19338

I doubt it would work that way, the electronics, sensors, thrust, and maneuverability to intercept an airborn target are worlds away from a simple GPS chip and a simple airframe.

19339

This is bad:

There is basically no connection between the average American’s personal financial situation and aid to Ukraine, but that sort of thing has never stopped Republicans from attacking foreign aid before.

19340

This drives me nuts. I see conservative friends of mine post crap like this all the time - “why are we sending aid to X when we could use that money to help veterans, the homeless, etc.”, totally ignoring that their political party considers any such spending “socialism” and never supports such efforts.

19341

That would require pretty advanced systems and be fairly unreliable, I suspect.

Basically this.

The Iranian drone is effectively :

  1. Take off and fly to GPS coordinates
  2. Crash directly into the ground at that location

Meanwhile a drone interceptor has so many steps to even get in the area of an incoming Iranian drone, it would probably be it’s own thread. We’ve seen footage of “drone fights” with human operators who just happen to have drones in the area of each other. Now imagine one is just flying at top speed and the other one has to try to detect it, launch, catch up and ram into it with enough force to disable it. These things are BIG. They’re roughly the size of a car (though obviously lighter, but still 440 lbs). Which means you’d need a similarly large drone to impact it to have a chance of it being effected. Your drone also has to be many times faster to catch the thing.

19342

For an intereceptor you would give it a small explosive, ramming would be ridiculously hard. You know what would be cool? Railgun. These things are slow enough and small enough that a much smaller railgun than what we’ve tried to do on ships would be an absolute beast at shooting these down. Or any other hypervelocity rifle.

19343

Martlet (for example) has a modern tri-mode seeker (but no mm wave radar, which I imagine would drive the price up) and costs £30k, supposedly.

It’s funny, traditionally the GOP would be all in on funding proxy wars against the Russians. I wonder what might have changed? /s

19344

Unfortunately, not many cities with railguns available. And drones to attack military targets I’m sure will be more expensive / more highly developed, but to attack a regular city, grenade, flight, maybe a little bit of hardened navigation ability, done.

19345

From what I’ve seen of rail guns at that scale it wouldn’t do much of anything. That’s akin to talking about lasers.

A 50 cal/20 mm of some sort would be more effective imo and you don’t have to invent the things.

Pretty much this.

The solution is guns around the city, with spotters out further. These things are slow and really loud. Spotter hears one, radios to guns, guns engage it outside of city as it approaches. It’s not a complex problem really, it’s just a matter of the materials and manpower to make it happen.

19346

I said cool, not practical! pew pew!

19347

I mean, it would be pretty dope, but from what I’ve seen they don’t work if they’re small. You basically need a ship to make them powerful enough to be better than a gunpowder weapon.

Like this thing has a muzzle velocity of… basically nothing. It’s rounds fire at the speed of an arrow.

19348

Attacks on facilities making things are notoriously uneven in their results. The Israeli attacks on the Osirak reactor complex arguably did more to help the Iraqi WMD efforts than hinder them, and the Iranians have been learning a lot of lessons over the last few decades about how to harden critical infrastructure. There’s no guarantee anything short of a nuke or a massive full-on conventional bombing campaign would actually destroy Iran’s drone-making ability. Just not in the cards, even before you get to the problems of civilian casualties, political fallout, and important things like that.

These drone strikes though, the ones crashing into cities and infrastructure in Ukraine, are nuisances, deadly on a local scale but materially insignificant. They appear hugely dramatic when we see all of the social media coverage, but in terms of what is happening on the battlefield they don’t make much of an impact I don’t think. They need to be dealt with due to their psychological impact, and because doing so would throw the whole thing back in Russia’s face, but these drones are not turning the tide of battle or anything.

19349

Heh, yeah I’ve watched that as well. By smaller I meant the size of an AA gun hooked into the city grid, not a rifle. You wouldn’t need much of a projectile to shoot down these dinky drones. .50 would work but you still have to get rounds on target, and it’s not as easy as folks think. Hypervelocity solves that problem but railguns are still wishful thinking. Only bad thing about CIWS is it costs a few thousand every second it shoots and needs a support team, radar emplacement, etc.

19350

And important point. Militarily they’re being used to do nothing of value.

It’s just war crimes for the sake of doing war crimes.

And Israel already blew up one factory, odds are trying it again wont work and also Iran is on the cusp of possible revolution so unifying them at this time seems like a terrible idea. Especially so since it probably wont do much of anything anyway.

19351

It also needs to be in the right spot. Those things were built to engage targets that are approaching them at short ranges. You’d need to ring a city with them to provide proper coverage.

19352

Ukraine says 30% of its power plants destroyed in last eight days. I don’t know how many drones Iran has sent over, but unless they can think up a solution and implement it tomorrow, it’ll probably be too late. The biggest targets will be hit within a few days, or the supply of drones might run out. It doesn’t seem like just a petty revenge campaign.

Everyone’s scared of escalating Russia, and yet they just decided to plunge the Ukraine into the dark cold right before winter. There’s a line here that Russia is crossing that I feel needs escalation by the West. I know villages have been reduced to rubble already, but there’s something very different to battles on the front, with an implied possibility of a pre-emptive civilian exodus, to terror bombings behind the lines that will cause thousands of innocent deaths due to power failure. if it was just V2-esque terror bombings, it could be interpreted as just impotent amorality, but power is the foundation of modern society.

19353

Honestly something like a Shilka seems like the solution, but my understanding is that it’s hard to pick these things up on radar and engage them. But since they’re slow and loud, and Shilkas can be aimed with a Mark One Eyeball as far as I understand it, they’d be a good answer with a ring of spotters around the target.

Thing is there aren’t that many of the things outside of places like Syria these days. I think the Pole have a bunch of converted ones.

Maybe these terrorist attacks will get more nations to prioritize stuff like Gephardts to Ukraine. It’s an easier sell to the public that you’re sending AA platforms to protect cities from Iranian terror weapons than sending them to help troops fight enemy aircraft.

Edit: It also bugs me that the US has no systems like this outside of the Navy really. We’re all in on missiles, when we just need a bunch of lead in the sky for these sorts of things.

19354

The problem is that these are hugging the terrain and anything on the ground is going to have a very limited winodw when it is in line of sight. It seems those old WW2 antiaircraft towers in Berlin are sort of the solution, except we’re talking about expensive solutions for a specific threat, when it seems the threat can easily change as the technology gets even more sophisitcated.

19355

I wonder how many C-RAM/LPWSs we could get to them?

They seem pretty effective and supposedly they can shoot down mortar shells, so a slow drone should be nothing to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phpabF_5ulU

19356

Surely there’s enough Republicans who understand the gravity of the threat that they would join with Democrats in approving new Ukraine aid?

19357

If McCarthy is the Speaker, he doesn’t even have to bring Ukraine aid up for a vote, so it doesn’t really matter how many Rs would vote for it. Remember, Republican rules in the House are that nothing comes up for a vote unless it has the support of a majority of Republicans in the House. Dem votes are irrelevant to the question of advancing any bill.