Hah, this reminded me that Dave Portnoy bought $500k of Rheinmetall stock about a month ago. He was copying the trade of a congresswoman who happens to be on the house subcommittee of military construction. Hard to imagine her trade wasn't related to this news
Rheinmetall's stock value looks like it's down 6% in the last month, I doubt this news will do much to it. Her trade was probably related to Rheinmetall being one of the world's biggest weapons manufacturers and well positioned when Germany and other European countries are putting a lot of money into their military spending.
Rheinmetall's stock's development during the last five years closely matches that of Saab, another big European weapons manufacturer. You don't have to be a political insider to guess that the stock will increase in value.
>You don't have to be a political insider to guess that the stock will increase in value.
having non public information about a company that is also doing well publically is still an effective trading strategy. the value of a company like Rheinmetall is the sum of it's sources of profit.
Of course, but that buy isn't necessarily an indication that she had insider knowledge about this deal. These kind of deals happens all the time, and this particular one hasn't moved the stock value enough to make insider trading worth it or even to make the accusation.
That stock is slightly down over last month even with this press release 5 days ago, so the larger investment community seems less than sold on this news...
One wonders if people on that committe would naturally be more inclined to trade in the defense industry; like how people on HN seem to have a lot of SV tech investments.
People tend to overestimate the profitability of defense contractors. Operating in a heavily boom-bust market, with high capital expenditures and high operating costs (the entire supply chain and final manufacturing is done almost exclusively in high cost-of-living western countries), and dealing with massive quantities of politics and regulation eats away at those margins.
And Rheinmetall is in Europe, not America, where all of these things are 100x more true.
The press release talks mostly about sensors and software integration.
It also mentions end-effector systems, Andruil's Anvil system[0], and Rheinmetall's "high-power guns", which I guess refers to Skynex[1].
The public demo videos[2] for Skynex aren't particularly impressive, they shoot down some high flying stationary drones.
Skynex is a huge 35mm cannon, that seems expensive and overkill for the C-sUAS role.
I'm surprised we aren't seeing smaller automated anti drone turrets, that can be deployed close to fighting positions, shooting either a small airburst grenade, like the 20mm round from the OICW program[3], or some kind of flak/shotgun round.
The electronics are the expensive part of the round (one would assume), and even moreso when you need to squeeze it into a smaller round. I doubt that having a slightly larger round (which also provides more range and might require less rounds to kill the target) is considered much of a problem.
Basically, any impact with a drone will disable it. The trick is actually hitting it. So you either need volume of fire (which implies a buttload of small rounds), precision (which might imply lower mechanical or sensor reliability) or proximity detonation. If you're going for the latter and are optimizing for cost you don't (necessarily) want the smallest round possible.
The reason I'd like to see a smaller system, isn't primarily due to cost, but so that the system could be deployed closer to where it's needed, and in volume.
The Skynex 35 mm cannon is massive, requires a truck to transport, and presumably needs a generator to power.
If you could develop a small man-portable battery/solar powered turret, that fires small-arm caliber rounds, you could put them right next to a foxhole, to shoot down incoming drones.
I don't think the electronics should be expensive(by military standards), they have already been developed, it's basically just a timed fuze, that is programed by the gun as it fires.
If you have 100s of small drones coming at you from all directions you would need to start hitting them as far as possible which is going to require a large round.
I don’t think this system would be positioned within artillery range, that seems negligent as it’s stationary. It seems like this system would be deployed protecting bases and other high value targets, at least according to their promo materials.
A larger round also has more body material to fragment upon explosion, if indeed they are proximity airburst rounds. Which ideally means a higher PK as well as longer ranger.
You would expect these are going to have anti-anti-drone defensive measures, lower profile signals, directional, IR/laser, wideband/agile-RF and the like, aside from things like shrouded blades, indirect message routing via a master drone to reduce RF energy cost.
Yup. It's been 'Game On' for several years now. I would expect that using the RF signal for detection will go extinct as an opportunity in a very short time span (esp as targeting gets more AI-ish capabilities), detecting the audio signature will be key, and reducing that signature will accelerate.
Quieter drones would get my good housekeeping tick of approval. Lots of downsides but I think the upsides dominate. I prefer less intrusion (audio) to demanding they beep loudly so I know I am being snooped on.
Yup, nevermind reducing signature for military stealth, I'd also like it reduced just for general use.
I think it will be critical for delivery applications. People think more rapid delivery via drone is cool, for about five seconds, when they think of the noise, and then it's "Hell no! I don't want those damn things buzzing around my neighborhood all day!"
This is definitely interesting in the face of the news that Ukraine has been using very small FPV drones successfully on the front lines as opposed to more sophisticated systems like the Bayraktar drones. There seems to be a huge gap in air defense systems when it comes to small UAS and this should effectively address that.
