Picrel is an American prototype with a .50cal iirc. So what has the action so far in Ukraine taught us about the role of drones on the battlefield? I mean all kinds of drones, from quad copters dropping grenades/mines/rpg's to small surveillance drones. Especially land based systems like picrel.
>Have we now officially entered the Drone Wars era?
>Should we expect to see systems like picrel coming into play soon?
>What other kinds of developments should we expect?
Feel free to wildly speculate. My first thoughts are that we ought to soon see stuff like picrel, over the next 2-5, become very common. As a consequence of this I expect their usage by Law enforcement to increase.
to be honest i think this is sort of a ww1 moment, a temporary interlude between technologies that produces a war that seems totally bizarre in retrospect. i think total electromagnetic spectrum death is like 15-20 years out and drones that can deal with that will no longer be cheap enough to be employed like this.
I think the war will be used as the example as to why Western military should expand its use on drones and introduce autonomous systems. I think his whole debacle will be used to sell autonomous drones to law e
So you reckon there will be an intense period of mass produced cheap drones followed by a bottleneck as EM tech develops to render them non-viable? Wouldn't massive EM area denial also wipe out all communications? And we'd take a couple of steps backwards in that dept?
emission strength drops off at the square of the distance traveled. i think unit to unit mesh networking using agile beamforming blah blah blah like they're working on will often be fine but longer range signals suffer nonlinearly. modular microreactors are going to allow larger systems to push out comparatively obscene amounts of energy.
skynet begins to learn rapidly and eventually becomes self-aware at 2:14 am edt on august 29, 1997
probably the same old technology treadmill, just faster
What do you think of the notion of a cyber attack being able to take control of autonomous weapon systems? Obviously it has battlefield usage. But I'm also thinking if we DO end up with mass autonomous law enforcement, surely they could be used against the civilian population in a cyber attack by an enemy nation? Just wondering.
i mean, anything that's networked can be attacked. how easy that is to do depends on how well a lot of things are implemented and maintained. i don't think automated law enforcement is likely to happen anytime soon. maybe quadcopters for car chases, but even in the question of raw autistic exercise of power by unaccountable monsters, human police serve a double purpose of putting an occasionally likeable face to the street level enforcement and also sucking away a percentage of capable men into a service that knows where its paychecks come from.
People won't be driving nuclear reactors to the front line to power radio jammers.
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Important question.
Can we just chuck it in the ocean when we're done with it?
HOW CAN THIS LEAD TO GOOD THINGS!?!
Could probably be weaponised in a pinch.
They're not going to put it where it might get shot at.
we're in the age of long range precision fires, dude. 'where it might get shot at' is most of the earth in a real-ass war. time to stop being scared of radiation lol.
thats what you think, fucko
>early MSG
>destroying a Zaku creates a mini nuclear explosion when the fusion generator containment fails
>couple episodes later
>lol its fine
I get that it's a tricky thing to hang and could disrupt the flow of a story to always adhere to it but still funny to think about how they quickly the went from "Amuro tries not to damage the torso to leave the reactor intact" to "mobile suits just explode in a normal sized explosion relative to their size like a tank would"
canon wise it's only supposed to do it if a beam weapon pens the reactor, the injection of extra energetic particles turns it into a fission reaction
the main reason is because nobody wanted to animate wrecks, so everything just explodes and vanishes in a lot of scenes
>Special expensive drones
>Cheap mass produced drones
>EM tech development
>Back to special expensive drones
>???
Now what?
Except that the cheap mass produced kind ought still be viable for law enforcement since they won't be facing countermeasures.
>dumb scientist builds self-aware AI drone that's immune to jamming
>self-aware AI drones decides to kill all meatbags
>terminator scenario
this ain't no joke
Honestly I see it as far more likely we move towards heavy automation and the end of civilization comes about because of a global cyber war that turns those automated weapon systems on civilian populations.
My theory is that military drones are going to switch from using a single omnidirectional antenna to using 4-8 unidirectional antennas in order to counter jamming. A jammer can jam the antennas that are pointing at it but that does nothing if the drone isn't receiving control signals on those antennas.
They're gonna move to AI full autonomy, and then just move around with their own internal navigation plus visuals. They can have an entire detailed satellite map in 3D of the entire flight path so they always know where they are. No need for remote control.
I think the real counter is going to be automated AI air control. Small turrets and small missile systems that can blanket the sky and hit UAV's.
Passenger planes will always have 2 pilots. It is more likely passengers in economy minus will get feeding tubes and standing seats to cut down on cost.
>standing seats
Turbulence says hi
>They're gonna move to AI full autonomy
retard moment
>total electromagnetic spectrum death
HARM is a hard counter to jamming
I firmly believe that we should be sending UGVs for field testing in Ukraine, they would be excellent for the high attritional warfare presented while also providing benefits of smaller size so harder to hit. They’d be great for suppressing entrenched enemies. We should also give them reapers.
>I firmly believe that we should be sending UGVs for field testing in Ukraine
I honestly expected it to be treated as Spanish Civil War 2, where every and any body is using it as a testing ground. but 'muh nukes', 'muh escalation' ruined all the horrible war fun.
They would be hauled off, then sold to china for 250 million dollars so Russia can fund the war. Too risky to lose real tech. Now augmenting say a Leo 1 as a UGV might work. Lower tech, off the shelf parts. Could also make decoys to draw artillery fire and call in counter battery.
