China builds first dedicated drone carrier | Hacker News Reader

China builds first dedicated drone carrier

navalnews.com

66 pointsulrischa61 comments

    China has built the world's first dedicated drone carrier. The ship has not been reported however and many of the circumstances surrounding it remain a mystery.

I'm pretty sure it was Naval News that reported on this carrier some six to nine months ago and linked to a youtube video showing the carrier and coordinated marine drone swarms.

Whichever source it was, the article I read and the youtube were pulled in less than 24 hours and the links I saved (on my other office machine, not to hand ATM) were dead.

China developing such things is no surprise, the US military PR side choosing to report then not report for another six months is just as interesting.

it's hard not to forsee a future where entire wars are fought by sending millions of drones at each other. I can't decide if it's a dystopian nightmare or a much better thing than having humans slaughter each other. It's sort of the ultimate conversion of physical war to economic. The side that runs out of money to make more or better drones first will be the loser.

Probably optimistic though. I guess each side will always know that humans are the high value targets and that will dictate that whatever else happens they will still target them even if a proxy-war is being fought by the drones.

You also need men to actually hold any land. The best you can do with drones is turning enemy territory into grey zone.

> You also need men to actually hold any land

*and women

You do not need women in uniform to hold any land so that's a nice to have.

I'm not talking about settling that land. I imagine that in Golan Heights Israel only basically has military personnel.

You need ground troops to hold land. They come in two genders.

> I guess each side will always know that humans are the high value targets and that will dictate that whatever else happens they will still target them even if a proxy-war is being fought by the drones.

Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not. It's more valuable to target an oil refinery, an airport or a strategic bridge.

The next war will boil down to math. AI powered drones where intelligence and strategy will determine the fate of the war. That is until the other party decide to blow the whole thing with nuclear weapons.

> Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not.

Tell that to Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Also, tell that to Ukraine.

Humans will always be targets at least somewhat; If for nothing else, they are near the controls to some drone. Warfare is psychological at least as much as it is physical.

Nuclear weapons are on a different category. They are not targeting a lot of humans but pretty much all humans; and infrastructure too (strategic or not).

Carpet shelling or carpet bombing with kilotons of TNT beg to differ.

Carpet bombing has strictly limited utility vs. humans and infrastructure, as shown by allied bombing campaigns in WWII. Strategic targets were bombed for years and the Germans kept building tanks and aircraft. Japanese cities were burned without breaking the will of the Japanese people to fight.

With nuclear weapons, the potential for total destruction of human civilization is extremely high. The "tons of TNT" measure doesn't take into account flash, radiation and environmental effects of nuclear warfare.

The next war will boil down to math. AI powered drones where intelligence and strategy will determine the fate of the war.

AI powered drones are useless without the logistics and manufacturing base which they came from. They also cannot take land, because they're drones, not infantry killbots. They also lack the attribute and strength of tube artillery, rockets, fighter planes, etc.

It's also missing the dimensions of counter such as direct energy weapons, SHORADs, electronic warfare, etc. Drones are prominent now because counters hadn't been sufficiently developed or widely deployed.

Also, we don't know when the next war will erupt. 1 year? 5 year? 10 year? It's quite bold to make such prediction.

>Humans are more of an emotional target. Some humans are a high value target, but most are not

Only using western $military spending$ numbers, like $10K switchblade-300 or those ridiculous $90K Rogue https://www.twz.com/air/rogue-1-is-one-of-the-marine-corps-n... https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1colzqq...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/12/04/some-o...

Ukraine calculated that at $500-1000 per fpv kill they can deplete all russian able bodies without breaking $10 Billion, something inconceivable to NATO armies.

While a common sentiment, I think this concept misses the entire purpose of war. The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another, and by extension, prevent your enemy from imposing his. A drone-on-drone war may be an opening salvo, but unless drones are the only means available to an aggressor or defender, they will never be the only means being used in warfare no matter how technologically advanced things become. As long as an enemy has the will and capacity to resist force upon him, or still has the ability to impose his will by force on another, the war will continue. Once enough of one side's drones or robots are sufficiently defeated, it will be people that are the means for imposing or resisting force, so they will eventually always be the ones fighting and dying.

