It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
I recently got a report from a friend who went by North Carolina, and he spoke quite positively of the ship. They have a fair bit open, including an engine, turret, and fire control, and the signage was good enough to get his teenage daughters interested for a while. I do hope to get there myself soon, but in the meantime, hopefully this helps anyone who is thinking about visiting.
Overhauls are LA Maritime Sites, JDAM*, In Defense of Missile Defense and for 2023, Honda Point Part 3 and Conscription.
Comments
Came across this fun set of pics of a modern marine steam turbine, burning boil-off LNG. https://www.team-bhp.com/news/working-marine-steam-turbine-onboard-merchant-ship
Incredible to compare it to Iowa.
So, drones.
Let's say I have 1m USD to play with.
Let's say a drone is 1k USD.
That gives me 1k drones.
Let's say a drone makes 100 mph, so there's plenty of closing time to a target ship.
What's the outcome?
I can't see any ship having enough munitions to defend itself?
So then you have couple of hundred of drones delivering HE, possibly to the waterline.
Thoughts?
Starting to see assessments of the 24th Oct second Iranian missile attack on Israel, based on commercial satellite images. This time around the Iranians seem to have used more ballistic missiles, and while there wasn't much damage, a fair number of missiles seem to have got through. Nevatim airbase in Israel shows around thirty new craters.
Saturation drone attacks, yes can be shot down. Saturation ballistic missiles, maybe not yet?
Something a bit lighter than current events in the Middle East. (Or Ukraine. Or the South China Sea ...) A 21st C battleship design I sketched out in response to a podcast challenge.
https://laranzu.id.au/writing/jeanbart.html
Critique away!
@Joe Drone: such small drones don't have the range or EM-hardening to threaten a ship (though they can be useful in land warfare). The larger drones that do cost ~$100k and are still slow enough to be vulnerable to guns.
I cannot imagine for one second I have this right, but given my lack of deeper knowledge, on the face of it, I can think to contest some of the assertions made in the NG page you've linked to.
If I have 1000 drones, the combined payload will be well in excess of 500 lb. Get the drones to bunch up and detonate together.
I could be wrong, but I think small drones can manage this?
If there's 1k drones, you don't need to worry about being shot down - the idea is the defending ship exhausts its munitions.
With a 1k drone, we're looking at a camera (which could be IR) and on-board processsing. We can't use radio links back to base, because of jamming. You can't jam a camera, but you can try to fool it.
I doubt getting drones to bunch up together would work anyway (each drone has to be ~ half a meter away from each other not to crash which would spread out the impact from the explosion, but ignoring that, the manoeuvring needed to bunch them all up together would make them sitting ducks. A single missile can take them all out.
Also a single phalanx contains 1500 rounds, and can fire them all in less than half a minute. Especially if all the drones are bunched up, this just seems like an easy way to lose a million dollars.
I do not know of a single battery powered drone with a range longer than 20 miles. At 1000 dollars standard range is just a few Kms. You would need a jet engine, at which point you're talking minimum multiple thousands of dollars per drone.
I see drones performing amazing maneuvers on display.
No - or at least, I'm arguing a case for a no, as I'm arguing there are 1k drones and the defending ship has run out of munitions.
1k drones approaching a ship from a given direction over a range of heights and distances. That's a large volume of space and a lot of targets. If we said 10 rounds per target and every target is hit, that's 150 drones per Phalanx. Arleigh Burke have 1 or 2 Phalanx.
Yes.
Why not a (and cheap) combustion engine driving the propellers? there's no need for great speed.
Re drones, I stand behind the original post. I don't think you could get the sort of capabilities you want on $1k, or even anywhere close. That's high-end commercial drones at best, which means that if you're attacking something with Aegis, the drones die from the radar. (No, I am not joking in the slightest.) Or you pop smoke from the SRBOC and hide in that, assuming optical guidance. If they're bunched up, the 5" is going to do a number on them, or you could use a missile with some software mods. And we have systems like lasers in the works, which will do even better.
It's also worth noting that against ships, low speed is actually a huge deal, which I hadn't realized when I wrote that. The ship is moving a significant amount relative to the drones, and that could easily mean they end up staring at an empty patch of sea because the ship didn't follow the course you expected and jammed any updates, or at the very least taking a lot longer to close than you would expect, which means more time for defenses to work.
That's with pretty low velocity and nobody jamming, and maybe ground support for positioning. Doing that in war is harder.
@Hugh
First, yeah, we're still not sure exactly how many missiles got through, but given the low casualties, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those were deliberately let through because they wouldn't hit anything vital.
Re the battleship design, it's an interesting concept. I'd recommend going to IEP, particularly if you're doing EM weapons (which seem to not work very well, but I'll assume they do for the sake of the hypothetical). That way, you can use all three turbines for power or propulsion as necessary. You could probably even add a fourth in place of the battery bank, and distribute them throughout the ship. That much electricity would tend to make people nervous, because I doubt the batteries will react well to water, and more generation is always helpful.
