Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly. Drones only look powerful because they're a recent innovation (in terms of military procurement timelines).

They're being shot down with air defense missiles designed for helicopters, because that's the cheapest option we currently have.

Once RFPs, responses, and projects work their way to completion, everyone will have anti-drone air defense missiles that, while still expensive, will be better cost:capability calibrated.

The real difference that drone warfare seems to make is in persistence of ISR, which is why so much funding seems to be going into stealthy HALE platforms with stealthy networking and sensors (point to point and LPIR).

The correct lesson to take away from Ukraine seems to be that future battlefields will have key assets (tanks, ships, supply stores, HQs, etc) under threat to a greater depth behind front lines. And not because of a capability change (i.e. a drone can get there with a weapon), but because of a visibility change (a drone can loiter and identify the asset).

Creating a smoking hole in the ground at an arbitrary location is a capability most advanced militaries have had since the 1990s.

What's changed is the ability to find something valuable to place that hole on, at all times, anywhere, at a cost you can organically equip smaller units with.

Meanwhile, spotter drones are getting smaller and more stealthy. How do you detect, much less shoot down, a drone the size of a small bird or even an insect?

My only concern here, is a mini-nuke on board.

Ever C4 inside a grasshopper (as the grasshopper also need space to move), is going to be tiny.

Even if you made the grasshopper out of solid, but explosive plastic, a mini nuke would be far scarier.

I wonder, what the minimal size of a nuke is. I'm sure we have limits, due to materials, explosive force to cause the compression wave, etc, but I wonder the theoretical limited mini size.

I mean, what if an earwig could enter your ear, into your canal, then go boom, and turn your brain to mush?

There's a minimum critical mass for fission weapons that means they are never going to be earwig-size [1]. Fusion weapons require a fission trigger so they are no smaller than the smallest fission weapon. The only earwig-size nuclear explosive that might theoretically exist is one based on antimatter, but with present and currently foreseeable technology that is the stuff of science fiction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of... Note that explosive compression lowers the critical mass, but it soon requires more than one gram of high explosive to trim the fissile material budget by one gram, so minimal-size devices are still in the range of kilograms.

The most obvious use case for a grasshopper/earwig size explosive is as a self-assembling munition. Users dial in the critical mass necessary for destruction of the target and program the members of the munition group to identify, track, and assemble at the target's weak point, insuring that at least one of the explosive initiators (primers) makes it into the assembled munition and once their internal mesh network confirms that critical mass, primer, etc are in place, a detonation is initiated.

The individual units could travel a circuitous route to the actual target without raising much suspicion and once in the immediate vicinity they could be programmed to rapidly converge on the target.

That's how I see it. With self-assembling munitions you have less waste of resources, you can target individuals in a command structure or individual critical components of their military infrastructure and you could do it with things that could be made to be relatively inconspicuous so that an observer could see them as a normal part of the environment. Until they converge of course and if this happens fast enough it can be difficult for the targeted entity to unravel exactly how it all went down.

Future war looks scary to me.

Futurist predictions tend to most often be wrong because they fail to account for easier / cheaper ways of obtaining the same effect. This seems like such a case.

Why are you self-assembling anything when you can park a remotely operated machine gun along someone's driving route?

>Why are you self-assembling anything...

This just provides another tool in the inventory. You're forcing the adversary to plan for strategies to mitigate attacks like this. Everyone already knows about remote-controlled machine guns and those who feel threatened by the prospect of having something like this used against them are actively working to mitigate the threat.

With a self-assembling munition you have a new, novel method of conducting an attack that literally forces an adversary to use a zero trust threat model 24 hours a day against every little thing that moves once the adversary understands how it happened.

When the grass can suddenly come alive with dormant, self-assembling munitions that have suddenly detected that a target on their list is in the vicinity then it adds another layer of complexity to force protection since both human and material assets could be targeted at any time from any direction by something like a bug-sized bot that may not even register in your consciousness until it is too late.

That's all I'm thinking.

It might take a (human) generation to get us there. It might not.

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear artillery shells for 155mm and 152mm howitzers, respectively -- those would have a yield of about 100 tons on the low end, up to 2 kilotons on the high end. Higher-caliber artillery pieces, like a 203mm piece, could have a shell on the order of 10 to 15 kilotons, roughly approaching the Hiroshima bomb's power.

The American W82 155mm nuclear artillery shell[0] weighed 43kg (95lb), was 860 mm (34 in) long, and had a yield of 2 kilotons -- equivalent to 500 full WW2 heavy bomber loads.

These shells (as well as bombs and warheads with similar yields, carried by planes and missiles, respectively) are called tactical nuclear weapons -- meant for use on the battlefield, to break up enemy formations. Their blast radius is relatively small. It was theorized that if the Cold War went hot and a conventional WW3 broke out, if the Soviet Union was pushing NATO forces back, then the Americans would authorize the use of tactical nuclear warheads. This would likely cause a spiral of escalation, up to a strategic nuclear exchange.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W82

If a robotic earwig can make it into your ear, it can kill you with milligrams of simple poison.

Critical mass for plutonium is 10 KG. A nuke needs to be supercritical, plus the mechanism of the bomb itself. Smallest nuke ever built is 50kg, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_devic...

Smallest nukes were phased out by all major nations because there is too much risk of them getting lost, falling into wrong hands, being used without authorisation, etc. Several 'big' nukes were already lost and never found

23.1Kg. ~50lbs

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