Ukraine War thread.

The drones are terrifying. The consumer drones that Ukraine uses are racing drones and they're very fast. They're much harder to fly than photography drones, but they're super maneuverable and very fast.

Still they are very short range and they require two-way communication to work.

I don't think we would be in a situation similar to this Ukraine Russia fight. Basically a trench warfare deal where the fighting is in close proximity to a front line.

I think that we would obliterate any given area that we wanted to operate in and it would be pretty much free of drones.

The Russians are too stupid and are incapable of doing something like that.

Quote from Toad

Drones are proving to be a much more capable weapon than anyone imagined before this little war started.

I feel certain that counter drone technologies are getting mucho interest. You can bet the chinks are going to school on this.

How many chink subs sank before the idiots figured out to flood tubes before opening outer doors?

Quote from Gina

The drones are terrifying. The consumer drones that Ukraine uses are racing drones and they're very fast. They're much harder to fly than photography drones, but they're super maneuverable and very fast.

Still they are very short range and they require two-way communication to work.

I don't think we would be in a situation similar to this Ukraine Russia fight. Basically a trench warfare deal where the fighting is in close proximity to a front line.

I think that we would obliterate any given area that we wanted to operate in and it would be pretty much free of drones.

The Russians are too stupid and are incapable of doing something like that.

Display More

How do you make a Shotgun, but bigger with a longer range?

Quote from Danneskjold

How do you make a Shotgun, but bigger with a longer range?

I was thinking about this last night. How to make a portable drone defense system.

Anything that tangles those rotors. Even string if it was shot up and fell down through an area like streamers. But that's the last resort when they're right there. And that probably wouldn't work since they're so freaking fast.

But a shotgun is great something like that.

I think the heart of it though is going after the communication and the areas where they're launched from. Because they can't be far away. You just have to have control of the area.

The way we fight, we would have control of the air before we started fucking around with tanks and stuff like the stupid ass Russians.

I think microwave directed energy weapons could fry all the electronics in any area. Or even on a smaller scale at swarms of drones.

Coworker has one that will do 87MPH. It gets there in about 2 seconds.

These guys are flying something similar.

Did any of you ever play starcraft?

Science fiction will become science.

Quote from Gina

The drones are terrifying. The consumer drones that Ukraine uses are racing drones and they're very fast. They're much harder to fly than photography drones, but they're super maneuverable and very fast.

Still they are very short range and they require two-way communication to work.

I don't think we would be in a situation similar to this Ukraine Russia fight. Basically a trench warfare deal where the fighting is in close proximity to a front line.

I think that we would obliterate any given area that we wanted to operate in and it would be pretty much free of drones.

The Russians are too stupid and are incapable of doing something like that.

Display More

Do you still have the data from the FW site GG? Several members here mentioned the post I had made back in 2014, that guys at my r/c club had a 6 rotor drone that could lift a 5 gallon pail of water, and fly at 50 mph with it. I had said then that weaponizing them with explosives, and an inertial navigation board (GPS jammers won't do shit to it then), and you had yourself a poor man's explosive cruise missile. If GPS/radio jamming isn't around, then the drone could be remotely piloted with DJI/whatever FPV goggles - again that was 2014 tech.

Now they simply taking RPG7/16/etc rounds, disabling the arming safety on them so they'll detonate on impact, duct taping them to a drone, and ta-da, in a zone without jamming, they then just chase vehicles, troops, animals, whatever they want, and then crash into them. Not just the RPG rounds either, they use those for anti-vehicle mostly, other explosives too, plus we've all seen them rig up a simple mechanism to drop frags into open hatches. Unreal.

My best friend spent the better part of the last couple years there, with his own company/unit in the foreign fighters unit, he built up a recon/QRF unit, and has SO much info - he's writing a 2nd book eventually. They've completely changed infantry (and all other ground based) warfare.

I did see a recent video on YT, a US platoon NCO tanker in an US armored unit in the CAV IIRC, and he was saying that their main focus and area that they are very concerned about is defending against these cheap commercial mini suicide drones with RPG/etc rounds taped on to them. Also the frag droppers. VERY tough to secure against he was saying, and the US is working hard and fast to come up with reliable anti drone tech and weapons. I'll find it and link it here when I do, it was excellent.

