Russian defence against drone swarms

Unable to post video. So a few stills
Mi-28 shooting down a drone. First pic you can see the 30mm rounds flying towards it. Second pic of it being destroyed.

Nice... the combination of air burst 30mm shells and being able to fire from above at a target would limit the collateral damage caused by firing a 30mm cannon around the place. The helicopter already has high res thermals and other optics and radar so its ability to find and engage drones should be pretty good.

It was supposed to be a feature of the new Mi-28NM.

That seems to be a very big powerful drone that is exploding...

Russians won this war the moment their economy kept running during wartime

Actually this conflict is allowing Russia to clean house and get rid of foreign owners of Russian companies and organisations that have been bleeding Russia for decades... but not just that, the Russians have been selling cheap energy and raw materials to Europe for decades to be nice and not just Europe, but Japan and the US as well and what did they get in return... getting to buy the finished products at 10x the price... Japanese fishermen fishing in Russian waters and sending the fish to be canned in Japan and then sold on the Russian market at 10 times the price Japanese customers buy the same thing for in Japan... Russia has been getting screwed all these decades and now they can look to the rest of the world.

Ironically the rest of the world is getting screwed by the west too and they are sick of it as well, so Russia and the rest of the world can trade and both make good money and not get overcharged so their consumers can get better goods for reasonable prices without any slave labour necessary for anyone...

It is a win win for Russia and the rest of the world... except the west is going to find it much harder from now on and I suspect the rich will still keep getting richer which is going to lead to the poor asking why the rich are so damn rich and everyone else struggles just to keep the lights on.

But that is not Russias problem.

Some 57mm guns with high explosive fragmenting munitions would stop the approach of drones easily

23mm guns with airburst shells would be rather cheaper and the vehicles carrying them lighter and they could carry rather more ready to fire ammo.

Also I think SOSNA is better than pantsir for these targets, where you need cheap command guidance missiles and some 57mm flak to bring them down

SOSNA is a smaller lighter more cost effective missile and out to 10km would be very effective, but then the new BULAT missiles with laser beam riding and a HEFRAG warhead would be rather interesting too.

Lasers are maturing and of course EM weapons could also be part of the solutions too.

I don't think the answer is flak, I think the answer is another drone swarm and radar that can direct either armored drones to smash the attacking drones, or explosive drone that can shower the attacking swarm with shrapnel. Also a Grad rocket that deploys 4 subrockets with a net would take down a lot of drones.

If the airburst rounds are affordable then it makes sense to use them in large numbers.

The added bonus is that airburst rounds are also very effective against some types of targets like enemy troops hiding behind a wall or fence or in a trench where direct or frontal fire would not be effective at all.

The problem traditionally is the time accuracy necessary to make them effective also makes them expensive to use in large numbers, but a simple command detonated round would be excellent... put the expensive stuff on the vehicle so it gets reused over and over.

A drone swarm is interesting... but with cardboard drones and light plastic drones designed to be invisible on radar means they are going to be very light weight and weak so a ramming drone or a drone with a shotgun weapon loaded starts to make sense... especially if it can land and have its magazine replaced and take off again to continue the job.

With a normal drone heavy shot would be needed to assure a kill so buckshot, which reduces the number of projectiles in each shot, but against cardboard or light plastic then lighter shot can be used with vastly more projectiles.

Different sized shot means effectiveness will vary, so the light pellets of a number 3 shot round would shred most targets at 10-20m but at 100m might just bounce off many targets, whereas a buckshot round has ball bearings that would still penetrate at 100m but the problem is that there will only be 12 ball bearings in each shot and at 100m they will be spread over a circle 20m across which means while they might damage the target then odds are they wont hit the target in the first place.

A shotgun works best at a range where the projectiles all hit relatively close to the point of aim because there is no way to control the pattern of hits.

At very close range a shotgun would be ideal but if the target is explosive like a Geran then shooting it might just set it off and destroy the target you are protecting anyway... or it might kill you.

