Surrounding a major city, these continuous curtain of projectiles fall back to Earth at terminal velocity relatively harmlessly where they're gathered, put back into the system and fired again allowing the walls to stay up indefinitely.
Could shoot them in an arc to create a dome where they're collected on the other side and shot back up.
Literally an iron dome.-- doctorremulac3, Sep 28 2024 how not to use planes Sky_20tarp_20genera...s,to%20be%20enough.a primary school child's proposal for solving droughts in Africa [Loris, Sep 29 2024] You need filaments, or nets to bung up the rotors. Bolas at the very least. Invisible EMP vortex rings might do the trick...
Small punctures will be ineffective against a swarm.
Like taking a an automatic rifle to a bee hive.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 29 2024 But it’d not one small puncture, it’s 100 of these things smashing into any particular drone in the space of a couple of seconds.
It’s a wall of these things there’s no space between the streams. And it’s the recovery recycling that allows that.-- doctorremulac3, Sep 29 2024 Think of it like this; you're in the middle of a gigantic hemisphere. Every single thing you fire is going to travel in tangents such that anything close gets obliterated but anything even just slightly farther away will experience more gaps than flak. Objects need time to travel so hundreds of these things will be passing through space which was once their target.
Recovery of ammo is a great tactic, but bullets are not going defeat mass drones.
We need some sort of flare deployment proximity net type thing until we can directionaly EMP robotic armaments to fry them where they stand... or fly, or swim.
It's coming.
I've actually given this quite a bit of thought and am still spinning my wheels......but hailstorms of recoverable bullets ain't it.
You want an iron dome?
How about ten billion ten foot lengths of gossamer spider silk like strands of spun carbon fibre waiting to be deployed in wave after wave of entanglement? Hell even recycled plastic strands will do the job.
Every flying toy I ever bought my kids succumbed to pet hair.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 29 2024 //...but hailstorms of recoverable bullets ain't it.//
How does a single drone get through this? They’d all be ground into dust. And so what if some spent projectiles and drone dust rain down on the city at terminal velocity causing the same damage as pennies from the Empire State Building? Better than millions of targeted hunter/killer drones.
Wars have always been about logistics, but I think when they're all fought by drones it's going to be doubly so.
I think we agree that that's the case. Might disagree on how to handle it but the drone swarms are coming.-- doctorremulac3, Sep 29 2024 Agreed.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 29 2024 I feel about this the same way I feel about solving droughts in Africa with planes. (link to anecdote)
I suspect that fairly simple calculations would explain why this isn't a thing which is done.
How many projectiles do you need to lob per second to guarantee (or, near-guarantee) a hit on a drone travelling at an expected speed through the flight-path of a projectile stream? How many guns would you need to generate a reasonable length of 'curtain'? How heavy would each individual projectile be, and therefore how much energy would you need to throw it up to the height it needs to block drones? (You will need to account for air-resistance for a final answer, but even an answer disregarding it may be instructive.)
Given those answers, how much total energy is required to run the system, per minute?-- Loris, Sep 29 2024 Let me do the calculations here.... let's see.. velocity quant represents the quantum wave function in a hypothetical 11-dimensional brane plank if the plank length tensor in a supersymmetric universe... that quantifies the Higgs boson's influence vector on dark matter interactions... quantum flight vector symbolizes the gradient of quantum trajectory density fluctuations... but zero-point refers to the zero-point energy field deviation in a multiverse context of such vectors.
Let me double check that...
Okay, pretty sure this is right. The answer to all those is "a lot".-- doctorremulac3, Sep 29 2024 Wonder how effective water would be against drones? Embed stuff that gets tangled in the rotors maybe? String or something?-- doctorremulac3, Sep 29 2024 random, halfbakery