Kemper Boyd posted:

One of Galland's issues with the Bf 109 was that it just wasn't as capable in shooting down bombers as the Fw 190, and the Luftwaffels ended up strapping gun pods to 109's to get more guns into it. The MG's didn't do jack against B-17's, it took 20 or preferably 30 mm cannon to shoot them down.

Blistex posted:

Yeah. The evolving 109 armaments were idea for taking on enemy fighters and light attack aircraft, but something heavier was needed to effectively take out B-17 swarms due to armour plating and engine redundancy. The 110 had (in some varients) a fearsome array of forward firing guns, and even they had trouble taking out US 4 engine bombers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HezICMWc8I

Cyrano4747 posted:

Goddamn the tail gunner and ball turret gunner there had a bad day.

quote:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Vitamin J posted:

I have a friend who's developing a smartphone targeting app that would be adaptable to any type of mortar you could find. You basically strap the phone or tablet to the mortar tube and input your variables like mortar weight and coefficient of drag, temperature, etc. The system would have a sensor that would measure the projectile velocity as it exited the barrel and use that data for subsequent shots. On top of that it will take inputs from a drone over the target area like wind speed at various altitudes and it would locate impacts on the map for correction. Then the readout on the phone would say move left, right, up, down etc until it turned green, then you shoot again. My friend went to Kurdistan to fight with the Peshmerga last year and brought a home made foamboard flying wing drone. They were severely limited by NATO no-fly orders and friendly Peshmerga trying to shoot it down (haha) but when he was able to get it in the air he flew missions 15-30km away at altitudes of 500m and was able to direct mortar fire onto targets with a lot greater accuracy than they were used to. He said the biggest problem they faced using the drone was that none of the local fighters knew how to even read a map. Map reading seems like such an easy task, but apparently it's not a common skill around those parts.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Goddamn the tail gunner and ball turret gunner there had a bad day.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Goddamn the tail gunner and ball turret gunner there had a bad day.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Indeed.

It took a lot of fire to take out a Fortress.

Mr Crustacean posted:

Certainly, cost and weight will increase if you want more features, but bear in mind that this thing is a toy that costs $999 and weighs 750 grams. The fact that it's been possible to miniaturise and reduce the cost so much bodes exceptionally well for the scalability of these devices. If you double the weight and cost in order to harden it, carry a multispectral sensor and a payload, it's still only $2000 and 1.5kg. 

In terms of guidance, absolutely, it will always be difficult to pick up individual soldiers, but there are amazing advances in machine recognition right now, alongside the miniaturisation of sensor technology; you can get a multispectral thermal camera for $250. That's enough to pick up a vehicle's heat signature, correlate it to the optical sensor and then prosecute that target.

There are also a lot of rather vulnerable targets on a battlefield that don't require a large warhead to destroy. If you put an EFP adjacent to a parked aircraft, radar or fuel depot then it may be sufficient. 

For the cost of a thousand bucks you get a realtime 1080p FMV ISR platform with a 7km transmit radius. An autonomously guided hand grenade with a 20km+ strike range. When you put an EFP on them, an infantryman can now kill a vehicle short of a tank with a weapon the size of a hand grenade at 20km+ standoff. Everyone can afford one and operate them en masse, it's cheap, light and small enough to equip every single squad member with and easily enough employed for any idiot to use, right down to the part time Jihadist.

How are you going to run Bagram air base when anyone within 20km of it can send hundreds of these to locate and target your parked aircraft, fuel and ammunition depots, radar and comms antennas? 

How are you going to deal with IEDs that fly around and find you instead of counting on you to roll over them?

