Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone
anduril.com
anduril.com
Shooting down supersonic, hypersonic, and stealth missiles is hard. You may need to fire multiple anti-air missile just to hit one attacking anti-ship missile. But doing so depletes your magazine faster and it can just come down to who has more ammo.
If you’re able to fire a couple anti-air missiles, and then recover the ones that miss, or have them loiter and acquire a new target, I could see that as being an advantage.
Lasers will be very good for VSHORAD, like in Israel or for point defences of objects like embassies or bases in questionable places (CRAM - Counter Rocket Artillery and Mortar).
I always do wonder how realistic these war games actually are?
They (at least the war games that are public) always assume at least one or both sides are near 100% competent with their systems.
The Ukraine war has at least showed that that is not the case, the best example perhaps being the sinking of the Moskva, or the multitude of times Ukraine has managed to pierce Russian air defenses (who, mind you, has the most AD of anyone).
I'm pretty certain that a lot of these war game scenarios, of played out in real life, wouldn't play out the same way. There'd be miscommunication, technical issues with equipment, massive total surprise on both sides and so forth.
Counter to that are decoys, lots of them.
The YouTube ones? No they’re entertainment. They talk a lot about the limitations of the software they use. For example, they say simulated hypersonic missile are likely much less accurate than they are in the game. But I think there’s plenty to glean from them.
> They (at least the war games that are public) always assume at least one or both sides are near 100% competent with their systems.
Uhhh... that's not a wargame.
A wargame is when you send actual commanders into the actual field, with their actual troops, and roleplay a scenario.
Yeah, there's walkie talkies that go back to HQ where the top-level generals are rolling dice saying "That unit, you got shot, pretend you're dead", and such, but war-games are a scenario to test your generals, admirals, and chain of command. And often times, require physical movement of the lowest level troops.
----------
But at a minimum, you're testing the commander's reaction times in these scenarios.
More often it’s run like Age of Empires, just with modern units and 3rd party judges.
Like, I know that F22 fighters actually flew and were being tested vs RADAR systems in a recent wargame. Obviously no one shot anyone, but its not exactly cheap to run this equipment.
Still, its good roleplay / practice for the pilot (and their commanders and crew), so its absolutely worthwhile. Even if the whole wargame ends up being an unrealistic piece of crap, its still worth excersizing / practicing / drilling the fundamentals
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-ste...
The armed HE variant, that one does not seem that straightforward to me because I don't quite see how this is better than a small missile. Is the benefit loitering? Because a larger drone can carry several armed payloads, and loiter for much longer. Is the benefit detection? Maybe that's it, given its size. Is the benefit autonomous deployment? That probably is pretty useful. Very curious who the government customer is (JSOC?).
Anyway, very cool and slick looking engineering.
Edit: Luckey with some additional comments[1]. "[I]ncreases the operator’s engagement decision space" is I think maybe the key thing here, now that I think about it. The battlefield today is saturated with sensors, so giving the operator just an extra bit of time to understand the data probably is a key innovation for drone warfare.
>Roadrunner-M's performance capacity is far superior than competing air defense solutions and is already an overmatch capability against current and emerging threats. Its employment methodology significantly increases the operator’s engagement decision space which is critically constrained with current capabilities.
>Roadrunner-M innovations include faster launch and take-off timing, three times the warhead payload capacity, ten times the one way effective range, and is three times more maneuverable in G force, compared to similar offerings on the market. A single operator can launch and supervise multiple Roadrunner or Roadrunner-M squadrons.
>Roadrunner-M can be controlled by Lattice, Anduril’s AI-powered software suite for command and control, or be fully integrated into existing air defense radars, sensors, and architectures to provide immediately deployable capability."
If you can reduce volume and weight of missile shipments with these things that might be incredibly valuable, even if it's more expensive overall
It’s also subsonic, loud and quite large so isn’t going to be particularly stealthy.
My bet would be something more akin to a small missile you can launch speculatively with more range and capability than you see with modified drones in Ukraine that can be landed in your lines and repacked if not actually used.
That doesn't mean it's incapable of taking off on its own vertically though.
I think the value compounding can come when these are used as a swarm or as part of multi strategy defense / offense system.
Shooting down modern/future hypersonic or stealth missiles is hard and there is no guarantee you will take it down with just one. So this way you can recover the rest once you get a hit.