I've always read "gauss gun" as synonymous with coilgun.
I would also look at reducing the armor a lot. Armor is always set based on expected threats, and battleship armor is way too heavy for the sorts of things that a modern warship is likely to face. I would think that 15-20 cm is plenty. Should stop most small anti-ship missiles and all current guns.
I have heard bad things about the 57mm Bofors, and might suggest replacing those with the standard 76mm weapons. More range and a lot more effect, and a good rate of fire against drones. I personally would also make sure it had at least a short-range SAM, because it's better to shoot down missiles than to tank the hits.
Yes.
In what way? electromagnetic inteference?
1k drone, I think you could have IR. Of course, you then have flares. The situation in general though would be drone with on-board sensor which you have to fool; no link back to base, which you could jam.
They would surely be spread out; if they were not, they'd be shot down in bunches. No need for bunching up and it's only harmful.
Yes, but those systems are not here yet, and also I wonder if they will be rated for 1k shots in a reasonably short time-frame (given their maximum range).
Yes.
Keep in mind the idea is to exhaust munitions in the target ship. How long it takes doesn't matter.
Yes. I have seen though displays where independent drones, no base control, were doing some fancy stuff, like flying in a group through a dense forest, maneuvering around the trees as they go along.
I may be wrong, but I'm still feeling like a destroyer could not shoot down 1k targets in an engagement. You spoke about the radar - I don't know about this, so I wait to hear what you say.
With 1k drones, you can cover a wide search area. You can run a mesh wi-fi type network between the drones, so the mass of drones can exchange information. I would think it's easy enough to know when you've found a ship on the ocean; they are pretty unlike what's around them. Not so straightforward with a ship by the shore or in an inlet or fjord. The problem I see is the ship using decoys and/or hiding in smoke, and I understand there are hot smokes, for IR blocking. However, at this point, we're down to one problem only, decoys.
Also, I would guess you can't fire laser defences through smoke. If the laser isn't rating for 1k shots in a reasonably short time, then you have to use decoys.
Think what would happen if you stuck the drone in a microwave. Those things put out a lot of power, and can do so in a pretty narrow beam.
Yeah. It's just that fooling an onboard camera isn't likely to be that hard.
A quick google gives me a 50' lethal radius for a 5" shell. (I am not going to take the time to hunt down a better number, but I suspect that's on the low side with modern guns against modern drones.) That's going to be a cloud at least a thousand feet on a side if you have a criteria of "don't get that close together". They'll have to close more than that to get your "synchronized detonation", at which point the defenses murder them. And that leaves aside things like canister which could make the lethal volume rather larger.
They're basically commercial lasers in a bundle, so I would expect them to be capable of continuous operations. Against a plastic drone, you're talking a decent range, and it takes a long time to close. Exact numbers can be customized to taste, but I will run the math later.
It does if the slow closing speed lets you use cheaper defenses, particularly if the incoming is spread out. The Phalanx is a good example. If I have to deal with one at a time, then that's completely adequate and I can just use some other system to cover the reloading gap. There's a lot of stuff you can't do with a high-speed missile that is an option for something with this kind of performance.
Not if I decide to switch on my jammers. There is absolutely zero way anything which you can buy for $1000 is going to be able to talk through the ECM suite of a modern warship. If you're spreading out to search, then the drones will arrive uncoordinated and independently, and most of them will miss altogether. And at that point, I can probably just use guns.
(And don't get too excited about home-on-jam. There are options to defeat that, too. To pick one, helicopters can carry jammers, too, particularly the kind you would need to deal with this.)
Joe Drone:
20 mm by 20 mm by 200 mm (the length is almost certainly a massive overestimate) multiplied by a million gives a cube a bit over 4 m per side. Very few warships are too small to be able to fit that.
@JoeDrone Re radar: the old story about the invention of the microwave is that someone got his chocolate bar melted while working on an early radar set. The Aegis is designed to see stuff in space: Wikipedia lists an average power of 58 kW, with a peak of 6MW. For reference, here's a microwave operating at 20kW on some relevant metals. https://youtu.be/mg79n_ndR68?&t=897 Obviously, the radar isn’t optimized for cooking, and you’re looking at a farther range, but you have 300 times the power of that thing. There’s a reason that all the emitters have to be verified Off before people are allowed to do things nearby/in front of them.
Re: Drones: Presumably the reason you want to use drones over a similar cost missile is that you’d like to recover the extras, so you aren’t spending one Million dollars every time you shoot at a piece of ocean; that cuts your range in half, as it needs to go & come back. Subtract a bit more if you want them to do anything at max range (ie loiter, look for stuff, dodge).
