Saildrone

Saildrone Surveyor USV (unmanned surface vehicle) armed with Lockheed Martin JAGM (Joint Air-to-Ground Missiles) Missiles

First I have heard about Saildrone. Apparently it is an unmanned vessel that moves about using the wind on that big vane sticking out of the deck. Defence Blog has the story.

Report from Bingen

Silent RR Crossing

Iowa Man came to town today so we had lunch at Longbottoms. We were talking about the advantages of living in Bingen (which is across the Columbia River from Hood River) versus living in the big city. Rent, as you might expect, is cheaper. Grocery stores are few, scattered and cost a bit more. 

The thing that caught my attention is the trains - 50 trains a day. There are three crossings where the train has to blow its horn, and if you are nearby those horns are loud. I've been out to Bingen a couple of times, but I don't remember the trains being a big deal. But then I was only there for a few hours. Iowa Man survives by stuffing silicon earplugs in his ears.

Anyway, Bingen is supposed to be getting a Quiet Zone. Iowa Man was telling me a silent crossing involves concrete barriers to keep cars from evading the crossing gates and probably some other requirements. Looking around for a picture, this is the only one I could find. It is the splash panel that shows up when YoiTube displays a list of videos. Play the associated video and this image is nowhere to be found. This is a screenshot that I uploaded to Google Photos to crop because my Windows image viewer won't crop images anymore. All I get is a black image. Probably need more memory. I wonder if older memory would be cheaper that the latest stuff that is costing 10x more than it was a year ago.

Hood River Bridge

The 100 year old bridge over the Columiba River is going to be replaced, or at least they are talking about replacing it. That's kind of the way it goes with people. Before anyone does anything, everyone has to discuss it and discuss it at length.

Hood River Bridge

Looking at that first picture of the bridge reminds me of just how wide the Columbia River is at that point. The bridge is almost a mile long, and remember, this isn't one of your long, lazy flatland rivers, at this point the Columbia is rolling along at two miles per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It don't stop for nobody or nuttin'.

Insitu FLARES and INTEGRATOR drones

Insitu is building drones in Bingen. It was bought out by Boeing and now it is being absorbed by ACHR, one of the air-taxi guys. Since our skies will soon be filled with flying air-taxis, does this mean that Bingen will become the Detroit of the 21st Century?

Cunningham-Hall PT-6 biplane with Mount Hood

There is a big antique car and airplane museum in Hood River - WAAAM - the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum. The museum was founded in 2007 which might explain why I have never heard of it. I don't know how many vehicles they have on display but the list on Wikipedia takes 17 screens. The museum itself covers five acres. Iowa Man recommends riding in the cart.

Custom map of the Hood River area made for this post.

DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge

Katana Drone

Defence Blog reports:

Katana carried a 112 pound payload aboard a 29 pound airframe, producing an official payload-to-aircraft-weight ratio of 3.84 to 1, Avidrone said. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had set a 4-to-1 ratio as the goal when it opened the competition in November 2025, a mark no existing heavy-lift drone had reached and one no team in the competition managed to hit. Avidrone’s result was the closest.

This might explain why helicopters with tail rotors are the most common helicopter configuration. 

Anti-Drone Bullets

Found this curious bit on RT:

Russian arms giant showcases pioneering anti-drone rounds
The multiple-projectile munitions have already been delivered for army trials

A pioneering Russian anti-drone round, which uses special three-element bullets in standard small-arms munitions, has been showcased in a new video released by the defense conglomerate Rostec.

The Mnogotochie (Ellipsis) project was unveiled earlier this year and is currently undergoing trials in the army, according to the report. On Friday, Rostec published footage showing the new munitions in action at a testing range.

Mnogotochie is a variant of a multiple-projectile cartridge for rifled weapons. Each bullet consists of three stacked elements made from a special bronze-like alloy. The spin gives them sufficient stability to be compatible with muzzle brakes, unlike shotgun rounds, while the spread increases the chances of hitting and disabling a small FPV drone.

