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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

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I think the fancy anti-drone AA tech already exists in the form of EMP weapons.

I have not encountered any EMP weapons that do not cause significant collateral damage against all unhardened electronics in the area around the weapon. (If there have been any recent developments in this area I'd love to hear about them.)

If your response to a $100 quadcopter is to destroy $5k in security cameras, have you really come out ahead?

It means that one side has to withdraw all its unhardened electronics from the area before deploying the EMP weapon, obviously.

You're going to withdraw all your unhardened electronics from the area in the 30 seconds before the quadcopter flies over in your direction?

You can of course try to ensure that you have no unhardened electronics around beforehand - but now that essentially means 'no unhardened electronics near the battlefield' - and unhardened electronics are useful. Not to mention fairly ubiquitous in civilian installations.

Makes you wonder why there are no EMP guns in every platoon and on every tank already, knocking drones out of the sky left and right. Anyway, there are optical wire-guided drones already that have a Faraday cage protecting their electronics.

We already had those, they were called TOW Missiles!

More seriously, I get the impression we are working on plenty of counter-UAS weapons. Military procurement is just slow.

A single TOW missile costs $100000, if I remember correctly. How much does a suicide drone cost? $1000? $5000?

A TOW needs to explode a tank. If you need to explode a temu special, you can probably cut some corners.

What do drones explode, then? Even the cheapest ones that simply drop ordnance basically perform a top attack like the best AT missile. FPV drones fly into the weakest point of the tank's armor.

For the optical, wire-guided kind, probably more than $5K, but much less than the TOW.

For the bargain versions deployed in Ukraine? Maybe even less.

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