• EldritchFeminity
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    8 hours ago

    We’ve had these for decades now. They’re called CIWS, and they’re capable of taking missiles out of the sky and turning inflatable dinghies into flotsam. They’re mounted on every aircraft carrier in the world - both US and otherwise - and we’ve fielded trailer mounted variants for at least 20 years. They were using them in Iraq to blow mortar rounds out of the air.

    We have automated systems on vehicles capable of identifying a tank round traveling 1,700 meters per second via radar, figure out whether it’s going to hit or miss the vehicle, and fire an explosive at it to neutralize it if it is, all within a span of about 300 milliseconds.

    The biggest issues with drones are largely man portable solutions and things that don’t send thousands of rounds of lead into the sky to rain down on a population center. Drones are small enough to fly indoors and cheap enough to be deployed in swarms. Figuring out how to counter those aspects is probably where the most energy is going to be spent.

      • EldritchFeminity
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        2 hours ago

        That, and drones are both small and therefore harder to detect - especially flying close to sea level - and they can be remote controlled, which allows them to move erratically, making them much harder targets to hit. There’s definitely a reason that countries are looking into things like lasers and blasts of air to knock them out of the sky instead of just filling the area with a lot of bullets.