Yeah, if you're a military then you have tools to provide you massed fire effects or ISR, that's been a thing since the advent of artillery, radio and aircraft. However, there's an awful lot of tail involved with running an artillery battery or aircraft, traditionally only nation states have been able to run those assets. With the advent of these devices, now anyone can have massed precision fires and they can hold them right in their hand. This is the democratisation of precision strike, anyone can have what was previously exclusively in the arsenal of nation states

M_Gargantua posted:

EW capabilities don't stop visual and thermal targeting. And any deployed system isn't going to need to be remotely operated, there is no way to control a bot swarm with any granularity. You're limited to vague statements like: Patrol here, Engage heat signatures in this area, RTB when <20% battery or armament, etc.

Local EW can stop drones from receiving updated commands from remote posts. As for drone to drone communication if you're dumping enough energy into RF to block intra-swarm communications then the system will respond by destroying the jammer. Meanwhile drones, since they have IR cameras, can communicate basic distributed decisions with strobing IR LEDs. You don't need much power or bandwidth to transmit one of a dozen intents to the rest of the swarm. one blink for searching, four for engaging, even adding error correcting hamming code you can transmit a 16 bit packet that has all the information the rest of the swarm needs.

The best defense against drones right now are directed microwave weapons, and it is possible to harden electronics against that to an extent.

Which leads to murder drones block-II: You get a big drone, its got a modern 60mm mortar tube and a dozen smart rounds, which lands and deploys 2k from ground engagement. Its agile, mobile, and can redeploy in minutes if threatened. Its very hard to get enough radiative power with microwaves at 1k, so three cheep drones closes the distance, they either get to the anti-drone system and destroy it or its operators, or the sensor data as they get shot down gives targeting data for our standoff mortar. Alternatively standoff missiles/artillery/whatever. And after that you still have the capability for the swarm to call in indirect fire when the target geometry calls for it.

I think autonomous targeting is much further along then you think?

M_Gargantua posted:

I'm saying we could have that on the ground in six months if we wanted. The technology may not be "mature" but just like self driving cars we can do it today. EW has been used to defeat drone remote control, defeating hardened drones themselves is a much more difficult proposition. And when each drone costs $1000 and a smart weapon to counter one also costs $1000 but can miss now drones are suddenly winning both the war of bodies and the war of cost.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Indeed.

It took a lot of fire to take out a Fortress.

Smiling Jack posted:

Just a reminder that the reactivated Iowas were so hosed up that the gun crews were a) loving terrified of the things and b) repeatedly warned that they were going to blow the gently caress up.

The higher ups responded by conducting a firing exercise for a distance record. The turret blew the gently caress up. The Navy blamed it on a gay murder suicide plot by a conveniently dead enlisted man with absolutely zero evidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion

Baloogan posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ4v6wqxWOo

food-rf posted:

What's with the goofy special effects mixed in with all the cool airplane footage?

Blistex posted:

"Corelli Barnett, in Audit of War, ruefully compares the 13,000 man-hours needed to make a Spitfire Mk V airframe with the 4,000 for an Me 109G."

Hermann Göring posted:

In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I’m going to buy a British radio set—then at least I’ll own something that has always worked.

aphid_licker posted:

Wonder if they let him have that radio.

Blistex posted:

I'm pretty sure it was the other way around, and to a much greater extent since Willy designed the 109 to be as small and easy to produce as possible. If you look at the blueprints of a 109 and compare them to the 190 you'll see that the 109 has an amazingly spartan interior, and makes much better use of stamped materials and shared structures (etc. landing gear/engine mount). The most most widely produced version 109-G was averaging 4000 man hours to produce, and by 1944 was down to 2000 due to the production line being streamlined, while the 190 seems to be cited as being 5,400 man-hours to produce. The 109 was also 1000kg lighter than the 190, so there is that as well. Also the engines used have a huge price difference as well. The Bf-109's 600 series engine was 1/2 to even 1/3rd the cost of the FW-190's 800 series engine. Also your average 109 (the vast majority of which were F-G models) carried 3 guns, while your average 190 carried 6.

