Well, if the Air Force guys are getting overrun, it's probably because we're holding the airfield while the Army and Marines evacuate![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Eye'm the cutest!
Any way you cut it though, NOBODY'S coming out looking good in that kind of fuck up.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Not necessarily true. USAF Sec For are basically the infantry bastard children of the Air Force. But then again they seem like the only component of the USAF that is like that these days.
Dearquis is correct in a broad historical sense. Melee weapons gave way to fire arms with melee weapons becoming secondary or tertiary weapons meant as back ups to the fire arm.
It is entirely feasible that sufficiently complex drone/drone weapons/drone swarms could supplant personal fire arms and largely relegate them to the role of back up weapons.
Who watches the watchmen?
Eye'm the cutest!
And then somebody comes up with the idea of hitting the battlezone with an EMP and making you look worse off than a Third World army.
Be careful about becoming too dependent on one form of technology.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
And then you remember advanced tech can do things like harden against EMP and that cute flash bulb was all for show.
Who watches the watchmen?
And then some smartass creates a shaped EMP warhead to create an EM penetrator spike.
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
While drones could supplant personal weapons as the primary means of war, it makes no sense to remove personal weapons entirely. Knives are still carried by every army today simply on the off chance that the soldier needs a melee weapon. Personal weapons may become smaller and more compact but if there's an off chance that the soldier will need a weapon then he will carry a weapon.
The effectiveness of drones is another topic entirely and one that deserves its own thread.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Drones could easily become a personal weapon. They would supplant other weapons and push them into a different role or even phase them out of common use entirely. Older then civilization really.
Think something like the Arrow like weapon from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Afp: And the arms race wheel takes another turn :p
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Drones meet lasers, lasers meet skeet. Also, shielding drones against EMP becomes somewhat harder the smaller you make them, and shielding adds weight, which eats into payload capacity for small drones.
edited 20th Nov '14 11:40:52 PM by MattII
Kinetic strike drones which attack their targets by taking a terminal dive from altitude, using their lead shielding as a blunt striking object?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Lasers meet advanced computing and drone swarms over whelming targeting systems as drone swarms act a flying EW array.
EM shielding isn't that hard or that heavy. Kinetic and protection from energy weapons on the other hand.
AFP: Not a bad idea at all. Shielding and weapon all in one package.
edited 21st Nov '14 12:19:06 AM by TuefelHundenIV
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If you can see a target you can shoot it, and with a laser you can do it from a long way away. Also, drones need to be of at least a certain size to do any damage, so there's a limit on how small you can make things.
As for dropping drones, that assumes the drones can get overhead in the first place.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Lasers have a lot of limits on range and rates of fire. I highly doubt lasers will be ripping through swarms of anything. Weapons like annular blast, directed blast, and even continuous rod would be more efficient then a one target a time weapon like a laser. Even then there is no such thing as perfect defense. Just like there is no such thing as a perfect weapon or a perfect counter.
Getting a drone up into the air easy we do it a lot already. You don't even need a steep dive to produce a kinetic weapon. Something as simple as a small but powerful kicker charge could get the job done. That method would be kind of crude in a future setting though. The assumption there will be no such thing as flying craft on a future battle field is at best questionable.
Who watches the watchmen?
Eye'm the cutest!
That (sadly cancelled) joint US-Israeli missile shield laser back some years ago could rip into a sizable barrage of various rounds from a single laser battery.
Laser weaponry has come a long way in the last 20 years, it won't be much longer before rapid-fire lasers with excellent killing power start becoming practical. At least as point defenses for FOB's, permanent bases and ships.
edited 21st Nov '14 5:25:29 AM by MajorTom
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Artisan of Auspicious Artifacts
Drones, and most A.I.s for that matter, have two weaknesses. The first is electronic warfare. Chaff and radio jamming can cause less autonomous drones to all but drop dead. More autonomous drones can be fooled by nearly childish deceptions. Make a cardboard cutout of a soldier and warm it with an electronic heater and a drone will happily waste all its ammo trying to kill it. The AI won't even report an error since as far as its concerned, it has successfully detected and engaged the enemy.
Who Am I?
Smart-swarms would have weaknesses, no doubt. But that's like saying kinetic armor renders firearms useless. Obviously, there will be a race between offensive and defensive measures like there has always been. But one thing is for sure: a rifle wont help you very much.
As for how they cause damage, I was envisioning the use of contact explosives. Imagine a swarm of flying shotgun shells, and larger up to cruise missiles.
EMP and laser point defenses sound like effective ideas, but the decisive element will be attrition. Who will run out of replacements first- the drone swarms or the EMP launcher? There are counter measures that can be used against laser platforms.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
edited 21st Nov '14 9:19:21 AM by MattII
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Tom: Against unguided dumb rounds on a fixed trajectory. Even then missiles are a lot better.
Matt: AOE weapons will still be hands down more efficient at fighting a swarm of anything then point target weapons including smart bullets no matter how you slice it. No one said the drones would be perfect.