I think the primary use for the armed variant will be anti-drone, with decent capability against subsonic manned platforms. That said, it would probably also work well against unarmored ground targets…
It changes the cost/benefit of firing to save a target Vs saving for a more valued save later. quite a big deal with cheaper swam strategies planned.
you still have to reload these but landing repack + fuel is pretty easy.
What is good about this company is that we build things fast and there's not of lot of slacking going on that you see in most of the defense industry. We make things fast and cheap, but they're very poor quality.
To give one example take a look at our counter UAS:
https://www.anduril.com/capability/counter-uas/
Watch the video it will give you chills. What the video won't show is how ineffective this product is. The enemy sends one drone, maybe it will work. If the enemy sends 3 or 4 we're done. This shit barely works, I wouldn't trust my life with it at all. All tests and demonstrations showed utter failure and STILL even though we failed on all the tests we STILL got a contract from the government. There's for sure money changing hands behind the scenes.
It also doesn't show you how crappy the UI is. You think we have a custom UI device to control this thing? No. It's react running in chrome on windows. It's also really poorly designed. The initial UI was made by some kid straight out of school and it was just poorly optimized. And despite this... The government still bought it, simply because a crap product is the only available option.
And to be real with you, we can't beat China tech. In terms of the quality, price and speed ratio, China dominates anduril by a landslide. The US can dominate on quality, but we we give up speed and price as a result. And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all.
No, I'd expect a cost plus contract to do that. I wouldn't expected anyone else to do that.
Anyway, a front end UI can still work even though it's not ideal, but there's huge performance issues with what we have. Huge. The thing doesn't even run webgl for rendering, it's layering svgs on top of mapbox and those svgs are redrawn every frame with no caching. It's poorly designed and clunky and slow and buggy.
I mean, obviously. Anduril is one company, and still a relatively small company at that.
> And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all.
The US, as you mention, already has quality. We need speed and things that are "good enough" right now, not quality. Anduril seems to be heading pretty good in that direction.
That's why there isn't a single video of a live demonstration against enemies. It's not that good. Palmer "suggested" our stuff is being used in Ukraine but how come I see tons of videos cheap drones operating in Ukraine and no anduril products? Because cheap drones are > then anything anduril has built.
>I mean, obviously. Anduril is one company, and still a relatively small company at that.
I meant that the average company in China operating in the same space can beat out anduril. Take DJI for example. Not even primarily a military company, their products BETTER than ours in the field of battle. There products were so effective in Ukraine that DJI had to write safe guards to prevent usage. Anduril can't hold a candle to this.
It's insane to think it would make sense to build on anything other than the best existing commercial technology and expect it to be reliable, affordable and maintainable. The military would not and should not change everything from Windows/Linux and Chrome to some completely custom OS and UI. (In the places we do provide products with the latter, we are more than state-of-the-art.)
Avionics have been piggybacking off of commercial electronics due to the sheer scale since at least the 1980's because it just makes sense, while the primes have been slow to do the same in software, partly due to mindsets like yours.
And the fact is, when creating software, everything starts out buggy, because nothing exists. That's why you develop, test and fix it. Normally we of course wouldn't ship anything that's not perfect, but our customers have begged us for products, saying they have nothing that can deal with some of the threats they face and so are okay with having to restart an app every now and then until it's ironed out.
Plus, if you can see through Anduril's marketing, how can you not see through China's marketing?
The Hanger that houses the Roadrunner gives me "last thing you see as Q* becomes sentient and launches the killer drones" vibes.
Of course, maybe we're already post-singularity. My memory of the before-times is pretty hazy and confused. "Reality" seems more and more like a camp Paul Verhoeven satire of reality.
Unbelievably cool, but it also terrifies me.
It’s wild reading this thread where everyone is literally gung-Ho over Andruil yet the sentiment in any post about Palantir is the exact opposite.
Same folks, everyone. They’re just doing hardware now.
Fewer than 5% of Anduril employees are former Palantir employees.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/kadyrov-chec...
In the US its quite common. A huge percentage of defense spending is specifically restricted to small businesses and big projects have percentages that must be subcontracted to small subcontractors. And then there is the whole SBIR program too. So anything R&D-ish goes there. It's a giant subsidy program for white christian enginners (bc you need clearance)
I say subsidy bc they have a near zero chance of actually supplying the military. You're extremely lucky to ever get a Phase II. The big players ensure none of the small businesses actually ever get big
in reality, Mormons end up in these agencies for perfectly logical reasons. The disproportionate number of Mormons is usually chalked up to three factors: Mormon people often have strong foreign language skills, from missions overseas; a relatively easy time getting security clearances, given their abstention from drugs and alcohol; and a willingness to serve.
https://www.quora.com/Are-Mormons-over-represented-in-the-CI...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772466
https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/1/23403019/fact-or-fiction-t...
