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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Orlans are the 2-3 hour recon drone you are talking about. Small quads have only a 20 to 30 minute lifespan, meaning they have a range of about 10km (and realistically we are looking at 4-5km) at best, compared with the 40km+ with Orlan and Lancet. The orlan is low observation, deep recon capable, with laser guidance. IR is really shit, the 640x480 sensors don't have digital zoom and drones don't show up on 2015 era IR optics till about 2km away at best, because they are a flat profile from front. Nafo gloats about how its all COTS shit but orlan is damn good and cheap for what it does. Deep recon LO with lasing means the lancets dont need their own onboard guidance, only initial telemetry. The last meter probability kill with Orlan 30 is way above artillery spam and way cheaper than slinging kinzhals or the retarded pitchup rocket spam.

GBAD is basically toast once it lights up against a drone swarm becsuse of dynamic targeting, you dont even need mounted ATGM when the drone is itself the munition. Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAVs, not quadcopters, so the outer radius for them to.be spotted is really large. Trucks are also hard to spot far behind the frontline, as we see the brits use blowpipes off trucks and the HIMARs trucks took like 2 years before they got hit, so killing launchers before they shoot off the payload is really tough.

I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range

Of course, but the AV500 is dirt fucking cheap. Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions, and thats with CAIC markup. China can churn these out by the hundreds per week, and there is no way for NATO air superiority conops to just put enough metal in the air to counter that. Until Skynex, Iron Beam or Loyal Wingman come up at scale, an AV500 or loitering munition swarm of 40 munitions per salvo can get through even a russian Pantsir+Shilka screen. Iron Beam is the best option to kill swarms though, and Rafael says they are a year from deploying it at scale, but you still need to spam Iron Beam units. About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.

Orlan has a flight endurance of 9-10 hours.

Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAV

is there any videos or drawings of these?

Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions

Are they really making helicopters + some anti-air missiles <120k ? What's the specs on the missile ?

About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.

I wanna see that chew up MLRS spam aimed at its location.

Especially once you start using more durable rockets. Chewing up through few cm of steel on a rotating rocket seems pretty tough! And there's a dozen coming in, and you've got what, 15 seconds to do it ?

10 hours? Coulda sworn 4. Neat!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ma3ya_lqCLM&pp=ygUgY2hpbmEgZHJvbmUgc3dhcm0gdHJ1Y2sgbGF1bmNoZXI%3D

This is the best one I can find online. Arms fairs normally have good shit at the CAIC booth, but the Chinese uploaded videos are on pure-cancer Chinese video hosting providers.

Re the AV500 vs F35, no the chinese UAV swarms are not meant to kill any F35, only fly through a hair of incoming fire. 100 F35 with max payloads is max 10 kills per sortie, and the Chinese intended conops is to send hundreds of munitions at a time.

I wanna see that chew up MLRS spam aimed at its location.

Your implication is right, it wont. I specified 4s and the short range to highlight the inability of Iron Beam to hard kill incoming saturation fire of fast movers. IAI demos show the Iron Beam focused against sUAVs and dumb rockets, not tube or stabilised munitions. Still, the cost per kill for Iron Beam is low enough that slow swarms of UAVs will be hard countered by literal beam spam.

I paint you as a miltech enthusiast, and man you cannot believe the shit out there now. We are at a strange inflection point, and the future is really grim.