I have accidentally seen far too many videos from !ukraine@sopuli.xyz to know that these things are fucking brutal.
Knowing full well that on a metric of pure numbers, these don’t compare to other weapons of war, but there’s something about the personal nature of these fuckers that are just so fucking soul-destroying.
Those videos are definitely NSFL (and are usually marked as such, in fairness), but most of them have zoomed-in, full-screen footage of the carnage they leave behind. They are mostly individual or 2-3 individuals hiding/cowering alone in a trench, blown to literal pieces and left dying, completely unaware that somewhere on the other end of that drone is an operator watching their final excruciating moments of life.
It is one thing to be operating a long-range artillery weapon, or a drone flying at several thousand feet firing long-range missiles, or being in a close-combat life-or-death situation, but it’s a completely different experience watching a shell drop on a defenseless, terrified and cowering human (likely coerced into war or forcibly compelled to the front-line) as if you’re 10 fucking feet above them, while yourself are completely out of immediate harm.
Fuck war, but especially fuck these drones in particular.
c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz
The syntax you want is this:
!ukraine@sopuli.xyzWhich yields this:
That’ll create a hyperlink to the community through whichever lemmy frontend a given person reading your comment is using. So, for example, I’m reading it on lemmy.today, and there, it’ll be https://lemmy.today/c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz . Lets a given user just click and then subscribe to the community.
thanks
Bombs strapped to remote controlled planes aren’t the weapons of the future. The American military has fucking autonomous robot dogs that carry machine guns and have thermal imaging sensors.
I disagree. Ukrainian style suicide drones combined with autonomous robot dogs carrying guns with thermal sensors are the weapons of the future, and it is a horrifying future. Governments will absolutely use both.
That looks like something that will work very well, until a bomb gets dropped on it from a $5 remote controlled plane.
Drones currently outpace their countermeasurs. This will definitely not be a thing forever. I think the effectiveness of cheap drones will go down as be countermeasures are invented.
We already see new very effective military drone jammers starting to come out
The only reliable counter to a drone is likely another drone.
I suspect Peter F Hamilton got it close, in the Confederation series, with WASPs. They are space based weapon platforms. They carry a mix of offensive and defensive subsystems, and operate with swarm logic.
I could easily see a larger drone carrying a swarm of 1 shot micro drones. When close, some would be sacrificed to get better sensor data, others would go on the attack. Conversely, a defensive target would launch their own swarm. It’s goal would be to stop the attackers getting a good shot on a high value target. It might also counterattack, either against the mother ship drone, or backtracking to find the launch site.
Jamming would also be part of this. A jammer could easily cut off the swarm from external data sources. Live satellite or remote surveillance systems would be cut. Point to point lasers are far harder, as are burst transmissions. Local sensor drones could easily punch short range data back, or paint targets, until they are destroyed by defensive systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
Anti-air guns are the countermeasure. RADAR good enough to detect drones + an aimbot and programmable air-burst round to “shotgun” your pellets to damage those soft plastic bits.
We’re going back to WW2 tech. AA guns were considered obsolete because Helicopters + Missiles had more range. But now we need to build cheaper AA Guns for the anti-drone role.
AA Guns are also useful vs infantry, so in an infantry vs infantry fight, having an AA Gun platform will be useful even without any drones around. Airburst and rapid fire is always useful, and I expect the computers that make RADAR possible will be far cheaper today than decades past.
They may both have a role.
If you know that a given point is at risk of attack, using a static defense like AA guns is practical. Say you have some sort of specific, high-value target that you can put AA guns around. That may be a very sensible thing to do.