Reminds me of a Soviet Spetsnaz group in Afghanistan who found an Afghan with a pile of pebbles and a pebble sized hole in the front of his head. Petal mines had been dropped and he was eliminating them by throwing pebbles at them to destroy them. One mine he hit at the wrong angle and the explosion blew the pebble straight back at him and blew the pebble into the back of his skull.

Finding a guy with a shotgun peppered with shrapnel because he detonated a drone with a big bomb would be the equivalent.

To hit such targets at useful ranges requires airburst ammo, but if you can make it command detonated then the distance you can hit drones would be very useful.

The 2A7 cannon of the ZSU-23-4 is water cooled and has a good muzzle velocity so the calculations for an intercept are made simpler out to about 2km or so.

If you can get the price down to perhaps $20 per shot, you could mass produce them in enormous numbers and of course even against troops in the field or soft targets like cars an airburst round can do damage and kill with a round that would otherwise have not hit the target directly.

A burst of 10 shells where one round hits the target will do damage, but 10 rounds that all explode at or near the targets location will be devastating to unarmoured targets and pretty damn scary even for armoured targets watching these rounds explode all around you.

So far it seems they have airburst 23mm shells and airburst 30mm shells and airburst 57mm shells... I would like to see the same technology used to create airburst 40mm grenades, which would be devastating... a 40mm or 30mm grenade set to detonate after travelling 30-40m would be an excellent anti drone weapon for a drone... a cheap simple laser rangefinder and optical based ballistics computer could allow an AI system to fire the gun once the targets are selected...

Flak is basically just shrapnel; so larger shells in that case - but those are long out of production and the guns for them. Otherwise it would be a sound idea

It would be useful for the larger shells to be fired from guns that are actually already in use... perhaps an airburst 100mm HE shell for the BMP-3 vehicle... or perhaps for air burst shells being developed for grenade launchers which have a much higher ratio of HE to splinters making them rather more effective for air burst rounds than their calibre would otherwise suggest.

That would mean 57mm grenade or 40mm grenade or 30mm grenade rounds with airburst components added... such ammo is generally compact with propellent being tiny in terms of volume, and in fact in the case of the Russian 40mm grenade (both under barrel and new automatic grenade launcher types) there is no propellent case, so the ammo is rather compact for what it is.

Being mostly bomb their low velocity is not important because part of the command detonation system would include a ballistics computer anyway... the low velocity being compensated for heavier weights of metal fragments and HE payload.

This might be expensive, but what about stations with infrared vision and laser range finders that have extremely fast moving heads. I'm talking spinning and oscillating sensor heads that spin and move up and down simultaneously at about 20/30 rotations and up/down oscillations a second. This all connected to some serious computing hardware with complex neural network programs that can automatically detect targets.

Or do you mean LIDAR?

I would imagine large flak shells 85mm, 100mm, and maybe 130mm will still be floating around in storage as will be the equipment to make such.

A 100mm shell wont be cheap, and while it will have enormous potential range against drones, you likely wont be spotting targets at such range... which would be like trying to use a 50 cal sniper rifle to shoot soft targets you likely wont be seeing till they are 200m away.

Plus for accuracy you would need new ammo with air burst potential which totally eliminates the advantage of using an old gun.

Using 57mm ex AA guns for hitting enemy defended positions makes sense because they have the guns and put them on the back of vehicles for mobility and they have plenty of ammo... HE and AP... and the distances they will be firing and the targets they will be shooting the very old ammo for shooting at aircraft will be plenty good enough.

For a modern battlefield for a modern BMP however the old AA guns never had great armour piercing performance because they were never used as anti tank weapons so their anti armour rounds are designed to have the same ballistic performance as their HE rounds so both types shoot to the same point of aim when fired together.

The lack of armour penetration performance was not an issue because aircraft are not very well armoured anyway.

In comparison the 57mm large HE bomb and APFSDS would have completely different ballistic trajectories... the HE round like a rainbow and the APFSDS relatively flat out to quite decent ranges.

Shooting them both in a belt means a hit then a miss...