I can't imagine if Ukrainians had incredibly advanced drone/robot tech, them throwing all their drones at the Russians, loosing them all, and then saying 'Well, we used up all our drones, I guess we'll give up now.' It always comes down to removing an enemy's capacity or will to resist force, and people will always be part of that equation.

>While a common sentiment, I think this concept misses the entire purpose of war. The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another, and by extension, prevent your enemy from imposing his.

More fundamentally, war is just another facet of diplomacy.

It's commonly said that diplomacy has failed when wars are waged, but actually wars are merely the act of last resort in diplomacy and diplomacy itself is perfectly fine.

War itself involves a great deal of diplomacy between those fighting, various allies of those fighting, neutral 3rd parties etc.

Treatment of prisoners of war is probably the most obvious example of this. If you’re known to treat people who surrender well then you get more people willing to do so compared to a reputation as a country which will simply slaughter anyone captured. Sure it forces you to devote resources to caring for potentially millions of people, but that’s preferable to fighting millions of desperate people.

If drone armies are vastly more powerful than human armies, the latter become insignificant much like unarmed civilians are irrelevant in a war today. If Ukraine loses its army, it will surrender. If an army of the future loses its drones it will be impossible to oppose the winner’s drones and would surrender as well.

Still had to atom bomb the Japanese for them to capitulate. Sometimes defenders ready to fight with stick and stones. At the end of the day, still need to slaughter a bunch of combatants and civilians to extract human cost to prime surrender. Drones may make that more expedient by making the slaughter competely lopsided. But peoples tend not to capitulate until they've suffered severe loss in material and lives. IMO what's more likely are fully automate drones that guns down wedding parties without human operators on winning side developing PTSD.

It will help non-state actors wage the asymmetric war and impose costs.

Think Houthis, they may in few years drive sea/air drones with small load munitions - operating far from the site, and statistically be lucky to make their point

It will not be limited to them either - pick a place that have people who think they are oppressed and live in the margins, and really have not a whole lot at stake to worry

> Once enough of one side's drones or robots are sufficiently defeated, it will be people that are the means for imposing or resisting force, so they will eventually always be the ones fighting and dying.

If your people are better at building drones than fighting in person, then presumably the enemy's drones will already be in your cities before it makes sense to send people to stop them.

> The purpose of any war is to impose your will by force on another… …It always comes down to removing an enemy's capacity or will to resist force, and people will always be part of that equation.

People are the quarry. That doesn't mean that the physical means to resist force will always be in the hands of people.

It might also mean an initial attritional phase where machines kill machines, followed by a very brief and very lethal series of machine-directed killings in all your metropolitan areas, as soon as one side runs out of drones and drone-producing factories.

>I can't imagine if Ukrainians had incredibly advanced drone/robot tech,

sufficiently advanced for supply disruption

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cse...

and profit denial, something international sanctions seems to have failed to accomplish, here 1400km away from border:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cns...

> them throwing all their drones at the Russians, loosing them all

'losing' by blowing stuff up

>and then saying 'Well, we used up all our drones, I guess we'll give up now.'

is that what you see here (NSFW):

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cuq...

are 20 burned russian bodies Ukrainian way of saying 'I guess we'll give up now'? Drones enabled $500-1000 kills, the cheapest way to erase enemy manpower ever achieved.

This is typical ru trench run

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cth...

and mopping up leftovers

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1cum...

You are misunderstanding the nature of war. Drones, much like aircraft can't take ground. Infantry can, other ground units such as tanks and AFV helps assists in that.

For sure, drones will be a new element in warfare, but as like units in strategy video games, they have weakness and strength. Although unlike strategy games, reality doesn't care about balance.

When we say “drone” we often think of aircraft, but there are done ships and drone vehicles too.