But the problem, if you intend to rely only on those, is that there is then a concentration of force issue. The attacker can choose which point to attack; they get the initiative.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
But, okay, say you try to go big with static defenses. Let’s say that you can obtain and pony up the resources to hypothetically stick an AA gun at every single point along the front line and border, and that your AA gun has the altitude to hit a drone. You have an unbroken line of engagement envelope all around a country. That’d be an extraordinary expenditure, but it could hypothetically be done. So a drone has to fly through defended airspace. The problem is that if the other guy expends an equivalent amount of resources, he can buy a shit-ton of drones and fly them all through a single gun’s engagement envelope. Even if he doesn’t even bother to try to attack the antiaircraft gun, your gun defenses are just going to get overwhelmed, because all of the attacker’s resources are engaged, whereas the vast bulk of the defender’s resources are not in the fight. Maybe you hit a tiny percentage of drones, but the rest are going to be able to simply fly through.
The problem is that the cost of static defenses in that scenario grows at something like the square of the scale of the air conflict – you have to have enough static defenses to counter all of the attacker’s aircraft, and pre-place those defenses at all points that might be attacked, whereas the cost of the attack grows only linearly. It’s cost-effective to use static defenses only if the attacker is compelled to attack a limited number of points.
If that’s not the case, then using some form of mobile defense is more important – say, I don’t know, you have a fleet of gun-armed, jet-powered counter-UAS UASes. Dollar-for-dollar, they might not be as effective as a static gun. But…you can route most or all of them in to meet any given attack.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points; and his forces being thus distributed in many directions, the numbers we shall have to face at any given point will be proportionately few.
For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
Numerical weakness comes from having to prepare against possible attacks; numerical strength, from compelling our adversary to make these preparations against us.
Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.
But if neither time nor place be known, then the left wing will be impotent to succor the right, the right equally impotent to succor the left, the van unable to relieve the rear, or the rear to support the van. How much more so if the furthest portions of the army are anything under a hundred LI apart, and even the nearest are separated by several LI!
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ~400 BC
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
You use the word easily so many times here where it becomes more and more apparent that you probably don’t think it means what it means
I’ve worked with drones of various sizes. Bigger and more expensive ones are more capable, but hard to make bullet proof. If you can remote off their sensors and weapons into cheap, more disposable systems, it makes sense.
A big drone, like a predator, drops a package into an area. Mid sized multicopters provide local computing power and coordination. Small planes provide fast loiter surveillance. Small multicopters with cameras give more accurate coverage. For attack, you have what amounts to a hand grenade with props. Protection takes the form of similar disposables. A flying strobe light to mess up optical tracking. Chaff bombs to mess up radar tracking. Smoke to obscure the high value units.
A lot of these I could throw together myself, given a few weeks, and a few grand. What part wouldn’t be easy, for a large and well funded military r&d team?
What part wouldn’t be easy? The hand grenade with props. The strobe light. The chaff. The software. The batteries and power supply. The reliability. The compute requirements. There is so many things that are easy sounding to you because you romanticise the idea but it’s not easily done at all
Easy for a remotely advanced military force.
An explosive drone is easy. Just a small amount of high explosives and an electronic detonator.
Strobe lights could just be an overdriven LED. It just needs to dazzle optical sensors for a few seconds.
Chaff is just lightweight foil. It’s effectively an oversized party popper. It’s job is to help overwhelm radar based tracking.
Software is the hardest bit. At the same time, many computer game ‘AIs’ are good enough at this they need to be dumbed down significantly. It would be more specialised, but only needs to be written once, then rolled out to a fleet.
Batteries would be a swarms limiting factor. Single shot lithium would likely be the bulk. 5-20 minutes of flight, then it’s dead. Disposables would likely need to be moved into position by other means, either a dedicated transport drone, ground transport, or air drop. Your transport doesn’t need to stay in the combat zone however, it can bug out and be reused. Larger more specialist systems would land and loiter to save batteries, and/or be fuel cell powered.
Reliability is handled by numbers, losing 10% is fine, when you have 20% extra.
Computing requires would be met by something like Nvidia’s Jetson range. They are designed for low power, low weight AI processing. Putting a tflop of computing power in the close Comms loop would be simple. The controller would be the most expensive part of the swarm. Not only would it need enough power, both computing and electrical, but also significant Comms capabilities. Radio links, with optical backup would be the workhorse. With a mesh setup, including dummies to help hide it’s location. This is similar to how the display drones work. An expensive hub, serving a cheap swarm.