You have to get the costs balanced too- it can't cost 1 million dollars to kill a 250 dollar drone, for obvious "what if the adversary was China" reasons.
I don't understand why nobody has put auto-shotguns on an tripod with an aiming system, like a mini-CIWS.
I've seen Russian soldiers successfully shoot down drones using shotguns, the problem is that the smaller ones can be too fast and nimble for humans to reliably target. Even if you can shoot down 2 of 3, the third one will get you.
Combine the YOLO algorithm with a high-frame-rate camera, a two-axis servo, a heavy tripod, and a shotgun... and you're defended!
This could be mounted on the back of a tank or humvee also.
Something like you describe really does sound like an ideal terminal stage defense system, with 20 or 35mm autocannon covering longer ranges.
Purely theory crafting, I think the final piece would be small, standalone AESA radar units perhaps the size of a man-carryable generator that can be distributed across a given area and networked to likewise distributed shooters, spreading out the targets, adding redundancy to the system, and reducing the odds of your dugout-with-air-defense-asset getting hit by an anti-radiation munition that homed in on a known emitter.
The reason that you don't need radar for this is that the small suicide drones use cameras (vision) to attack. If you can't see them, they can't see you! Contrast this to general aviation where planes can be kilometers up, behind cloud-cover and can attack you with radar-guided missiles.
Radar probably won't have high enough resolution and won't be able to differentiate between drones and birds. Not to mention that most drones are carbon fibre or plastic and won't have much of a radar return to begin with.
Conversely, vision systems could be trained to ID drones reliably, and could use data such as the high-frequency "beat" of the propellers to detect drones from just a few pixels of sensor data.
Shotguns have a very limited effective range. Round pellets have a low ballistic coefficient and lose energy quickly. Using larger bore shotguns only delivers marginal range improvements. Automated shotguns might end up being one aspect of SHORAD, but based on recent developments it looks like they'll end up being less important than jammers plus autocannons (short term) and lasers (longer term).
I think many are trying something along these lines. The devil is in the details.
The shotgun needs to be reloaded. The system needs to be reasonably reliable and durable. Feels like the range of the shotgun is also a problem. The system needs to have some sort of friend vs. foe identification, possibly not shoot at birds or other random objects. The camera needs to be able to deal with looking at the sun and low light, day and night, likely needs to be able to scan. Pretty soon you get to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
My point was once you start adapting to all the requirements you inevitably end up with a more complex system. Another thing that happens in a war is that the enemy will adapt to what you're doing.
The principles are fine (well, not sure camera is the right only sensor but aside). The actual engineering of a working system you can use in real life is complicated and that's what many are working on.
A Phalanx_CWIS is overkill. Also, I suspected that the system received continuous upgrades throughout the decades.
Likewise, the Abrams tanks are cold war era tanks, but they are continuously upgraded that a modern Abrams tank isn't really a 1980 tank. Modernization is likely to remove some weight and make Abrams more survivable against drones, in response to the Russo-Ukrainian war;
Ukraine has been using improvised small FPV drones since Russia invaded pretty much. The Russians in contrast seem to have been using larger drones (like those supplied by Iran).
Hezbollah has been attacking Israel from Lebanon for many months now with small drones and the air defence systems like Iron Dome haven't been able to effectively deal with that. One recent example: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hezbollah-swarms-north-with-at...
There is a major effort right now in Israel to address that gap.
> The Russians in contrast seem to have been using larger drones (like those supplied by Iran).
You are confusing short-range and long-range campaigns. Both sides are using fpvs, mavics-style, short-range fixed wing and long-range winged (like shahed-136) drones
I thought the Russians relied more on military gas powered drones (like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan-10 ) and were not using cheaper fpvs. Certainly in the earlier days there was a lot of footage of Ukranians dropping grenades and mortars via improvised drones and I think the Russians were more spotting with Orlans and then using artillery.
Most if not all the random videos I've seen of cheaper FPV drones were Ukraninian but that could totally be my social media bubble.
>"Yes, we live in an utopia and everyone is very kind and at peace. Who would ever want to build these things?"
Killing and destruction is just about the easiest thing to do in the world. Animals can do it. Creation is what makes us human. And no, creating a sharper stick doesn't count.
you are defining an out-group (those who wage war and violence) and creating a justification for potential violence against them. comparing them to animals.. it's obvious where that's going. this is what humans do. sharp sticks are a pretty great innovation whether you use them for skewering lamb or killing bad guys.
They mention using Skymaster for C&C but Lattice is also C&C. Idk anything about this stuff but it kinda sounds like WordPress doing a press release about integrating Drupal lol.
Defense company product announcements don't mean anything till they get to the field. The only reason HN is interested in this one is because there's a Silicon Valley VC-funded company attached to it
https://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1795810560677749078
reply