Saw an RT article on this very fact from the Russian perspective (with a mention Ukraine did it too). That was oh 1-3 months ago? They mentioned they could strap a 1500kg bomb or even two to some of them and drive them right into a Ukrainian trench or dug-out. The vehicle they showed in the example video was 6 or 8 wheels I think and had room for carrying a bunch of weight on top, it was low to the ground.
Ukraine is so desperate for a wunderwaffen to come and reverse their fortunes
A drone is not defeated by digging a ditch around your perimeter.
If ground robots were viable, they’d already be ubiquitous in warfare. They’re not because they require human support for basic terrain problems. This is an issue that drones do not suffer from. Drones are significantly harder to defend against and that’s what makes them good.
If you make robots part of your strategy your enemy will just start digging ditches that the robot can’t deal with.
Hope you never lose commo with you’re ground drone.
Yeah… once you mobility kill a ground unit, all its shit belongs to you. Or you just leave it there, mark the location with the nearest artillery battery covering the area and wait for its recovery/repair team to walk up before calling arty on top of them.
It gets easier to dig anti-vehicle ditches as the length of the vehicle’s wheelbase decreases. You don’t need the ditch to be as wide or as deep.
Could be useful against vehicles and infantry that are on the move without anyplace to hid in but then you’d have to know exactly where to deploy to catch units on the move.
I do think we’re close to legged ground drones instead of wheels, which would be harder, but still possible to defense.
The massive advantage drones get in the air from removing the human aids them in every single way because of the reduced weight, size, etc. I don’t see how much faster, cheaper, etc. a human-less truck/tank could be. I guess you could make them a little shorter and oblique to shoot at.
quadcopter type drones have their limitations, and the more ubiquitous they become the more R&D will be put into defeating them. At the end of the day though any war will require something to take and hold ground which is something air power of any kind simply can’t do on its own, so mobile heavy weapons make a lot of sense deployed alongside infantry for that purpose, whether that’s in the form of a drone, or a light or a heavy traditionally-piloted vehicle.
in twenty years warfare will be flying drones, drone tanks, drone arty, drone AA, and trenches full of conscripts being shot at by the robots.
I don’t think drone heavy vehicles make that much sense. They are very heavy machinery that requires a team of people that are capable of maintaining it, particularly after damage, and handling any kind of difficult terrain requires infantry support. There’s a certain degree of improved situational awareness and judgement that comes from actually being in the vehicle rather than operating something on a monitor too.
Why make drone tanks anyway? The point of a tank is to be heavily armored for the occupants on board. If you don’t have occupants to protect then you don’t need the heavy armour, you can improve every other characteristic of the vehicle.
Cheaper, disposable, fast moving vehicles with some heavy armament make more sense as a drone platform. Armoured enough to deal with small arms fire and disposable enough to accept losses to anti-armour. Just make sure the factories can shit out a lot of them.
Cheaper, disposable, fast moving vehicles with some heavy armament make more sense as a drone platform.
Rocket tag with drone tank hunters fits into my vision, but my point is just that any and all military operations will inevitably revolve around people with guns and instead of getting fully automated robot on robot warfare we’re going to turn war into an automated shooting gallery where poor people are the targets.
Its more an issue of engineering. Flying drones typically use the same sorts of movement a normal plane or helicopter does. So it was easy to transition them. We are still working on creating ground based drones that dont rely on wheels or treads, but those are coming. Robots with the same type of movement ability as a human, or any other animal for that matter are entirely doable. We just have to work on
- Engineering them, and
- Powering them. Movement through air is much less energy intensive. Ground based ones use energy anytime they move, and more of it.
Im expecting we will eventually have wars with no humans soldiers involved directly at all, and it’ll be coming a lot sooner then you might expect.
Humanoid robot drones can also be controlled remotely by human soldiers. Which would allow highly skilled special forces units to go on suicide missions with no actual bodily risk. Just remotely controlling their robots through a complex VR setup.
So here’s the thing about that: Those are expensive as fuck.
I can get an aerial drone off Alibaba, strap a bunch of C4 and nails on it for like $50 and we’re done and dusted. I don’t have to be a special forces operator. I just have to be able to fly a drone close enough to nail-bomb a bunch of dudes from a cozy remote control center. If I fuck up, well, there’s 10,000 more drones I can remote into. They’re cheap. No need to pay Boston Dynamics $300,000 per unit. I got that Alibaba hook-up.
Warfare is rapidly becoming pointless. What’s the ultimate end game? A bunch of drones versus a bunch of drones? What’s the point? I would like to think that this would make humanity realize the fruitlessness of warfare, but I’m not that naive. We’ll all go along with it. Why wouldn’t we? We’re all idiots.
Yeah, that makes sense. Less fuel usage and less tech to keep it going while having a larger weight capacity. No chance of getting it back, but if they were blowing up the drones too, then it’s moot. Also stealth I suppose, but that’s out of my wheelhouse.
