Αnti-drone warfare

I was actually thinking of a simple aircraft type UAV with cameras that could be remote flown and mounting a new 40mm balkan grenade launcher in its nose.

In operation you would fly your UAV towards enemy UAVs and open fire at about 30-50m range with special grenades designed to fly 20-40m and then explode blowing forward an enormous blast of ball bearings and cube shrapnel like a claymore mine... a good quality forward looking camera with night vision... it would probably be quite fun... attack them from behind they wont know what hit them and the cost in fuel and grenades should not be that high... you could probably carry 20-50 grenades as a payload, so you could take out quite a few targets. With a well designed round it should be very very effective... you could fit a laser range finder on the aircraft so no ammo is wasted... you could even use computer calculations to determine the aim point and even have it firing automatically based on range and closing speed from the laser and the position in the field of view of the target.

Another option of course could simply be a couple of fixed shotgun barrels with buckshot and fly right up behind the target and blast it with lead...

You just have to remember that this might occur above friendly forces or civilians... an airburst grenade would not be too much of a threat, and nor would shot gun rounds from any height.

Something like this, just for the air:

Yes, though because a diver is not a small fast target a rifle with supercavitating bullet would suffice...


It is not super fast but the bullets it fires should reach out quite far and fast... a bit like a remote gun turret that can move slowly around the thing you are defending... port or ship or whatever...

I rather suspect it would be also rather valuable in dealing with mines found in operations... move closer to the target at 1knt and then shoot it.... not the end of the world if you are too close... but perfectly safe for you.

You would make a terrific military engineer hahaha!

I would probably be a terrible engineer, but I like to think I might be a good ideas person...

I guess the Russian solution is intended not only for reusability but also for fast interception. UAVs are small targets than can fly very low and they are probably not that easy to detect from very far away. Maybe there is no time to go hunting them one after the other but rather throw many interceptors

I think we can both agree the wide variety of threats means a variety of solutions is needed... from a Kalashnikov gun that is actually designed to jam as a normal part of its operation... to this weapon, and many other solutions in between.

The key is cost... you want something cheap and simple that can deal with a lot of targets... preferably with the target not even knowing you are there...

I mean the Serbs used helicopters with door gunners to fly alongside expensive NATO UAVs and just shoot them down with PKMs... brilliant... and relatively simple.

We have seen a requirement for new Helicopter types to be able to shoot down small aerial vehicles... so the Mi-28NM could have airburst 30mm cannon shells which would also be useful...

Exactly what you said

Interesting... they have had what they call cargo rounds for their 30mm cannon for fighters and aircraft where the round travels as a complete projectile until a fixed distance where a rear charge detonates and sends subprojectiles in the direction of the target like a super shotgun blast.

The round itself is optimised for shooting at ground targets like troops or soft targets in the open and is intended for targets 1.8km from the muzzle give or take a metre.

A 40mm grenade could pack a lot of small projectiles with a charge powerful enough to give good range and coverage, and if you had a set fuse to detonate the grenade at a fixed range... 40-80m or so, you could use a laser rangefinder to position your aircraft to fire them so that the blast would cover the area around the target so that even if it stopped or turned or sped up it would still get pummelled...

The issue is that while the 40mm grenade will be more expensive than shotgun shells, it will also deliver a much more powerful blow at greater ranges, so it could deal with all sorts of targets... including enemy helicopters... the key would be forward facing fragmentation effect for the grenades for a good even spread of fragments.

It could be used to stop a swarm of small drones, but it could also be used against an infantry attack on the base too.

A shotgun shell would not have the capacity... a human sized target out to maybe 20m most of the time... further away and you probably wont get enough hits to assure a kill... buckshot would be necessary as lighter loads would probably not hit hard enough to do enough damage on some UAVs...

Fragments from an exploding grenade will be travelling much much fast and do rather more damage...

Even better than the 40 mm grenade is 57 mm ammo... with more than 10 km range and huge destructive capacity, especially against soft targets. This is almost a 3 kg shell, so no small thing at all.

Quite true, and a 57mm gun armed vehicle will likely be part of the air defence of most static and mobile targets needing defence from armed drones, but in terms of weight and size and cost, a light simple aircraft with a grenade launcher would be cheaper and simpler, and much less bulky.

They have talked about a tethered UAV for Armata that hovers above 10+m above the vehicle with thermal imagers and radar to detect targets and threats... those sort of sensors plus a laser range finder would be plenty to detect small UAVs and UCAVs... the interception UAV should have the mobility to fly out to where the swarm is coming from and to fly around firing at the UAVs from close range... preferably from behind so they don't see it coming... if it can match the speed of the incoming drone attack it can shoot from behind and above and just pick them off.

