High-Power Microwave Defeats Drone Swarm

Are these Masars? If not, square cubed to the rescue.

They're a pretty good way of storing energy in a way you can deliver it _really really_ fast. Sure, not in a way your carefully designed electronic circuits can make use of it, but if you need a really really big ZAP! capacitors are a reasonable option. After all, clouds and dirt are not the most efficient choice for capacitor plates, and air is not an ideal dielectric, but lightning goes ZAP! quite satisfyingly.

As I posted elsewhere here,you might enjoy Lightning On Demand's Lorentz Cannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lix-vr_AF38

At full load and a thermodynamic efficiency of about ~31% a 70kW generator is about 300hp mechanical. Those fit on a trailer. Not a "small" trailer. A dual axle type trailer with ~1.3 tons of capacity (Cummings C70D2RE.) Military generators tend to be heavier than commercial units. It will burn about ~175 gal/day of diesel, so yes a "good sized" tank about: about ~3.2 55 gal drums every day.

Now, they're imagining "625 element" systems for adequate coverage of a high value site, like an air base. About 2000 bbl/day. That's a little more than 10 large tanker trucks of fuel.

Logistically non-trivial. The Russian's have learned that large fuel trucks are short-lived in drone-dense environments.

Of course, that all for 100% 24/7 operation. I suspect that any real system will quickly become adept at running far less than 100%.

Combine those with the more-common juxtaposition of WD-40 versus duct-tape, and one can probably summon something eldritch.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29459896

Coiled antennas are fairly common and have been around since at least the 1960s...

Any electromagnetic wave has both an electric field and a magnetic field, hence its name.

An antenna can be made from either a straight wire sensitive to the electric field or from a loop of wire sensitive to the magnetic field.

The only reasons why a motor is usually a bad antenna is that it should have a case with good shielding properties (i.e. the magnetic circuits have only small gaps) and the high inductances of its windings act as low-pass filters for high-frequency induced currents, like those of a microwave transmitter.

There exist electric motors with very low inertia of the moving parts (to enable high accelerations), where the rotor does not have any ferromagnetic material and the stator has large gaps for the rotor. Such motors can be much more efficient antennas than standard motors, but such motors are not used in drones.

All the cheap radios for under 30 MHz signals used antennas made of a ferrite bar with a coil on it, very similar to a motor winding, except that the magnetic circuit had a much greater gap than in a motor, because they were more sensitive at small sizes than antennas sensitive to the electric field.

Moreover, brushless motors do not have an aluminum rotor. You are thinking about AC induction motors. Induction motors do not have brushes, but nobody calls them brushless, because they never had brushes. Only DC motors are called brushless, because their classic variant had brushes, which are replaced by power transistors in brushless motors.

The aluminum rotor of induction motors is normally inside, not outside. The inverted construction is rare.

Both induction motors and brushless motors have windings only on the stator, which is the external part in the normal motor structure, and those are equally susceptible to variable magnetic fields, except that they are usually bad antennas for the reasons mentioned above, especially at microwave frequencies.

In an ideal motor, the stator is not an electrical conductor (which is actually the case for ferrite stators), so it has no shielding properties for electric fields, but it has shielding properties for the magnetic field, if the gaps in its magnetic circuit are small.

At the same time, terrain is just harder and slower to navigate, it's easier to erect barriers, and humans are better at spotting eye-level threats. There's a reason why murder-drones are common on the battlefield, and murder-humanoids aren't.

What I think makes Leonidas more efficient is they likely operate in continuous wave bursts rather than pulses. Probably with a broad comb rather than one specific value too.

It would likely be a mistake to overfit what is happening in the Ukraine to US capabilities.

It has. Don't be fooled that just because you haven't seen it means it doesn't exist.

>The Netherlands and Germany used to have old anti-air systems that were basically a tank undercarriage with a radar and two rapid fire machine guns

The GEPARD. Every country has similar. Soviet countries had the Shilka vehicles, US built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS (and the Duster before it). Even before we put radar on these things, slapping a bunch of 50 cals on the back of a truck was standard, and Ukraine does that right now, to mild success.

Currently the US is building some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM which is basically just a non-self propelled (but still technically mechanized) SPAAG, but is modern so it can even take out missiles and sometimes mortar shells! Also, Rheinmetall has been working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield for quite some time, but holy shit is it pricey for what it is, and it uses special ammo too so that's sucky. Pretty much every arms manufacturer in Europe though is taking their default 30mm or 40mm cannon and slapping it and a generic small radar on whatever mobility platform they can find. The market is ravenous for it right now. It's just not a premier product though, as it's basically off the shelf hardware. Except for the US, who struggled and failed to make the M247 Sergeant York

The West's current plan to entirely null small drones and Shahed style things that fly slowly is the APKWS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...

The gyst is, you take dirt cheap ($3000) rockets that we have a million of, slap a $10k laser guidance package on them, and then use an F-literally whatever (or even helicopters) with bog standard targeting pods to click on a drone and make them go away. I don't think this is viable against DJIs with grenades but I'm pretty sure the plan for that is the MK-82 special delivered to any patch of warm on the FLIR

If you think that can't scale, understand that since WW2, the US's entire air strategy is "fly 1000 sorties all day every day forever". It's why the US doesn't actually have that much in terms of Anti-Air platforms. Their anti-air platform is 3000 planes. They also managed to actually execute such a strategy in the first Gulf War.

There's a lot happening in the Ukraine war that absolutely will not carry over, because you must understand that the Ukraine airspace is basically unused. Neither combatant has enough air power or anti-air systems to control the airspace, or to project air power. They mostly just have the occasional sortie to lob a bomb or launch cruise missiles. This would not be the case with NATO, as long as the US joins in.

IMO, the biggest oversight in the west is that we should be building roughly a billion copies of the Russian Krasnopol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system) . The power of drones has been cheap precision. It used to be only the US had precision in quantity, but shitloads of drones with laser designators is a vast "democratization" of precision in weapons. The US has the Excalibur guided artillery shell, but it's been basically nulled out by GPS jamming and was too expensive anyway.

Some western countries have various more effective semi-guided artillery munitions, things like the BONUS round, but they're expensive, and it's nice to have a commodity version of "I point a laser at that square centimeter and am sure that it dies for like $30k"

People under treat will justify all sorts of things. It's up to everyone else to to balance whether their response is reasonable.

Only tricky thing is if currents induced in motors are too hard to reject in driver circuitry, tho even at the extreme this should be possible to insulate with capacitors (or worse/heavier with transformers)

If they could weaponize earthquakes instead, now that'd be brilliant.