Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nostrademons 1829 days ago
A TOW anti-tank missile's warhead is about 10 lbs, and it penetrates tanks just fine. That's well within the carrying capacities of commodity carrying drones, which can carry about 20-100 lbs.

Shaped charges are remarkably effective at penetrating armor, penetrating up to 7x their diameter. A 4-inch wide charge will penetrate up to 28 inches of solid steel armor, more than a WW2 battleship's armor.

I don't know how much armor a modern aircraft carrier has, but they're designed for the era of not-very-maneuverable warheads. Send it through the aircraft lifts and blow up the hangar filled with munitions and jet fuel, or punch through the bridge windows and kill the command staff.

Same goes for common tank countermeasures against HEAT rounds, like composite or reactive armor. These are both designed on the assumption that the same exact spot is not going to be hit twice, but you can program a drone to invalidate that assumption pretty easily.