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Comment by at0mic22 | Hacker News Reader

Curios enough, drones definitely produce interference from rotors apart from sensible noise. A modern anti-drone system should not rely on traditional reflection-detecting radars but try detecting electric motors, radio signals from 3g/4g modems etc. And it does not necessarily have to work for many miles.

I would see it as a reasonably sized box loaded with interceptor drones, they don't even have to explode. That's something we will see en masse shortly from the Russian side.

Actually nobody should take Russians as dumb and clumsy. They adapt fast. And they can benchmark fast too, thanks to ukrainians. The only open questions is whether the rest of the world accepts new situation, or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s

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> A modern anti-drone system should not rely on traditional reflection-detecting radars but try detecting electric motors, radio signals from 3g/4g modems etc.

Standard kit on US military aircraft detect this and 5th gen platforms like the F-35 are designed to attack such systems.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the F-35 is that it is a combat aircraft, 1970s style but with better tech. In many regards, it is designed primarily as a state-of-the-art EW and AWACS-like system that can operate as part of a mesh. Yeah, it is still pretty good at the basic combat mission but the whole mesh EW/AWACS bit is its killer feature.

In the 20th century, you kill the AWACS/EW platforms, they are gone. A lot of effort went into both killing and protecting them. In the 21st century the AWACS/EW platform is a fluid organism comprising many stealthy cells because it is embedded into many platforms, and is much harder to kill because it isn’t a discrete target.

I don't mean those anti-drone systems should target regular aircrafts. Really cool F35 can target them and at the same time it’s highly unlikely F35 would have ever reached those distant airfields.

For sure, I think those airfields are a bit beyond the combat radius of an F-35. It is partly why they are where they are.

Even in the traditional scenario it’s still unclear how would F35 compete in range with enormous antennas on both specific aircrafts like Е-3 or land-based defense systems.

Or is it more about fail safety rather than distance?

the F35 can track targets at more than double the distance of the E3.

It is the the most advanced flying weapons platform ever created, and the most misunderstood.

> Really cool F35 can target them and at the same time it’s highly unlikely F35 would have ever reached those distant airfields.

If you wanted to take out bombers regularly attacking you with F-35s, you don't have to reach the airfields, you just have to reach them somewhere between the airfields and where they release their weapons.

Modern missiles have been developed to a point where those bombers would not necessarily have to leave russian airspace to release them. It concerns me a lot if those supersonic bombers are still valid today, but taking the fact Russia has 4 new tu-160 in production, I shoulda be wrong

"new tu-160" is a stretch. These airframes were started during the time of the Soviet Union and are very very slowly being assembled. Russia has no ability to produce any of the TU-95/TU-23m/TU-160 past the few unassembled airframes it inherited from the USSR.

As far as I understood the biggest problem was not in the frame production itself, but in digitizing the Soviet era documentation for modern machinery.

They reported it done in 2018 and 2 new aircrafts are promised to be brand new. I doubt anyone would be able to reliably prove they coming with old frame or not.

Short range drones powered by lithium ion batteries with a flight time of 20 minutes and a low ground speed are in absolutely no way a replacement for long range supersonic attack aircraft.

And an autonomous supersonic attack aircraft would cost..about as much as the F-35 because the F-35 is not principally expensive because of the pilot.

Very much depends on the purpose, supersonic aircrafts coming from 60s are a great way to demonstrate power over a long distance along with aircraft sea carriers

But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap

Short range drones powered by lithium ion batteries with a flight time of 20 minutes and a low ground speed are in absolutely no way a replacement for long range supersonic attack aircraft.

They don't have to replace them. They just have to destroy them.

Yeah, basically not even the aircrafts are to blame, but insanely expensive and limited air defense systems.

You shouldn't be launching a patriot missile to take down a drone, that's the point

TIL most of the drones used in Ukraine aren’t wireless. They unspool an extremely thin fiber optic filament. There is a video of some soldiers walking through a field and it looks like he’s collecting thick spider webs as he goes.

Most drones are wireless, the vast majority in fact, but there are drones that use fiber optic but of course they are much more expensive and they have to carry a large spool of fiber optic, the spool must be on the drone so it wouldn't tangled.

Drones connected to their controller with a bunch of dangling cables sounds completely mental.

The aftermath certainly looks crazy. One of the comments talked about seeing an older video of a drone following a line of cables back to an operator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1kwsum...

Yes, I was wrong about it being most. But it is a growing segment.

AFAIK fiber drones are specifically short range, couple of miles only. The spool size itself is the limiting factor

Up to 30km now. Though I was wrong about it being most, it is a growing number.

https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/new_domestic_30_km...

I believe its designed for bigger drones, where power supply would be the primary concern

The fiber optic doesn't carry power. Just the video and control signals.

What's the purpose of using the fiber? To avoid radio signals?

Electronic warfare is pretty effective against drones that are using radio waves for their communication. Earlier in the war you could see a lot of drone footage that would become washed out with static as they got closer to tanks so it's much more reliable to use spools of fiber.

To counter jamming and GPS spoofing. https://spectrum.ieee.org/killer-drones

The RF communications they use are not robust in so-called denied environments, so it is relatively easy to severe the link with EW even if it is not that sophisticated. The use of fiber is a workaround that gives the drone a reliable control link. It does not protect the drone against direct EW (e.g. attacks against the onboard systems).

Robust RF communication for denied environments is tech that exists, it just doesn’t seem to be present on the Ukraine/Russia battlefield. This is likely because so much of the drone tech is derived from consumer platforms and both sides have limited access to sophisticated military-grade RF silicon.

To counter EW measures and also in challenging radio environment. Like to fly into hangar with stored tanks 20+km from the frontline. Or into the canyon, places with so called radio shadow.

> or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s

This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.

Price-based they are.

This attack just showed this. An f-35 could have never pulled off these attacks.

OTOH, if Ukraine had F-35s, it probably wouldn't need to spend a year and a half preparing a covert operation to take out bombers that were conducting regular attacks on them, either, they'd just intercept them in the air.

Think Ukraine had its own airforce at the beginning, and for 30 years nobody stopped it from modernizing or acquiring new aircrafts.

Besides that, I doubt the US would have ever sold a single F35 to Ukraine just because of revealing radio-emission and reflection patterns to russian air defense, basically drawing F35 useless for future usage against Russia.

If your point is that it is easier to get drones than F-35s, that's not in debate.

That wasn't really the subject of discussion, though.

Good luck to intercept russians bombers 1000+km deep into their territory.

>less effective F35s

If the US had unleashed it's airforce, led by F35s the war probably would have been over in a week with Russia's air defences and invading army taken out.

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