Less time to produce (less you have to pay your workers)
Less materials to make an airframe (less you have to buy to make it)
Less expensive engine (less you have to buy it for)
Fewer guns/cannons (less you have to spend on them)

I'm pretty sure this is the reason why Messerschmitt was given the green light to go hog wild and produce as many as he could right up until the end of the world. Pound for pound it was the fastest fighter to build for the cheapest price.

"Corelli Barnett, in Audit of War, ruefully compares the 13,000 man-hours needed to make a Spitfire Mk V airframe with the 4,000 for an Me 109G."

Dead Reckoning posted:

I can't tell if English isn't your first language, or if you've just bought fully into Silicon Valley ~*~disruption~*~ fart huffing.

You are looking at a toy. That is the problem. It is a toy. It's like looking at an RC car and wondering why it took Tesla so long to scale it up to a passenger vehicle. The worst case failure state for the manufacturer is having to send the customer a new drone. What are the crosswind limitations of your drone? Does it work in precipitation? In 120 degree heat? In icing? Does it work after extended exposure to dust? Do the sensors? Does the remote? These are all questions that need to be answered before something is adopted as a weapon system.

You can't pin down what it's actually supposed to do, either. One minute you're talking about autonomous killbots, and the next about every lance corporal having a personal ISR platform. These are stupid for different reasons. The latter because of the unaddressed issues with ECM, SHORAD, DF and spectrum crunch. The former because, again, you are describing a system mainly useful for terrorism of civilians and poorly defended targets. There are very few military uses for a system that kills the first person-looking thing it meets in a 10km square. If you want it to do something other than this, the obstacle is not sensor resolution but autonomous target identification/discrimination, a problem which continues to vex the entire research apparatus of the U.S. military.

I get that you have an inexplicable hard-on for drones, but you're retarded if you think this is going to displace conventional fires at any point in the next 50 years.

food-rf posted:

What's with the goofy special effects mixed in with all the cool airplane footage?

Also, working in robotics has made me develop a special hatred for people who gobble up all the autonomous system hype without question. The next AI winter can't come fast enough - I might be unemployed then, but at least the smugness will keep me warm.

B4Ctom1 posted:

quote:

The idea of non-state actors attacking from the sea is not new. We merely have to look at attacks by Somali pirates or Al Qaeda’s attack on USS Cole for historical precedent......drone technological advances that are already on the horizon change the situation by diversifying both the types of threats and weaponry and also places them in the hands of non-state actors.


As discussed by Ulrike Franke, the booby-trapped IED that recently wounded French special operators in Syria showed that low-cost, commercially available, payload-carrying drones are now being weaponized. T.X. Hammesgave a bracing assessment on the “democratization of airpower,” discussing how technologies available to non-state groups could change the character of warfare.  Mark Jacobsen argued that the most dangerous insurgent operated drones will be custom-built rather than purchased “off of the shelf” and adapted from there. As 3D printing technologies advance and become more affordable, they explain, non-state actors will be capable of producing their own deadly drones. However, Hammes and Jacobson attacked the problem largely from the perspective of operations on or over land.  The U.S. Navy must also face this challenge.


...


How might this threat to our maritime assets manifest itself? The littorals will become evermore dangerous.

Looking further into the future, machine learning could allow these drones to identify and select specific targets with little human involvement, which would be critical on long distance raids over the horizon. Jacobsen explained how his team created drones capable of flying up to 80 miles with a two-pound payload or 40 miles with a four-pound payload. This sort of technology would make land-based attacks on naval ships near the coastline possible.

If non-flagged, or deceptively flagged, seemingly benign vessels sail into territorial waters, they can narrow the gap between the drone launch point and their final target. One can imagine a scenario where multiple non-state ships, similar to the “little blue men” of the Chinese Maritime Militia, close with U.S. warships under the protected veil of a civilian craft before launching waves of drones.