While none of this is “easy” for a random guy in a shed, or a terrorist in a cave, it’s child’s play compared to a lot of the tech the US can deploy.
It’s not easy for you, me
For anyone.
It’s easy for the anime engineers in your head
No, it’s not just arts and crafts foil put in a box and now you have chaffe
Again it’s just you romanticised the idea and don’t understand how complicated such a system would be, it’s beyond our capabilities to make
military hardware is not made to be cool, it’s made to be cost effective and reliable
I design build and operate broadcast equipment. A good chunk goes onto UAVs. I’ve built small quads, and I’ve played around with equipment fully capable of some of the more complex tasks. E.g. live 3D mapping from an airborne capable computer.
I’m also friends with several people who used to design and build military equipment, including radar systems. Military tech is a weird mix of amazingly high tech, stupidly simple hacks and long lifespan versions of off the shelf technology. I’ve a fairly good feel for how hard or easy a good chunk of the bits are to build. Most of what I suggested I could personally design and build, or easily commission, given some time, a reasonable budget, and access to restricted resources as required.
In its simplest form, chaff is just tuned lengths of mylar foil. As it flutters, it glitters in a radar beam. This creates a large noise floor. While modern military chaff is more advanced, the old stuff will still cause problems for modern systems. It’s not trying to hide a tank, or pull off a missile’s lock. It’s trying to swamp the signal from a tiny, mostly plastic, drone.
I’m also not saying to reinvent the wheel. Chaff is now a fairly niche defence tool. It’s hard to use while advancing, and gives away your position. It also needs to be integrated with other countermeasures to be useful. It is still a fairly solved problem however. It’s cheap to make, quick to deploy, and available in bulk, if required.
Most modern military equipment isn’t expensive due to its inherent nature. It’s expensive because it’s a niche product, and the buyers have deep wallets. The same game plays out in broadcasting. A £100k camera isn’t that much better than a £5k one. It is better however, and buyers are willing to pay for that difference.
The reverse is also true, as Ukraine is proving. 100 $1k drones are more useful than 1 $100k, ultra capable, drone or missile. The point of a swarm is to allow multiple cheap systems to do the job of a far more expensive weapon.
It’s going up be interesting and scary when we see the first mega swarm of drones, a river of them just pouring through the sky and hammering from every direction at the defenses.
Constant evolution of drone and antidrone, a production race with frontlines being slowly shifting walls of drone combat, them pouring out of factories as fast as they can be made with the front moving based on who can make more per hour
I suspect it will be more subtle even if it’s only battery life limited. Huge swarms will also struggle against fixed defences. More likely it will be used in ambush. E.g. air deployed near an enemy convoy, or swarming from rooftops and windows onto an infantry unit. Counter deployment will have to be seconds to stop the lead elements. Potentially with heavier reinforcements flying in.
I’ve personally got visions of a Boston dynamics dogbot with a harness full of drones. 1 button press and a few dozen micro drones swarm out, with larger ones launching as needed.
I could also see facial recognition drones being deployed from a predator drone, like cluster bombs. A little akin to the bots used in the film minority report. They swarm a building or block, and try and identify all the faces they can find.
The key thing however will be battery life. Multicopters are power hogs. You need around 40% battery to get maybe 5-20 minutes flight times (depending on how the manoeuvre). Longer times can be achieved , but requires larger systems with higher costs. Is 1 system with a 2 hour flight time worth 20 smaller systems only good for 10 minutes?
Jammers only work against remote controlled drones. Autonomous ones have no such issue. And jammers are never a problem against civilians, which tech like this will eventually be used on.
That’s only one example
Onboard AI guidance is not difficult.
I will be very suprised if this isn’t already happening.