The Ukrainian drone boats have been very successfully waging an asymmetric war in the Black Sea.

Drone ground vehicle development is mostly around demining, logistics and casualty evacuation. But there have been some old tanks laden with explosives used as breaches.

Somewhat related entertaining book recommendation (sci-fi thriller): Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez (from 2012).

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

From the same author, I can recommend "Daemon", "Freedom" and "Delta-V" (the first book). Just stay away from "Delta-V" book 2. :)

Feels like the book Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez.

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

We are rapidly moving towards the science fiction reality of a large plane flying over a city and dropping thousands of small, cheap, autonomous drones. The drones just hunt down all life. Then you just keep the city, infrastructure and all.

How would these drones deal with people who reside inside buildings which have physically enclosed interior spaces, such as houses, apartments, tenements, or large sheds and tents?

Unless special preparations are made, city-dwellers have to come out sometime, don't they?

I suppose the military will just wait patiently for their citizens to be starved out by quadcopters.

Generally if an enemies large slow military transport plane is flying over your city, your military is already losing.

One suicide explosive drone opens a hole, the next goes into it.

When you think about Russia and China and not adhering to international law, you could imagine a total war scenario where they use chemical and biological weapons to do just this. Imagine a drone force deploying over a city at night, dispersing the agents into the air and water. People would never know what hit them.

"Only China can build an aircraft carrier in relative secrecy."

Well if this is indeed supposed to mimic opposition forces, then China knows something that's supposed to be a secret, and the above statement is not (quite) true.

Are drones like the reaper easier and cheaper to maintain than normal planes like the f-35?

I could easily see USA releasing hybrid ships, with a few jets, but lots of drones

Yes, the MQ-9 Reaper is much easier and cheaper to maintain than an F-35. However, there is a huge capability gap to the extent that a Reaper simply can't do many missions at all. It isn't survivable for penetrating strikes, is vulnerable to communications link disruption, lacks an air search radar, can't defend itself against enemy aircraft, flies slower, has a much lower payload, can't do air refueling, can't carry nuclear weapons, etc. It is possible in principle the build a drone with capabilities similar to an F-35 but then it would be almost as expensive to maintain.

Having some drone carriers is probably a good idea. They could take over from supercarriers for limited missions, like striking insurgent targets in Yemen. That would be a lot cheaper. LHD class ships could be deployed with an air wing composed of a mix of F-35B jets plus various drones.

On the other hand, a drone doesn't need to be survivable. If a drone is shot down then all that's lost is a few million tax dollars, unlike a pilot or two if an F-35 or F/A-18 goes down. Drones are an expendable and consumable commodity.

A drone designed for aerial combat and dogfighting would also be inherently faster than any manned fighter. It doesn't need to account for the biological limitations of the pilot(s) which are far below the physical limitations of a fighter.

With regards to lack of self-sufficiency, no proficiency at aerial tasks (eg: refueling), et al., that's a question of when they will be satisfactorily solved given the continuing advances in computing power and the programs that execute on them.

This is where China will win. They can out-produce the United States and withhold the components the US needs to build the swarms. The US needs to wake up that it's supply chain and manufacturing is not self-sufficient and they're dependent on it's future competition (China already calls the US 'the enemy').

The U.S could do the future war trial in Ukraine. Such a missed opportunity…it’s clear that the heavy weapons packages are not enough. Taking out drones with patriot works against the economics of war.

Any future conflict between the US and China would look far, far different than the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In particular, the ranges are much longer in the Pacific theater of operations. Just look at a map. Small drones, tube artillery, and short-range missiles will be ineffective. There won't be as much ground combat. Both sides will have to rely more on naval forces, large aircraft (high fuel fraction plus aerial refueling), long-range missiles, and satellites.

> This is where China will win. They can out-produce the United States and withhold the components the US needs to build the swarms.