According to the developer, a Russian producer of precision firearms with expertise in specialized munitions, a 5.45x39mm Mnogotochie round remains effective at ranges of up to 150 meters, while its larger 7.62x54mm version is suited for twice that distance.

In the video, rounds of both calibers were tested in single shots and bursts against stationary and moving targets, demonstrating high penetration and a decent rate of dispersion. At 100 meters, Mnogotochie munitions have enough punch to consistently pierce a 25mm layer of wood backed by a 0.8mm steel sheet.

The idea behind the round is to remove the need for a separate anti-drone weapon, replacing it with relatively lightweight magazines for weapons already carried by troops.

The bullets were designed to be fitted on regular production lines. While series manufacturing has already been launched, the munition is considered still in development and is likely to receive upgrades.

0.8 mm is like 22 gauge sheet metal. I suspect these are not going to be particularly effective. I think you probably want something alike a CRAM, but firing 22s instead of 20 mm. Can RADAR detect a small drone accurately enough to properly aim a gun?

DARPA Heavy Lift Drone Challenge

I'm building a drone for the DARPA lift challenge
Hoarder Sam
Previous posts about carry drones:

• Delivery Drones
• Heavy Lift Drone
• Drone Delivery Service

Russians get Right to Bear Arms

Pischal Counter-UAV Gun

Not really for the average slob, it essentially enables private armies, as long as they are loyal to the regime. Of course they are going to be loyal. You aren't going to let a rebel force raise an army, are you?

From Meduza, 

Russia has authorized private companies to purchase heavy weapons and equipment to defend against drone attacks, including anti-aircraft artillery systems, gun turrets, radar systems, and electronic warfare systems, the Russian business outlet RBC reported, citing sources.

Previously, businesses were limited to what were described as “passive safeguards for facilities” for their security personnel, including small arms.

Authorities expect the policy, adopted under new regulations, to speed up the supply of weapons and equipment to mobile fire groups — units formed from reservists, volunteers, and employees of private enterprises to protect civilian infrastructure from drones.

One of RBC’s sources said such groups “demonstrate high effectiveness in intercepting fixed-wing drones.”

Ratt Anti-UAV System Exterior

Ratt Anti-UAV System Interior

About Meduza:

Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian media outlet. Completely outlawed by the Russian state, we operate from abroad to deliver news that censors can’t stop to millions of readers inside Russia and around the globe. You can read our reporting in both Russian and English. 

Drone Killer from the Giant's Kitchen

ThinKom Anti-Drone Microwave Weapon

It doesn't disrupt communications, it fries the target drone's electronics. It's a mechanical phased array powered by vacuum tubes. Don't know how much power it packs, but you probably don't want to be standing down range. Defence Blog has the story.

Squire autonomous seaglider drone

Squire autonomous seaglider. (REGENT Defense pic)

Funny looking bird. Eight electric motor driven propellers, flying boat hull, gull wings, wing tip sponsons. Defense Blog has the story.

Drone Me

Three drone stories from Defence Blog:

Israeli Aero-Sentinel drone being sold to Kazakhstan

V-BAT drone from Shield AI in India

US ULTRA autonomous drone transport vehicle

This drone business is just nuts. How nuts? Lets' ask Google:

How many military drones have been made each year since 2000?

The production of military drones has increased exponentially since 2000, evolving from limited, high-cost surveillance tools to hundreds of thousands of low-cost, AI-enabled systems annually by 2025. While precise, aggregate annual numbers for all countries are rarely disclosed, industry data indicates a shift from a few hundred units in the early 2000s to a market expected to see over 596,000 units produced in 2025. 

At this rate I except to see million drones to be produced this year.

Drone Attack

Drone Attack
Area shone is maybe 500 miles from top to bottom

Russia claims that Ukraine launched almost 100 drones in an attack on Putin's residence in Novogrod. They also claim they destroyed all those drones before they reached their target.