In hard numbers it's difficult to verify, besides being closely guarded intelligence agencies they're Federal and don't publish breakdowns of employment by religion, etc.
Military R&D tends to be broader minded in the sense they need hard skillsets and will take anyone with citizenship, a verifiable background, and the technical chops .. and even go wider if pressed for bodies.
The defence industry in the EU is just is less ra-ra jingoism mixed with SV hype in comparison.
At that price, even I would buy one!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/patriot-missile-ukraine-explain...
Interceptor missiles are here to stay. Lasers will accompany them but never replace.
2 machs is ~0.686 km/s - vs 300k km/s for laser.
and laser can be mounted on a plane, which makes it even more dangerous for air2air combat
There's not really any A2A going on anymore within visual range.
Stealth aircraft are immune to targeting radar guided lock except at quite close range. IR missiles are better, but are generally not BVR.
Also, at high altitude “within laser range” could be at “BVR” type ranges, e.g. over eighty km.
Lasers will, however, be very effective at SHORAD, especially against cheap drones, rockets, artillery shells and cruise missiles, in the proper conditions. Iron Beam is projected to cost $0.50-$1.00 in electricity per shot, compared to a $50-60k Iron Dome interceptor missile (which is already insanely cheap for what it is).
When intercepting drones and rockets in a middle of nowhere, what’s often used is a regular machine gun that’s mounted on a pickup truck.
Gepards have pretty short range in comparison to any missile system.
food for thought, and that was even before they were advertising offensive weapons technologies of this sort.
Of course, we could fix the drug smuggling by decriminalizing drug addiction and treating it like other public health issues. But the "War on Drugs" still rages on, after decades of failure.
No, they would be used to detect people crossing the border. What else would you use them for!?
I've watched more than a few videos of jet-powered RC aircraft, and they are scary fast. So it shouldn't be a surprise for the performance of a craft like this.
Cool logo and branding, but also kinda creepy.
..."and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats"...
Okay, but what/who is the root problem that created this company to solve this issue? The either real or perceived threats that the United States and its media affiliations have concocted has really put a tamper on its own ability to make policy decisions that benefit its own peoples. We are spending BILLIONS of dollars on wars in other countries WHILE neglecting our own. Why do we need another private company help with this?
Another question for a separate answer: why can't we spend that money on domestic issues?
Of course it probably won't work out this way because the DoD doesn't just say "We bought a bunch of Anduril Roadrunner's instead of $4m Patriot missiles [or whatever] this year, so we don't need as much budget, take some back".
But a company trying to come up with new solutions to existing problems (you might disagree they are real problems, but we are already spending the money regardless), is actually a good thing.
Just look at SpaceX – before SpaceX, NASA had the ability to send stuff to space. But post-SpaceX, they can send more payloads at a cheaper cost. Isn't that better?
They're now at the whim of an exceedingly eccentric billionaire for their space flight stuff. If Musk one day says he doesn't want to put up satellites that can be used to threaten Russia, NASA can't do anything about it, at least immediately (as they can't just rebuild their payload to fit into ULA rockets). We've already seen that play out with Starlink.
The world pre-SpaceX wasn't good either as NASA was mostly (ab)used by Congress to distribute pork, but now I think the pendulum has swung to the other side way too far - now Congress has zero control short of emergency nationalization over SpaceX.
Beyond that, there are now many, many other private endeavors working to add launch capacity, many of which exist thanks to SpaceX.
Regardless of one's feelings on the military-industrial complex, the use case seems relatively straightforward.
[0]https://www.eurasiantimes.com/deliveries-of-russias-deadly-o...
It performs the same job as a sam or aa gun, at a much increased price I would bet. And why is there a need to return to base? Then it needs to be refueled. You can also see when launched it sheds some covering, so returning to base does not mean it is operational again, it needs to be reset.
And that is in general the problem with US armament systems these days. Very impressive but way too expensive.
When people are able to buy it.
>You mean when it hits the shelves of Bass Pro Shops?
I would expect an online shop like most specialty goods.
I gotta know, what kind of online shops do you frequent?
My understanding is that you have an defensive area with ~20 of the hangers scattered around.