It’s one thing detecting a person with machine learning in a test and an actual soldier with camouflage in a very imperfect environment. Also good luck telling friend from foe from civilian.
This has all sorts of problems while making the whole system more complicated and prone to issues. Not the mention moral questions of autonomous weapons. I have no doubt it will happen but not yet, not here.
Why would the drone differentiate an armed person from a civilian? I mean, you’ll be asking to separate out children next, at that rate!
Yes it is.
Both of you are right.
It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.
If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.
That was a good guess but unfortunately it is just difficult even in the scenario you proposed
Realtime person detection and following it with a drone? Difficult for me, certainly, but there are enough people out there who have done it.
If I had to guess, the government has had this tech since at least the early 2000s. The CIA has been doing shady ass shit since their inception, and shit like that is probably only the tip of the iceberg of what they currently have. Though they’re probably using something closer to grenades than in that film, as 1 drone to 1 kill probably isn’t enough.
That short film is one of only a few that has stuck with me.
Western countries have been slow to absorb these lessons. Simple and cheap weapons will not replace big, high-end platforms, but they will complement them. The Pentagon is belatedly embarking on Replicator, an initiative to build thousands of low-cost drones and munitions able to take on China’s enormous forces. Europe is even further behind. Its ministers and generals increasingly believe that they could face another major European war by the end of the decade. If so, investment in low-end drones needs to grow urgently. Moreover, ubiquitous drones will require ubiquitous defences—not just on battlefields but also in cities at peace.
I think that any war determined by who can churn out more low-end drones is going to be dominated by China, given their overwhelming share of the consumer market. Consumer drones are made there because China has comparative advantage.
That will only change if the basic methods of manufacture change, like, production is far more heavily automated. And even then, it’s not clear to me that China has a disadvantage in industrial automation.
I think a more-interesting technology question is who has better counters to low-end drones. There, I can imagine room for a technological advantage. As things stand today, though, we really don’t have a compelling answer, and we probably should have come up with one by now.
These flying IEDs can be defeated with some simple radio jamming. They will fall out of the sky without a remote control signal.
So, I haven’t played with them, but even commercial, off-the-shelf DJI consumer drones have the ability to return to some location if they lose link, so they’re gonna have at least GPS in there. You can jam that, but they’ve got accelerometers, and you can’t jam that. They shouldn’t drop out of the sky even if you can manage to jam things.
It looks like DJI drones have frequency-hopping spread spectrum support, too. So you have to jam all frequencies that they’re using, since you don’t know which they’re using at any given instant. For consumer hardware, it probably doesn’t matter much – nobody is jamming you, so you sit in your little assigned piece of spectrum, have a handful of channels – but in a war, you can probably expand the frequencies you use, use a huge chunk of the spectrum, if need be.
There are also some forms of jam resistance that AFAIK are not being exploited – beam-forming or directional antennas.
Both Russia and Ukraine have a pretty strong interest in using electronic warfare against drones, and the fact that both are still using a lot of them seems like a pretty good argument that they can’t currently successfully stop them via electronic warfare.
And even if you can jam signal when it gets really close to the target, if you have a second drone watching – which it looks like Ukraine and Russia often are, from the videos I see, maybe to do damage assessment – you can probably stick a laser designator on those, if they haven’t already, use it to guide the weaponized drone in.
Another quick off-the-cuff improvement: the drone feeds being sent today contain a lot of unnecessary information, more than is required for a human operator to guide them in. The less information that needs to make it through, and the more you can afford to cut out and use on redundancy in transmission, the more-jam-resistant the thing is. You can fall back to a unreliable-channel mode if need be for the last bit of the approach.
Here’s a satellite source image. That’s lossily-compressed, JPEG, at 510,254 bytes. It’s pretty, but if you already know what you’re looking at and are trying to just ram it, you don’t need anything like that much information.
