The drone fired an RPG or the drone crashed into the copter carrying an RPG? THE PHYSICS.
If the picture is accurate it would have to have crashed into it.
save a lot of money if you just have a grenade and propel it yourself
Good luck hitting your target. With the drone even if you miss you can fly it back to safety until there is a new target too. Neither is meant for this type of combat and this case was probably just luck and an opertune target. The drone probably wasn’t launched specifically to take out the aircraft.
Rocket-propelled drone when?
… oh god, that’s just the toon gun from Roger Rabbit. It’s a bullet that can stop and ask for directions.
Rocket-propelled drone
That’s called a missile
Missiles are very good at the go go go but not so good at the stop.
They’ve got one way and it’s not the sort of trick you can repeat.
The invention of the suicide bomber (circa 2024, colourised)
Doesn’t rpg literally stand for rocket propelled grenade
No, it stands for Role Playing Game. The drone was role-playing as a suicide bomber, keep up.
LARP “fireballs” might work if delivered directly to the intake.
A true example of the action economy in combat.
Sadly no, it stands for “Ruchnoĭ protivotankovyĭ granatomet,” or “Hand Held Anti-tank Grenade Launcher” in English.
Yup
Kind of amazed the drone was going fast enough to trigger the impact fuse. but no propellant so couldn’t be fired
Presumably they tamper with the charge so a fast impact isn’t needed. Y’know, because what would be the point otherwise, regardless of the target.
I’d also assume they just flew the thing near the hovering helicopter and triggered it remotely, that would do the trick.
Or maybe they hit the blades?
It’s not mutually exclusive.
Drones are going to change future warfare so much. Big ships, fortifications, and slow planes/choppers are going to be very vulnerable imo
Up to the time we develop an effective counter.
But it’s enough of a game changer that large and emplaced targets will be overwhelmed. Watching those drone shows and their ability to communicate with each other like a hive mind blew my mind thinking about that from a military standpoint. I think it will be like stealth technology and radar. Most planes are not stealth so old radar is still effective. Some things will be able to protect themselves from drone attacks, but most will be vulnerable in one way or another. I’m just a military gamer and I can think of hundreds of types of drones I’d create if I was planning for a defense or attack, the experts have likely thought of those and thousands more; diggers, crawlers, flyers, dummies until signaled, attaching things coming in and out from ground, air, etc, and on and on.
I remember basic designs being bought out by governments in 2007 when I was following development, so yes, there are years of work already into this.
Imagine pods dropped like old parachutes but they become embedded in the ground with a drone controller and all the drones needed for the job at hand. You could drop hundreds of those in an area and create fortifications and drone weapon bases in one swoop. I imagine drone bases would be heavily protected from EMI type attacks
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age has a “forcefield” of anti-personnel drones around one compound. They form a dome and drift into one another to share power from the ground.
I don’t remember if there’s a reason they’re not just wirelessly charged, aside from mass air-to-air refueling sounding cooler.
I just read that! So much better than Snowcrash
Have you read Neuromancer? Snow Crash must seem even goofier than intended without the fresh context of whiz-bang 1980s cyberpunk. It’s satire. It’s satire of the whole Johnny Mnemonic, True Names, Lawnmower Man brand of futurism, from people who’d never seen the internet and figured computers are magic. Stephenson turned that flying-through-numbers mysticism into a shopping mall - and a shocking number of influential people did not get the joke.
If you like Stephenson’s writing when it’s a doorstop, Cryptonomicon bounces between World War II and 1999’s view of 2001. It freely borrows from historical events as much as it makes shit up… and I’ve been surprised by which parts weren’t fiction. Yamamoto’s assassination, for example. US fighters really did fly to the edge of their range, in the middle of nowhere, and fly back five hundred rounds lighter.
If you like Stephenson’s writing when his editor has a short leash, Zodiac is basically his whole formula writ small. Literally and figuratively.
I don’t know that I get the jokes. I prefer to read fast and in binges,but I had to put down Diamond Age, often at the most exciting parts, and go touch grass.
The drones were powered by atmospheric static, I think? Or was it solar power? They recharged each other by close contact. The black dust created by constantly battling nanobots was terrifying. More terrifying than the amount of money Stephenson must have spent on stimulants.
I think that’s just how he is. It’s not like Colombia naming a library after Stephen King.
Like this? https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/
I like that this system uses bullets against drones, rather than massive generators and microwaves
I expect drones are going to need IFF soon
Shit I had that on my Bingo card so many times in the 2010s I stopped putting it on there.
Dammit.
would USA helicopters got shot down by the drone too?
People who answer you won’t know what they’re talking about.
People who know what they’re talking about won’t answer you.
Repost your question to the war thunder forums if you want it answered.
With citable sources even!
We would offer the drone $2,200 and it would come work for us
A helicopter will crash if you just look at it wrong. I’m not quite sure why this is surprising to a lot of people.
Just because a helicopter can go faster than a drone, doesn’t mean it’s always going faster than a drone. The benefit of vertical take off is that you can land and pick up troops in dangerous areas.
More than likely this is the same scenario as whenever they shoot down one of ours with an RPG in Afghanistan. Got them right after touch down or take off, or got a lucky hit while they were flying low and slow.
A helicopter will crash if you just look at it wrong. I’m not quite sure why this is surprising to a lot of people.
People really don’t seem to understand how ridiculously flimsy helicopters can be. There’s a reason why they’re often called flying death traps by anyone who has to regularly be in one
Yup, and a second rotor just adds another way to die.
And making those rotors tilt adds many new and exciting ways to die
“We made our plane a helicopter so it works less.”
“It may be slow, but it’s dangerous to operate”
“It’s got VTOL! Well, STOL. And by L we mean wear your seatbelt.”
Yeap, only thing worse than rotary aircraft are apparently tiltrotar aircraft. The V22 is trying it’s best to be the most dangerous thing in the air in the worst way possible.
would USA helicopters got shot down by the drone too?
I would guess so.
If we had a sensor package that could reliably detect FPV drones out there, I suspect that it’d be getting mass-produced and sent to the Ukrainians.
A helicopter can go faster than an FPV drone, so as long as it’s in the air, and has a bit of warning, it can just outfly the drone; the drone can’t catch up. Maybe multiple drones simultaneously coming from all directions, especially if there’s also heavy air defenses that prevent the helicopter from climbing, could still bring down a helicopter.
“A bit of warning” is probably overselling the acceleration of a traditional rotorcraft. You can’t safely get four tons of anything moving quickly using the same mechanism keeping it off the ground. Compare that with minimalist disposable quadcopters, with their zero-to-top-speed profile of “holy shit, where’d it go?”
I want a $500 drone to shoot down a $1000 drone with a $10,000 missile.
$1000 drone? likely less than 500$ even for a consumer, and ukraine does have some of its own production setup to drive costs lower.
I kinda feel like an AirHogs plane could take down a Russian chopper now.
