Sure, any new technology will make waves until a solution is developed. Even now, jamming technology like the Drone Gun Mk.4 is being fielded by military and law enforcement agencies. It’s only a matter of time before it’s common place and effective. Such countermeasures won’t stop large aerial drones like the MQ1, but it will hamper FPV drones in CQC environments pretty effectively.
And until then, equipping troops with a shotgun and training in trap shooting will suffice in a pinch.
Is this meant to be a man-portable anti-drone weapon?
The problem with at gatling guns that makes them impractical as man-portable weapons is the weight of the ammo and energy source and rate of fire. Even with smaller caliber rounds, “Old Painless” would require carrying thousands of rounds of ammo which it would burn through around 1000 per minute or more and a giant battery pack to spin the barrels.
Because at the end of the day, tanks, planes, helicopters, and drones can’t occupy land.
Within a year of those being widespread, autonomous drones (which don’t need to communicate and hence can’t be jammed) will become widespread. The biggest impact of the jamming will be the loss of the propaganda value in publishing the videos.
Russian Gatling guns are gas-powered (meaning they’re driven by the pressure of the propellant gas of the round, just like gas-operated personal firearms). No external power source needed.
E.g.:
It’s a design choice. External power is not an objective requirement.
Of course if you have to make the propellant charges of each cartridge huge just to power the gun, in the end you’re not saving much weight.
This one uses a dog-standard Russian .50 cal bullet, but that is indeed a fairly high-powered round.
Useful for point defense against larger drones (Shahed/Geran type).
Small Arms ammunition will always be cheaper than drones.
Isn’t this basically the context of The Terminator, where the machines figured out they didn’t need humans, so they employed bots and drones to take humans out? I can see a time when artificial intelligence gets good enough that drones could be close to 100% autonomous and cheap enough to produce to swarm the battlefield. I think there will always be a place in warfare for meatware toting small arms, but less and less in the future.
The technology for quadcopter-type drones to occupy land is not too far off though, no? Occupying checkpoints and rural areas would be possible, but not cities. It comes done to the population density vs. the number of drones. Until then, a hybrid of humans + drones could cover a lot of situations.
Drones will always be cheaper (financially and morally) than human soldiers.
I thought in the war in Afghanistan, it was costing the military something like a million dollars per year per human soldier. Half a million per year in Iraq. And you can attach small arms to drones. Drones can function in the air, on land or in the sea. Ukraine is using land based drones with small firearms attached to them.
The TW 12.7 has a 50 caliber browning machine gun attached to it but they can also use rocket launchers, 7.62 rifles, 5.56 rifles, etc. It costs about $30,000 each, which is far cheaper than a human soldier.
Six weeks is a heck of a lot of endurance. What’s that thing’s power supply?
Dunno; it’s large enough to have an internal combustion engine. Presumably it can be refueled and rearmed at need.
The Ukrainian SkyFall P1-SUN drone can be produced for like $1000 and they can crank out 50,000 a month. It has a range of about 12 miles. Assume the Russians have something similar, that’s a 6 to 12 mile wide “no man’s land” just taking the cheapest tactical drones into account.
What is the ROI of deploying gatling gun or rocket based air defense systems against $1000 drones)?
I’ll have to see if I can find the link to a video I saw of a couple Ukrainian solders sneaking up behind and disabling a Russian drone that was sitting on the ground.
100 round box of .50 ammo weighs 40 lbs and a the YakB shoots through that in 2 seconds, Not to mention the kick any gatling gun will have firing 1000 rounds per minute at any caliber. It’s not a man-portable weapon.
Of course a 12.7mm autocannon has a hell of kick. That’s why I postulated something that shoots much, much smaller bullets.
No you’re right. I was thinking in terms of autonomous drones (which are technically possible, but not cheap or practical) and projecting that functionality onto current drones (which need a human operator). Dumb mistake on my part.
I mean, humans can sneak up on humans from behind sometimes, too.
This is happening right now in Ukraine, except the drones are controlled via km-long optical fibres and so utterly proof from jamming. The battlefields are now festooned with fibre like huge spiderwebs.
Nah, you can still jam those, too, by cutting the fibers. Ukraine is probably working on weapons and tactics for that right now.
Russia really should be doing the same, but they’re not nearly as adaptable as Ukraine is.
Make drones numerous and cheap enough and you could simply develop their autonomous programming by genetic algorithm; more or less, the ones that work and accomplish their goals get copied and modified until they’ve developed insect-like intelligence.
Unleash swarms of autonomous killbots onto the battlefield! What could possibly go wrong?