In fact you could have an area... say 10km away from your airbase where these UAVs operate... inside that range you can use other methods of dealing with UAVs... but having a 40mm grenade launcher and an EMP weapon perhaps on your UAV... because it is going to be flying close to the UAVs anyway... it makes sense to use both.

In terms of weight you should be able to manage 30-50 rounds of 40mm grenades, but the EMP weapon should be good for a few more kills from very close range... which should make it more effective against anything with any electronics in it.

Low power EW may be limited against autonomous, military grade hardened UAVs, but pure and simple destructive means like 57 mm ammo will do wonders against them and be a quite effective option IMO against UAV swarm

Actually Russia and Bulgaria developed a jamming 122mm shell that was designed to be fired into enemy territory near the front line and it was supposed to jam communications in the area for a period of a few hours... a scaled up model for a 152mm shell that sent out an EMP pulse to disable nearby UAVs could be another option.

It all depends on detection performance... a 152mm shell could be delivered to 70km, so potentially in Syria you could be delivering jammers to the launch sites... though you might want to design the jamming round so that it destroys itself during use so it cannot be captured... the volume difference between a 122mm jammer round and a 152mm round would mean careful design and material choice... lots of magnesium and big lithium batteries for instance, and even a charge or amount of naturally combustible materials that will destroy completely the round after it has blown all the nearby electronics would be an improvement.

So it changes role from 4-6 hours jamming to one near instant jamming pulse and then self destruction.

Then at 10-20km range you have UCAVs shooting and jamming enemy UCAVs, and then within 10km you have 57mm guns and of course 30mm cannon with air burst ammo too.... and perhaps even cheap command guided or beam riding missiles like Shturm or Kornet...

Some crazy stuff going on

dino00 wrote:Some crazy stuff going on

This proves my point without a shadow of a doubt, ECM is bar none by far the best way to deal with drones. From the video we saw how drone copters immediately were stopped in their tracks and quietly landed on the grown, similarly drones that fly like a plane will just crash to the ground and the effect will happen at the speed of light, instantaneous. Most of the 'suicide' drones the Kosher Nostra parades as destroyers of SAMs like Pantsir, can be killed just as easily as this. The Mosquito anti-drone ECM complex can effectively kill an indefinite amount of those things with a constant electro-magnetic barrier. Hard kill systems (57mm) are vastly inferior in that respect, and should be used solely on destroying drones that are ordinance carriers (UCAVs like Predator) or cruise missile drones like Tomahawks, where the destruction of the warhead ordinance is a high priority. Anti-drone drones armed with shotguns and nets should be used to cover/clean up the blind spots of the Mosquito ECM complex.

Well, the west likes to think in terms of new tech replacing old quite rapidly... even prematurely... ie MLRS is so wonderful, lets replace tube artillery with rockets....

They have realised that tube artillery has its own virtues too...

I personally think this technology can be combined with existing technology... these EM weapons can stop drones in their tracks and make them easier targets for even small arms to defend... make the hovering threats land and shoot them on the ground... make fixed wing threats crash, but keep other systems because we can't assume these systems will work perfectly forever or indeed on everything, so 57mm air burst shells and quad Pantsir missiles still have their place, but if these systems can do the job using a few cents worth of electricity then that is even better.

It should be possible to develop a 57mm EMP round that can be fired to go off within a swarm for instance... local artillery batteries with 152mm Coalition could launch 152mm EMP rounds within a radius of 70km which is a circle 140km across that it could be used in... of course being careful not to send your own systems to sleep obviously...

For the first time, the anti-drone complex "Silok-02" will be presented in the Southern Military District

The Army-2019 military-technical forum is held at several venues. The main ground is located in the Moscow Patriot park. There is a platform "Army-2019" and in the territory of the Rostov region. This is also a part of the Patriot park, but already located in Sambek of the Neklinovsky district.



For the first time, the newest EW Silok-02 complex is presented on this territory. This is a complex of technical means of countering the work of unmanned aerial vehicles of various types.

The complex will be presented by EW South-Eastern Military District specialists.

It is noteworthy that this news caused a stir in the Ukrainian blogosphere and some media. There were notes and headlines from the series “Russia is installing the latest EW systems near the Donbas”.

Silok-02 - the development of a previous modification of the UAV countering complex. He is able to automatically track the coordinates of the drone, using a wide range of frequencies. After the detection of the enemy's UAV, the Silok-02 enters the target suppression mode. The claimed range of the new Silk is “several kilometers”. No exact values ​​are given yet.

