Comment by nine_k
9 hours ago
Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
> IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually.
That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
Also, the ship appears to not have been operating any of its defensive systems at the time. It was a proverbial sitting duck.
> Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
On your first point - it is much more difficult than you think to "reasonably track" a vessel. There's no hardware just sitting there to watch what direction the carrier moves next. Satellites have to orbit - that's why you only get new photos of ground targets once or twice during a news cycle. Carrier movement patterns in wartime are designed to avoid reacquisition.
Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.