Comment by zarzavat
9 days ago
The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low.
Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.
I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war.
The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.
Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier.
Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.
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> I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead
Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.
Latest FPV drones in Ukraine became much more resistant to electronic countermeasures. Plus other drones are used as retranslators.
Seems they are using kilometers of fibre optic cables, so they fly tethered and communication can't be disrupted.
I'd hate to be part of the clean-up crew when that war ends. Broken fibre is nasty stuff.
I believe they’ve also deployed hybrid solutions: FPV fibre drones launched and piloted via link to an unmanned platform.
So a drone boat with good/secure signalling pulls up and a bunch of fibre optic drones launch from that point penetrating inland.
I'll gladly take up the fibre clean up. You deal with the mines :)