But let’s say we aren’t worried about that, can spend 1 million a shot; how much range do we need? For this, I’m looking at the Termit/Silkworm antiship missile; on the top end, looking at around 70 miles of range, which is on the shorter side, but seems like a good baseline. If we look at the DJI camera drone lineup, at the thousand dollar range they have the Air3S, which has… 46 minutes of flight time, at 28.8kph, sea level, no wind, sensors off. So less than a 5th of the speed and range that we need. Having onboard processing is also going to eat into that energy budget, as is any sort of payload, given the Air3S is under 2 pounds.
Let’s cheat, pretend they’re cars; much more efficient engines by virtue of not having to lift the thing, just roll it, and with the massive energy density advantage of gas over batteries. To go 70 miles assuming a ~35mpg car, you need 2 gallons of gasoline. Each gallon is ~6 pounds. A drone able to lift 12 pounds puts you closer to the ten thousand dollar cost range, and that’s assuming that you can make a combustion engine that can get you 35mpg flight at 100mph for the same weight as the electric + batteries (Afaik, not possible). Remember to also add back some batteries to run the camera & auto guidance systems, and payload. And again, this is assuming a one-way trip out to 70 miles.
This is a bit of a black box, though - it needed to be defined more to see if it's practicable.
First thought is that I guess the radar must stop doing other things. That might be an issue.
Next thoughts - What would the effective range be? how long would transmission need to occur? what would be the shape of the area of effect? how accurately could that beam be placed, and moved?
I'm wondering if machine learning might not be a game-changer here. Feed into a neural net data for ships, plus everything you've got showing ships using decoys. Train the drone softwware on that and reward it for scoring hits.
Intuition feels to me like the volume of space covered by 1k drones would be much much larger than the main gun could effectively attack. Let's say we have a 3D graph paper, and at each junction of lines, there's a drone, and we have say to start with 10m a side on the graph paper. I'm now going to wing it with some math, which is very likely to be flawed, so let's all work through it until it's right.
So we have cube root drones on each axis, which is 10 drones. That's a cube 100m on each axis, so a volume of 1m cubic meters, or 3.3m cubic feet. For convenience, let's imagine shells forming a lethal cube rather than a lethal sphere, and have that cube with 50 feet on each axis, which is 41,667 cubic meters. That gives 24 shots to cover 1m cubic meters.
Let's now increase the distance between drones to 100m. That gives 100m cubic meters. Then we need 2400 shots to cover the volume.
With only 10 drones on each axis, 100m spacing seems entirely reasonable.
How many 5" shells does an AB carry? what's the barrel life?
Any concerns about overheating? power supplies? recharge times?
Yes. Each drone will take a certain time to take down, and it might be there's only one laser. 1k drones - question might be how many lasers you would need.
More math. It will have errors, but we'll debug it.
Pedia says Phalanx max effective range about 1.5 km. With a drone speed of let's say 100mph, and a ship heading directly away from them at 30 knots, that's about 65mph closing speed, which is about 105 kmph. That gives about 50 seconds before the lead drones reach the ship, and not much more before the rest arrive (100m spacing box). That reads like one full loaded ammo can be fired off, then you need a reload (I don't know how long that takes), and then you have time for a minority of the reload to be fired.
If we were to say (no clue if this is reasonable or not) 10 rounds per target, and 30 seconds for all ammo to be fired, and in that 30 seconds there are no significant delays aiming the weapon and acquiring targets (might the system be overwhelmed with 1k incoming targets?), one Phalanx gets through 150 drones plus maybe another 50 with the reload.
I was thinking only during the search phase, while a good distance from the ship. Once the drones have visual, they use their camera only.
I can't see a reason for that to be so; a drone locates the ship, and lets the other drones know. Now the drones, out of range of the ship, spend some time to manuever into a co-ordinated group, then they go in. There's no reason for the drones to go in just in the order they would happen otherwise to arrive in. They could form up, so they would.
No, not a thought in my mind, I think because it wouldn't fit within the 1k USD budget.
I'm no physicist, and I may well be wrong, but I think the power drops off very strongly with distance. Cube root or quad root, something like that?
No. The reason for use would be if it were found a mass of drones were more effective than a missile. In my thought, I'm assuming all the drones are expended.
Yes. Battery power wouldn't cut it. It would have to be chemical energy. I was thinking a cheap petrol engine.
Mmm. To borrow an appropriate phase, that's not going to fly.
Is there a possibility that because the drone is airborne, and so has lift, we could do much better?
Gliders travel long distances without any fuel at all. Perhaps you need fuel to climb, and after that, you can cruise efficiently.
Yes. I think also this is not possible, certainly not cheaply using off-the-shelf engines even if it could be done in principle.
This perhaps would imply a larger drone, with larger wings for more lift.
@bean, thanks for the comments
The armour thickness came with the hull I'd chosen, and I wanted to keep as much of the original design as I could. If 150-200mm is enough, I'd build a new Alaska. (Or maybe a new WW1 HMS Tiger just because she was a beautiful ship.)
