They said they are making an armored variant.
Power Armor?
- Thread starter solarz
- Start date
Wonder if it is strong enough to allow the soldier to carry a minigun.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
No amount of armour plate you can realistically apply can stop a FPV with a shaped charge warhead. You need other means of dealing with converted commercial drones.
The armoured variant will be primarily aimed at stopping small arms rounds and shrapnel from artillery and grenades. I think they will be most useful in urban combat, so shouldn’t be exposed to drones much.
For open field operations, I think a quad limbed robot mount paired with the armoured exo-suit would be an interesting developmental evolution of traditional heavy cavalry. These will be able to rapidly cross open, mined fields and be far less susceptible to traditional ATGM, artillery, RPG and grenade attacks that have been so effective at stopping armoured charges in Ukraine, while being effectively immune to conventional infantry small arms fires. Their armour won’t be able to stand up to FPVs, but the speed and distribution of forces should massively mitigate the effectiveness of FPV attacks, especially against traditional FPV drones that rely on human pilots so are limited in peak deployable numbers.
So, you can have massed armoured calvary delivering armoured exo-suit wearing infantry into enemy trenches at similar speeds to a traditional armoured charge, only ATGMs, FPVs and the like will only be able to take out single riders with each shot, so the vast majority of troops should be able to reach the enemy trenches. Once in the trenches, they can dismount and be functionally immune to enemy small arms and be able to quickly clear the trenches for minimal losses.
Seems to me that with exoskeleton it wouldn't be too hard to install say helmet mounted 3D Lidars with accompanying net-shooting guns to take down small FPV drones. Otherwise AI-operated massed FPV drones can still be very deadly to a cavalry charge.
looks like the only powered junction is on the arm support, probably helps with holding the rifle and absorbing recoil. The legs support looks unpowered
Don't the Russians have heavily armoured soldiers with shields and machineguns? I imagine a powered exoskeleton would take quite the load off the soldiers. And if it's gonna be less nimble than your average soldier - well it's not like it was nimble to start with anyway.
Also wonder how soon till they develop shaped charges for rifle fired grenades and stuff like OCIW. Because rpgs wouldn't be safe to fire indoors if you happen on heavily armoured opponents.
Also wonder how soon till they develop shaped charges for rifle fired grenades and stuff like OCIW. Because rpgs wouldn't be safe to fire indoors if you happen on heavily armoured opponents.
I am 99% certain they have a grenade rifle or an OCIW-like in testing, or at least in development.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
LIDAR won’t have the range to give you enough reaction time to deal with FPVs.
Net launchers will also be unreliable and be too short range and low shot count to deal with AI drone swarms.
But more importantly, no matter what systems and methods you go with, it all impose costs and compromises due to size, weight, power requirements and costs that it will be a suboptimal arrangement.
To truly and effectively deal with drone swarms, you need dedicated systems, just like how modern armour rely on SAMs for anti-air and not their own 50 cal MGs.