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Comment by lowbloodsugar | Hacker News Reader

1500 rounds in a Phalanx, so need 1510 drones (catapults, radar, any aircraft on deck), at, say $5000 each. $7.5m to take a carrier out of the battle. I hope the Navy has wargamed this or demonstrated the phalanx software wont shit itself with that many targets.

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How are the drones different from a simple bomb or missile then? You might as well just build a smaller SDB with more strikes. The vast majority of these drone weapons boil down to the concept of a guided bomb. Drones have a limited operational time measured in minutes and they can only attack once. The only difference to conventional bombs is that smaller explosives cause less collateral damage.

Check out this wargame, where floats of small inexpensive boats dominate a traditional navy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Assuming the drones/missiles cannot be easily jammed, the main counter to such an opponent would be to:

1) Know their capabilities 2) Stay out of range of the drone/missile swarm, until you have rendered them harmless (by destroying or blinding them).

There are unjammable communications. Essentially ad-hoc networks using laser beams, coordinated from a plane.

The reason it's unjammable is that you need to be in line-of-sight of the laser between 2 devices to jam it.

Blinding swarms of drones with communications and coordination between them is impossible. If necessary, they'll just get their sight from a satellite above.

So this would fall under the assumption that they could not be jammed, in which case the trick is to stay out of range, and destroy them before launch.

Missiles like this with ranges of 100s of kilometers will be very expensive, and can be intercepted by cheaper missiles/drones (or soon, lasers).

You can jam unjammable laser. If there was something like fog or rain it could block it's line of sight.

Something like a CIWS could work but it’s big and heavy and probably would need some time to calibrate. So you can’t have them with you everywhere, especially on a foot patrol, raid, recon, etc...

Well, once someone has 1510 drones capable of taking a carrier out of battle, they'll just toss a few dozen smaller turrets on the carrier that fire birdshot at full auto.

Check out the US Navy’s new laser cannon!

It's wild to imagine but 100% believable to think that the US Navy already has technology to defeat a large mass of cheap weaponized drones. And even more entertaining if it's lasers.

It would be a shame if those drones were covered with mirrors,wouldn't it?

That means more weight, more cost, for something that is ultimately disposable.

hopefully the navy isn't superstitious.

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