Batteries rightly make people nervous, but then ships are already filled with things that don't react well with seawater. My thinking is that batteries have improved a lot in the 21st C, and we're now comfortable with them in our pockets and cars, so maybe ships too? The Japanese navy has switched to lithium-ion batteries for their new subs.
I went for the twin 57mm Bofors because the original had those, plus twice as many barrels for redundancy and the smaller calibre = more dakka. But yes, single Otto Melara 76mm would work as well and give much better range, especially since I don't have SeaRAM or similar.
@Joe Drone, Aegis radars would be very good at knocking down drones.
For power levels, the radars on an AEGIS equipped or similar modern warship can be up to ten times a microwave oven. And the beam is focused rather than radiating evenly in a sphere, so the square cube law doesn't apply. (Well technically it does: the overall energy within the volume doesn't change, just most of it is now concentrated in one small 3D arc.)
For switching and aiming, the electronically scanned phased array radars (ships with flat panels on the sides of the hull rather than a big sphere) are aimed electronically and can change targets in milliseconds. The mechanically scanned radars inside the spheres rotate, but the modern versions can be pointed in one direction very precisely.
@Joe Drone
Two of your suggestions for the drone swarm have already been demonstrated. The Soviet P-700 missiles flew in a small squadron of 8 or so, one missile flying higher than the others to get a good radar view of the target and using a short range link to feed that info to the others. If the high flyer got shot down another would take over. The modern Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile has an infra-red seeker, and enough onboard smarts to navigate through crowded littoral waters and look for designed ships. May be capable of aiming at a specific part of the target ship for maximum damage.
A couple of things that need to be taken into consideration. One is the surface area needed for storing and launching your drone swarm. A thousand small aircraft, especially winged, take up at least the same area on the ground as a Nimitz aircraft carrier or two. Not something you can hide from satellites. A cruise missile with a cluster bomb warhead could destroy them all. (Yes, you could build hardened shelters, or defend the launch sites. All these massively push up the cost.)
The other thing is weather, especially wind. Sailing ships were popular for so long because there is a lot of wind at sea. And it's often not smooth and predictable. Not good for very light aircraft to try and maintain formation, and in stronger winds the drones might actually break up. I agree that drones have put on some very impressive synchronised flying displays, but I'm not aware of any taking place in less than perfect weather.
None of this is saying that large swarms of cheap drones won't be a threat.
@JoeDrone
The power loss is proportional to the square of the distance; quad would apply if we’re worried about the return trip as well for normal radar returns, but in this case we don’t need to worry about that. Looking into it more, the wiki source for the 6 MW is a medical study for an accidental 7 minute undirected exposure at ~90 meters. Which was enough to shut down the instruments on a coast guard ship, set off fire alarms.
Number of shells for the 5” on an AB is 680, per wikipedia, and it can start engaging at 30+ km, 20 rpm; given your closing speed, that lets them get through around 300 shells. Once the drones are far enough apart to not get clusters, we’ll assume each shot is aimed at a different drone, rather than trying to fill the entire empty space of the cube. The two Mk38 (25mm autocannons) each have at least 200 rounds (didn’t find a good source); they can start engaging at around 6 km. Wouldn’t be super effective as is, but there’s been a lot of development recently of proximity/timed airburst fuzes for the 25-30mm cannons, specifically to counter UAVs.
Your formation is going to struggle once you get into jamming range, unless you want to add extra sensors & processing to watch all around the drone & maintain distance; additionally, they do have to converge in a tight area once on terminal approach, if we’re relying on repeated hits to make up for the smaller payload (Which smoke is absolutely going to screw with, esp if they can’t coordinate due to jamming). On the other hand, losing formation might be a good thing, as your 100mph travel is going to mean you pass through any flak/shrapnel hitting the first row after about two seconds; not terrible, but still probably causing losses given the numbers involved.
Re wings: definitely better than rotorcraft. Looking at existing aircraft, seems like 30mpg is achievable, for very light prop aircraft, so still a minimum size of “several gallons of aviation gas”. But hey, if this is single use, we can go even more efficient propellant + engines; solid rockets! Can’t throttle, but if we’re just doing a climb, glide, and then maybe another burn at the end, it should be manageable. Cost won’t be so nice though, and you lose the fine control needed for formation flying &/ hitting the same spot. Also, the ship can now spot you from a lot farther away, as you’re above the sea-skimming horizon.
Looking again at payload: if we assume that half of the 5” shells miss, that’s still the entire first face of the cube slapped down, and half of the next face (of ten). We’ll give the Mk38’s 50 kills for now (to make the numbers easy), and say per your numbers the CIWS gets another 200. Total kills 400, before any lasers or radar cooking, decoys, other attrition. To give us some margin, we’ll round that to half, so our target payload of 500lb needs to be split among 500 drones in order to get through. And that’s assuming we can pile it all into the right spot through smoke, jamming. One pound is about the same payload as a M31 rifle grenade. With a HEAT warhead, that can punch a very narrow hole through a decent thickness of steel, but most of the juicy bits will be more than a foot deep, so you’re going to need enough to hit the same spot to let others deeper in.
