[fvdessen]

Not entirely unrelated, but FPV drones are now the main weapon of the Ukraine war. They started using them against tanks, then groups of soldiers, but have now found that they are cost effective enough to go against individual soldiers.

The drone soldiers operate in small teams from underground bunkers close to the front from which they launch hundreds of drones a day, with different types of drones for different targets. The limiting factor is the amount of drones, Ukraine plans to build one million of them this year domestically.

Apart from jamming, there's not much to defend yourself against drones except staying underground, or moving fast enough that there is no time for you to be spotted and tracked. But drones can see kms away and move at hundreds of kmph, then go after you personally, even inside buildings, and even at night with infrared vision.

In an interview they asked a drone-ace how many ennemies he killed, he said he couldn't remember; "Do you remember how many cups of coffee you drank last year?".

I am not sure what to think about all this, but it is certainly fascinating

[05]

Bombs and artillery is the main weapon, FPV drones are a novelty and they're being limited by being tied to the remote pilot. Pilots don't really scale that well - it takes a long time to train, and they have to be relatively close to the drone, so they're vulnerable to counter attacks.

Autonomous drones are supposedly already used for oil refineries (vision based navigation, to mitigate GPS jamming), once this tech trickles down to smaller drones things will get really scary..

[evantbyrne]

I wouldn't describe the large scale use of FPV drones in conflicts over the past couple years as a "novelty". They perform reconnaissance on a scale that wasn't previously possible; harass, pin down, provide target coordinates for, and even directly attack infantry squads; and destroy immobilized or poorly armored vehicles. That's not even mentioning the single-use specially made drones with larger warheads, which are capable-enough of taking out armored vehicles that tank designs have been forced to evolve.

[saidinesh5]

> it takes a long time to train, and they have to be relatively close to the drone, so they're vulnerable to counter attacks.

You'd think so. I mean to fly a quad properly, you'd need like 20-30 hours. To just crash a drone into a large enough target, 6-7 hours is more than enough.

As for having to be relatively close to the drone, range extenders these days seem to go a long way.. or even having a receiver outside a safe bunker - that seems to be how the Ukrainians/Russians fly these days.

[kqr]

> To just crash a drone into a large enough target, 6-7 hours is more than enough.

I know nothing about this but this makes it sound like the target is cooperative. Isn't it harder to crash into a target that actively tries to avoid you?

(E.g. listening for propeller whine, shooting at objects in sky, ducking into small openings, having signal jammers, moving/arranging personnel to limit the impact of drone damage, running counter-drone efforts, etc.)

I remember reading that book about the Predator drone and being surprised how much of Predator effectiveness came down to pilot skill, rather than technology. The predator was just a slow, small prop plane, after all. What made it powerful was that the pilots knew exactly how to use those properties (along with knowledge of the enemies' technology limitations) to evade detection and interception.

[swaginator]

There's plenty of footage you can see of how the FPV drones are used.

> to evade detection and interception.

I was under the impression that the Reaper was typically used where US has air superiority. There is an international combat guy on Youtube who fought with the YPG in Rojava and has been hunted by that type of loitering drone, he said they are easy enough to hide from, but the main thing is that they are almost always around-- and eventually lead to complacency. To quote the IRA: "we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."

[saidinesh5]

With the predator, you're controlling a large, expensive aircraft flying at higher altitudes. But with these cheap $250 flying bricks, you're directly controlling the bullet.

You don't have to worry about stalling, latency, accuracy etc.. they are also harder to shoot down because of their size and speed.

So they simply select targets like a moving vehicle or a bunker or even a group of moving people, and go kamikaze.

[topspin]

> once this tech trickles down to smaller drones

That is here now. Small drones are appearing in Ukraine that target vehicles and infantry using machine vision and thermal imaging. This is driven by RF jamming that limits FPV. Also, the terminal phase of a small drone attack is often where the attack fails and automating that improves effectiveness even when FPV is possible. Less skill is necessary when a fighter can just designate a target and hit the 'kill' button, so this is a force multiplier.

An interesting story on this is found here[1]. Quantity serial production is underway and it will be in wide use very soon, as in the next couple weeks. One thing they've done is secure the software to prevent reverse engineering.