The US and allies can cut off or seriously curtail most of the raw materials required to run Chinese factories. China can stockpile raw materials but the US can stockpile Chinese sourced components. So that’s more like a Mexican standoff.

> The US needs to wake up that it's supply chain and manufacturing is not self-sufficient

Diversifying from Chinese production is happening albeit too slowly for comfort. The major problem isn’t the threat of war which may never happen, it’s China being unable to sustain its economy due to population collapse which is inevitable.

Here we go again. Every time this subject comes up, the dilettantes claim that drones will be superior to manned fighters for air-to-air combat due to human limitations on G forces. Of course this is total nonsense. Building airframes that can handle >9Gs imposes severe design compromises on weight, stores, and intake geometry. In reality there are other factors that matter far more including sensors (and sensor fusion), observability, weapons, data links, EW, and decoys; in fact, the next generation of tactical aircraft (both crewed and uncrewed) are being designed to optimize those factors at the expense of maneuverability.

Computing power isn't the issue. Drones will continue to gradually take over a larger set of missions, but we are at least decades away from being able to write software that can perform the full spectrum of missions as well as a human pilot. And we still haven't built electro-optical sensors with dynamic range and slew rate as good as the human eye.

>Drones will continue to gradually take over a larger set of missions, but we are at least decades away from being able to write software that can perform the full spectrum of missions as well as a human pilot.

Open AI is Sam's company now, Ilya is out. The new Open AI will have no qualms about accepting DoD funding.

>the dilettantes claim that drones will be superior to manned fighters for air-to-air combat due to human limitations on G forces.

I never claimed such a thing. I said drones designed for air combat will be faster because the upper limit will be dictated by physical limits of the airframe thereof instead of the biological limits of the human pilot(s).

Whether the faster drones would be superior is another question entirely.

Nonsense. Humans don't limit aircraft speed. The actual limits are imposed by airframe heating and fuel consumption. Keeping human crews alive is hardly the biggest engineering challenge.

Higher speed does offer a bit of advantage in BVR combat in that it allows for launching missiles with higher initial energy state.

IMO op is really talking about wider performance envelop, i.e. unmanned platforms that can do sustained high G maneuvers at speed to better win energetics game against missiles that assume manned fighter can't sustain more than a few high G maneuvers with upperbound that would kill pilots.

Anyone who believes such a ridiculous approach would work simply hasn't been paying attention or hasn't done the math. No one is going to build drones capable of sustained high-G maneuvers. It would be a pointless waste of money because building airframes with that capability comes with too much of a weight penalty. And the latest generation of missiles has gotten so deadly that being able to pull a few more Gs in the terminal engagement phase won't save the drone anyway.

The design focus has shifted away from maneuverability, and towards better sensors and lower observability. It's far more effective to detect the adversary and shoot first rather than trying to dodge incoming fire. And if they do detect an incoming missile the defensive tactics will focus on signature reduction, EW, and decoys rather than extreme maneuvers.

The next generation of tactical aircraft (both crewed and uncrewed) will be physically larger with a higher fuel fraction in order to remain relevant in the Pacific fight. It's a long way from Guam to Taiwan. They won't be able to tank every hour as was common practice during GWOT operations in the Middle East. That larger size and higher weight necessarily imposes limits on maneuverability. I would be shocked if future UCAV airframes are stressed for more than 7G.

You do realize that fighters flying today are capable of faster and harder maneuvers than they usually do, right? They are held back by the biological limits of the pilot, who must wear a pressurized flight suit, breathe pressurized oxygen, and use special breathing techniques to counteract blackouts, redouts, and other symptoms that come from pushing the human body to its limits.

The fighter meanwhile can do far more for longer. A fighter today pushed hard enough to tear off its wings, suffocate its intakes, etc. means the pilot will have been dead already for a long time prior.

>The next generation of tactical aircraft (both crewed and uncrewed) will be physically larger with a higher fuel fraction in order to remain relevant in the Pacific fight. It's a long way from Guam to Taiwan. They won't be able to tank every hour as was common practice during GWOT operations in the Middle East.