Tbh even ZSU-23-4 would be adequate

With airburst 23mm cannon shells and the right optics and radar equipment I would say removing two barrels and using the ammo for the four cannon fired from two cannon would be just fine. Excellent for use against drones and still useful against a range of ground and air targets depending on the ammo you use.

23mm would be good enough considering the distances you will be spotting drones at, especially the smaller ones.

30mm would allow engagements at greater ranges and also for taking down stronger built drones.

one of Russian telgram reporters sarcastically mentioned: building steel hangars is so hard for us that building new planes is easier

Planes can't take off from or land in hangars and when they are not in hangars they are just as vulnerable as if the hangers were never built.

Also what size hangars are we talking about... to house Il-76 aircraft they are going to have to be enormous... how do you stop a drone attack flying into the hangars?

The main problem with drone strikes is lack of Niobium SV radar

Niobium and Nebo radars can track plastic FPV drones, which was proven on combat approved

The Russian military is designed to defend itself, but drone attacks on infrastructure by the nazis means they have to try to defend everything... there are millions of potential targets the Orcs can try to hit with drones... the Russian military cannot cover them all, it would be ridiculous to try.

No western country could defend its own territory either... it is just not possible and that is why they developed drones... because their conventional aircraft and missiles just wont make it but a few drones might.

You wont see the thousands of drones they lost or failied... you just see the one that got through.

Yes seriously they have gun nets, why not rocket nets

The bigger you make a net the more rapidly it becomes big and bulky and difficult to deploy properly... to have a 10m by 10m net it would be cheaper and easier to have a 10kg HE bomb with 20kgs of metal fragments that covers an area 10m by 10m with high velocity fragments that will rip a drone to pieces even if it doesn't catch them in a net.

Net guns are used to recover animals to keep them intact... a pointless exercise if the target is a suicide drone with a bomb on board.

Last but not least, 100 mm ammunition is big enough to get airburst fuze, or programmable one, or remotely detonated ... It will be very cost effective fighting drones.
Making a tier of anti drone defense of 300 km requires three batteries. That's all.
It is not an accident that a country that leads the worlds drone warfare - Iran - has the gun taddei mentioned and develops it heavily.

And its performance could be massively enhanced with an airship that carries radar arrays that scan the terrain below 24/7 and transmits target information to those firebases with the long range guns.

But more importantly they are funding 152mm guns that shoot 70km or soon perhaps 180km so why use 100mm when you can use 152mm or 203mm for the job and also use it as standard artillery too so when you are not shelling an enemy position you can be shooting down all their drones.

That airship could be fitted with all sorts of sensors including LIDAR and EO systems for finding and tracking drones and other threats.

caveat emptor wrote:

flamming_python wrote:

In that case all civilian activities should be transferred elsewhere, and the same goes for other such bases too. There is no way to secure such airbases while they don't have a large restricted territory around them (the Russian term is ZATO) and have civilians coming to and from all the time. Then anti-drone measures and EW systems can be employed more freely. The lack of civilian air traffic will also clear the skies some more.

This particular airport is hard to protect, as it is literally within city limits. There are houses and industrial buildings on the other side of the airport fence. Better solution would be to move planes somewhere safer, where tampon zone can be built. You can even use Google street view to inspect parts of the airport fence at some places Also, some parts of the airport infrastructure is barely 100 meter distance from first industrial sites. Anyone could attack with FPV drones from there and disappear in five minutes.


Yellow is the airport fence

To give perspective to the airport and the military: the nice row of buildings in the top left hand corner of the photo across the river is the base of the 76th Guards Airborne division minus 1 regiment. Go south of the airport along the river just out of view, you have the home base of the 2nd Guards Spetsnaz brigade. Past it about 10 kms and the remaining regimental base of the 76th is located.

Forget 70,it is a ballistic range with a descending phase.

The 70km range rounds are GLONASS guided so you could use the multifire capability to get multiple rounds on target all at once... remember GLONASS works in three dimensions so the airspace over a target could be targeted with GLONASS guided shells to airburst in a target box around a group of drones or swarm even.

Not complex to work out the fragmentation pattern of such a shell and calculate the required location to detonate a group of shells together to cover and airspace box with hot fragments at a given time... it is already something the air defence network is trying to do anyway.

