"digital twin"?

Is there a simulation that has been documented to have the identical behavior and flight characteristics as the real thing? Does not seem like it.

If there is a difference, it is not a twin.

Part of it is the sophistication. Take the Tomahawk: assumed range of ~1000 miles , estimated accuracy of 30 feet. Can launch from above or below water. Etc.

The other part is the limited production runs. Until last month, the DoD was generally purchasing ~100 of these annually. There's no scale economy in making these, so those 100 missiles need to support the entire production & R&D of the product.

Check out Joe Barnard's youtube channel BPS.Space where he's documenting his development of "high power" (hobby) rockets. Those are relatively small rockets still but nonetheless he's getting into performance regimes where the engineering starts to be tricky and the details really matter. The more extreme your rocket gets, the difficulty really ramps up quick.

It’s not a complete explanation, but I was awed by the precision of the shower screens used in modern rocket engines. In the 60s it might have sufficed to just spray fuel into the combustion chamber using some nozzles, but now we have highly precise matrices of micro-perforations that maximize combustion.

Also if you want to harden the rocket against EMP attacks you need an inertial guidance system, and those things also demand extreme precision.

It really depends on what kind of rocket you’re talking about. An unguided rocket propelled grenade mass produced with 1960s technology is a few hundred bucks. Stepping up to a simple TOW guided missile using 1970s technology quickly ramps that price up to $5-10k per round with a max range of 3-5km.

Once you add in modern electronics and guidance and reliability that cost quickly skyrockets, going up an order of magnitude at each step of complexity (advanced guided like the Javelin, cruise, ballistic, etc).

Fireworks rocket do not cost as much. But if you want high precision and high speed, that simply is expensive. Also the area is of course restricted making it more expensive as most states do not want DIY rockets everywhere.

They arent. Missiles cost millions. Rockets are cheap. Rockets are unguided. Missiles are guided. From a military perspective, spacelaunch rockets are techically "unguided" as they are not tracking a target but trying to stick to a fixed/programed trajectory. It is the seeker head that costs the millions, all the jamming/counter-jamming tech that drives up development costs.

This is a rather basic (passive) seeker head by modern standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:R-27_missile_homing_head,...

> What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?

A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?

Not joking - I considered it as a hobby project years ago until I discovered how hard it would be to do legally.

Ukraine needs more cheap weapons.

People can do very scary things with a knife, a car, or petrol+matches.

We don't try to regulate those things out of existence like we do with new technology (drones and now 3D printers)

Kind of ridiculous that a country with more guns than people and 45k firearms deaths per year wants to regulate 3D printed plastic. Yet collecting and shooting actual guns is still an acceptable hobby in many states.

McGuyver pouring sap on a pinecone

Hiya! (Grenade)

It's not the only real defense. This works pretty well too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM

There's clearly a need for more cheap interceptor drones as well, but it's not like the US military won't start deploying those soon enough.

With all do respect I think your over complicating the problem. It’s not rocket science (no pun intended). It’s essentially a hobby rocket that can be weaponized and it’s all DIY. That’s the point simple and off the shelf. Not meant to travel towards the stratosphere or even long range. Quick and dirty way to cause havoc in a localized area.

You'd be AMAZED what you can find on eBay.

I saw this pop up alongside its video thumbnail and nearly shit myself watching it and going "damn, that looks exactly like what's on those RU/UA drones going at each other"... https://www.ebay.com/itm/197224214645

"HS AI Vision Cube For Ultra-long-range Target Recognition tracking & Thermal" for as low as $175. I am feeling the potential ITAR violations straight through my screen.

I think MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers used in consumer drones should be just about good enough to measure orientation and acceleration, and those are cheap and easy to get.

You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.

I think thanks to drones and RC hobbyists, there's a generally nice body of knowledge on how to get good enough data from consumer hardware to keep things flying.

> equally cheap or cheaper

I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.

Couldn’t post earlier seems HN is rate limited :/

hardest issue as I mentioned in another comment is detection. Now on using other drones to counter a drone, there are other issues, as I built and tested some before, assuming you got the detection part done. The first one is guidance and correction mid-air, flying manually won’t really be practical due to the need for an extraordinary flying skills, which can’t be relied on in the field, the second part is the speed, you need to ALWAYS make sure the interceptor is faster to catch it up, third is the weight, I disagree about the payload part you mentioned, I have seen videos of light weight drones failing to wreck bigger ones, if you are relying on collision alone. Additionally, the telemetry/video/C&C for the interceptor, if jamming is already in place, your counter won’t work either.

The swarm will require a low latency comms link, centralized or decentralized, if the area is jammed, it won’t work. i have built a self-healing decentralized system using cellular in each drone, but that’s useless if the network is down to start with.

So they might work in a very specific use case, but not an ultimate solution to counter them.

David Suaez in Kill Decision had swarms of small single shot drones with the targeting intelligence of ‘00 camera. Identify a face, fly towards it, fire when close. It was an implementation of quantity has a quality all its own.

At long distances the small cross section of the drone requires tight focusing (expensive optics) or a high power, preferably pulsed laser (expensive laser) or both.

Not impossible but many times more expensive than the drone

The practicalities of using lasers are covered in some depth on the Naval Gazing blog. First part here:

https://www.navalgazing.net/Lasers-at-Sea-Part-1

At very short distances and with a lot of power, perhaps. Despite what we see in movies laser beams diverge. And then with distance it’s harder to track moving objects precisely to hit the same spot long enough to melt it.

At that point might as well spend the money to use a kinetic weapon with basic tracking and ballistic calculations.

Powerful enough laser and accurate enough targeting system is easy to say, but not easypeasy to do. Dumping thousands of Joules on a tiny moving target is much easier to do with explosives.

Lasers imo don't really have IRL advantages over machine guns and rockets, and their line of sight nature is a huge limitation.

Lasers won’t effectively work, it’s a two part equation, detection and targeting. To neutralize a target using a ground-based laser, you need an enormous power, and still it won’t penetrate a high distance/altitude in the sky, environment factors also to be considered. The detection part is even harder, these small 8in drones are almost impossible to detect unless you can hear it, aka it’s over, because they can fly at 250km/h, too small to be visually detected, acoustic sensors will fail to detect them, and radar will miss it as a false negative since it’s the size of a bird. I have seen some systems trying to combine all that to detect them plus AI for flying pattern detection, but they are far from being reliable in practical applications.

> "let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!

LLMs (Large Language Models) are far from the only type of AI around. It's a pretty broad field, and there are real-time AI systems, for example, self-driving cars, which have the response times you're thinking of. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

"Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones."

That feels like a bold and unsupported assertion. Ask a pilot how they'd feel about takeoffs or landings through airspace filled with adversarial drones.

A flock of unlucky geese can knock out a jet turbine, how is this a "for sure" conclusion?

> Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.

Until they land then, due to their cost, they become a very juicy target to aim for.

maybe in the air, but I seem to recall the Ukrainians being successful at attacking Russian planes on the ground.