So, you’re still looking at a minimum weight of at least 10lb, with some nice fancy cameras to spot from over 30km out, (so you can organize and start heading in before the 5” starts deleting), enough onboard computing power to ignore decoys, guess through smoke, and enough maneuverability with whatever nice gliding wings you used to get the range to sneak a couple hundred into exactly the same spot, for a thousand dollars each. And that gets you… about half the payload of a P-15 Termit, a soviet missile from the 60’s (1000lb warhead + unburnt fuel, basis for 70km range), or a little bit better than an Exocet, french from the 1970s (364lb warhead), both of which are flying at least 7 times faster, with sea skimming. Pricing as always is hard to find, but the old Exocets were apparently somewhere in the 1/3rd to half a million dollar price range.
Re SPY-1 as a jammer - the square distance law still impacts their ability to reach that far out. I suppose you could gamble on trying to fry them all within a kilometer or three, but that gets hairy.
The second thing is that S-band is substantially longer than visible or near IR wavelengths - at long distances you probably need a lot of antennas and other things that make it susceptible to jamming, but at short distances you could possibly have a psuedo-Faraday cage with only narrow aperture optical guidance.
If the overall stipulation is that you have $1M to spend, I think the basic question is if you're better off with 1 Harpoon class weapon (US Harpoon pricing is $1.5M, but you could probably get a 95% as capable version from China for <$1M), two Exocets at $500K each, 10 mid-tier drones at $100K each, 100 low-tier drones at $10K each, or 1K $1K improved consumer drones.
I am skeptical you could get enough warhead weight in a consumer level drone to make it worthwhile - maybe if you got a magic shot on the bridge or something, but otherwise it seems like you would basically going for harassment and maybe taking out a VLS cell or some of the individual array elements of a SPY radar (or the helo if it's on the helideck). However, 1,000 2 pound warheads is not the same as a 2,000 pound warhead, or even a 500 pounder.
However, I think you can also get a decent amount of performance by abandoning quad-copters and moving to more traditional winged missiles or glorified R/C planes. You would probably have to sit down with a calculator for longer than I'm willing to, but they already have RC jets in the 30lb thrust range, implying a weight of 300-400lbs. Similarly, you could use a cheap leafblower type engine to turn a prop or ducted fan.
Finally, a lot of this depends on the use case - for a mid-Pacific blue water navy vs blue water navy 'neutral field' confrontation it's probably useless because anyone who is in that fight already has the whiz bang stuff, targeting requires fancy sensors, etc. But if you're looking to make a better mouse trap for the Houthis trying to pinch the Red Sea a bit more, or maybe keep the Russians up at night in the Black Sea, it has more promise.
One last thought - at scale, a lot of stuff gets very cheap. What is $1K to us is not $1K from the manufacturer in China or India, especially if you use commodity parts, etc.
Like, you can buy a fully equipped car for $20K, which includes a 150hp motor rated for 100k miles, a 2800 lb vehicle, disc brakes, lane keeping, etc. And they turn a profit on it! Obviously that's not directly applicable to drones or missiles, but I think it's a different way to back into the rough order of cost associated with most of the mechanical stuff, as well as basic position keeping sensors and so on. Doubly so because missiles are not intended to last ten years, so you can back off on some of the reliability considerations in favor of performance.
Yes.
Ah, this leads to a central question : are these radars equipped to be directed, as a beam, toward a specific and moving target area?
How would they know they had been successful shooting down drones?
How long would the exposure time have to be to achieve a kill?
What area could the beam cover, and at what range, and achieve a kill or kills?
I'm thinking - guessing - that beam operation is part of normal function, and the radar will be receive returns, and so will be able to see the targets, and so see them fall from the sky.
However, I've only see people say how powerful the radar is; I have no idea of actual effective range in this role, and no one yet has tried to come up with numbers for that, and we need that otherwise we can't know if this would work or not.
There is also the other problem that the radar may be needed for other tasks, and it is not possible to switch it to anti-drone work for what could be a significant period of time (we've yet to get an idea of how long it would take to take down these drones). A Phalanx is a Phalanx and it has only one job, but a main radar has a number of other tasks, all of which are important.
Separate to the current discussion, this approach seems unwise; you always have a higher-flying, more-visible missile. It would seem better to do occasional pop-up, that be always-up.
Yes.
This has brought to mind that such software is a substantial cost. If we consider drone hardware at 1k USD, that's fine, but we must also consider the cost of developing such software, and whether or not it can run on a relatively cheap drone.
Yes. A very good point.
If they were quad-copters, they could if the incoming attack was detected, quite likely avoid the consequences by simultanously taking off vertically, and so being airborne. No need for a run-way, so becoming airborne is rapid.
Indeed, if they quad-copters, you could then think about them participating in the defence; there's no reason for them not to be general purpose devices. This would bring us on to the question of the utility of massed, co-operating quad-copters in an air-defence role.