The big problem is that very small drones flying very low wont be spotted till they are right on their target... for such targets a shotgun is as good a weapon as any other.

With aircraft air defences they have layers... short range, medium range, long range etc etc and it is no different with drones... but when talking about airburst shells it not only makes engagement much easier but LIDAR and other sensors means it wont matter how small the RCS or IR signature is... having the battlefield flooded with platforms with airburst ammo and ballistics computers for single shot hits or even two or three shot hits will make operating drones quite difficult... you need to be sure they are not your own of course too.

The point is that no one system will solve all the problems because drones come in all shapes and sizes... most existing AD equipment can deal with the bigger ones like Geran etc, but the hand held models need extra work... but new mini missiles for dealing with artillery shells and artillery rockets should be good for small drones too... airburst 40mm grenades might make it more affordable where the guidance and aiming is reused on the platform it is based on.

LIDAR and optical detection and tracking systems will be critical and jamming and even just smoke rounds can play a part.

Something like airburst 152mm shells along with the sensors to find targets would be useful as well, but mostly against a big swarm where the heavy shell can take out large numbers of drones in a single shot... perhaps used together with EMP shells that might take out drones over a significant range... along with lasers and exotic beam weapons that might also disable the electronics in the drones... even just for a minute or two.

Shotguns, jammers, small missiles, airburst shells, but also electronic systems to work out where they came from and who launched them and where they hold their conventions so an Iskander or Dagger can be delivered to them quickly and on time.

It is important to use existing stuff... regarding listening for drones, well there are already sound based artillery detection systems and vehicle mounted sniper detection systems that could be adapted for use to detect drones... the engine noise of the vehicle it is mounted on could be cancelled out to make the system rather effective and might be your only warning of a last minute attack... perhaps enough to automatically launch an interceptor like ARENA, or even just shut the hatches and fire smoke.

So old cannon shells like 23mm offer smaller size and lower costs than 57mm and 30mm so it makes it cost effective, but the larger rounds should also be produced because bigger shells with more HE and more fragments with better range will have better reach and command detonated shells can be used for all sorts of other roles too, so the effort is never wasted.

Jammers and lasers and other things including better radars all enhances anti drone protection but also it will be effective for use against other things as well.

Russian developers have created a small-sized Antidrone complex that can warn of the approach of enemy drones. The new device consists of a small radar and target direction finder. It can detect aircraft the size of a pigeon at a distance of up to 10 km, determine their altitude and speed. The complex is small - it fits in the trunk of an UAZ. Some of the equipment has successfully passed tests in the SVO zone. The developers plan to supplement it with a compact electronic warfare (EW) system. Experts believe that a trench radar, together with electronic warfare systems, will be able to protect entire areas on the line of combat contact from drone attacks.

Will even find a pigeon

The set of equipment of the small-sized Antidron complex includes an all-round radar station and two types of detectors for detecting UAVs. The radar itself consists of four phased antenna arrays that provide all-round visibility. It allows you to find, recognize and identify drones at a range of up to 10 km, moving at speeds of up to 250 km/h, works at any time of the day and in difficult weather conditions, such as thunderstorms, hail, snow, showers, squally winds, cumulonimbus clouds , assure its developers from the Nizhny Novgorod company StriOt-Bor.

— The station can easily detect a drone the size of a pigeon at any time of the day, its altitude and speed. For comparison, even small quadrocopters like Mavic, which are actively used by the enemy in the northwestern military zone, are usually large in size,” Yuri Tsyplenkov, chief designer of radar systems at the development company, told Izvestia.
Ukrainian Armed Forces drone in the sky near Artemovsk

The radar is mobile and easy to fold. The height of the radar canvas is about a meter. In a semi-disassembled state, the complex can be transported without problems in the back of a pickup truck or in the trunk of a UAZ Patriot. It will take literally a couple of minutes to get it into working condition.

The radar is also capable of running an automated search for antenna faults in real time.

The set of equipment of the complex also includes a “Tortik” unmanned aerial vehicle detection detector . It can detect drones and moving vehicles at a range of up to 3 km and indicate the direction where they are.

