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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation. Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

  1. Whether integrated air defenses can truly withstand competent airforces who also have things such as stealth cruise missile is unclear

Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.

  1. Oh yeah. Is an ATGM cheaper or more expensive than the dead simple dumb muniition used by APS systems ? Cause these aren't expensive to make, and almost completely negate legacy ATGMs unless paired with a sophisticated jamming attack ..

APS surely are an interesting topic:

The U.S does not yet seems to have a soft kill APS in production but Russia uses the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtora-1 on T-80 and (all?) T-90s

According to the manufacturers, Shtora decreases the chances of a tank being hit by an anti-tank missile, such as the Dragon, by a factor of 4–5:1.[10]

While russia has in addition 3 generations of hard kill APS, the U.S has 2 independent proof of concept models

first APS in history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drozd

Although reported to offer an 80% increase in survival rate during its testing in Afghanistan, the radar was unable to adequately detect threats and the firing of its rockets caused unacceptably high levels of collateral damage.[1]

later succeded with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_(countermeasure)

The computer has a reaction time of 0.05 seconds and protects the tank over a 300-degree arc, everywhere but the rear side of the turret. The system engages targets within 50 metres (55 yd) of the vehicle it is defending, and the ammunition detonates at around 1.5 metres (1.6 yd) from the threat.[10] It will engage any threat approaching the tank between the velocities of 70 metres per second (230 ft/s) and 700 metres per second (2,300 ft/s), and can detect false targets, such as outgoing projectiles, birds and small caliber bullets.[11] Arena works during the day and night, and the lack of electromagnetic interference allows the system to be used by multiple vehicles as a team.[23] The 27-volt system requires approximately one kilowatt of power, and weighs around 1,100 kilograms (2,400 lb).[11] Arena increases a tank's probability of surviving a rocket-propelled grenade by between 1.5[11]–2 times.[24]

Despite being very interesting, It seems this system is not in use but is available for export versions

Last gen deployed on Armata vehicles:

Afganit (Russian: Афганит, lit. 'Afghanite') is a Russian active protection system (APS) employed on modern Russian Armata family of vehicles.[1] It is intended to supersede the Arena APS and utilises radar and electro-optical sensors in the ultraviolet and infrared bands.[2][3] The millimeter-wavelength radar detects and tracks incoming anti-tank munitions. The system can reportedly intercept armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot kinetic energy penetrators in addition to high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) munitions.[4][5] Currently, the maximum speed that can be intercepted is 1,700 m/s (Mach 5.0), with projected future increases of up to 3,000 m/s (Mach 8.8).[6] According to news sources, it protects the tank from all sides.[7][8]

A few armata (not the T-14) have been seen in Ukraine but not meaningfully deployed yet.

Interestingly Ukraine has its own APS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaslin_Active_Protection_System however I have no clue how much it is used in practice?

About the US prototype APS:

n 2006–2007, the Institute for Defense Analysis found Quick Kill to be relatively immature and had significant development risks. Important components such as the radar were not yet fully developed and testing of the system as a whole was on hold while the warhead was redesigned. They also found Trophy, which uses a shotgun-like kill mechanism, to be the most mature of the 15 systems they analyzed.

while the other one seems promising:

However, in August 2018 the Army decided not to continue qualifying Iron Curtain onto the Stryker, saying that while the system "generally worked in concept" and was "generally able to hit its targets," it was still not mature enough.[11]

China recently deployed the GL-5 which has a range of 100 meters, twice that of arena (no clue for afganit)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GL5_Active_Protection_System

innovative since it launch 2 rockets.

The irsaely trophy seems interesting. Gun based.

almost completely negate legacy ATGMs unless paired with a sophisticated jamming attack ..

This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.

Firstly as we can see, at least for Russia and the U.S, hard kill APS are nothing more than uncertain and possibly buggy proof of concepts.

Russia did deploy some successfully in afghanistan but the fact they didn't deploy them shows that the tech is mostly not ready.

It could be that the new APS system on armatas is disruptives and working well, but that is unproven. It's possible but uncertain that using recent machine learning techniques would yield lower danger/false positives but given the classical inertia, if that were the answer, we're not ready to see that deployed until 20 years, and even so ML techniques have generally dangerous error rates.

It would be interesting to evaluate how much deployed in the wild are the ukrainian and chinese and israeli APS systems are though.

and what about hard kill APS for aircrafts/helicos?

As for soft kill APS, well russia is the only to have one widely deployed but Ukraine still manage to destroy T-90s just fine.

beyond the real world production ready-ness/falsepositives issues/safety of hard kill APS, what the manufacturer says is not necessarily objective truth

about the range, the claimed 360 degree coverage, reaction time, etc

especially I suspect many APS are weak and possibly useless against top-down attacking ATGMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_protection_system#Top_attack_munitions

Overall I am very curious about the future of this technology and we might get answers either by:

studying academic papers/experiments about them

waiting for a china-taiwan war (unlikely)

waiting for a new israel based war (no idea)

waiting for the ukrainian APS system to be deployed or for western countries giving APS to ukraine (e.g. germany supposedly has one)

waiting for the armata systems to see some action in Ukraine, most likely but only if the war last a few years.

But your initial point is wrong, ATGMs have currently and probably for the foreasable future, destroyed tanks economics.

This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.

No, pretty much Israeli trophy use fighting Hezbollah showed that is the case.

Feel free to prove me wrong there, however. That's what I remember as being the case.

Also, iirc, US and other NATO are going to buy Trophy and install it.

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