[andrewstuart]

There must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones including sound, visual, radio.

Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against?

Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide in without radio communication once they spot their target.

Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the world.

[ceejayoz]

I suspect we're going to see a big resurgence in anti-aircraft guns, like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard.

[mschuster91]

Or on a smaller scale, something homebrew like a bunch of AK-74s attached to something resembling a minigun [1]. Or the other way around, take old AA guns, place them on the back of a pickup and shred Russian infantry without mercy [2].

Certainly the Ukrainians are showing the future when it comes to land-based wars; the question is how many of these we're actually going to see.

[1] https://armourersbench.com/2023/07/09/ukraines-improvised-an...

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ingenious-ukrainians-invent-ho...

[andrewstuart]

Of all shapes and sizes. I can imagine a robot M16 attached to a drone spotter might be effective against the sort of small drones that are hitting tanks in Ukraine.

[instagib]

Semi automatic shotgun spread pattern is pretty good for short range.

[maxerickson]

Why not a 20 mm cannon?

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

[ttepasse]

Because the land version of Phalanx, the Centurion, is big, needs a large transport and a lot of energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM

Although an auto cannon seems to be the right thing. The current thing seems to be the mobile, smaller Skyranger systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyranger_30

That’s still rather big and is a dedicated vehicle. I wonder if there are initiatives of coupling the remote-controlled weapon turrents on normal vehicles with radar and such enabling anti-air capability:

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

[maxerickson]

That's a 30 mm cannon.

[ceejayoz]

C-RAM is 20, but a bulkier, less mobile system. Raw barrel size isn’t the only consideration.

[cm2187]

Plus people will get a lot less worked up about AI picking and aiming at targets in the air vs on the ground.

[ceejayoz]

Until one pulls a USS Vincennes.

[jazzyjackson]

why fire ammo when you have laser beams?

https://bluehalo.com/c-uas-autonomous-systems/c-uas-directed...

[mopsi]

Cost, reliability and simplicity! A WWII-era 20-40mm cannon upgraded with automated targeting system doesn't even have to accurately hit the target if its shell explodes into a cloud of metal fragments that hits propellers and control surfaces or gets ingested into a jet engine.

[dotnet00]

Directed energy weapons are still in their early days, they're not powerful enough to just shrug off all sorts of potential countermeasures the way a solid chunk of metal hitting the target does.

[sand500]

Could train birds of prey to actively hunt down and rip apart drones.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/the-milit...