In addition, a portable individual UAV detection detector “Sight” has been developed for fighters. It is not much larger than a TV remote control and weighs about 400 g; if necessary, it can be attached to a bulletproof vest.

It can detect a drone at a distance of up to 3 km, which will be indicated by an audio signal. And the LCD display will immediately reflect the distance to the UAV. “Cake” and “Sight” operate in silent mode, so it is impossible to detect a fighter or position using the device. The radar, “Cake” and “Sight” can operate independently of each other.

Combat use

According to the developers, some of the equipment was successfully tested in the Northern Military District zone - it was sent to one of the volunteer formations. The remaining components will be tested on the line of combat contact until the end of this year.

Information about the appearance of UAVs will help fighters hide from them, making reconnaissance, adjustment or strikes more difficult. You can also report a detected target to electronic warfare or anti-drone gun crews.

“We are working on mini-electronic warfare that can operate in conjunction with a radar,” noted Yuri Tsyplenkov. “It will allow us to immediately begin neutralizing the UAVs and create a security dome over the positions.”

The radar and other equipment of the complex can be used for civilian purposes. For example, to protect important facilities: airfields, oil refineries and railway junctions.

Now the main means of combating UAVs are air defense and electronic warfare (EW) systems; drone strikers are used at the platoon or company level, military expert Alexei Leonkov told Izvestia.

“Recently, the enemy has begun to use drones en masse,” he noted. “The radar of the new complex will help warn about an attack and take camouflage measures for our soldiers. This will ultimately help reduce losses. Of course, it must be supplemented with an electronic warfare complex. The radar will warn of an attack in time, electronic warfare will cover platoon or company strong points, armored vehicle parking areas and other important objects. Such electronic warfare, as a rule, interrupts the connection between the control station and the drone, after which it loses its target and randomly falls without causing damage.

The trench complex will be a good response to an enemy who is massively using FPV kamikazes, he believes.

“Now in the trenches, fighters, as a rule, use drone strikes,” he noted. “But she can land one UAV, and the rest will make their way to the target.” There are not enough drone strikers for every drone. And a trench radar with electronic warfare will effectively protect entire areas from kamikaze attacks.

Leonkov noted that army units have powerful Pole-21 electronic warfare systems , the work of which can be complemented by Antidron.

The Pole-21 complexes are designed to combat more serious targets. Primarily with precision missiles, bombs, missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles operating using satellite navigation.

This complex is capable of creating an impenetrable dome of interference, suppressing equipment for linking to global satellite and radio navigation systems. It controls airspace within a radius of more than 50 km.

The Pole-21 electronic warfare systems are already in service with the Russian army. The first reports of their arrival in units of the Central Military District appeared in 2019.

https://iz-ru.translate.goog/1615870/bogdan-stepovoi/razmer-i-znachenie-novaia-mini-rls-predupredit-ob-atakakh-dronov?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

23mm gun is effective up to around 1500m in height. It can be easily outperformed even by really cheap drones, which means your coverage must be extremely dense.

I was thinking more of an unmanned turret with LIDAR and IRST and 360 degree IR sensor array and perhaps the MMW radar ball from the Mi-28NM modified to also look up as well as sideways with perhaps a mix of 23mm cannons and lasers and SOSNA or KORNET-EM missiles and perhaps even Bulat missiles.

That turret could be mounted on a range of ground vehicles including Tigr or BTR-82 based platforms as well as newer Typhoon 4x4 and 6x6 vehicles and of course Boomerang 8x8 vehicles for mobility to operate with ground troops and also supply columns. The right mixture of ammo to engage both ground and air targets would be useful... a sort of anti drone dedicated Terminator design, though many of its capabilities should also be incorporated into tanks and armoured vehicles and Terminator vehicles too.

Obviously various jammers should be included in the design too.

With 100mm gun, you can reach 10 km height and some 20 km distance using modern ammunition. HArdly any drone flies that high those days, and it will be restricted only to some really expensive, high tier pieces.

