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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

Right now they're shooting down small drones with $100k manpads. I'm not convinced drones are sensitive to ECM.

Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver.

Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)

>Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons

I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt.

BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.

>it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target.

Israel demonstrated that capability earlier this year. https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-13004...

Sounds like a fantastic way to rapidly maim a hawk.

I think the goal with this method could be to train the hawk to carry an object such as a net or dangling string that the hawk would drop into the propellers of the drone, thus disabling it.

One could also use a hawk as a platform to carry electronic means of disabling drones.

The problem with hawks and drones becomes one of teaching the hawk to recognize enemy drones since it is likely in future wars that all sides will use drones and that it may be difficult to identify who controls a particular drone without monitoring that drone to map its communication path.

It's cool to use a bird that instinctively hunts other birds but we need to understand that hawks are not hard to see and to eliminate so their utility on a battlefield is limited.

I upvoted you because you may be right. I don't really know if people are IRL training hawks for this purpose, but if they did maybe they could give them protection of some kind, like articulated metal "shoes". It's also possible that smaller drones' propellers just don't have the kinetic energy to damage a bird in any meaningful way. It's all speculation, but I still think it would be very cool.

Weaponised hawks have many interesting properties. They don't emit radio waves, and not much infrared either, so are hard to locate and shoot down. They can loiter forever (well, limited by hawk's lifetime, whatever it is), are self-refueling, and, to some extent, also self-repairing and self-replicating.

Hawks also can't be suborned.

The problem with laser weapons so far is that they have insufficient power and are fighting the inverse square law.

Heating to create sufficient damage takes multiple seconds in good conditions. They work great in field tests where the operator can keep the target aligned exactly for a while and the target operator isn't evading. Add mirror finishes, thermal shielding, automated detection and evasion, much of which is cheap, and that'll stay a demonstrator weapon for a long time.

I don't think anyone is worried about the claimed Russian lasers against drones (particularly since Russia tends to tout a lot of vaporware), but I'd be worried that since Russia is already happy to systematically commit and even advertise their war crimes, that they'd start using the lasers as blinding weapons despite the fact that it is also a war crime.

Mostly the use of laser blinders is uncommon because a laser which can blind a person will also happily do that to you from a reflective surface or down a military sighting optic.

Good point - tho if you are wearing protective optical gear and you can expect the enemy is not wearing it...

Lasers also suffer from easily deployed countermeasures. Anyone who has been passed by some truck rolling coal can attest to how trivial it is for anything running a combustion engine to be modified to foul the air around it to the point of zero visibility. In addition, flying projectiles like missiles, mortars, or ICBMs can simply spin such that the laser has to heat the whole circumference of the body rather than a single point in order to be effective, which they may be doing anyway for stabilization

Laser weapons of this sort aren't manually operated. They automatically track the target while they are firing, and they are normally pulsed to allow higher instantaneous powers, which make mirror finishes useless (the pulsed power is high enough that the amount of power that isn't reflected is enough to heat the surface of the mirror finish enough to make it non-reflective). The target also becomes very bright while it's being engaged, making it much easier for electro-optical systems to track.

The multiple seconds to kill is dependent on the laser power, the higher the power, the longer it takes to kill. The LaWS tested by the USN was 30kW or so, but they're looking at lasers with 10x the power for operational use. So the 2 seconds to down a UAV turns into 2/10s of a second, which is probably beyond reaction time, even for automated detection and evasion.

Yes, I understand that much or all of the tracking is automated. That does not negate all countermeasures. If the laser is powerful enough to punch through a mirrored surface, then one can use a sacrificial surface, a scattering surface, heat shield, emission of a scattering fog/smoke/chaff, etc., etc., etc.

I've watched the successful tests, and I'm not impressed. sure, it can shoot down a black-painted sitting duck with no countermeasures in several seconds. Merely starting to do twisting and spinning aerobatic maneuvers would have foiled it by constantly presenting new surfaces such that no tracking would work (can't make the laser point at the same spot from the other side).

The point is that until lasers get to insane powers not yet available in any portable form, it is not at all a slam-dunk. This stuff was funded decades ago for the "Star Wars" anti-missile initiative. It could use all power in fixed positions on the ground, so as big, heavy, and sprawling as you want, and the target missiles couldn't significantly evade, and it was an utter failure. Sure, we've since seen orders of magnitude increases in strength, but we're still orders of magnitude away.

Scattering surfaces aren't going to be any better against lasers, they'll heat up and become black bodies relatively quickly. Neither will emitting smoke or fog, because we're talking about airborne items, and they won't stay surrounding the aircraft very well. Sacrificial or heat shields will help, but that's extra weight that reduces your payload, and for quadcopter type drones, you can't reasonably add those to your props.

SDI wasn't successful, no, because they didn't have the capability to make high power electrical lasers worth a damn back then. But the semi-operational AN/SEQ-1 was 30kW a decade ago, and technology has improved since then. Again, we're looking at an order of magnitude more power. And I don't think we need many more orders of magnitude to get down below the threshold of : can't do anything in the time you've got.

Just shoot some stringy gel into the propellers. I'm sure a material exists that can both tangle the propellers or block the inlets of jets which would make it effective against a variety of types.

You have to get the stringy gel to the propellers, which is most of the cost of a MANPAD. The warhead doesn't cost all that much, whether it's explosive or silly string.

>Yossarian sidled up drunkenly to Colonel Korn at the officers' club one night to kid with him about the new Lepage gun that the Germans had moved in. "What Lepage gun?" Colonel Korn inquired with curiosity. "The new three hundred and forty four millimeter Lepage glue gun," Yossarian answered. "It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air."

-Catch-22

Thanks for this. Catch-22 is my all-time favorite war related book. There is so much in there to take in and enjoy. Absurdity, off-color humor, puns, social commentary. Heller was magnificent in this book.

Yeah you kinda expect a swarm of drones like a small ocean fleet. With smaller drones to protect the main cruiser.

Can manpads lock on 400$ DJI style drones ?

I purposely left that detail out because I dont know. They have been hitting those junk Orlans which is what I meant. I guess you can bring down the mini drones with a rifle? Like OP says there are a bunch of radio jamming guns around which probably confuse DJI.

This post says they downed 65 "targets" in one day so I'm guessing they're the cheap drones. https://t.me/LastBP/9398

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