I have no evidence of any of this. I will say it seems plausible, both that Ukraine launched such an attack and that they were foiled.

No, the reason I am posting this is because of the map. The map originally posted on RT is all in Russian. I couldn't make any sense of it, though I suspect that the big city in the upper right quadrant is Moscow. But I fed the link to Google and Google offered to translate it for me, so I said go ahead, and that's the image we have above. Ukraine does not appear in this map. Note the label on the big city in this translated version.

Beriev Be-12

Drone's eye view of Russian Beriev Be-12 flying boat

Ukraine sent drones to attack a Russian base in Crimea and blew up a couple of flying boats and a helicopter. Still trying to adjust my thinking to accommodate the idea that weapons can give you eye-witness view of their own destruction. I mean, it was only last week that video cameras cost zillions of dollars.

Beriev Be-12

The Be-12 is a big airplane. The wingspan is a hundred feet, it's a hundred feet long and it weighs 25 tons. For comparison, the PBY Catalina is only 65 feet long and weighs 10 tons. The Japanese US-2 is about 10% longer and wider and has four engines. First flight was in 1960, so the design is like 65 years old. The Russians built 150 of them.

Drones Versus Ships

Russian Project 21631 Buyan-M Kalibr cruise missile carrier

Ukrainian reconnaissance ship Simferopol

Ukraine and Russia are still shooting at each other, nothing new there, but today Defence Blog reports that we have two mirrored cases:

• Russia attacks Ukrainian ship using drones, and
• Ukraine attacks Russian ship using drones.

Russia reports that they have sunk the Ukrainian ship.

Simferopol on left, Kaliber on right

Fiber Optic Cable Debris

The fields of Fiber Optic Cables in Ukraine
Kagan Dunlap

I like this guy, he just lays out the facts, no partisan sniping, at least none that I've noticed. Remember when drones were all radio controlled, and then they came out with jamming machines? Now they've got drones that trail a line of fiber optic cable behind them. Now if you want to stop a drone, all you need is a pair of scissors to snip the line. Of course that means being behind the drone, which can be problematic on the battlefield.

P. S. I didn't notice any 'sparkles' in the video, but it makes no difference, the story is what's important here.

Reach for the Drone

Anatolian Shepherd/Kangal protecting his herd from a drone

Modern problems require modern solutions.

Via daily timewaster

Land of Bad - Netflix Movie

LAND OF BAD Official Trailer (2024) Russell Crowe
Movie Trailers Source

Three 'operators' and one newbie (Liam Hemsworth) parachute into a Philippines jungle to rescue a CIA 'asset'. Instead of the small group of troublemakers they were expecting to find, they find a whole army of Muslim terrorists. On the other side of world we have Russell Crowe as drone operator 'Reaper' working at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We get to see high-tech communications at work with our newbie calling in strike coordinates and the drone operators delivering. They also get some help from a couple F-18 fighters and a B1-B bomber. Seems kind of overfill for extracting five guys from the jungle, but it makes for a good show.

The film switches back and forth between intense jungle combat in the Philippines and peaceful suburban life in Las Vegas. I don't always agree (okay, almost never) with America's scattershot approach to foreign policy, but I gotta admire the guys who are out there working on the front lines.

There was an episode of a TV series we watched a while back, The Good Wife maybe, where a female drone operator was convicted in a military court of pressing the fire button in violation of an order. She was likewise operating a drone on the other side of the word from where she sat at the controls safe at home. Some people were killed as a result, but it was never clear, to me at any rate, whether they were bad guys or not. Of course with our flaky leadership, it is unlikely whether anyone else knew either.

The Sulu Sea gets mentioned during the opening of the movie and I think - wait a minute - that sounds familiar. Yes indeed - the minesweeper USS Guardian grounded on a reef in the middle of the Sulu Sea back in 2013. I put up a couple of posts about the incident, here and here. Wikipedia has a page, as does the US Navy.

