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What Are The Best Ways To Counter Enemy Drones?

Wes

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A lot of factions, including the Star Army, and several enemies, make extensive use of small drones for scouting and attacking. Even in real life, drone warfare has become a big deal in the defense of Ukraine against the Russian invaders, with FPV drones taking out tanks and troops. What do you see as the ways that factions in the SARP universe counter these types of drones to keep them from becoming a problem?
 
One key thing the Russians/Ukrainians are lacking in their drone warfare (as far as I am aware of) is the lack of mobile sensor platforms. A drone can just fly above, the sound being too long for human hearing to pick up, watch the idiots do their thing and then drop whatever at their choosing. Even if power armor are not around, you could place a sensor suite into a pack or another sentinel drone. Dealing with them once they are detected likely be whatever you have on hand that has the range to engage.

Now that I think about it, might be a good counter against flying NH-series lifeforms too. Have been thinking about how combat engineers might be able to shape the aerial portion of a battlefield beyond earthworks. Maybe some sort of bouncing Betty/mini-missile mine that launches high into the air before detonating.Though how exactly do you disrupt anti-gravity systems beyond increasing local gravity?
 
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Dealing with them once they are detected likely be whatever you have on hand that has the range to engage.
In the case of Mindy armors and Mishhu battle pods, they tend to carry mini-missiles around that would probably be great for drones because they explode, they have the smarts to find moving targets, and they can be carried in large numbers.
 
Oh wow, a topic I am uniquely qualified to speak on! Forgive the post quality I'm currently mobile-posting!

For context I have been a part of the OSINT community the last half decade and have taken a lot of interest and done a lot of research on the recent rise of drones and generalized automated warfare such as FPV, Lisat, naval lupe, and other such recently popularized drone platforms being utilized not only in the current theaters of the worlds various hot zones but also in the general use and advancement over the years.

For both the real world and SARP the answer is: We cant, yet.

Spoiler: Boring read, TLDR: drones are fairly new and finding their niche in our world but arent the future of warfare, just a new part of it.
In the real world, to use small-scale drones such as FPV/kamikaze and latent ordinance drones the means are often expensive to produce and easy to circumvent. Most countermeasures involve jammers either man-portable or large-scale in nature that exist to block cellular, radio, GPS or even wifi connections in a small localized area using devices that can be as small as a backpack to be carried around or a large suitcase all the way up to a tractor-trailer in size and scope.

These are often expensive to produce and generate a lot of heat and use up a lot of power and as such are very situational like when you know you are about to come face to face with the zipper of death and even then arent generally reliable if they arent tuned correctly.

There are larger jamming platforms but those are often very dubious in their use because they are indicriminate and such wide scale they interfere with local aircraft for hundreds of kilometers and are originally used to deny the use of airspace to military aircraft first and foremost.

Finally there are commercial solutions. Some more recent drone platforms have come to rely of commercially-made cellular chips which many manufacturers have designed the GPS and cellular devices to detect the specific speed and altitude changes that a drone is capable of and then shutting down to avoid being used as a weapon. While others have come to rely on satellite-uplinks such as Starlink which I wont get into how that has been used in recent years.

Pretty much in the really world drones are the new sharp stick. They are very useful and cheap but despite the ramblings of certain uninformed billionaires arent a replacement of certain military aircraft now or even likely two decades from now. They have and will find their niche and fit into future warfare the same way the early tank or helicopter needed to.
Now for SARP.

The answer remains the same; We really cant stop or fight drones effectively in this setting. Before anyone comes in and handwaves about their particular super-thing that at most is described with nonsensical word soup on the wiki or some headcanon the fact of the matter is that in this setting the tech is simply too advanced to have rock-paper-scissors counters to any/everything.

EM weapons arent popular and even when they are-are situational at best.

You can have human-level and beyond sentient AI built onto chips as small as a grain of rice you can put into drones.

We have lightweight materials and coatings that shield from everything these days.

And the settings AI, while underutilized in their capabilities IMO, are poorly described or thought out and cant really be factored in because they are backed more by the OOC "Because I said so" than any actual logic so you cant just say 'well we have mass-produced AI that just hack all the drones and stop them' or by using tech that the setting prohibits simply because it was too meta or abused in the first place.

Pretty much you can make a pocket-nuke the size of a blister drone with an AI chip the size of a grain of rice to control it and then mass-field them by the thousands if SARP was real. The best way to stop them would be to make drones or systems specifically designed to counter them like they do in the real world but much more advanced. They would be situational at best, but i'd rather have a shoulder-mounted CIWS on my Mindy on the off chance of a drone swarm than to be caught without.

Though if anyone could/would be able to figure it out I think it would be either Yamatai due to having some last-decade experience in cyberwarfare against the spacers. Said spacers/voidfolk being experts in electronic warfare systems and the connection to automata, Nep very distantly if they ever remember The Forged and their tech, and maybe to self-import my own stuff SnS to a lesser degree since they have a lot of experience with drones/AI/drone soldiery and its use and actively use electronic warfare/ECM/ECCM unlike some parts of the setting where such things are an afterthought.

Frankly the factions of the kikyo sector are lucky nobody is just strip-mining whole worlds and creating mass-factories of drone soldiers terminator-style. A tech/machine enemy would be able to rival yamatai tit for tat imo.
 
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Or something like the Bulldog drones from helldivers. A little flying friend that flies at your shoulder and shoots at enemies/other drones/ you (Little shits always shoot you in the back of the head when you're in the thick of it!).

I know they arent as fun or glamorous since most people like the hands-on action but sarp needs more PC-useable drones for utility and combat use. Especially by tech-related characters~
 
Personally I'm a fan of the kinetic approach-flak batteries, cwis, that sort of thing.

Of course as Charmaylarg has stated it's actually detecting the little bastards that's the problem.
 
I do not think drones would be as much of a problem in the SARPiverse as they currently are in real life. And even then, their effectiveness is wildly overblown by sensational videos showing statistically rare successes usually outside of frontline operational settings. There's a reason you usually see videos of drones taking out wounded or rear echelon troops or tanks on the road outside of combat.

Drone control frequencies are relatively easy to interrupt, particularly if done so early (before a target is prescribed for those drones that can complete their mission after signal interruption). Even in Ukraine, deployable countermeasure arrays and anti-drone jamming guns have been around for several years with high success rates. SARP's EWAR is far more advanced and pervasive than anything we've ever seen in real life.

Additionally, sensors in SARP are extremely advanced and would make drone interception for standard infantry soldier wearing a Mindy (or even an unarmored NH-33A with an AIES in their brain) to acquire, thus reducing their threat equivalent to that of any other small craft. The M2-4 gives the individual power armor soldier "Ultra Wide Band RADAR," and NH-33As are said to themselves have an AIES equivalent internally. These types of early detection devices simply aren't available to real world soldiers on the same individual scale; man-portable radar is essentially a crew-served tripod mounted piece of deployable equipment.

I think the way drones have existed in SARP prior to their real world application has been more prescient (as sci-fi tends to be) than it needs to be reactive to real world trends finally catching up to imagined futures that we and other fiction writers have envisioned for decades.
 


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