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Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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The game will iterate further. A machine gun works against current drones. It can be countered however. E.g. use a ducted drone, with a few layers of Kevlar facing the gun. It doesn't need to win, or even survive. It just needs to soak up the fire. The other drones rush in, either behind it, or from various angles.
Even things like chaff and smoke can mess up targeting for long enough to rush in.
You can't armor up a helicopter, and these drones are mostly quadcopters.
I've never heard of Kevlar stopping a 30mm round before either. Note that a 50cal is 12.7mm bulltet. A 30mm bullet is considered a cannon an an effective 118 caliber weapon.
50cal is well beyond the size where Kevlar is useful, let alone a 118 caliber airburst round. You need thick steel or Aluminum plates and a drone can't carry that kind of armor.
Smokescreens work on the ground where terrain can provide hiding. I've never heard of an air platform using a smoke screen.
Maybe a flare to draw fire / RADAR, but quadcopters move too fast and cover too much ground for smoke to be useful to obscure sight. AA guns engage at about 3mi or 5km away, who cares about a few meters of smoke?
If it fires big, heavy rounds, then they are slow and of limited numbers. You then bait it at range, or swarm it. If it uses lighter round, to get higher speeds, or more shots, then you use a different platform to soak its shots.
You're also likely vastly overestimating the final engagement ranges.Right now its long flights at relatively high altitudes. A properly designed drone swarm could hug terrain to close, or be deployed early and loiter on the ground in cover.
A good chunk of the swarm would also be small. 10cm would be big enough to carry just enough teeth to not be ignored. They would also be nimble as hell. It would be a numbers game.
As for the use of smoke. You use 3 or 4 types of drone. A smoke bomb lays down cover. Camera drones fly through and around it to triangulate on your gun. Finally a sniper platform drone moves out of cover and shoots blind, using the camera drones feeds. A coordinator might be required to sort the data. Critically, only cheap, disposable drones are exposed to fire.
The key is that you can mix and match drones on the offensive. Your defence needs to be able to react to all of them.
Common 30mm systems carry 700+ rounds and fire 10 per second.
So no on both cases. As I said, gun and bullets are the answer.
Note that these are programmable airburst rounds, meaning the system is self-exploding once it hits the desired range. It wouldn't take more than 5 shots to blanket the area of a smokescreen.
There is no mix and match here. You have yet to describe a system that can handle a typical 30mm gun, let alone two or four of them working as a team.
The actual teammate is a helicopter. The anti-helicopter is a stinger missile. Etc. Etc. And so the war games continue. But I see no role for your hypothetical drone swarm.
By the time you have enough drones to saturate a freaking machine cannon on aimbot that modern AA guns are, I'll add a 2nd or 3rd gun as a teammate. Bullets and AA guns are pretty cheap.
Drones can't effectively fire rifles because of physics. Sorry, just not stable enough. 30mm guns weigh a half ton, easy for ground equipment to move and is why 30mm systems can fire for 3mi out.
Any small gun you put on a drone won't have the range, stability, or accuracy of a ground based autocannon. You need to upgrade all the way to a CAS system like A10 before you compete, but missiles have negated that role on the modern battlefield.
And missiles don't need a drone to launch.
3mi range is distance to horizon on the ground btw. No drone can fly lower than the ground. Any amount of elevation means more range on the AA gun.
Gun drones are perfectly viable. They just can't fire well while flying. (At least not more than 1 shot) The current prototypes have to land and anchor themselves. They are currently machine guns, for area suppression, though anti-material would be viable.
The gun drone is also not in the smoke cloud, it's behind it. The smoke, chaff, strobes etc are just to break the ability to counter target it. You don't need to just saturate the cloud, but the whole area behind it.
As for the smoke, it's not 1 cloud. A drone's advantage is hyper mobility. A swarm would easily attack from multiple directions. Your gun is now required to saturate multiple clouds at multiple angles. 1 might be hiding something nasty, or 2 or none. Smoke (or chaff etc) drones would be dirt cheap, as would simple distraction drones.
To fight it, you would either need to put up a wall of shrapnel, which would quickly deplete a mobile weapon, or get accurate targeting data. Both could be viable, depending on the situation, but it's risky.
As for engagement ranges. A drone swarm would be cut down by advancing over a large open area. I fully agree on that. It would also struggle engaging fixed defences. That changes in a city, or forest, or mountainous area. A patrol or convoy could be encircled by a swarm in seconds, engaging from multiple sides simultaneously.
Your gun can fire 10 rounds a second. That's 50 rounds in 5 seconds. 200 micro drones, hitting from all sides could easily overwhelm it. Most don't even need a payload, they are $10-20 decoys. 1 clean hit on your gun however, and it is potentially disabled. At that point the more expensive stuff can potentially attack with impunity.
It takes 3 minutes for a 60mph drone to travel 3 miles.
It takes 1minute 30 seconds for a 120mph drone to travel 3 miles.
So no. I'll literally run out of ammo (70 seconds of firing) before you arrive.
Please show me a built up area where you have clear line of sight for 3 miles. 3-500m would be optimistic. You would have 10s to 100s of 15cm drones. They would flit around bins, cars, buildings and through windows. A racing drone can pull 4.5G of acceleration. It can spin that in a fraction of a second.
3G is enough to cover 300m in around 5 seconds. That's also assuming it is going from a dead start. If it can build up speed before entering line of sight, it would be even quicker.
Even worse, they could easily spend 30 seconds to manoeuvre around you. The sensor package drones (cameras, lidar etc) playing peekaboo, to snatch data. By the time they move, they've built a complete 3D map. They know every blind spot, every area the gun can't target. Your gun will go from nothing to shoot, to too many targets in a second or so. Most will just have extra batteries. They exist to draw fire. A few will have payloads designed to target your defences. Others will have payloads aimed at breaking up your situational awareness.
If you engage the micro drones, then your firing arcs will give windows for heavier elements to engage you. If you don't, then the armed micro drones will damage your defences or block your sensors, to create the same effect.
Avdiivka.
The vast majority of these battles are fought in the open planes of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMx051QX7mU
I like your attempts at turning this into a 300m problem instead of a 3-mile problem. But I'll take it that you know just how worthless a drone swarm would have been in the practical battlefield at Avdiivka, or other similar locations.