Anti-aircraft artillery could take down the r/c armada, or failing that…
Retaliation with Tomahawks.
Whatever damage your 100 or 1000 flying hand grenades could do, would be outdone with one or two missile strikes.
Yeah, but missiles move very fast, are still relatively big and produce a lot of heat. These all mean that they are (relatively) easy to detect, you can’t mistake them for anything else, and adding the fact that they usually move in one direction it is possible (hard but possible) to shoot them down.
With small plane (or other type of UAV) first you have to identify it as a plane (and not for example a bird), then you have to decide if it is dangerous (not just civilian RC plane) and worth using (expensive) means to take it down. Then there is problem of aiming - small planes are, well small, so they don’t show on radar (or at least not “strongly” enough), they don’t produce much heat so it may be hard for homing missiles to shoot them down.
Nitpick, they’ve been around since WWI, but they didn’t work very well back then and so were never used operationally.
The thousands of people standing around within control range of the thousands of RC drones would make an easy target plus you would have to have a huge number of frequency bands to keep the drones from flying into each other.
Realistically, the only use would be in a one or two shot engagement over short range against a single non-hardened target.
There’s no particular reason that a missile has to move in only one direction. In fact, from what I understand, many of them will move in various directions, both to pursue a moving target, and to evade enemy air defenses or hit a particularly vulnerable spot. There was a joke about how the Tomahawks during the Gulf War would fly down a city street, stop to wait for the light to change, then turn the corner and continue on to their targets.
D’oh, this problem just got easier. If you know what radio frequency the drones are being controlled with, simply jam the signal and let the drone continue on until it intersects the terrain. Similarly, if you know the frequency, you can find the transmitter (if the drone can pick up the control signal, so can the drone’s target and its defenders, if they are properly equipped). Missiles that can home in on radio transmitters have been in use at least since the Vietnam war, and are a key tool used by SEAD aircrews such as the Air Force’s Wild Weasels.
There are fairly decent commercially available autopilots for RC planes, costing hundreds not thousands of dollars. They navigate by GPS, and can be programmed with waypoints for altitude and location. They even include telemetry downlinks.
You wouldn’t need any radio controls once your RC armada was airborne.
In that case, I propose that we encase high-value targets with big mosquito nets to catch any incoming drones.
You could preprogram their path of flight or just use some other means to control them - for example cellular communication (fancy but possible).
First wave deals with nets, second wave destroys the peanut butter factories. Third wave profits.
Cellular communication is trivial. All the necessary components are available off the shelf for less than £200 total. Still easier to use an autopilot though.
Bah, scooped.
The amount of explosive needed to fully destoy the vehicle cuts into the working payload that can be carried. Also, that explosive makes it much more dangerous at landing, to handle the vehicle, storing them in hangers, etc.
According to Wikipedia:
We have been told the Iranians brought it down. The Iranians claim they brought it down. The US Government made all the official moves asking the drone be returned. The Iranians stated the drone now belongs to them and will not be returned. Anything beyond that is speculation.
Do you remember the US spy plane that went down in China in, I think, 2000-2001?
The crew had to destroy the sensitive material and systems before they were taken into custody. I am fairly certain they did it with hand tools.
The Chinese wouldn’t give the plane back either.
The did return it, eventually. In pieces. Apparently not all of the pieces were returned.
You don’t need explosives to self destruct. Military avionics have the capability to slag the memory on command, and all you need to destroy a vehicle is the nearest terrain. 0.5mv[sup]2[/sup] will do the job nicely.
Self-destruct ain’t free. As noted, it increases aquisition cost, reduces payload capacity, increases fuel consumption, and requires maintenance and special handling. The only reason you’d want to invest resources in a self-destruct feature is if the aircraft contains classified technology or data. Examples include an aircraft with stealth techology, or a reconnaissance aircraft that may have aerial photos (or imaging technology) you don’t want the enemy to know you have.
If it’s a stealthless flying bomb, you may as well leave the self-destruct out of the design and max out the size of the warhead.
They can take it down for sure. There is a number of systems designed to shoot down artillery and mortar shells, which should work just fine for RC planes. While most use auto-cannons, lasers also look promising.
The problem will be with detection. Small RC plane wouldn’t show up on IR camera and probably won’t have much of radar signature.
of course true.
I wasn’t trying to say that the current missiles are ineffective or deficient in some way. In fact, I wonder why the military is investigating small AVs with explosives. I don’t see the problem this solution is trying to solve. But they are working on it. DoD researches many things. Perhaps this will never get past the “interesting” stage.