Epirus announced that an upcoming US navy event* will include field experiments to investigate the ability of the company's long-pulse High-Power Microwave (HPM) technology to disable seaborne attack vessels.
*2024 Advanced Naval Technology Exercise Coastal Trident Program (ANTX-CT24)
antx.org
They've apparently already stopped outboard motors with this exact weapon, so should be a nice operational test.
HPMs are a pretty crazy weapon system if they aren't easily countered by something. Most people say muh faraday cages and I don't know enough about signals to counter that, but I do know these power densities are far far higher than what nuclear EMP gets to.
I completely blanked on that using that vid for the thread. One thing I'm curious about is what the turrets / mounts look like for the next gen of naval close-in DEWs. Do you limit their traverse as a safety precaution?
Flagging yourself with a maser seems unacceptable in a way that doing the same with a 5 inch or conventional CIWS doesn't.
There's beamforming you can do since it's an AESA, so I figure they can do safezones. Also, this shit would be horrible to get hit by, you'd get microwave'd through your whole thickness, not the less-lethal skin-deep kind like that Area Denial System.
They can do safe zones yeah
>T. Read the documents
what I hate about EWAR is that it looks fake, but that's how it is when it works. I think it'd be fun to make an open challenge against the system and have civilian penetration testers try to get past it. and make a prize for it. then it'd be interesting and fun.
why do you make a drive-by comment about what you hate about "ewar" in every directed energy thread
comment if you have something to say. ignore thread if you don't
since you were snide I'm not gonna bump with this comment. the point is that the fundamental method of attack is different than a laser, or gun-based system. the disruption to the drone is within its electrical system, it doesn't rupture a structural member, it doesn't destroy a motor, it doesn't blind a camera, it fricks with the electrical signals inside the control pathways of the system. it's nearly the same effect as sending a bogus control signal, which is why it looks fake.
There's nothing snide about it. In another thread you said you hate EWAR because there's so little open source information. Just participate in threads you don't hate.
>choreographed
sad
Step 1: Cover yourself in retroreflectors
Step 2. Drop the retroreflectors because the microwaves are inducing electrical currents in them and making them melt.
>he thinks that HPM can cause direct thermal destruction
It's always about destroying electronics, even multi-MW HPM systems.
Fair, it's more likely to create electrical arcs from the back of the retroreflector. That's not very punchy, tho.
Saying these methods are unrealistic was throwing me.
I just realized that the HPM is basically an Energy Shotgun. We Sci Fi now.
I fear microwave systems are a dead-end in a peer / near-pear conflict. It would be fairly trivial for Russia or China to harden drones against that. Even DEWs aren’t any kind of silver bullet. Missiles and ballistic kills are probably the only reliable counter in addition to EW cutting off comms links and forcing them into less-effective CPU-controlled loitering munitions.
People say it’s trivial to harden drones but I think that’s a load of shit. I haven’t yet to see a realistic method of hardening, let alone one that wouldn’t steeply increase cost. It’s always something moronic like muh mirrors but doesn’t account for weight or control surfaces or optics/sensors or rotors….
It’s like saying you’ll make jets immune to missiles by slapping on armor
Read homie read. That was open source 7 years ago
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1042082.pdf
This is a college essay dude. I literally write this type of shit for my engineering courses. Spoiler: it’s purely speculative. He reads a bunch of sources and tries to make an argument with some conclusions. It’s not even bad, it’s just not definitive and not worth arguing about because it doesn’t test or demonstrate anything. Note the constant use of may and might and could. He’s an intelligent and experienced man and some of the shit in here is useful but it’s also quite dated. And a bit rosey in that some of these mitigation methods could be bypassed by brute force. They’re mitigation techniques too, not a hard and fast counter
I expect the HPM/Hardening relationship will be one of competing sophistication not unlike stealth and radar has become. Neither will be perfectly reliable but both will be necessary, both will become increasingly costly and sophisticated and it’ll be another way in which thirdies are mogged
good primer, thanks
>People say it’s trivial to harden drones but I think that’s a load of shit. I haven’t yet to see a realistic method of hardening
Oh no. Anyway.....
When you're so moronic, is life any easier, or does it make daily life more difficult? The reason this wouldn't work is because the microwave 'safe' container doesn't shield the contents from the microwaves (hence your food heating up without issue). If the solution was this simple you would probably see multi-spectrum forms of passive hardening, because assuming this works in your little moronic world, I would assume many other infeasible things would work too. Real life isn't an anime homosexual-kun.
There's a number of ways but mostly they make the drone heavier. The simplest is a Faraday Cage. Wrap the drone in a conductive mesh that diverts electromagnetic forces around it. Problem, the faraday cage also blocks radio waves so you either have the antenna exposed or automate the drone and pray. It also increases the weight.
The next option is to manage the damage with fuses and breakers. Alas, cutting power to the rotors and cameras is exactly what the Maser is trying to do. Breakers also tend to be heavy.
The last option is to ground the drone, dispersing all that charge into something other than the drone. Unfortunately, that means either landing or carrying around a massive chunk of metal.
yeah that's what I meant. increasing weight is increasing cost, decreasing payload, decreasing speed and decreasing range. there's no simple way to parry microwaves, it's all trade offs and balancing. probably the goal will be to harden enough to reduce the range at which microwaves are effective and then eliminate microwave projectors your drones encounter with guided artillery
>It would be fairly trivial for Russia
>NOOOOO one of the world’s largest MICs can’t implement stuff available in the public domain years ago!!
Russia is obscenely behind on DEW, partially because they are so behind on optics. They have never been very good with lenses manufacturing, and their electronics systems are behind as well
explain to me how DEWs are cheaper than a SPAAG or C-RAM gun.
>explain to me how something that expends nothing is cheaper than a system that necessitates expendables
Electricity is cheap. Bullets are expensive.
And DEWs effective at range are not trivial. The problem is that lasers get attenuated by everything it has to travel through. Basically you have to dump a lot of energy into the air to get at the drone. Modern advancements in storage density and materials makes it feasible, but it’s probably not going to be this rapid fire sweeping of the the sky of swarming drones like what you’re expecting; it’s going to be an effector on a large truck tracking each drone for several seconds at least and will run out of energy much quicker than you imagine. They are discharging at much higher rate than what their generator is making so batteries have to charge, etc.
I agree with the first part but not the latter. Lasers are good for terminal interception and probably eventually APS. Space based lasers will probably be a part of ballistic interception constellations. They will never replace missiles or rifles. I think you’re a bit pessimistic on their magazine depth and ability to track multiple targets but I think in principle we mostly agree on that
Once drones can be rigged to detect the source locations of lasers and microwave projectors, wouldn't this become too risky to use? (since these expensive devices would be in bases instead of sitting alone remotely)
Not really. You'd place these weapons around points you plan to defend anyway. The drones would be sent right at these points and into DEW killboxes.
>(since these expensive devices would be in bases instead of sitting alone remotely)
That's one hell of an assumption here.
Even if that part is wrong, you are right to suppose that destruction by saturation will always be an issue.
But much like the recent demonstration in Israël, there's a ceiling below which mass missiles/drones attack are just being 99.99% intercepted, simply because the ratio of interceptors against projectiles is high enough.
The hope with direct-energy weapons is that the amount of interceptions per unit of time will be high, the success rate of interception will be high and the cost per interception will be low.
That way, the ceiling get raised so high that it finally take so many projectiles to get above it that it's not profitable to attack.