Drone Wars

Vortex Cannon vs Drone
Mark Rober

This video has three parts:

1.  0:00 Survey of current serious antidrone techniques
2.  6:20 Advertisement for Hack Pack, robot kits by mail
3. 11:30 Mark and his friends go out to the field to test their own anti-drone devices.

I think I know what I want for my birthday.

TDR-1 & WW2 TV

America's Secret WW2 Combat Drone That Bombed The Japanese | The TDR-1
Rex's Hanger

I'm watching this video and it all seems perfectly fine until he gets to the part about the TV. Wait a minute, TV cameras in remotely piloted drones? Yeah, okay, maybe in the 1950's, but in WW2? I think you're pulling my leg. But the video tells a pretty compelling tale. Anyway, the wormhole opened and I fell in.

WWII Military Television Development (Part 1)
InfoAge Science & History Museums

This video is kind of long. He does have a good line at 55 second mark:

'my actual boss gave me a magazine that had an article about television news, during world war two, to guide missiles. I'm saying guide missiles? I thought that was a black hole in time where television came out in 1939, the World's Fair, was introduced and then something it appeared again in the late 40s with, you know, Howdy Doody, you know how to do commercial television.'

There are also several video clips from WW2 shown in line with the video. They are of varying interest. Here they are spreadsheetified:

I could not format the time the way I wanted. If there were no hours involved, I just wanted to start with the minutes, but Google won't allow it. You can dispense with the leading number if it is zero, but you have to keep the leading colon. Stupid computer. Don't you know nuthin' about formatting time?

I like the hot rod they build to launch the GM Bug in the first clip. 100 MPH in 1500 feet. That's pretty good even today. Dual Cadillac engines, each one connected to a 'fluid flywheel'. In 1943.

Anyway, I think the deal was that we had a bunch of eggheads who were able to build these drones during WW2, but they didn't have enough clout to support a public relations department. I also suspect there just wasn't enough electrical engineering talent to go around. The mass of industry was still mechanical. The impetus of war probably enlarged the pool of engineering talent by tenfold before the war was over. More opportunities for more people meant more electrical engineers to work on screwball ideas like drones with TV cameras.

Here's some pics of the camera:

Block Camera - Nowak Archive

World War Two Airborne TV Camera

Courtesy of Richard Diehl

Airborne Television Camera CRV-59AAE

The Drone Industry has been infected by the Transformer Disease

NEW Type of Drone is GAME-CHANGING!

Tech Planet

A lot of these drones look like they might be too complicated for their own good, but mostly they are experimental. Some of this stuff may end up being useful.

Portable Death Ray

Raytheon Portable Laser

Raytheon has made a couple of these 10 kilowatt lasers. They have been testing them against drones and seem to work. Lasers are not 100% efficient, the efficiency varies depending on the technology used and the power output. If we figure 10%, just because ten is a nice round number, they're going to need a hundred horsepower generator to drive this thing, which might explain the big box on the bottom.

P. S.

Trim Trees with a Laser

P. P. S. If we figure we need a one hundred horsepower engine to drive this thing, and only 10% of the power finds its way into the actual laser beam, then we can figure the other 90% is being turned into heat, which means we are going to need a radiator dang near as big as the one on the engine to get rid of that heat.

Going on in this vein, if we are generating that much heat, this thing is going to be a big, fat infra-red target. It's also big and heavy, you need a truck to carry it around. A single small drone can be carried by a man, and a swarm of drones can be carried by a swarm of men. Yeah, I don't want to be there when it happens.

Cardboard Drones

Aussie company SYPAQ develops cardboard drones for defence of Ukraine | 7NEWS
7NEWS Australia

Via Defence Blog. Meanwhile I can't remember whether defense is spelled with a c or an s.