Anything capable of flying that high would need serious engine power which means both IR signature and radar signature so missiles would probably be more efficient to hit that sort of target anyway.

Last but not least, 100 mm ammunition is big enough to get airburst fuze, or programmable one, or remotely detonated ... It will be very cost effective fighting drones.
Making a tier of anti drone defense of 300 km requires three batteries. That's all.

They have existing 100mm guns that are old AA guns and also tank guns, but I would think you would want a large calibre gun vehicle that is already in production that can already point its gun in all sorts of steep elevations and with full 360 degree traverse... like 2S35.

Its variable propellant means you can send rounds fast or slow and get multiple rounds to arrive on target at near the same time creating a burst of fragments all around the interception box making hits almost certain.

It is already in production and would not need a lot of modification... it is already automated to a high degree... sending it target information in real time to deliver HE fragmentation rounds to airburst around the target area would be the sort of thing a standard vehicle might already be able to achieve anyway... and when there are no drones it could use more conventional ammo to hit ground targets.

Forget 70,it is a ballistic range with a descending phase.

I would say the only problem of hitting drones at 70km range is actually detecting drones at that distance but that would be C4ISTARS problem.

Connect every gun to optic fibre high speed internet, which runs through any modern city all over, and you get a maximal redundant system where every gun can be located at any random place. Same applies to data center, one just need to feed it with recon data of all sorts for further distribution. This system would be highly immune for any attempts to break the communication, extremely redundant and flexible. It is all passive, which is not of much importance fighting drones, but would be to defeat a combined attacks in a style Russkie carried. When anti radar missiles just waited for the AD radars to activate while fighting the drones to take them out ...
I seriously expect a renaissance of barrel anti aircraft artillery, soon ...

The sort of system that would be attached to a 2S35 battery anyway... feeding it ground surface targets could also be connected to the air defence network generating coordinates and altitudes for airburst shells to hit flying targets too. Remember GLONASS is not just coordinates on the ground but also coordinates in the air too.

When will those stupid people learn that a HAS will never protect a plane that is standing at the flightline?

If you spend 10 thousand dollars on steel reinforcing your door with deadlocks and padlocks and chains and even an electrified door mat... some thieves are not stupid and will just climb in a window... or go round to your back door.... or wait till you arrive home and pull a gun on you and threaten to shoot you if you don't let them in with you.

Safe rooms are not a great idea if the thieves are so pissed off they decide to burn your entire house down... even if you survive you lose everything anyway... and who is to say the police will catch them any time soon... they might just come back another night when you are not ready.

Give each airfield at least two TOR/M1 or 2 systems (one as a reserve), take army veterans (pensioners) who live "on site" and better up pension with 50% of the pension, but after extensive training they sit in the systems and secure the airfield (or other important possible target).

So for the price of a few drones they are getting you to spend millions to try to top everything, but as we have seen recently... when they can no longer hit military targets they will just murder civilians... at least the Russian military have a fighting chance with body armour and helmets...

Take a look and read exactly what Russian generals say about it: It is very heavy, very extensive and there is a system that blows such drones, such commercial plastic drones with warheads and explosives out of the sky: TORM2! to practically 99%.

TOR is an excellent system but they don't have enough to protect everything because anything that is not protected then becomes a target.

There is not enough money for a TOR to protect every person and every aircraft and every vehicle in Russia.

You have to accept that they will protect as much as they can, but when you have millions of enemies wanting to hurt you they are going to succeed sometimes. When they blow up a boat or aircraft... big deal... when they kill people... not good... but no amount of spending will stop that, but the best spending is on the drones and shells and bombs and missiles that Russia is using to destroy their country and kill their military...

I don't see why they cannot use sound detectors to detect the distinct sound of drones, and even target them using IR cams or stereo mics.

Not all drones are noisy.

During WWI sound detectors were widely used to determine where enemy artillery was coming from and also for early warning of aircraft attacks etc etc. Modern equivalents are fitted to new armoured vehicles to detect and determine the direction of enemy fire. Sometimes it is rather accurate and will work out the calibre and source location the fire came from.