First Idiocracy became non-fiction, next up is Black Mirror.
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I don’t understand why that would be, unless the cable is physically damaged by something in the water; that doesn’t seem like a big hazard over the limited duration of a drone flight.
An expensive, large, slow and vulnerable ship seems not the best mechanism to carry thousands of cheap mass produced drones in a numbers game
I don’t know what a dedicated drone carrier would look like, but I suspect nothing like today’s.
It would probably look like a modified sub
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Or heavy bombers dropping packets of drones on parachutes.
My guess is it’s not a insurmountable technical barrier, just a difficult one.
The more water proof your cable, the heavier the sheath you need.
Flowing water is likely to tangle or bend the cable. Fibre optics can only bend at a certain wide angle.
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If there is a fully automated drone swarm that has visual of the carrier, then they are pretty much unjammable I believe. The only way to jam it that I know of would be to make the carrier indistinguishable from the water to the sensors, which is obviously extremely difficult.
Most of a carrier’s defenses are likely to take place before that occurs though. A drone swarm would have to travel a great distance in order to reach the carrier, and currently drones probably don’t have that capability, but if they did then they would be spotted. What is more likely is that this hypothetical attack would require several motherships.
All drones reliant on satellite or GPS, so they can be jammed. For example Shaheds are fully automated but Ukraine has some planes which can fly above them, overwhelm their CRPA, causing them to fly off course until they crash. This would require finding the drone swarm before it got close enough for auto targeting to kick in.
Whatever made it through would have to get past something similar to the Skynex which was posted above, laser, or microwave defenses.
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Only the possibility of a break makes sense. That’s what they’re supposedly doing with the fences- pulling and twisting cables until they break.
I assume these are bare glass fibers with no outer jacket so as to minimize weight. They’re delicate but shouldn’t be affected just by submerging them in water for short duration.
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I hadn’t really thought about it, I just read it and accepted it, so unfortunately this is a lot of speculation on my part.
The drones need to travel 10km+, so they have very large spools of fiber optic cable which are very thin. Here’s a video of a place which has had a lot of fiberoptic drones fly over it:
https://x.com/United24media/status/1938979786988061155
The pilots need to be very careful where they lay the wires because of this. If they lay it over water then the increased drag probably results in a bend which the cable can’t handle.
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The B-52 is gonna make a big comeback. Much larger than a sub.
?
Typhoon class submarine is 574 feet long. B-52 is 159’ long 185’ wing span.
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Ok fine take my non-researched guess and blow it out of the water
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Here’s a pic of what Iran claimed was an F-35 they shot down, so who knows, maybe a B-52 will get to that size.
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wot in tarnation
I really do question how much of what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine is more generalizable. Like are drones really going to be a dominant problem if NATO/US force just out logistic’d the entire Russian front? Would guess no on that, but it would still a problem I guess.
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I think going forward that if one side out logistics the other, then it is because they won the drone battle. The side with their drones knocked out of the sky has such an enormous disadvantage, which is largely why we are in this situation now. Russia’s failure to adapt as quickly gave Ukraine the opportunity to overcome a military far more powerful than their own.
There’s some great examples of this on video. One of the most famous is from the start of the war when a Ukrainian hobby drone owner called the military and told them he had feed of an armored column. Ukraine then destroyed it by hitting the front and rear of the column with javelins and picking apart the rest of the column piece by piece. There’s also clips from both sides attacking a position with the help of a drone, and one person can take out multiple people while the other side doesn’t even know what is happening. Most recently it means that the side without the drone in the air is the side that is going to get droned.
Those are all extremely basic capabilities to take advantage of having the advantage of seeing the other side though. A future conflict will have far more lethal things to exploit, built around having the drone advantage. Here’s a video showing what a company is going to look like for the Army, to give you an idea.
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See this is my sticking point:
Russia’s military completely failed to overtake Ukraine before Ukraine had any real drones to speak of. They failed their little blitzkrieg. They failed their big maneuver based push. The drones didn’t come out in earnest until much later in the war.
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How does this all change if one side has air superiority?
edit: Meant to reply to the post above
Shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that those Boston Dynamics robot dogs were made for killing people.
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Difficult to get air superiority these days. Russia didn’t have a chance to do so against the hundreds of modern anti-air defenses Ukraine has so it is only relevant against weaker enemies like Iran.
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