Most conventional munitions do not bob and weave or move in rapidly calculated patterns in a swarm. Since when do they have to be slow? Sounds a bit arbitrary given there are number of effective relatively low velocity weapons and munitions in use now.
Who watches the watchmen?
Eye'm the cutest!
Only for the time being. As recent shit in Israel has shown with Iron Dome's exceptionally good performance while the Israelis were very accurate with it and very effective in stopping attacks, from a strictly accounting perspective the cost differential was staggeringly high in favor of Hamas. Put it this way, it took 80,000 dollars of Iron Dome equipment and ammo to stop one 350 dollar homemade rocket.
Meaning those lasers and other cost-effective-per-unit-of-ammo weapons (like railguns) are gonna start looking really attractive in the long run. After all kinda hard to beat the cost effectiveness of a massless X-ray beam or a few (kilo)grams of solid metal.
edited 21st Nov '14 4:06:08 PM by MajorTom
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Of course it is expensive. Compared to other weapon systems very few people make it or field it. It is also longer ranged, can engage its targets off bore, covers a wide area, is less effective by things like air particulate, and the missiles can move in parabolic paths. Lasers are a LOS weapon. They literally operate along a line. If it is off bore the laser can't shoot at it.
If you want to talk cost a land based CRAM Phalanx unit that can just as effectively swat mortars as the laser would be loads cheaper, more robust, and easier to field.
Who watches the watchmen?
Eye'm the cutest!
^ Hence why I said cost-effective systems. The C-RAM will evolve into high-velocity railguns and be complemented by lasers.
It's simple economics of war. If you spend a bazillion times as much as the enemy to stop a small amount of stuff, you're losing the war of attrition. Lasers and railguns can cost almost nothing compared to missiles and they can engage the same target for the same effectiveness.
Even better for lasers, on a terrestrial scale, the transit time is effectively instantaneous unlike Iron Dome's missiles. Faster interception equals greater warning and/or interception window. The speed of light is the fastest (known) interception speed imaginable. In the time it takes for an Iron Dome missile to acquire, track, intercept and destroy a projectile, a laser system has acquired, tracked, fired, destroyed the target and moved on to the next one possibly several times over.
In short, stop thinking missiles are the be all end all. Save those for the expensive targets at long range like aircraft or ships. Use the cheaper methods like railguns and lasers for point defense against incoming fire.
edited 21st Nov '14 6:57:36 PM by MajorTom
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Fraid not considering being terrestrial puts the most limits on a laser in the first place. Iron Dome isn't limited by pesky things like aggressive heat build up every time it fires a single shot or extremely high power requirements or have its effectiveness limited by inconvenient weather.
Iron Dome can also engage several targets at once. In the time it takes the laser to even come close to matching that you could fire Iron Dome multiple times stop to reload and still remain a head in number of targets successfully engaged. Lasers simply don't match up to the potential of missiles or even kinetic projectiles of any sort on a per shot or per weapon basis. Also a laser system may be cheaper by shot then missiles but it is far more expensive to set up and maintain and requires more to keep it running. You also can't do things like put different payloads in a laser or fire a different projectile from the same launcher. Missiles and kinetic projectiles are not only ultimately more cost effective in the long run, they have lower comparative maintenance, much smaller power needs, cheaper set up and maintenance, easier to produce in numbers, and they are also far more flexible. It is a lot easier to make a missile or kinetic projectile cheaper on a per shot basis you can't say the same for a laser.
At best your lasers will be a second fiddle to missiles and advanced kinetic weapon systems and less effective on a per shot basis. But hey its cheaper you get what you pay for.
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Who Am I?
"Well, except maybe for a wind blowing in the wrong direction." I will admit that I hadn't considered the effect of weather. A normal wind wouldn't stop a bird sized drone, but a high-velocity storm might. Good point.
"So in other words, all the punch of conventional weapons, but travelling much more slowly?" Why more slowly? Pretty much the same speed, but course-correcting and with loitering capability thrown in.
"And there are other possible defences against drones, like smart-bullets (2-3 bullet to 1 drone ought to be sustainable, for the defender)." That's more or less what these drone swarms are, except not tied down to a human firing platform.
Basically, the difference between a micro-drone and a bullet is the engine and the sensors attached to it. A conventional firearm doesnt seem to have very many advantages that I can see. Now, an effective laser pistol with movement sensors and and automatic firing mechanism might offer a challenge...
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
De marquis: The Smart bullets is a pretty good one actually. In terms of ability to pursue, track, and move along or against an evasive target that would be pretty effective.
I am somewhat surprised no one has really thought this up. One of the best possible defenses against a drone swarm would be your own drone swarm. Might be an interesting clash. Be like the "Push of Pikes" only with swarms of drones.
Who watches the watchmen?
If Air Force guys are engaged that close, chances are you're being dragged to the rear by Army or Marines getting you the fuck out in a general retreat.
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."