You do realize aircraft carriers exist and the US Navy has twenty of them, right? The F-35 by far has the shortest combat range of all fighters the US Navy has flown in recent times, and that is compensated by the fact they have literally moving airfields.

Some fighters flying today are only capable of exceeding human limits under very limited conditions: low altitude and limited stores. That is increasingly irrelevant. Navy tactical aircraft like the F-35C are only stressed to 7.5G.

Aircraft carriers don't solve the problem, and you have some of the basic facts wrong. The Navy is planning for an A2/AD environment where shore based missiles force carriers to stand off at longer ranges. The F-35C actually has a wider combat radius than the legacy F/A-18C but it's still not enough. Hence the focus on larger, less maneuverable designs for the next generation (plus low observable tankers).

The Navy has only 11 real carriers with catapults that can launch heavy aircraft with large fuel loads; the other amphibious ships can only operate V/STOL aircraft like the F-35B which is much shorter ranged due to limited fuel.

This is fixating on where the ball was, not where the ball could be going.

Design shifted away from maneuverability in the 90s because upper bound of manned maneuverbility was reached. Answer was to increase capability gap was pivot to stealth, sensors fusion, ew, bvr etc. When unmanned performance envelope opens up due to beyond man tier AI piloting, there's chance design will circle back to exploiting new kinematic options in conjunction with other 5G/6G advancements. It can be both, not either or. The energy math for defeating modern missiles is to outmaneuver them from afar thanks to sensors so they never reach no escape/terminal engagement range, which will lead to increase in missile complexity, which is fine, since it raises technical floor/expense of engaging next gen+ hardware and reduce less pool of capable adversaries. For me, this is possible direction for _POST_ NGAD projects. Keep in mind NGAD is mid 10s "legacy" thinking, along with associated visions of CCA/MUM-T. It wasn't concieved based on AI capabilities we now have. The point of NGAD is manned penetrating counter-air ... there's no reason to believe after NGAD won't be unmanned penetrating counter-air, and if that's the future, good reason to dump points in kinematics.

Hence I would not be surprised if future penetrating unmanned platforms = more performant airframes because they can cut down in other components, i.e. disposable, high performance, attritable shooters supported by sensors in the back meshed by flexible datalink. Especially considering wear/maintenance curve will be different for unmanned platforms that doesn't need regular flying hours. No need to support expensive engines and airframes with 8000 hour lifespan when you can cheap out on 500 because you don't expect platforms to survive more than a few sorties against peer adversaries. There's places to cut costs when designing for high performance attrition, i.e. simply having moderately sized airframes go on one way missions solves a lot of tanking problems in IndoPac.

> Humans don't limit aircraft speed

Maybe not cruising speed, but maneuvering performance certainly is limited. This article from the US Naval Institute says outright "The greatest limiting factor in military combat aircraft is the pilot".

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2008/september/pu...

I'll say it everyday of the week and twice on Sunday. The Secretary of the AF is already telling people his autonomous fighters are as good as his USAF pilots with ten years worth of flying. And they're not even planned to be operational until 2030.

At a very specific task - dogfighting.

The reaper was itself replaced in much the same manner at about the same time as when the f35 replaced the f16. An f-35 is still cheaper than an rq-170 or 180, which would be the better comparison

RQ-180 isn't a replacement for the Reaper.

I was thinking, what if Shahed had 10 Lancets to be activated somewhere around the route instead of a single explosive payload? Then it could strike several armoured vehicles at once, deep into the enemy ranks.

When I suggested aircraft carriers dedicated to drones around 2000, I was told it was absurd.

I was right.

If only President Clinton had listened to you.

It was not POTUS that rejected my ideas. It was DARPA-funded researchers at a university I worked at.

Well I knew that in 1998, immediately after playing StarCraft with Protoss. Too bad I didn’t have the right connection s to sell this precious information to the U.S army

I came to the comment section for this comment.

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