a microwave gun, to fry the electronics of hostile drones. And most famously, there are the Dutch police eagles, trained to snag a drone from the sky.
Part of the problem for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and other entities trying to protect against drones is that they're cheap. Workable quadcopters cost as little as a couple hundred dollars. Is there a way to knock drones out of the sky that's just as cheap as the drone itself?
Source
http://www.popsci.com/how-to-stop-a-drone
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 13 2017, @02:47PM
How do you detect and track a small mostly plastic object flying around.
Having built a little sub-250g one myself I can assure you that the non military community puts zero effort into RFI suppression.
Probably a good place to start before building little mini HARM missiles would be sniff for completely unshielded 3-phase brushless motors running 1000+ RPM. Electrically noisy as all hell. When you detect one sound an alarm. Use DF loops and with enough sensors reporting strength and alignment a very small perl script should be able to plot the location pretty quickly.
There is an almost too obvious solution, if they can launch one drone on you, go MAD strategy and give each squad a cloud of military grade drones. So you have better 360 degree coverage at a further range than the attackers. I hope you like that whining sound of drones because I suspect the battlefield in 2020s is going to sound like a leaf blower sales convention.
Lets see if every M1A1 had a row of autonomous fast chargers and auto battery pack swappers 1500 HP of gas turbine could electrically keep quite a fleet of our drones in the air. So if every window has one of our drones looking in it, how do you propose the opfor will attack us?
If you want to get the conspiracy theory people going just tell them crappy teen FPS games are drone training. You only live a couple minutes before respawning, you stay low alt because if you see it you can kill it and all the high value stuff is on the ground anyway... Given an infinite supply of bandwidth to the fighting area... Remember we have a lot of people predicted to lose their jobs due to automation, and they're all fat and old and high. We have enough quality cannon fodder to staff army divisions but now each 4 man tank requires say 160 drone pilots back home, that gives you four shifts for 24x7 coverage and ten active drones per tank which frankly might be low and you need maybe 20 drones for military effectiveness and lets say 40 battery packs and a 20 pack multi-battery charger... Its not entirely insane of an idea.
I've gone to a couple outdoor drone racing events and given a small target and competitive testosterone its not unusual for drones to hit each other, so have half the drone force for a tank (five) flying CAP near the tank and the other half (five) doing recon missions in areas where it would be convenient to view and attack a tank. That forces the opfor into positions where its not easy to see what the tank is doing, which may very well be the whole point of the exercise. Sure Mr Opfor our drones will mercilessly hassle you when you're in the five best places to ambush their tank, so you go to the sixth best place where the infantry carefully set up a textbook perfect killbox ambush for you and then ...
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday February 13 2017, @04:36PM
I like your thinking. I order to reduce the cost of operation, we can make the drones semi autonomous. Then you can have dozens of drones controlled by a master "manager" that will keep observation of all the drones, ensure the drones are patrolling the correct locations, schedule charging, alert ground forces when the drones spot something on their sensors, and ensure that all the TPS reports are submitted with the correct cover letter of the week.
If the reports aren't necessary, then even the manager's job could be automated.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 13 2017, @05:03PM
From a combat perspective suddenly having tank commanders going from three people and a radio yelling at them to an extra ten pilots high on energy drinks back home is likely to be a problem, so I like the idea of a flight controller talking exclusively to the tank commander.
Something I like about grognard hex based military sims/games is I can bolt something like this on to MBT (a great cardboard game, not computer game) and just try it out. So the alternative rules of simulation is zero fog of war in all adjacent hexes because of CAP, zero ambush situations, plus you can warp the arty game mechanic into tasking a drone recon force to any hex in sight. It would seem to unbalance the game so much as to make it unplayable, which I guess makes it a good or inevitable weapons system.
Culturally things would get weird if tank crews go from mostly being tankers to mostly being drone combat pilots teleoperated from back home. I wonder if drone combat pilots would have to be enlisted and put up with the green weenie or be the usual civilian contractor types. Hmm.
There's probably a decent hard sci fi or military sci fi book buried in here somewheres. Really I have no idea why I do this computer shit when I should probably be writing sci fi novels. In my infinite spare time, I guess.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday February 13 2017, @11:00PM
So what you are saying, some dude with a $200 drone can invoke a $5,000,000 counteroffensive. Sounds like the $200 guy wins no matter what here.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 14 2017, @01:07AM
The drones will be fully autonomous, and a flock was just launched from a Super Hornet for testing recently.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek