Posted on 12/19/2024 6:06:47 PM PST by Gideon7
Interesting
...No Radar system is 100%, they’ll be lucky to detect and target 40% of the incoming.
...and that assumes alert and well trained operators
“It is interesting that the US military now has (or will soon have) the capability to take drones down precisely and en masse.”
Providing that China sell them the piece-parts that they need in sufficient quantity.
“...No Radar system is 100%, they’ll be lucky to detect and target 40% of the incoming.”
And if one drone gets through, or an artillery shell...
Based on the description, it sounds like it can run pretty much automatically to protect a perimeter.
The transcript reads like an advertisement.
I’d love to see an actual test which measured its limitations.
Of course, such information would be classified.
BTTT
Does anyone remember Age of Empires computer game that came out in 1997? You started out in stone age and advanced to future stage. The future stage had drones and equipment that shot lasers. Looks like we’re almost there.
And that pesky civilian aircraft in the background.
It looks like an AESA radar made into a weapon by greatly increased output power. This has been under development for decades as a defensive system for high value targets like aircraft and ships.
It’s a DBF (digitial beam formed) high power microwave radar system, essentially. It bandies the words EMP about like it’s true EMP but is not.
True EMP requires an extremely wideband antenna (and therefore less directive), and in this case to target a single drone or sector of drones the DBF cannot be ‘wideband in the sense of an EMP’.
You generally can get 5-10% bandwidth on something like a phased array, maybe a little more with a DBF when using dipole like individual elements for the digital beam forming off the array elements.
So why the ‘EMP’ claim? What this system likely does is use high power DBF to directively hit a drone or drone sector with high power MW to either saturate the front ends of the drone receiver, or hopefully burn out drone receiver/control parts.
In listening to the Youtube talker, it’s a DBF system that uses newer solid state elements (he says ‘transistors’) that can handle more power. So what it likely is would be an AESA array with transmitter and receiver elements right at the antenna element level that quickly get up/down converted to digital baseband so the computer can play its DBF tricks. Good thing if you can do it but this isn’t an EMP in the classical sense.
What if the drone comes at it at three feet off the ground?
The big AESAs can do that, too.
One problem here is that the very beams this puppy emits can be used to target it.
Nonetheless, the tech for the sorts of battles envisioned on Babylon 5 is not that far off.
Bfl
You’re probably thinking of a similar game, as Age of Empires never got to future stage. I remember one did back then, but I don’t remember the details.
Interestingly enough, AoE is more popular than ever. My 16 year old and his friends are huge into it...and they keep upgrading it.
The essential point is that instead of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) that radiates widely and indiscriminately, the new device used an EMP that is electronically focused and targeted to disrupt or destroy the radio links and circuitry of only specific hostile drones.
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