Thanks for continuing to update this thread Rabit, and for having it GG, lots of work, it's appreciated.

edit - heh found it, great video to listen to IMO for the current US armor/army perspective on the war and drones.

Quote from Gina

I think microwave directed energy weapons could fry all the electronics in any area. Or even on a smaller scale at swarms of drones.

But you'd still have to detect it, and aim it fast enough.

Which means that either way, electronic pulse or auto-shotgun, you'd need a radar array on top of every (important) vehicle good enough to pick up a 2 foot wide drone.

I remember seeing a video of a 6 rotor drone being used to lift people into the air and drop them in a lake. Shit looked like fun

It's all fun until someone gets dropped onto the smoker at the end of the dock

I would imagine that detecting the small drones is going to be the biggest problem. From the little knowledge I have they are mostly plastic and battery powered. Radar would have a hard time detecting them and little if any ir signature.

I've thought about GPS drones and all of that, but the ones that were seeing on these videos rely on a video link so that they can hunt down people and targets in real time and chase them or whatever.

So all that stuff is jammable.

Of course the next thing would be autonomous targeting, but they've had that already and that's just a different ball game and a different thing all together.

But these little racing drones that Ukraine is using to drop bombs through hatches, Chase people, fly through windows and hangers and all that stuff is all done because of a visual link and directed by a photography drone monitoring everything.

And even 10 km is a short distance.

Don't think there's any way that we would be involved in this kind of a thing because we would control the area we were fighting in if we were sending tanks in.

As I said before, the Russians are too fucking stupid and incapable of securing the air around their operations.

Quote from Toad

I’m sure drones have our war planners lying awake at night.

Sending 100 tanks that cost $15 million each into battle and having them all wiped out by 3-400 drones that cost maybe $200 each tops is going to be a significant tactical consideration.

The times they are a changin’

Most of a Strategic Airlift Wing could be destroyed right now, from a Waffle House parking lot, by 1 guy with a pickup and off-the-shelf engineering.

It's 1 mile. It could be done with 3d printed drones we were playing with in 2009. Nowadays the average racing multirotor drones are 20mph faster than they were then, with world records around 230mph. I had (I killed it) an 80" fixed wing fpv drone with gps, laser altimeter, etc, using a system called Ardupilot that could fly 15 miles away on 433mhz controls + return to home on signal loss that would only need a minor refit for modern electronics to be a pretty good artillery spotter. I have a 100" model called an Anaconda which I'm fairly sure has seen action in Ukraine, it can haul cameras for 2 hours on retrofitted laptop batteries.

Given the size of an RPG-7 round and a swing-arm drone body to accomodate it, you can pack probably 300 of pnuematic launch tubes in the back of a pickup truck, 15 wide x 20 deep. That should be sufficient to make every aircraft their combat ineffective. Even easy to make them talk on wifi at that range and divide up targets using their machine vision.

If you want to stop something that's just using onboard inertial navigation and machine vision because you're jamming the control and video frequencies, you either have to shoot it out of the air or blind it with lasers. Anybody remember that soviet ridiculous laser tank that was supposed to blind people? Maybe time to dust that idea off.

Quote from definitely-not-indy

If you want to stop something that's just using onboard inertial navigation and machine vision because you're jamming the control and video frequencies, you either have to shoot it out of the air or blind it with lasers. Anybody remember that soviet ridiculous laser tank that was supposed to blind people? Maybe time to dust that idea off.

Where are you going to get RPG shells, though?

Quote from Gina

The drones are terrifying. The consumer drones that Ukraine uses are racing drones and they're very fast. They're much harder to fly than photography drones, but they're super maneuverable and very fast.

They're actually extremely easy to fly. Everybody here that's played AH could do it easily with an afternoon of practice. Within a few hours you'll be shooting gaps the size of an open window. The only thing to tweak with experience is the camera angle. The more angle you have, the faster go since level to your vision is a ton of forward body tilt, but the harder it is to fly slow since you end up seeing more air than ground. Otherwise it's just 2 sticks, Rudder & Power on your left, Pitch & Roll on the right. If you panic, you just flip a switch and auto-hover turns on. Another switch position can turn on angle limits to prevent you from doing rolls and loops.

Practice is also extremely cheap. Most frames hold up to a lot of crashes, they fly on cheap, fast charging lipo batteries, and the only constant replacement is really cheap propellers.