So we are all by now well aware of the threat posed by small, cheap drones like the shaheed or the Bayraktar putting around the battlefield collecting info and/or blowing things up, so the only real question is how to counter them
My suggestion is this, a small (~4m long) unmanned propeller driven aircraft with a powerful engine for speed and laid out in the form of pic related, a WW2 piston prop fighter - which I believe will have the following advantages:
>Capable of engaging and destroying quadcopters, low flying recon and suicide drones or even an unwary helicopter if it got close enough
>Faster and more maneuverable than all other targets in its weight class
>Cheap to produce thanks to older design and material requirements
>good loiter time, can patrol wide areas and engage multiple targets per sortie
>reusable anti drone munition that can return to base after expending on board ammunition
My question therefore is basically what kind of weapons should this revolutionary new unmanned aircraft carry?
Right now my best suggestion is brace of light machine guns in more or less the same configuration as the original WW2 fighter designs but I would like to hear other suggestions if you have any
Shaheed doesn't loiter, collect information, or attack battlefields. It just attacks enemy infrastructure. Also it's not a drone, it's a missile.
A much better answer to low grade missile attacks is to take measures that lower civilian casualties and then just try to fix whatever the missile broke quickly.
The point is that this thing should be able to kill both but will in particular serve as a cost effective way of intercepting suicide drones that cross into friendly airspace
It's a missile. Not a drone.
And no, the point is to just lower civilian casualties, which usually doesn't include active defenses, and then just fix whatever the missile broke. A city losing electricity for two hours doesn't matter to the war effort. You protect civilians with things like active observation in a radius around civilian population centers so people in likely targets know to take cover.
You're better off ignoring the threat past reducing civilian casualties.
I don't think we should settle for just ignoring a threat to civilian lives, I think we should try to do better by intercepting the enemy flying bombs
>just try to fix whatever the missile broke quickly
until your construction crews get targeted or their supply chain's disrupted
i doubt you can easily repair a stretch of high-tension lines and cell towers more than a dozen times before you start running out of specialized components
and if the guys with loiter bombs also have some kind of surveillance capability on the area destroyed, they'll know when the construction crews are vulnerable
>until your construction crews get targeted or their supply chain's disrupted
By what? These drones are incapable of those sorts of attacks. Do you even know what they do? Anything with the capability you seem to think they have is a legitimate threat and costs millions of dollars but isn't survivable over enemy urban areas.
Shaheed isn't that.
You're wrong. What's it going to do? Put a pothole in a bridge?
>until your construction crews get targeted or their supply chain's disrupted
That might be the case with better drones but Shaheds have no camera, are guided to a target area where they'll land within 50m and are loud and slow giving people time to clear out... if they are in any danger at all.
It's looking like the real backbone of the blitz on Ukrainian infrastructure is being handled mostly by Russia's remaining missile stock which they are going hog wild with expecting Iranian replacement missiles. The drones are mostly just eating air defense ammunition that could be used for more valuable targets.
The Shahed is only mentioned so much because trolls larp'd it as Russian HIMARS.
>small, cheap drones like the shaheed or the Bayraktar
those are two entirely different classes of drones
Yes, one's a drone. The other isn't.
Why not make this exact thing but smaller and cheaper then ram it into enemy drones? Save on the resources and complexity of onboard weapons.
>enemy country invades
>recruit RC clubs to hunt drones
making it just large enough to be reusable will save more resources in the long run because you won't need a new drone for each mission
Or, you know, instead of building piston fighters for your gay ass SOVL memes we could do what we've been doing already, the problem being that Ukraine never had the capability to build its own laser defense systems
Sounds like MANPAD bait.
Also
SHORAD with better targeting to gun down drones is a better option, plus some missiles for other targets/getting fast surefire kill if need be. I imagine we may see the return of stuff like Gepard (plus missiles)/ADATS (gun equipped version) or the rise of laser based SHORAD.
Absolutely no one aside from third world countries could reasonably "bring back" gun based SHORAD
the US got rid of all of its M163 VADS... 25 years ago. All of the hype you've ever seen around this vehicle was for a 20mm gun that had a hard limit of 1,800 meters (useless against anything carrying guided missiles, even small ones).
Simply put, missile based systems will remain for class 4+ drones and lasers will be more than adequate for <3
<3 you too, homosexual
SHORAD is good, but can only ever be in one place at a time whereas interceptor drones can be dispatched in response to incursions as they are detected
Ideally you would have both, keeping the SHORAD to protect important locations and/or clean up anything that gets past the interceptors
>Interceptor drone
That's called a missile, anon.