If they were confident in this weapon, they'd let hobbyists come fly drones in front of it.
They don't do that because unfortunately most kinds of directed energy weapons are fairly easy to shield against.
Even external Comms is fairly easy to avoid jamming of as long as you can design both transmitter and receiver and use phased array antennas and a shared key in both.
Ukraine felt it necessary to design fiber-optic cable controlled drones as a countermeasure, so I suspect the fancy radio solution isn't that easy. Or the enemy just jams the entire band.
both sides are using fiber optic controls because they're using modded hobby grade drones which don't have phased array antennas, and fiber is far cheaper than a phased array antenna on a drone which is disposable.
But the next gen of drones will have phased arrays because they're things that are hard to design, and expensive to make a small quantity of, but when you start making 10M+ drones, they become cheap, and obviously have more utility than fiber.
If they were confident in this weapon, they'd let hobbyists come fly drones in front of it.
They don't do that because unfortunately most kinds of directed energy weapons are fairly easy to shield against.
Even external Comms is fairly easy to avoid jamming of as long as you can design both transmitter and receiver and use phased array antennas and a shared key in both.
Ukraine felt it necessary to design fiber-optic cable controlled drones as a countermeasure, so I suspect the fancy radio solution isn't that easy. Or the enemy just jams the entire band.
both sides are using fiber optic controls because they're using modded hobby grade drones which don't have phased array antennas, and fiber is far cheaper than a phased array antenna on a drone which is disposable.
But the next gen of drones will have phased arrays because they're things that are hard to design, and expensive to make a small quantity of, but when you start making 10M+ drones, they become cheap, and obviously have more utility than fiber.
Presumably it works by inducing high voltages in antennas that aren't designed for it.
I wonder if you could counter it by putting diode shunts in the right places?
(in trials, not yet on a battlefield)
This is a press release from the government not-privatised part of MOD research.
It's run by Talis - isn't that private?
DSTL is the government bit per this extremely long URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defence-science-a...
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