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Leszek Karlik

@cstross

I foresee the resurgence of shotguns as military weapons, you're going to get specialised anti-drone specialists in every infantry squad.

Also, I think this thread severely overestimates fuel-air explosives, you don't need Space Marine armour to protect soldiers against FAE barotrauma, you need to protect a soldier's respiratory system, the rest is pretty resilient.

14 August at 14:40 | Wall-to-wall | Open on circumstances.run
6 comments
Jacek Wesołowski

@Leszek_Karlik @cstross Standard shotguns have the range of 50-150 metres, depending on type of ammo, and that doesn't sound like enough. I'm not sure how far you can extend the range before the weapon stops being portable.

14 August at 14:49 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Leszek Karlik

@jzillw @cstross

An FPV drone will have small warhead with an effective blast range of a few metres, you need lots of fuel for 50 metres of effective kill radius.

Generally, blast waves are a very inefficient way to kill people because they go down with cube of the radius, which is why shrapnel is used (its density decreases with square of the radius).

Fuel-air explosives start the explosion over a larger volume which mitigates the cube law somewhat, but you still need lots of fuel to have a large kill radius.

@jzillw @cstross

An FPV drone will have small warhead with an effective blast range of a few metres, you need lots of fuel for 50 metres of effective kill radius.

Generally, blast waves are a very inefficient way to kill people because they go down with cube of the radius, which is why shrapnel is used (its density decreases with square of the radius).

14 August at 16:12 | Open on circumstances.run
Jacek Wesołowski

@Leszek_Karlik @cstross I wasn't thinking about blast radii. The drone is coming in at 20m/s or more. Unless you're perfectly positioned to intercept it, your window of opportunity is in the order of 3 seconds. In video games we call that "fast-paced". God help you if there's more than one.

14 August at 17:28 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Isaac Ji Kuo

@jzillw @Leszek_Karlik @cstross

That's why it's not really a weapon system problem, it's a detection and tracking problem. A human shotgunner can handle the kill IF the tracking system shows him where the incoming threat is.

This system could include a network of spaced apart microphones - perhaps microphones on each soldier. This won't be able to detect glide bombs, but could track the location of most nearby drones with adequate precision.

14 August at 17:55 | Open on spacey.space
Brie Mmm

Acoustic detection was all the rage before radar was invented; most devices were rather unwieldy, but there were also portable personal systems, like this German one:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M7iDSsoA6_g/V8jmRT8R6AI/AAAAAAAAK4w/5agLXmyGXYImWKRCs5w_nRAyBnkyZHwGgCLcB/s1600/acoustic_locator_13.jpg

where sound tubes were paired with “glasses”, to precisely direct line of sight.

Microphone network would need to have current and precise information about soldiers' relative postitions; I wonder what method would be fast, precise and not easy to spot by itself.

Acoustic detection was all the rage before radar was invented; most devices were rather unwieldy, but there were also portable personal systems, like this German one:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M7iDSsoA6_g/V8jmRT8R6AI/AAAAAAAAK4w/5agLXmyGXYImWKRCs5w_nRAyBnkyZHwGgCLcB/s1600/acoustic_locator_13.jpg

where sound tubes were paired with “glasses”, to precisely direct line of sight.
14 August at 19:08 | Open on venera.social
7leaguebootdisk

@isaackuo @jzillw @Leszek_Karlik @cstross they use acoustic detection to spot long range Russian drones already.

15 August at 0:35 | Open on mindly.social
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