Photonic chips? We understand electromagnetism a heckuvalot better than quantum mechanics right now. If a fucking microwave from the seventies will jack up your wifi, then it’s not a stretch to imagine something that can effectively knock out a small appliance intranet without having to resort to a major scientific breakthrough.
As for light as a communication method? Infinitely more susceptible to jamming. Generating high intensity radio waves and propagating them through space to jam signals in a specified area requires serious juice compared to firing high intensity lasers directly in the drone’s eyehole. Also, you can pepper the area with reflective chaff or white smoke.
Of course, all of this technical navel-gazing is speculative because drone swarm tactics haven’t been developed. Attempts to mitigate the effects of a weapon are always going to be based on an understanding of how the weapon will be used.
did previous evolutions in military technology seem this scary?
When they first came out with the machine gun - at the time called the Gatling gun - there was some thought that it was so horrible that it would put an end to war. In practice, it was too valuable to not use, so we just sucked it up and started manufacturing them.
It sounds like a scene from the book “Kill Decision” by Daniel Suarez. Very interesting book. Written a few years ago. Check it out. Brings up a lot of issues like how you control a swarm.
Any reason nets and barrage balloons wouldn’t work as well as they always did? Although I suppose they would give away your location and then they just send the big UAV over to drop a bomb on your head.
Actually, the European inventors used them on aboriginals long before they turned them on each other. At the opening of WWI they had no idea they would be so effective against equally modern troops.
What exactly is supposed to be happening in the swarm attack at 0:55? It looks like the drones are strafing the target with lasers Star Wars-style, which is definitely not possible in real life. My guess is what the graphic designer was trying to depict was the swarm using multiple terrain-scanning lasers or other sensors to rapidly build up a 3D picture of the target area, so that a human operator can make a decision on where to target a missile strike (probably from a distant launcher or a larger, armed UAV, but possibly from a suicide warhead on board one of the swarmers). It’s really not very clear, though.
Here’s one thing to consider. As fucked-up and imperialistic and murderous as the US has been lately, a lot of these technologies are growing out of a genuine push to limit civilian death and destruction. You see the phrase “precision low-collateral damage strike” in the video. Blowing up a carload of innocent civilians with a drone-launched Hellfire is completely unacceptable and needs to be stopped, but realize that in previous wars we addressed this sort of thing by carpet-bombing 10 acres with incendiaries.
Is it weird that I find that launcher almost cute? I mean, it looks like the kind of thing that would spew waves of screaming high-explosive missiles, and instead it just goes twoing and farts out a wobbly li’l airplane. Dawww!
What I find pretty scary is that when these swarming autonomous drones get retired, they’ll be sold for practically nothing to police departments, who probably won’t be able to resist the temptation to set these swarms to fly around looking for trouble.
Autonomous, ever-present swarms of drones to automatically document whatever wrongdoing their crime server decides you’re doing. Then they’ll tazer you from six different robots, then they’ll call in the officers to curbstomp you and shoot you for resisting arrest. All in your own back yard. Because the departments will obviously claim they don’t have that much control over where the swarms wander.
But it’ll make the cops’ job easier, so they’ll lobby congress along with northrup grumman and whatever else drone builders to make it legal.
I understand the introduction of the crossbow in Europe rather freaked out some people.
The militarized elite (ie knights, etc) suddenly discovered there was a weapon that negated a lot of the advantages they held on a battlefield. Anyone could become reasonably effective with a crossbow in a ridiculously short period of time, and at close ranges, crossbows would go right through armour, another edge the elites had over the rank and file.
Not to mention that if you outfitted your men with crossbows you’d be likely to be in front of them - not exactly where you’d want to be if you were less than popular with the men under your command. And consider that the modern word ‘villain’ originally just meant ‘peasent’ - reason for that shift being that the folks in charge pretty much expected the lower classes to lie, cheat and backstab on a moment’s notice.
