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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure?

One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.

Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.

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Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.

> Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed

Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).

> The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.

Why is this, for the rest of us?

To imitate.

There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.

If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...

> there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones

As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it.

There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank.

All autonomous and adopted.

The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.

If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can run an INS just as easily.

Most of the conversation here is focused on cheap drones. Are there cheap Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)? As I understand, it only appears inside of multi-million dollar cruise/ballistic missiles, fighter jets, and long-range bombers. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also, it might be that there are cheap INS systems that are good enough (e.g., "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"), plus a bit of AI-enabled vision on the drone camera.

Yes, you can buy an IMU as a single IC for less than $5[1]. Otherwise your smartphone probably already have all the required sensors.

Of course, those have significantly less performance than the one you put in an airliner or ballistic missile.

As you mention yourself, its a question of good enough. You need to be a lot more accuracy to hit a city after a twenty minute sub-orbital coast, than to find the nearby trench. And yes, computer vision is used to correct for drift.

[1]: IMU's on DigiKey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/motion-sensors/im...

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