However, if they were winged, they would need a runway of some kind, then that implies some degree of queuing, and then you cannot have them all take off, to avoid incoming munitions.
None of this is on the menu. The protection would cost far more than that being protected.
Yes and yes.
I wonder how much wind a quad-copter can cope with? I have no idea. I mean, quad-copters are currently off the menu due to lack of range, but it's an interesting question in and of itself.
Just a quick reply right now to this one point, proper reply soon;
Perhaps if you could more or less cover the ship with small explosions, it would be rendered unfit as a combatant, because the exterior would be pretty much hammered - I'm thinking pretty much all sensors would be disabled?
@Joe Drone, the P-700 and Kongsberg show that software for swarming and target identification already exists, so the development cost would be a lot lower than if starting from scratch. As for computing power, that just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. A Raspberry Pi would have been considered a supercomputer in the 1990s.
I would worry more about the sensors. A quick check on optical/imaging supplier Edmund Optics shows that infra-red cameras are in the hundreds of dollars for the bare minimum sensor, single digit thousands for a good one. That's a $10K drone, not a $1K
It also seems possible that $1M is not enough to reasonably attack a modern destroyer that is expecting the shot and unconstrained in ability to fire countermeasures, etc.
Which raises the obvious point that the most cost effective attacks are when it’s not fully alert and ready, as was demonstrated with the Cole. While that exact attack would be unlikely to succeed again, that seems to be the general direction - get an old freighter and ram a destroyer while it’s anchored and most of the crew are on shore leave, send drones into the dry docks and recreate the Bonhomme Richard, etc.
Been busy so no proper replies, yet, but I just had a thought.
What a drone in-air recharging?
You want range. A drone can manage say 15km. You want a range say 10x that. You need to send out enough additional drones that they can recharge each other on the way. Recharging drones have a payload only of batteries.
Question then is, how much of the mass of a typical 1k USD drone is battery, and how much payload is available?
I think we'll run into the Black Buck problem, with tankers needing to refuel tankers, and your actual payload at the end becomes very small, but I think also the costs, in terms of drones assigned to recharging, will not be a continous function over distance - there will be cliff-edges, where at that range you then need another set of recharging drones, and the recharging drones for those drones, and so on.
So you might get a useful range increase without too much cost.
There remains however the question of how a drone recharges another drone. Actual recharging, a la mobile phone, I would expect too slow. You'd have to replace batteries. That's not something a consumer drone would have, but if you were thinking cheap custom drones, you could perhaps begin to think about if it could be done.
For in flight drone recharging, I'd go with beamed power. The drone just needs a receiving plate for microwaves, like a solar panel but different frequency. No tricky flying to match and connect, just a ground station with a big directional transmitter. The drone does need RF shielding to stop the rest of it being jammed or fried by the power beam, but that's useful to have anyway, see previous discussion about drones being shot down by radar.
And for the ultimate in over the horizon drone ops, could this finally be an actual use case for orbiting beamed power satellites? Much lower power requirements at ground level (OK, close to) and at least some militaries are already willing to spend enormous amounts on space infrastructure.
I think the biggest problem with recharging drones in flight is that it's really hard to see two drones plus a very complicated recharging mechanism being cheaper than a single drone with some sort of hydrocarbon engine.
@Hugh
I am very not sure that you wouldn't be better off pointing that power directly at the enemy.
Re range limitations - I think you'd be surprised how much more performance a wing gets you than a quad copter. Very back of the envelope, but you'd probably get 4x to 6x the ton-miles per hour, which is a meaningful improvement in performance.
Also, for disposable weapons with range considerations, it seems like a cluster bomb or mother ship would be an easier solution - send ten mother ships to 15km (or whatever range is outside of easy reach of point defense weapons like CIWS) and have them each drop 100 smaller drones. That seems easier and cheaper than trying to refine in flight refueling for micro-drones.
One point that usually comes up in this sort of discussion is the kill chain: you need to find the target, to localise it, to track it, to target it, etc., each of which may require a different solution. Consider the tracking stage in particular. Taking some numbers from upthread, if your drones are flying 70 miles at 100 mph, you have a 40-minute window during which you need to track the target vessel or else your drone swarm may fly to the wrong location. So you need an expensive, high-endurance platform which can hang out within sensor range of your target vessel for that length of time. That's much more difficult than tracking your target for the 6 minutes it would take an NSM to fly the same distance.
RedRover's suggestion, of a higher-end weapon that deploys submunitions when it gets close to the target, is a plausible compromise. It combines a large weapon's speed and range with a swarm of small weapons' pressure on the enemy's supply of defensive munitions - at the least, it forces your enemy to use expensive, long-range SAMs instead of cheaper shorter-ranged options. The Anglo-French Perseus concept, with its deployable effectors, was a limited example of this approach. Arguably an F-35 carrying a pair of JSMs is, too: the JSMs are comparatively cheap, and the (reusable!) F-35 provides them with improved range.