[1] https://mil.in.ua/en/news/drones-with-machine-vision-are-bei...

Another thing that stands out to me in that article is the claim that production is limited by component availability. An obvious thing to do is further enhancing these drones by converting them from suicide drones to bomb delivery vehicles so they can be reused.

> Bombs and artillery is the main weapon

That's a generalization that overlooks a great deal in Ukraine. It's like selecting some organ in the body and calling it the "main organ." These drones frequently provide precision forward observation that enables artillery and precision missiles. It's a system, and without FPV observation, FPV interdiction and other contributions Ukraine wouldn't be performing as well as it has.

[thadt]

Flying a drone from inside a bunker is, for all intents and purposes, playing a video game. Call of Duty and Flight Simulator have been training very capable pilots for years now. If you want to see the (near) future of warfare, hop on an open COD game.

As for optional, full autonomy on small drones - I suspect it's further along than many might expect.

[bambax]

> once this tech trickles down to smaller drones

We're almost there: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369380266_Channel-A...

[josefresco]

> FPV drones are a novelty

I can't find the link, but I believe I read Russian doctors claiming that drones were now the #1 cause of battlefield infantry injuries.

[wyldberry]

This makes sense because of the other aspects at play in the war, namely no one having clear air dominance, which allows artillery to shape the battlefield. In the shaped battlefield, the hunter-killer type drones have a target rich environment.

[05]

That’s really impressive, - although for more deadly weapons deaths/injuries ratio would be different than with drones.

[is_true]

I think the problem is with the autonomy.

Someone is gonna end up using something like a global hawk (spy drone) to deploy smaller kamikaze drones.

[consumer451]

Ukraine already does the mothership thing using a larger multicopter, and there is a company working on the autonomy part. They are supposedly close to releasing the product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40428492

[is_true]

it's "cool" tech but unfortunately not in the industry I would like

[lm28469]

There are only two forces of creation in tech, the porn industry and the military

[Ringz]

As they are for life in general.

[AndrewKemendo]

We’re already there

Headed to production

[exar0815]

Drones basically have flipped the total modern artillery doctrine on their heads.

With the proliferation of fire-finder-radar, modern artillery started to switch from dug in stationary guns to highly mobile "shoot-and-scoot"-tactics, in which a gun quickly fires half a dozen rounds in a time-on-target salvo and relocates to dodge the counterbattery fire. For this, modern Artillery systems like PZH2000, Archer, RCH155, Dana and Caesar are optimized.

Since the advent of quick and cheap FPV drones, moving artillery on the road is much more in danger, and dug-in guns with jammers, SHORAD and overhead protection again regained the survivability edge - albeit mainly because russia lost most of its modern radar.

The only western SPA with any chance of survival seems to be the PZH2000, as its on a tracked carriage allowing it offroad movement and concealment and being better armored than most wheeled contemporaries on Lorry-Chassis

[icegreentea2]

Uh, I'm not sure FPVs have all of the effects that you're discussing.

FPVs are significantly range limited (~10km), and have relatively small surveillance footprint. It's true that persistent ISR is significantly increasing the danger posed to all vehicles within the 10-30km (perhaps further) of the 'front line', but these are predominantly coming from different classes of drones.

And yes, while FPVs can be queued onto SPGs (or whatever) by these other drones, so can other means of fires (like traditional artillery). As a reminder, tube artillery can usually reach out to at least 20km.

I am not downplaying the impact that drones in general have, and I'm also not claiming that FPVs cannot significantly shape artillery operations within 5-10km of the front line.

Here's the rub - Russia is clearly cable to assembly company sized AFV elements (though not consistently) to attack. And yes, we see these attacks generally get repulsed (with significant FPV drone involvement). So we know that Ukrainian ISR + FPV combination (Ukraine has been limiting its artillery usage) can be overwhelmed in the deeper space - it is possible to mass company sized elements, and transit them through into the line of contact, reasonably intact.

There's no denying that PzH2000 is more survivable than Archer or Caesar (that is infact the entire point of Archer and Caesar - trade suitability and tactical mobility for strategic/operational mobility). But you're also missing like... M109? Like by numbers, there were more M109s donated than any other western platform.