If these launching platforms can get close enough to get their drones within range of U.S. forces, their flying IEDs used en masse would present a serious problem for U.S. vessels. U.S. Navy ships are equipped with either the Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS) or Aegis Combat System to defend against airborne missile attacks. Neither system is designed to defeat small, maneuverable drones. That leaves the close-in weapon system (CIWS) as the lone defender of the ship. CIWS identifies, tracks, and neutralizes close airborne contacts that have penetrated the ship’s long-range defenses. If the swarm of attacking drones were numerous enough, it is likely that a few could slip past the CIWS defense bubble. And a few is all it would take to disable a ship or seriously interrupt operations. For instance, drones could be “trained” to hunt and kill — with shrapnel or explosively formed penetrators — the radar, flight deck, bridge, and communications antennae. Even if only one of these targets were hit, the ship would be taken out of the game.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/10/the-navy-litorally-has-a-drone-problem/

Waroduce posted:

Interesting that we just had a discussion regarding the deployment of those $1000 drones. War on the Rocks is a podcast I enjoy listening to and they just posted this:


THE NAVY LITTORALLY HAS A DRONE PROBLEM



I don't know about that 3-D printing bullshit but its an interesting read. 

Waroduce posted:

Interesting that we just had a discussion regarding the deployment of those $1000 drones. War on the Rocks is a podcast I enjoy listening to and they just posted this:


THE NAVY LITTORALLY HAS A DRONE PROBLEM



I don't know about that 3-D printing bullshit but its an interesting read. 

Akion posted:

Yeah. It seems like a lot of these articles like to pretend the US Military is dumb and not paying attention to/investing significant resources in staying ahead of the threat curve. It's like "ONE WEIRD TRICK THE AMERICAN DEVILS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!"

I mean, we have loving DARPA building Hypersonic poo poo. You really think we aren't aware of and building counters to the threat of a swarm of cheap drones? I'm guessing if CRAM can take out an inbound mortar, a few of those will probably have no issue engaging your swarm of cheap drones.

That Works posted:

Hell even Marines on the deck with shotguns would be pretty effective against it.

That Works posted:

Hell even Marines on the deck with shotguns would be pretty effective against it.

Godholio posted:

Holy poo poo a real mission for the Marine Corps. Deck defense for naval vessels.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I can't tell if English isn't your first language, or if you've just bought fully into Silicon Valley ~*~disruption~*~ fart huffing.

bewbies posted:

This, unironically.

Slightly more high tech solution: the XM25, or whatever it becomes, equipped with proximity fused and or guided rounds. It seems kind of ridiculous but it seems to be gaining traction among important people so, here we go.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I can't tell if English isn't your first language, or *snip*

You are looking at a toy. That is the problem. It is a toy. It's like looking at an RC car and wondering why it took Tesla so long to scale it up to a passenger vehicle. The worst case failure state for the manufacturer is having to send the customer a new drone. What are the crosswind limitations of your drone? Does it work in precipitation? In 120 degree heat? In icing? Does it work after extended exposure to dust? Do the sensors? Does the remote? These are all questions that need to be answered before something is adopted as a weapon system.

Dead Reckoning posted:

You can't pin down what it's actually supposed to do, either. One minute you're talking about autonomous killbots, and the next about every lance corporal having a personal ISR platform. These are stupid for different reasons. The latter because of the unaddressed issues with ECM, SHORAD, DF and spectrum crunch. The former because, again, you are describing a system mainly useful for terrorism of civilians and poorly defended targets. There are very few military uses for a system that kills the first person-looking thing it meets in a 10km square. If you want it to do something other than this, the obstacle is not sensor resolution but autonomous target identification/discrimination, a problem which continues to vex the entire research apparatus of the U.S. military.

Dead Reckoning posted:

I get that you have an inexplicable hard-on for drones, but you're *snip again*

Oh, well clearly all we need to do is develop a small, disposable, highly maneuverable system capable of instantly tracking and communicating with dozens to hundreds of other elements using a jam-proof and spoof-proof communication system in order to make decisions using complex artificial intelligence.

If you actually believe that, I can put you in touch with someone from DARPA. But I think you understand that the problems are more complex than you make them out to be.