I think where all these discussions go off track is they lose sight of both the original goal, and the way that any increase in complexity or development costs tends to force other increases in complexity/development costs, leading the whole thing to spiral out of control.
If I want to destroy a ship for one hundred million dollars, I already have a decent way to do that - fire however many ASMs I can afford that have the minimum characteristics needed to find and hit the ship with reasonable probability(this will depend on range, and capabilities of enemy ship).
The aim here was to see if we could destroy a ship for 1,000,000 dollars, using drones.
Now I don't think it's unliklely that you could find an unsuspecting corvette stationary 5kms off the coast of e.g. Somalia, procure 1000 off-the-shelf drones and 1000 grenades, modify or write some fairly basic software to give the drones target coordinates of the ship, and launch them all at the ship.
They're not going to be able to hit a specific location on the ship, just fly to the coordinates you gave them, but if the crew is sleeping at the wheel they might all get through and cause significant damage and a mission kill.
But for the same token, in that circumstance you could just fire a few RPGs at them, which have more powerful warheads, and are ten a penny in some areas of the world.
And once you've done this once, the navy is just going to stop letting ships sit stationary off the coast of Somalia. If you try repeating the trick in a western port, you'll find someone knocking at your door the moment you try procuring 1000 drones and explosives.
So we want something that's actually useful at range. Battery recharging is pointlessly complex and limited compared to winged jet engine drones, so let's assume you go with that. Now we're looking at a minimum of 10,000 dollars a drone. At range you have to work out how to find a moving enemy ship, and then coordinate all drones to attack it, in the presence of GPS and other jamming technologies. Definitely doable, but you'll be looking at years of development, plus at least 10,000,000 dollars in development cost. Also you're going to have to fly these drones during testing, so the US is going to know exactly what you're up to.
You're now spending 10,000,000 dollars per attack, so you're going to want more than just a mission kill. You're going to need software to detect the most vulnerable parts of a ship optically and attack them in such a way as to maximise damage. That further pushes up development costs.
Now if you're spending that much on development, you need to use this more than once to recoup your costs. If this swarm of drones is vulnerable to gunfire, the US will increase the number of phalanx on their ships. If it's vulnerable to radar frying, they'll develop software to do that. I have know idea if this is possible, but if you can clog cheap jet engines by filling the air with light pieces of tough fabric, they will develop that and use that.
So you need to make sure that your drones don't have any cheap vulnerabilities. That means you're not using off the shelf drones, pushing up prices further, and further increases your development costs.
At this point your 'cheap' drones are likely costing you 100,000 dollars each, and you've spend 100,000,000 on development. They're now fairly hard to easily take down, but since an average naval ship has a huge number of missiles, you're still going to need a minimum of a couple of hundred to get through.
So it's a minimum of 20,000,000 dollars per attack, 100,000,000 dollars fixed costs, and your launch base is a sitting duck. If you have one runway, it's going to take about half an hour just to get all the drones to launch, and then they have to circle together in the air, until they're all ready to leave at once. So you'll need multiple runways, and the US is going to know exactly where they are, and preemptively strike them in a war.
Also this cloud of drones is going to stick out like a sore thumb on radar, leaving plenty of time for a supersonic interceptor to arrive and shoot as many as it can down with its cannon on the way.
All of this is to say - I don't believe that it's impossible, or even unlikely we'll incorporate autonomous swarms in future anti ship weapons. but they'll come at a price point similar to current anti ship weapons, and fill a similar role. They'll just improve the capabilities of these existing weapons, rather than fundamentally shift the balance of power.
Seems to me that blue water naval war is the WORST application for drones:
Ranges are very long, several dozen km at least. Which makes your range requirements long, and hence expensive.
Ranges are very long, several dozen km at least. Which gives heaps of time for detection and interception.
The environment is wide open, which makes detection much easier.
Your targets are very tough, you need a serious payload to have a good chance of even a mission kill.
Your targets are very well armed with a range of electronic, electromagnetic and kinetic countermeasures.
@doctorpat
There is also the non-trivial issue of how you get your drone fleet to the middle of the ocean in the first place. You either need a fairly sophisticated aircraft, or your own destroyer / submarine. And in that case you can probably afford a more whiz bang set of weapons than $1k drones.
But for comparatively constrained operations (the Baltic, Red and parts of the Black Seas, the Persian Gulf, and the various straits) it seems somewhat more promising.
@yair
I think you can get a piston engine that bridges the gap between jets and electric fairly well. Plus they’re cheap!
At the likely size of these drones, I don’t think the infrastructure ends up being that complex, and certainly not multiple runways. If anything catapults or a similar external launch system both simplify the drone design (no undercarriage!) and reduce the logistical footprint. The all in weight and volume (with folded wings), would probably be on the order of 1-3 40’ containers.