[praptak]

Domakha has ~50km range.

Here's a report (in Polish) from a FO mission to correct HIMARS fire (sadly the drone was lost but the Russians had to send a fighter jet to shoot it down with a rocket): https://x.com/Aldohartwinska/status/1792838189494706220

[fullspectrumdev]

FPV drones have been used at much longer ranges than that - it’s pretty well documented with videos that with repeater systems there’s now been strikes in excess of 25km using FPV, by both sides.

That’s not to downplay artillery though: you simply cannot deliver the volume of fires with drones that you can with tubes.

[exar0815]

>>And yes, while FPVs can be queued onto SPGs (or whatever) by these other drones, so can other means of fires (like traditional artillery). As a reminder, tube artillery can usually reach out to at least 20km.

Yeah but that's the whole point thats been discussed in interested circles - the shift of the vulnerability of SPGs from the firing to the travel phase in absence of accompanying VSHORAD. (If they just had 2000 Gepards) And as Gunlorrys have to travel and fire on certain roads, that decreases the problem space.

For the M109, you are completely right. I missed that one.

I am not saying that tube artillery has a problem, but that ~10-20km around the line of contact seems to be the place you don't want to rely on mobility alone for survivability. Rheinmetall currently seems to be developing a 100km ranged base bleed grenade for 155mm pipes.

[icegreentea2]

Ok that makes sense.

I agree that persistent ISR has dramatically increased the vulnerability of especially road bound SPGs behind the line of contact.

I guess in my first post, I was emphasizing that the catalyst for this increased vulnerability was not the FPV drones, but rather of ISR drones.

[hylaride]

I'm not going to go into details of why I know (other than I'm an FPV pilot with a drone licence in my country and I have direct connections to pilots operating in a certain conflict), but you're more wrong than right. FPV drones have become a factor and like all new technologies, had an immediate impact that has since been blunted by adapting, eg EM warfare/jamming, "cope cages" around tanks, and the fact that it's still artillery killing the most soldiers.

FPV drones carrying anything more than antipersonnel grenades are heavy, with limited range and can have EW sensors track the control link signal sources that can then be responded with artillery.

Since a lot of the adaptions have happened, FPV pilots on both sides have become more about harassing the enemy than a strategic flipping of artillery doctrine (which was shifting to more mobile batteries before FPV drones came into the picture).

[rainworld]

Primary reason the 2000 fares better in terms of survival is because they are being extra careful with them. Likely the condition under which they were provided. But that means fewer missions, greater distance and so on.

[KptMarchewa]

Lancets are much bigger problem for artillery as they are not as limited in range as FPVs.

[coldtea]

>In an interview they asked a drone-ace how many ennemies he killed, he said he couldn't remember; "Do you remember how many cups of coffee you drank last year?".

On the other hand, that's also what someone bragging insincerely would say...

[tylergetsay]

OP is refering to this vid (which is great): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WipqeFgzdTc

[lnsru]

Today I left major European defense company. It’s fantastic how tax payer pay for real outdated, but properly certified crap. Long story short: Bundeswehr soldier can’t use improvised drone at all. In fact he also needs a license and insurance. This renders earlier mentioned Bundeswehr useless in modern conflict against an enemy with many improvised drones. With certification 500-1000$ diy drone costs suddenly 10 times more. Maybe this is nice business opportunity to team up for?

[simion314]

Hopefully this will make invasion much more costly, so smaller countries will have more chances to survive their imperialists neighbors. Sure the criminals can level your city but they need toe eventually move their troops in to pillage the resources and then you can make them pay. Only downside is with countries that can afford to lose 1000+ men a day for years, it will cost them and you a lot.

Anyone knows if in China such men loses are acceptable for the population.

[swaginator]

I just watched that video. I feel bad for the kid. Even in the absolute best case scenario, Ukraine wins and he has to live the rest of his life with nightmares of all the people he killed. I know this isn't exactly productive discourse but God, war is incredibly bleak.

[vdfs]

How do they control them? Is it using Internet/4G? Isn't easy to jam those signals?