Another possibility would be adding stealthy nose-cones to RPGs. Then you have to increase radar power of the defending system. ...which would help enemy artillery to target the tanks.
I'm not saying this system is nullified. Just that there will be ways to bypass it.
If you have a type of drone that can carry a useful payload (shaped charge powerful enough to disable a tank, in the ballpark of 5-10 kg, is not that feasible for a small drone - but a something like a frag grenade may be feasible), then you might as make them all real, the dummies would cost almost the same.
If you go handgrenade size, the drone costs just bit over 100$.
Anti-tank shaped explosive charge would be hundreds of dollars but again, a fraction of the drone cost.
It's different with ICBM's.
But yes, I think you have a point in that with COTS robot technology, it should be very cheap to produce swarms of simple missiles. If the adversary answers with "military-grade" countermeasures, he'd go bankrupt..
But drones that can be made up to look like they are drones that can carry enough explosives when seen from a bit of a distance is another matter.
Hopefully they test for this stuff and have a firm idea of where they want their thresholds but, then again, sometimes bugs happen. https://www.wired.com/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/
Speak for yourself. I loved rockets[0] as a playful kid!
I played with Estes rockets too. How many people are likely to in war zones like these APS devices will be deployed in are likely to though? The rocket motors aren't super cheap and aren't really reusable or easy to make your own.
There's a huge difference between RPGs and hand thrown anti personnel grenades. The first uses a shaped charge to create a very directional blast of fast hot metal that can punch through armor and the latter is an unfocused omnidirectional blast that can't get through light armor.
'rocket propelled grenade' is a backronym.
Actually, looking at these sources, the non-propelled versions were actually called "ruchnaya protivotankovaya granata" ("hand-held anti-tank grenade"). Still the same acronym of course, it just doesn't include the launcher. So when the launcher part was added, the phrase changed slightly but the acronym remained the same. And it was only at this point that the phrase "rocket-propelled grenade" could be used to refer to this weapon, and the phrase was presumably created to match the acronym RPG.
One publicized case of a soldier in a vehicle "protected" by this system but killed by a tossed hand grenade or hit by a grenade launcher from long range (ordinary 40mm grenades are only fired at about 75 m/s at the muzzle), and there will be calls for this value to be adjusted.
If soldiers are exposed, then such a system reacting is a greater threat to their lives than a hand grenade; triggering the system is quite likely to harm nearby troops.
>most
Great/s
Also I assume objects travelling below a certain speed or heat threshold are not "processed" so most children or children-thrown objects would not be targeted.