@Shas Ui is the commenter with the Golden VLS: he "can spend 1 million a shot" (Not even gonna pretend I'm sorry)
@Joe Drone
As is, sandpapering with small explosive might mission kill, but it might be just as easy to repair, and more critically, you won't know if it is; maybe you got enough through that it can't see, maybe it just has some scratched paint. It would probably be relatively easy to armor against; look at how tanks have sprouted cheap cages to provide standoff vs higher capability drones (Switchblade 600 has a 20lb warhead); I'm sure the same could be done over the key delicates. Except the radar; might need something different there, but given the type of incoming, perhaps something as simple as a fishing-line net hung out a couple of meters in front (Assuming that's radar transparent enough).
Regarding battery mass: looking at the DJI website for the specs of the Air 3S (1.1k pricetag), it has a takeoff weight of 724 grams, and the battery weighs aprox 247 grams, takes between 60 to 80 minutes to charge, depending on setup. Doesn't seem to be any allocation for payload, other than the integrated camera. Max wind speed resistance of 12m/s (27mph).
Can I suggest the Shahed 136, with modified software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESAShahed136
It seems to cost about $20,000, can be made by Iran level technology, has a range of 1,600 miles, and a warhead of 110 lbs.
If I want to attack an Aegis cruiser, I'll send 50 drones and watch the captain spend $50M in missiles to defend my $1M attack. Because I don't think an actual captain who wants to keep his job and take exactly zero casualties is gonna let 50 missiles get within gun range. The I'll attack for realz, and the next 50 drones hurts or sinks his ship.
In actual fact, I'll probably not attack the Aegis cruiser with $2M in drones but use just $1M to attack the undefended tanker in the same theatre. Its much more certain and still kills Americans and is a much easier target.
The Shahed is about the right tool for this job, in a way quadcopters and other mini-drones aren't. But it will need a better guidance system, which will push the cost up a bit.
I will note that a typical multirole helicopter can outrun a Shahed. If the ship has a helo at 5-minute alert, I think it can wait until the Shaheds come over the radar horizon, launch the helicopter, and have the door gunner shoot them all down before they reach Phalanx range. The margins on that would be pretty tight, so best if you can spot the enemy beyond the horizon. Which is another thing multirole helicopters are good at.
It's also not clear whether a Shahed's electronics are hardened to the point of surviving a large naval AESA radar set to "kill".
Barring either of those, right now you'd use RAM and ESSM at $1E6/shot for the first wave, then run away and use guns against any second wave.
But if we get wind of anyone gearing up for this sort of attack, the obvious short-term counter is something like a navalized Multi-Mission Launcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-MissionLauncher) loaded with Stingers at $100K per kill, and in a few years either swap out the Stingers with quad-packed $20K MHTK missiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniatureHit-to-Kill_Missile) or just use a laser (https://www.navalgazing.net/Lasers-at-Sea-Part-2).
Am now reading Castles of Steel. Makes an interesting complement to Rules of the Game, and certainly emphasizes the degree to which a cult of obedience and centralized authority had come to dominate the RN, not just in the Grand Fleet but throughout. Also interesting in that the RN seems to have rediscovered elan and initiative by the start of WW2. A consequence of lessons learned from the Great War at Sea, or just a consequence of fighting without overwhelming material superiority?
Churchill thus far is coming across as serial bumbling incompetent. Where did his reputation for supreme competence come from? And regarding the famous signal of `Winston is back!' supposedly sent to the fleet in 1939, in order to boost morale - on the evidence of the first third of Castles, I would think this would scare the pants off the navy, rather than boost morale. Or is there something Castles is not telling me?
Probably a lot of lessons learned, and some degree of personnel exfiltration from the more elan-ish parts of the RN, like submarines and some of the destroyers and cruisers on independent duty.
The reputation of wartime leaders almost always has more to do with their success in war than anything else. And Churchill's staff restrained him enough for Britain to win. It didn't hurt that he was a very good writer and his books are fairly notable sources. But when you look closely, it was a fairly constant string of terrible decisions. Weirdly, Gallipoli was actually one of the less bad ones. It was a fairly typical British plan, but it didn't work, and Churchill ended up holding the bag.
I was radicalized into something of the anti-Churchill position by reading on Mers-el-Kebir, particularly a French source which took an extremely dim view of his handling of the situation.
Re "Winston is Back", I suspect that this reputation among the lower decks was rather different than that with senior officers. But I also wouldn't be surprised if that was self-promoting mythologizing.
Also notable is how extraordinarily risk averse Jellicoe seems to have been, starting well before Jutland. It seems abundantly clear from his correspondence with the admiralty that he placed far more importance on preserving the strength of the Grand Fleet (and with it global sea control) than on destroying the High Seas Fleet. And maybe that was the right temperament for
the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon,' but the Admiralty can hardly have been surprised at Jellicoe's caution at Jutland. If they had wanted afighting admiral,' they should have replaced him well before then.