In fact, Silok-02 is a new generation antidronic " weapon ". And the relevance of such weapons is growing not only in the military, but also in the civil sphere. Such EW tools, aimed at fighting drones, make it possible to create a barrier to the work of reconnaissance drones, as well as shock UAVs on important objects, including the territories of military units.

https://topwar.ru/159460-v-juvo-vpervye-budet-predstavlen-antidronovyj-kompleks-silok-02.html

Silok =/= Silk

It it a diminutive for "strong" in Russian. Like "little strong one". These translation applications are pretty lame if they choke this way.
In this case the translator assumes upper case first letter means name and stops translating.

kvs wrote:Silok =/= Silk

It it a diminutive for "strong" in Russian.   Like "little strong one".    These translation applications are pretty lame if they choke this way.  
In this case the translator assumes upper case first letter means name and stops translating.  

Yeah, they also usually mess up articles dealing with ECM. They confuse 'jamming' with 'stuffing', like WTH lol?

Nice... if you look at the full sized photo of the gray ended things at the muzzle end of the weapon you can see each has a frequency marked on it... so each one sends a signal in a specific frequency range to target aerial vehicles... before I zoomed in I thought they might be little EMP devices that each fire one at a time to attack the target, but having looked at the image closely they each target a frequency to defeat an aerial vehicle.

Nice.

Against a military drone that works on other frequencies it will be useless.

Yeah, you are probably not getting the point... that is the brief case for sale to foreigners that is shown to the public, there is probably another brief case that it not for sale or only for sale to military customers...

That case is probably legal in most countries and could be used to defend airports or airshows or other major public events where the threat from air attack is considered sufficient to warrant buying this sort of thing.

The other jammers wont be so widely sold...

BTW will repeat my old joke... it is the only Kalashnikov designed to jam... hahahaha...

We also don't know much about this system... it is possible that those things in the suitcase are both jammers and receivers, so you can fit them and point them at a target to detect emissions, or attempt to disable the system but if they don't work you could fit the other attachments and try them instead...

The Rex 2 seems to be the upgraded model with an attachment at the bottom and two more attachments on the weapon, while the Rex 1 seems to have two normal positioned attachments and two more added to the left side... presumably another on the other side and it could have all 5 jammers fitted at one time.

Perhaps the transmitters for the Rex-2 are more specialised or perhaps broadband emitters...

GarryB wrote:Nice... if you look at the full sized photo of the gray ended things at the muzzle end of the weapon you can see each has a frequency marked on it... so each one sends a signal in a specific frequency range to target aerial vehicles... before I zoomed in I thought they might be little EMP devices that each fire one at a time to attack the target, but having looked at the image closely they each target a frequency to defeat an aerial vehicle.

Nice.

If you ever were wondering what the gun base was for the top anti-drone gun, it's in fact the MR-514K air rifle:



https://www.bakerairguns.com/product/baikal-mp-514k-pellet-rifle/

https://kalashnikov.media/video/sovremennaya-pnevmatika-vintovka-mr-514k

If you want something like you discribed it will be bigger with computers and screens and many different antennas and electronics, hardly man portable. It won't be a rifle like this thing.

For all we know the military model might have broad band jammers... perhaps only one or two to cover a very wide frequency range to deal with any sort of communication system, but there is no reason it would have to be man portable either... they might even have a rocket launcher or grenade launcher with explosive based EMP jammer rounds that can be fired at threats to detonate on command as close as possible to take out any sort of drone... or perhaps just disable their cameras which would be enough most of the time...

If you ever were wondering what the gun base was for the top anti-drone gun, it's in fact the MR-514K air rifle:

That is why that looked so familiar... thanks for posting...

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-27/can-american-drone-swarms-beat-russias-anti-missile-systems

Yeah, Russians are too dumb to handle such yanqui brilliance. Who invented MLRS, dipwads? So now you
capitalist puritans are all about Leninist quantity has a quality all its own, eh. To an informed observer,
this looks a lot like clutching at the straws of desperation. You know, Russia is the world leader in EW.

kvs wrote:https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-27/can-american-drone-swarms-beat-russias-anti-missile-systems

Yeah, Russians are too dumb to handle such yanqui brilliance.   Who invented MLRS, dipwads?  So now you
capitalist puritans are all about Leninist quantity has a quality all its own, eh.  To an informed observer,
this looks a lot like clutching at the straws of desperation.  You know, Russia is the world leader in EW.

You forgot to add the Soviet/Russian navy pioneered swarm missile tactics for at least 50 years now. A multitude of Soviet era and contemporary Russian Ashm's have 'wolf-pack' swarming algorithms built in to their software.