All these solutions seem like tacking on additional weight and costs to an already expensive platform + prone to friendly fire against infantry. Having drone Overwatch and intercept drones on standby seems a more workable solution.
PLA Next Generation Main Battle Tank
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That could work well for battles on fields/plains or any type of large open battlefield but what about city warfare? You cannot squeeze in another UGV/vehicle dedicated to drone defenses on roads in cities while having enough of them to provide adequate coverage.
FriedRiceNSpice
Major
I believe what he meant is the best way to deal with hostile aerial drones is to blot out the sun with your own (including use of interceptor drones to hunt down enemy drones).
In Urban (City) warfare, it is still combined arms, and tanks work with infantry to clear strongpoints. Being in a confined space does not negate the tenants of combined arms fighting. Tanks do not fight by themselves, that is how they get destroyed.
If we are talking about the PLA next GEN MBT, the drone attack would be a feature of the APS, if I was a betting man. Maybe it might be built into the RWS, but the PLA has shown that they look to fight as a combined arms team and they like everyone else is trying to figure out how sUAS/drones fit into the unit and how to defend the UNIT and not the individual platform. Right? Or am I missing something?
Agree it is going to be built into RWS, with 360 degree camera system provide both drone detection and potentially an augmented reality system for enhanced situation awareness.
The pros is that none of this is out of the way, you need RWS for anti infantry anyway, and 360 degree camera is a great idea for tanks even without drone threat. No need for specialized anti-drone system
It'll still be cheap compared to the rest of the tank, and would need to be added either way due to the need for machine guns to engage infantry. Drones themselves, specifically companies like DJI, is instructive in this regard because they have shown that sensors and actuators with a high refresh rate is more than sufficient to keep a drone stable even against averse and unexpected directional changes, and I don't see why such systems can't be replicated on an MG station especially since you can spend way more per unit than you could on a drone.
Vibrations can be managed in the same way, especially if the gun is self-guided with an aligned camera to just point and shoot instead of plugged into a complicated ballistics computer system. Drones only need to be engaged at a hundred meters or so, after all. You can use a fused system with an MM wave radar and camera setup to get even more data into the drone, whilst requiring only very rudimentary AI to adjust gun angle even if there's drift from poor maintenance or damage. You can even make the gun do conical fire, if you don't want to use programmable airburst munitions.
There's a difference between "maximum range" and "maximum effective range"
Smaller pellets lose energy much faster. The pellets ultimately need to hit and disable drones.
Birdshot is typically #9 which is approx. 2mm ball bearings. Throw (lit.) that at a drone and even if it hit rotors, it'll just bounce off. It needs to hit with enough energy to penetrate/disable parts.
Wasn't your claim that Birdshot will easily go over a hundred? So ... YES - Come to me and I will let you shoot at me with #9 at a 100m and a 2mm sheet of ABS plastic in front of me. The spread at 100m is going to be big, there'll only be a few pellets within 1m of me. The energy will be so lame, it won't even bother me behind a 2mm sheet of ABS plastic (typical drone body material?). I'm willing to go at 40m too - if I get to wear eyepro and thick clothes (on top of the 2mm ABS sheet).
Source:
- I regularly trap/skeet and at 30-40m+, it sometimes doesn't even break the clay even if it hits.
- I've also shot peasants in the English country a couple of times and had pellets "rain" on me with zero effect.
- My area, they cull pigeons/crows with shotguns and birdshot. Mind you, this is in a dense, built up, residential area. No way it gets done if birdshot effective range is what you claim it to be.
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Maximum Effective Range is what you want when you're trying to engage-destroy targets.
One is not the other.
Also, since I mentioned Spread. Pellets spread from a shotgun is an advantage as it puts up a wall of lead without needing a high ROF. It is also a disadvantage as the further the range, the bigger the spread, to the point where you tradeoff bigger pellets for the range-energy but you have less pellets per shot so you no longer have the pattern density to get a pellet on target. Per your table, you get to the point where you are using (slow) solid slugs - in which case you are better off with rifles. You could choke the barrel and tighten the dispersion but then you compromise the effective spread at short range.
There will always be tradeoffs. Shotgun type anti-drone defence could be a way of implementing a "CIWS" like defence with a very small beaten zone to allow for better freedom of use around your own troops.
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Also, on top of this, another part that often gets missed - deconflicting the battle space to prevent blue-on-blues.
Even artillery fire needs to clear the air space along the shell flight path. Imagine the various anti-drones from 7.62 to 30mm firing off at "random".
I'm distressed to hear about this. In which region of the English countryside is it legal to shoot peasants?
I was at a friends house in the Southwest, out in the country, somewhere near Bath.
When I had my kids over, he would even let them fire off a few rounds in the nearby woods - just made sure it's pointed in the right direction (nothing in the beaten zone).