Here’s the same image after I’ve run a Laplace edge-detection on it, denoised it, run a threshold on it (you could probably use a simple heuristic to select the threshold, but even if not, it’d be fine for the operator to manually choose a threshold), converted it to 1-bit, and then PNG-compressed it. That resulting frame is enough to keep identifying the objects in the image, enough that if you could see that frame, an operator could hold it on-target, and it’s only 30,343 bytes, about 6% the size.
Then you can use the newly-free bandwidth to send forward error correction information – some folks here may have used it in the form of PAR2, popular in the piracy scene – so that if any N% of the data makes it through, the frame can be reassembled. Now it’s a lot harder to jam.
And that’s an off-the-cuff approach that took me about 2 minutes just using the tools that I have on my system (GIMP and PAR2) and zero time trying to improve on it. You figure that if you pay someone who actually specializes in the area to bang on this a bit, you can probably get something rather better.
Sounds like a good idea. It also sounds like you know a few things about GIMP - are you subscribed to gimp@lemmy.world?
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Ah, well spotted, you c*nt! Hope you have a wonderful day too!
Can we please just fight all of our wars on the moon with giant robots like God intended?
deleted by creator
What sucks is that us hobbist’s can’t get FPV, motors, ESC’s, or batteries at reasonable prices (if at all)
The reality of it, is this is short lived.
Anti-Air meant for small drones like this is coming and soon.
And it will shut these down quickly.
How would that anti-air against small drones look like? It is not easy.
Probably miniaturized versions of CIWS / C-RAM or laser systems.
These small drones attack single people and small infantry groups as well as small vehicles up to heavy armor. With laser there is the issue of portability, especially power supply. Also cheap reflective coating requires very high power densities for a kill. Apart from detection and tracking which can use fused microphone array and camera array data the time to react is very short and it has to provide high density of fire on the cheap. I’ve seen some shotgun use with very limited effectivity. Ditto nets. Maybe antidrone swarms can work, but power limits loitering time. Swarm attacks can easily overwhelm protection.
It looks like a hard problem.
I haven’t really been paying much attention, but last I looked, lasers ran into sustained-rate-of-fire issues, which is one of the things that you’d want something like this to be able to do.
They’re nice in that they can counter very-fast-moving missiles – can’t outrun light or the laser’s panning speed – but I don’t know if a powerful laser is necessarily a cost-effective way to deal with a large number of inexpensive drones.
There are cheap continuous operation 2 kW fiber lasers for material processing which could be enough for the flimsier slower drones.
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Do those maintain the kind of beam coherency required for long-range use?
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I think that the weaponized lasers I’ve seen in actual military use, like the AN/SEQ-3, are pulse lasers. I don’t know why that is the case; if I had to guess, it might be necessary to avoid some forms of defenses, like producing so much thermal expansion so quickly that it tears apart ablative armor or prevents the target from rotating or rotating some form of shield to change the point exposed to the laser. I don’t really follow laser technology, though. Are these capable of pulsed output?
The small drones do not require a long range use, since you are going to detect them only late, and need to terminate them within few seconds.
I have seen an improvised optics on a Youtube channel where a 2 kW continuous operation fiber laser had enough energy flux at 100 m or farther.
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Nah, lasers too big. It would be a simple birdshot shotgun. Its detection and aiming.
When they are high up, they can be hard to spot and hear.
But a pair of sensitive mic’s and a camera designed to look for them could easily be paired with some AR glasses.somebody already put lasers on F35 and israelis are using ground-based lasers as a complement to iron dome
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
Perhaps instead we could just restructure our epistemically confabulated reality in a way that doesn’t inevitably lead to unnecessary conflict due to diverging models that haven’t grown the necessary priors to peacefully allow comprehension and the ability exist simultaneously.
breath
We are finally coming to comprehend how our brains work, and how intelligent systems generally work at any scale, in any ecosystem. Subconsciously enacted social systems included.
We’re seeing developments that make me extremely optimistic, even if everything else is currently on fire. We just need a few more years without self focused turds blowing up the world.
most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
Drones aren’t being used to kill other drones, they are being used to drop bombs on people
