Who would go to war willingly against what are basically, sentient flying artillery shells?
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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It is so much worse. Like I watched a legitimate YT war strategist going through the viability timeline on robot dogs on the battlefield. We are already at that stage where a bigger player will be able to field tens of thousands of robot dogs.
Like it is not talked about enough, but Russia has a total GDP that is lower than just the US state of Texas. Texas is third to California and New York. So all of Russia and Ukraine are piddly in terms of total capacity. That is the sad part. Like, if people really wanted to end the war, stomping Russia should be very easy but no one is really funding that solution. They would rather Russia bleed its manpower ahead of China taking Taiwan and ending its civil war.
Robot dogs are limited by battery life and therefore range. Their real purpose is to draw fire and reveal the position of enemies. Drones are ineffective at triangulating the positions of fired munitions due to noise and the computational power required in combination with a 9 axis position sensor. That is the primary purpose of robot dogs. They are primarily for drawing fire for the drones to then attack.
When one looks at the cheap sensors available for microcontrollers now, like millimeter wave sensors, things get even more scary. Like you know how your WiFi goes through walls. Yeah, same thing but directional motion sensing. Like it can easily detect and differentiate me from my cats and trigger only when I make a gesture like waving my whole arm or entering a specific room...from a sensor in another room a few walls away... for less than $20... Now picture a mine triggered by that... Or a robotic high caliber gun shooting through walls.
Really cheap ground driving or walking drones can be an effective way to rapidly clear minefields too. It's a good area for decoys too. If some of them have advanced thermal sensors and maybe some weapons then they'll be a target for the enemy but you can have a bunch of real cheap dogshit versions that can't do much more than move forward.
Also there is still the air breathing battery technology, which isnt ready but is very high performance, double the charge or half the size. The limitation is something that might not matter for one time use drones, where the limitation is that the batteries corrode and don't have many recharge cycles. That's bad for phones but fine for disposable drones. I expect that will be a thing within 5 years.
It would probably be more effective to use lithium and have a charge threshold where it just stops and acts as a sensor and mesh communications node. In that kind of mode, the battery life would be nearly indefinite. If the front line moves well past, they are recovered. If not, they are a mined explosive or ready to make a last stand.
Even at $3k-$10k robot dogs are dirt cheap next to training a human for 3-6 months.
I was being glib - you're horrifically spot on - but my point stands; who would willingly become a combatant in that?
The uneducated and brainwashed
I'm immediately remembering the guy that moved him and his family to Russia and is now on the front lines.
On the plus side, he won't be their long.
The Ukraine war has shown that electronic warfare is very effective against drones.
Man, could you imagine if Russia cared about its soldiers? Shit would be hardcore.
I dont think i'd rather have drones dropping these shells than artillery. This is a hack solution to their no arty problems.
It depends. If you start a war with a reasonable stockpile of artillery and shells then you will have a greater amount of shells than firing pieces at the start. So you can fire with your guns but you can get a big advantage if you can fire more than your opponent in the first round of fire and in the first few days. So if you can have a bunch of these cheapo things then you could effectively double or triple your rate of fire for a short period. That can be a big advantage if it means you break through fortifications or disabled anti air defense. They can move faster and be more responsive than moving artillery pieces around especially in rough terrain.
So you want both really. Having more options is better.
these things are so slow to drop 1 bomb its not increasing rate of fire at all. Their only advantage is that they dont get hit by counter artillery and dont require an artillery division to operate. It works for ukraine because they cant call for firesupport on most of their fronts.
Shells don't work without no barrel.
Pretty sure that's wrong
Absolute unit
So what Iβm curious to see is a variant of these with a Polish Piorun MANPAD (modernized, upgraded, and far more deadly variant of the old Soviet Igla MANPAD). I think they come in at under 15kg ready-to-fireβ¦ which offers some intriguing possibilities in terms of making Russian pilots say βwhere the fuck did they sneak that SAM in fromβ
I had thought recoilless rifle, so long as you don't need the tube to come back after you could probably 3d print around a sleeve and dump it after a couple uses regardless. Use like pelletized manpad transport cases for the printer filament and you'd have a pretty steady supply of low recoil relatively easily aimable rockets of a sort with huge huge stockpiles of ammo from countries who let's say have fewer political qualms.
How does that work? I thought these shells need to be fired before they are armed. If not, handling them seems very dangerous
That bit on the front of the shell looks like they swapped the fuse out entirely. Likely replaced with something that detonates when it hits the ground.
That bit on the front is switched out with a pointed tip before firing, that is just a tip to aid with moving the shell around in logistics I think.
You're right. I just realized I had it backwards. I didn't even see the loop part and thought that sticky bit was coming out from the nose.
This is true engineering
i think it's done because that's what they had on hand. engineer would recognize that shell is built to survive getting shot out of barrel, while drone dropped something doesn't have such constraint. this would allow for lighter shell in the same volume, or bigger and more destructive package with the same mass
or maybe some of shells were defective, idk
Yep they just have a lot of shells on hand and itβs obviously more work to safely dissect it than put a bigger drone on top.
Optimizing drone payloads is a problem to solve when youβre in peacetime and have years to rework the supply chain.
Smaller payloads are often custom made, it's not a stretch to make a bigger one also especially considering that it's a thing that already happened previously. I've seen video of Ukrainians melting TNT out of mortar shells (it can be done with hot water) to put it in lighter, custom made drone payloads, surely there's a supply of TM-62s or loose explosives to use in this way
otoh sounds like a good thing, because it suggests that 155mm projectile supply is adequate