1. !!Incoming threat!!
2. LAUNCH ALL THE DRONES,
3. One intercepts,
4. Other loiter a while in case of additional threats,
5. Remaining drones return to base.
Having them "in the air" waiting doesn't seem to be that big of a help when your missile launcher can have the rocket in the air about as fast after an intercept command is issued. And small missiles are and will continue to get cheaper.
Maybe the price calculation gets better for guaranteeing an intercept? Since either you assume Drone/Missile #1 is going to hit or you fire more just in case that first one misses, because waiting to see if you have a hit before firing another is not an option, and given enough delay and fast communication you could have the second drone abort and fly back after a confirmed intercept.
And the result is much less accurate, and the warhead is smaller. Instead of actively flying the warhead as close to the target as possible, the drone now needs to calculate the optimal detachment point and hope the warhead ends up at the right place for an intercept. This detachment point needs to be at least several seconds before intercept to give the drone enough time to get out of the blast radius, so if the target is actively evading, any hope of hitting it is basically zero.
As long as the drone is cheap enough, this is the superior solution for the widest range of viable targets.
Maybe if you are going up against lots of really simple drones with zero evasion capabilities and no armour, it might make sense to to even simpler and swap the warhead module out for a what is essentially a large single-shot shotgun, but that's going to have significantly less power.
> A future version of the Roadrunner will be able to land even after destroying a target, Luckey says.
This is more to establish the company’s general credibility & draw in new talent.
Tbh this could be to convince people within the DoD to stop blanket rejecting their bids just because they are new and unfamiliar.
> Roadrunner-M has been operationally validated with an existing US Government customer.
If you have better ideas, please do let us know. The friends I have on the front line would certainly prefer to be at home with their families over Christmas rather than sitting in a trench, staving off frostbite and bullets.
"Human operator supervises autonomous mission execution with intuitive UI/UX to enable increased understanding and decision advantage ."
https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/
When AI assisted mass target selection is already a thing:
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal...
Autonomous killing tools are an obvious next step.
Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe.
The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.
Every country gets an army. The only question is: whose?
Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the German soldiers can march in the shade!
;-)
The chickens always come home to roost.
The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.
It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea.
Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.
Before them, we had two devastating world wars in the span of about three decades, with over 100,000,000 dead total. Now we’ve gone over seven decades without another.
Let’s hope the deterrent holds through the current, ongoing, and horribly irresponsible brinksmanship.
The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not a significant news event for me. Ukraine was weak, and the tepid response to the invasion from Ukraine and the rest of the West meant that Russia just rolled in without opposition or much drama.
Fast forward 8 years, and Ukraine has further developed its national identity and is starting to become a real democracy. The 2022 invasion was a big wake-up call for the West. We had thought that we had won the Cold War in 1992, and that our geopolitical rivals, while still warranting concern, were not a direct threat to us and our allies anymore. Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Russia remains a backwater with a GDP the size of Italy. They are not a significant threat to US interests, any more than Italy could possibly hope to be.
If anything, a strong America just lends a false sense of security to countries like Ukraine, which might be better off understating that they must see to their own safety and security.
Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.
Name a full member of NATO who has been invaded. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Even without NATO membership, China currently isn't occupying Taiwan. Guess why.
> Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.
Did you even read the first part of my comment? Do I sound like an apologist for the USA's recent foreign policy?
There is a lot of pork spent for the USA's military. Cost overruns and unnecessary systems abound. That doesn't obviate the need for a strong military to keep the peace for ourselves and our allies.
The world is different now than it was 100 years ago. Many counties have at least a few nuclear weapons. We can't afford to let things spin out of control. We need stability, and NATO provides a lot of that.
Name the last time a NATO country invaded another NATO member. Oh, wait, that never happened, and never will happen. That's called stability.
A lot of people will argue that defense companies want wars to break out to increase their business, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In wartime, the military mostly needs cheap commodities—ammunition, supplies, food, fuel—nothing you can really differentiate on. And especially the most recent wars have mostly been against poorly armed terrorists, when the defense industry makes a lot more money selling weapons that would be total overkill against the Taliban but potentially useful against Russia or China.
Very cool aesthetic - https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FGAPMRBva0AAiF0l.jpg
Cost claim - low hundreds of thousands of dollars (I find it unlikely it'll be this low, we'll see if they can pull it off)
Not sure I see the point of landing suicide drones at such a low price point.
> Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense that can rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats — or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.
(key word is the "or")