The importance of line move

Coincidence...?

Spring has this oh-exploitable logo style, so it would have been aesthetically superior.

Now that we have established that it is not coincidence... What would be the efficient methods to to fight this kind of swarms or ultra-swarms?

• Even tracking all elements of swarm is hard or worse (think passive state swarm with almost no signature)
• Single point or sparse defense can be cheaply overloaded even if it has rapid fire capability and extreme accuracy

(99% accuracy is not enough)

• Distributed dense defense network has to have same magnitude of elements in swarm (with same or below unit cost of swarm)

End of the current widely spread warfare doctrines?

The drones neccessarily have shorter range weapons, if any, and practically no armor. You also cannot use AoE because the sky is big. An obvious approach is to just kill them with accurate, high rate of fire, longer range weapons (which in ZK would make them precise riots like mace, redback, felon).

Do we see people try to do that IRL? Yes we do - there are multiple rnd programs that specifically aim to produce a drone-chopping laser. The question is whether it will be cheap enough, but then these drones also require a proper plane to drop them, and besides the fuel and pilot time will consume the opportunity cost of this plane doing a conventional run, so it is reasonable to think it might.

These and these guys seem to disagree on the "can't chop with laser" part.

quote: I doubt it would be particularly effective vs ground drones though

I don't see how UGV's would be any different from "weird infantry" or "robot tank" in this regard, so for them the point about "just shoot them in face with your existing gun" holds well. I think they're much less weird than swarmer UAV's anyway.

(or "send your own UGV to kill enemy UGV")

quote: I don't see how UGV's would be any different from "weird infantry" or "robot tank" in this regard, so for them the point about "just shoot them in face with your existing gun" holds well. I think they're much less weird than swarmer UAV's anyway.

My mistake, these drones are actually flying. They're also purely for surveillance and are basically a battery and camera with wings. Considering that they can be dropped in the thousands though, a laser would need probably at least 10 seconds per drone and would have no chance of shooting them all down before they completed their mission.

The lasers are also shown being used against mortar fire, but the number of incoming shells they can deal with is not likely to be very high.

Also the way the lasers disabled the regular UAVs was not to 'shoot them in the face' but to cut through a very specific part of the drone causing it to lose control and crash. The main reason that works well is simply that the structure connecting the tail to the UAV is fairly thin and thus easy to destroy with a laser. Lasers are also more effective vs aircraft because the motion of the aircraft naturally blows away the metal vapor which would otherwise provide shielding against the laser and prevent it from ablating more material effectively.

EDIT: Also line move in this case is only being used to have the drones sweep an area and not particularly as a tactical maneuver.

Few points on lasers and swarms:

• Existing laser units are in high kW or even low MW range - many (tens of) magnitudes higher cost than drone unit.
• Cost and energy requirements make lasers single or sparse point defense (think Annihilator vs Fleas in Z-k).
• Even extremely high power lasers have kill time in 5..10 seconds despite having low cost per shot.
• It is easy to disable single point defense with for example 5% of swarm units (think roaches - they are not super threat to all things in Z-k because they cost more than 1/10000 Annihilator price, plus static defense is near instant and 99.999 accurate against them).
• Swarm delivery - it can happen in various cost effective ways, fighter jet with dropper is just one example.
• Unit cost in swarm is already below thousand USD, now think of cutting edge technology of pressing wood pulp to thin sheets and forming planing structures from them...

http://www.recode.net/2017/1/12/14245816/disposable-drones-paper-darpa-save-your-life-otherlab

Most of you are higher ELO here than me here, I fully expect someone to have interesting new view angle on the problem :).

quote: many (tens of) magnitudes higher cost than drone unit

A ten orders of magnitude is 10 000 000 000, ten billion. Multiply by drone unit cost (Estimated at 1k) and you get a hundred billion per a single laser. I doubt this estimate. The capitalist-imperialist navy's own laser project costed about 30 mil $ iirc. That's the whole R&D plus prototypes, not production of a single device.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like Boeing or Rheinmetall are selling their things yet, so no hard data for now.

Anti-personal lasers are not a thing and wont be a thing for a while. Keep in mind that a laser does not increase its lethality against human beings with power. Even if it might make a hole right trough your body it most likely wont mortally wound a person because of instant cauterization of the wound unless it strikes a major artery within the body. Thus it would have to be used against complicated, easily damaged essential organs such as heart, head and a spine. That is all assuming that laser would stay on point long enough to deal enough damage to the tissue which would require a lot of energy. So there is already absolutely no portability of the AP laser weapon and that is a total no-go in the current doctrine of mobile warfare. That being said, it also would be totally stupid to install a laser on a drone because again you would need to have a lot of power. A light flying drone can barely fit an accumulator to enable it flight for sevral hours let alone to fire a laser capable of severly damaging human flesh.

The "freedom fleet" is using much more powerful lasers but these are meant to be ship mounted turrets designed to melt focal points of ships which is comparable to a surgeon operating on a patient with a laser. But that surgeon is 20 nautical miles from his patient which he intends to kill. Also the patient is a big armored ship with lots of weakness points such as amunition storages, fuel storages, bridge, communication center etc. Such ships have massive engines and accumulators capable of supplying energy to these weapons.