Moron a Leo hull would still use the same level of tech internals a smaller hill would need. The tech isn’t the skin of the vehicle you can’t peel it off and slap a different one on to make it “low tech”. A UGV could be a quad bike in a plastic hull with a fucking m202 strapped to a turret.
>If only you knew how bad things really are
That drones are very useful as expendable recon assets and can be pressed into an attack role if the front has crystalized and become relatively static.
Significantly more capable, expensive, and autonomous drones are required to be useful in mobile warfare.
Unmanned ground vehicles are still a total meme and will likely remain that way for quite some time. Though I would definitely make the case that pretty much all manned mine clearing vehicles should be converted to remote operation immediately.
What is it about land based autonomous vehicles makes them meme like? do you mean they just haven't had any real development yet to become useful? Or that there are intrinsic faults to such systems that make them non viable even with greater development?
>What is it about land based autonomous vehicles makes them meme like?
A few things;
- The conditions you'd want to use them in are ones which are too adverse for human operated machines. These tend to be the same conditions in which it's really easy to get your vehicle stuck. Human crew are versatile and good at getting things un-stuck. Aircraft don't have constant contact with mud, rocks, branches, variable ground pressure, etc; which makes them far better suited to remote operation.
- Cameras are very vulnerable and operating any kind of machine remotely runs into depth perception problems. You're missing a lot of the feedback you get from being in a vehicle, like the feel of the terrain underneath the tracks, the sounds, etc. Having worked with robots for work, it's a real pain to maneuver them in cramped spaces. Humans have innate proprioception, and experienced drivers eventually develop a similar sort of feel for vehicles, but it's even harder to build that intuition and muscle memory with something remotely operated.
- No real ability to unjam mechanical failures, toggle manual overrides, troubleshoot, etc. You have all kinds of fighting longevity problems that result in endurance that isn't much better than a manned vehicle.
- They just aren't much tougher than a manned vehicle. Hits that would injure a crewman are just as likely to seriously damage a critical component that renders the machine combat ineffective anyway. To get the most out of being unmanned you need to make the innards compact, and that means they're miserable to work on as there are no interior access spaces.
Some of these problems are certainly solvable and I think they'll eventually have some sort of role, but the advantages of unmanned machines currently lend themselves far better to flight. Flying drones do things that human aircraft can't do at all. UGVs only really do things that manned machines can already do, but at lower risk.
That was informative, thank you
it's way easier to get stuck on something on land while in the air you run into things very rarely.
I love tankettes so much
The issue is robotics gain cost with complexity. Land based systems are going to be tracked and wheeled for awhile because the Boston Dynamics type dog / humanoid ones are wayyy to complex / power intensive to be useful.
Would the tracked machine gun not be useful for squad based crap? Don't they already use them to haul their gear around? Or is that still in development.
Why does this look like something skynet would field.
It's taught us that drones are fucking terrifying and there's no reliably effective way to counter them. Sure you can take one down, if you can detect it, but good luck having a method where you can spot them and then engage before they've done their attack.
I don't think there's been such a blow to the perceived idea of warfare since field artillery started killing formations of men and forcing them to completely revise their thinking.
i feel like some kind of Tesla-esque camera system will be a solution.
why do ground drones suck so much balls compared to flying drones?
I feel like ground drones will never become practical or just pale in comparison to flying drones.
>why do ground drones suck so much balls compared to flying drones?
because the ground is an infinitely more complex and variable environment than the air.
I for one look forward to the future generation of killbots.
Was waiting for someone to post that.
That they're really effective against shitty 1985 militaries.
To counter drones, you will need to create something that is large, heavily, armored, and cannot be taken down in a few shots. Tanks will be obsolete in this business.
Since radio technology will always be jammed thanks to aerial drones and commands will have to be done at a short distance / front or with lasers.
Y'know the reason we don't have landships, giant tanks and mechs? Because of airpower and missile technology. They are massive slow moving targets.
If railguns ever get powerful enough to put nuclear warheads into intercontinental ballistic trajectories, I can imagine giant tanks replacing ICBM silos. They might be big, slow targets but they're still a lot more agile than a missile silo.
The difference being that a missile silo is way more protected than any moving land vehicle could possibly be. Other problems
>Field maintenance
>Support
>BRIDGES
The Germans realized in WWII that it would never happen. The only way I could have ever seen it happening is if for whatever reason aircraft never came about. But as soon as we had aircraft the idea of mobile fortresses went out the window.
At least we got aircraft carriers, the naval equivalent. With a bit of luck in the future we will get airborne drone carriers, which will be the aviation equivalent of the mobile fortress.
I think you're underestimating how useful intercontinental artillery would be and how vulnerable static installations are. The only thing I can see that might make the idea a non starter is if a submarine could mount the railgun and do the same thing while being harder to find and cheaper to move.
m-metal gear??!
I can't help feeling like most drones won't even be operated by soldiers, just civy contractors stationed two or three hundred miles away.
ground drones are memes that will never be a thing, unless its for something like mine clearance
air drones however, have only just entered their infancy and are going to get very scary
Why doesn't Rheinmetall send their T Model?
It is ready to go!
>light tank chassis
>double minigun
that thing is loads of fun in armored core
Rheinmetall always designing the most badass shit
The drones will inevitable become more complex until we have full on ai driven mecha fighting each other. That will be bad ass
It taught us that AlieXpress is your friend. You can use it to get the equipment you need to drop bombs on two vatniks as one performs CPR on the other's gizmo.
It also taught that surveillance is key when engaging in trench warfare. Also, use counter drone tech.