Unlike systems that rely on hydraulic drives, it uses electric drives, making integration with various platforms easier, the ministry said.
Unlike systems that rely on hydraulic drives, it uses electric drives, making integration with various platforms easier, the ministry said.
I honestly believe that the enormous amount of drones on the battlefield today will cause a resurgence of flak as a primary AA weapon. For a while now, missiles have been the go-to, but expensive and advanced missiles can be countered by massive swarms of cheap drones. Flak cannons with modern targeting systems and automatic range finding is probably the most reasonable counter to these drone swarms.
I’m thinking CIWS systems will also experience development.
Older systems are known to struggle with drones, but swapping out single solid rounds for something that fragments like FLAK, such that the system can spew a cloud of metal instead of a stream, feels like it would do well against drones.
The whole point of FLAK is AOE, but the more precise your automatic targeting, the less of that you need, so I feel like some middle ground is likely to emerge.
Definitely, however a major advantage of flak over solid rounds (especially with modern automatic range finding and programmable munitions) is that it’s a very easy and cheap way to turn a 1 m miss on that 30 cm drone at 1 km distance into a hit.
The weapons shooting these munitions typically shoot anything from 12.7 mm to 30-40 mm munitions, while even bird shot is enough to take out a drone. With that in mind, there’s really no reason to not make that 30 mm shell fragment into a dispersed cloud of bird shot that would barely harm a plane, since it makes it so much easier to take out the thousands of drones attacking you. Whenever the occasional heavier target shows up, you can just disable the fragmentation effect (programmable munitions) and you basically have a CIWS.
Exactly.
Or if you really need to save, have two ammo feeds.
I agree but I think people are also missing that attack helicopters are already flying flak cannons.
With other “stuff” in them, like long threads winding up in drone rotors, em bursts, etc.
I’m honestly a bit surprised that some kind of net that can be shot from an under-barrel mounted grenade launcher hasn’t been developed/deployed yet. I’m imagining something like a standard 40 mm grenade casing that contains a net that folds out after maybe 50 m (or a programmable distance, or a proximity trigger). Very thin/light strings are enough to take down a drone, so you could probably easily pack a 5 x 5 m or even 10 x 10 m net into a 40 mm casing. People are already shooting at drones with rifles, I would imagine something that lets you shoot out a large net to 100 + meters would make taking down drones a lot easier for an infantryman, and being able to fire it from a standard barrel-mounted grenade launcher would make it very easy to deploy.
I would imagine that this kind of thing could drastically improve the ability of infantry to deal with drones when they are exposed. I’m sure there’s a good reason this hasn’t been implemented, but I have a hard time figuring out what that reason is.
Same here. I imagine there is probably some thing making it useless, like you just don’t have the time to get the “gun” out or even aim, or there are branches everywhere or they’ll just drone drop you anyways etc.
What a horror it all is.