Soviet era reserve vehicles.

lancelot wrote:The only Pantsir systems I saw photos of were the ones stuck in the mud. I think they need to put Pantsir back in a tracked chassis.
Maybe send some of the upgraded Tunguska into Ukraine.

They have sent upgraded Tunguskas into the Ukraine

A couple even broke down and were captured

There must be hundreds if not thousands of drone being used in ukraine battle. Why not send the shilka in to blow them out of the sky on the cheap (sa missiles cost way more)?

Small targets are difficult targets for AA guns that don't have guided shells or airburst shells...

The new command detonation 30mm rounds would be better.

What would probably be cheapest would be an anti drone drone that can fly around the battlefield and approach enemy drones and shoot them down with a short range weapon like a shotgun or a grenade launcher firing grenades that can explode on command or at a fixed distance from the grenade launcher.

Would actually be quite fun, you could connect its control system to the local air defence network and so you fly the drone around... you want good speed so you can cover territory quickly as needed.... having radar information from local air defence vehicles should tell you were the local drones are and also having ground forces scanning for drones too.
When an enemy drone is detected you get a warning and so your drone flys to the area by itself and then you use thermal optics and normal video optics to find the target drone and just fly straight at it... a laser rangefinder will tell you when it is close enough and a double tap from your shotgun should get you a kill for a few dollars at most.

Firing from 15 metres means you will get a spread of pellets of about 80cm or so with each shot so your chances of hits should be good.

A relatively slow closing speed could allow multiple hits to ensure destruction... a belt fed shotgun would allow the best flight persistance with a mix of buckshot and say number 3 pellets.

The buckshot would be heavy enough to damage hard structures in the drone while the number 3 shot is small and would have a nice dense pattern so very light drones will get multiple hits where a buckshot round might not get any hits at all on small targets.

You can't really control the pattern of projectiles from a shotgun, so a 1m circle of hits with only about 8-12 projectiles in a buckshot load a small target might be missed but with 200 pellets in a number 3 shot even a small target should get several hits each shot... and so just keep shooting till it goes down.

I still would love to see how a modern high caliber bore artillery would work as anti-drone one
Watching someone who is using some kind of weaponry is a very smart move.
Iranians pioneered in unmanned warfare, they are using thousands of drones of different classes - hats off gents!
And they still evolve a 100mm gun system for anti-air purposes.
That thing can easily reach 13 km in high and 20+ in distance. It is much above the attack envelope of any drone.
A 100mm round can be easily used for making extremely powerful smart ammo, with programmable options, lots of fragments, a big warhead, one can even consider some kind of trajectory correction ...
One shoot one kill principle wouldn't be hard to implement here.
Guns can be fully automatic. Costs close to nothing. You can make a barrier linear type of defense echelon with it, with multiplied search&tracking systems, fully passive.
Just put a dozen around any facility, and watch the drones falling down in flames.

Drones are still relatively new in the sense that solutions to them are still being worked on.

There are enough different types of drones for no one solution to be good for everything.

The 23mm rounds of the Shilka were replaced with 30mm cannon shells from the Tunguska to extend the effective engagement range and to add HE power to the rounds.

The next step because of drones and cruise missiles that cannon rounds will just blow past without direct hits and direct hits are not easy even with ballistic computers.

Air burst shells and guided shells are more expensive but in comparison to standard rounds which might require thousands to be fired for each hit scored, a single air burst round might be enough for a kill so even if it costs 10 times more than standard shells it works out cheaper and more cost effective.

In terms of large calibre shells I do like the idea of the Iranian 100mm guns... but why develop a separate branch and type of ammo?

A 152mm gun like Coalition, is capable firing at a wide range of angles and full 360 degree traverse capability.

The rounds don't need to be missiles... sometimes just small fins for a small turn in flight to get closer to the target for the HE fragmentation charge to do the rest... it would be good for use against ground targets too.

With 70km range rounds and a CEP of 10m or less means a HE Frag round with perhaps a 10kgs bursting charge and 35kgs of ball bearings and shrapnel dispersed sideways and forward in a cone would make it a good dual purpose anti drone, anti helicopter and anti troops on the ground round.

Of course an anti drone drone with a shotgun or airburst grenade launcher would also be useful as would air burst 30mm and 57mm rounds, and of course the jammers would be handy to use too.

No one solution can be relied upon... but a 152mm round for tiny battlefield drones dropping grenades on troops is overkill.... a small drone of their own that can fly around and shoot down enemy drones would be cheap and useful.

Air management is going to be tricky because you don't want to be jamming and shooting down your own drones either.

Perhaps even a heavy strongly built drone that rams enemy drones to take them out could be designed too.

I suppose they do have a new type of ammo for it, as they claim 15+km altitude and 25km+ range for it - that is much better than any known 100×695 mm round.

Good to see the MoD is apparently prepping An-2s for use

Interesting FP, but largely irrelevant... the economic factors don't really apply regarding the AN-2 and S-300 missiles... the Russians have lots of An-2s and actually use them, the Orcs have S-300s but didn't pay for them or the western SAMs that will replace them.

The An-2s would be more useful as parts or to continue in the role they have been performing, cheap drones with corner reflectors would make more sense to lure Kievs air defences to turn their systems on.

Exactly.
The case for Russia is that they lack the number of planes in this class.
That is why they are carrying several different projects to upgrade, repair and improve the remaining An-2 fleet.
They can make thousands of drone imitators, they can even use old-generation AA missiles for this purpose. Both Volna and Neva has been converted for AA practice targets a long time ago. Sure the range won't be impressive, yet enough to open the Kiev airspace let's say.

They better focus their satellites and tu-214R to find the few remaining AD systems and mount good tactics to destroy them rather than throwing away planes.

They are not azerbaijan. They have very good yools to hunt ukro AD.

Lancet did a good job in the donbass since september regarding this issue.