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Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by eloff on Saturday September 14, 2019 @12:25PM (#20971815)
People here are quick to point out you can jam remote piloted drones, but you could also use AI to control then locally. That's much easier than the self driving car problem.

I think drones are the future of warfare, which means you are limited not by the number of soldiers you can field, but by your manufacturing and resource base ( and how well you can protect it.) To be fair, that's been at least partially true since the second World War, but now it will be the dominating factor.

However, it shouldn't change the balance between major powers, because conflict with major powers will almost certainly end in nuclear annihilation.

Even if it starts without nukes, the loser may soon see it as their only option. So I hope this means war between major powers is no longer possible. You wouldn't know it the way China and the US posture though. Or more ominously India and Pakistan.

Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by baybal2 on Saturday September 14, 2019 @12:43PM (#20971948)
Inertial navigation of toy drones these days can outmatch mid-cold-war ballistic missiles without any effort.

I doubt that those existing Yemeni drones use any radionavigation or remote control to begin with, as it looks to be a certain overkill for the task.

All their targets so far were big stationary targets, and there are all signs that they all use simple time (and not position) programmed maneuvers.

Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by CPLX on Saturday September 14, 2019 @02:05PM (#20972587)
Are you actually claiming they are using dead reckoning?

I don’t know much about drones but I have a pilots license and in my opinion it would be extremely hard to have forecast winds aloft accurate enough to reach a target hundreds of miles away with only time and vector information as the inputs.

They aren’t ballistic missles, going thousands of miles an hour, they’re going to be affected by wind.

They’ve got to be using GPS positioning too I would think. Why wouldn’t they?

Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by baybal2 on Saturday September 14, 2019 @02:09PM (#20972627)
Just guessing by reports that some of them get both lost wildly of course and do strikes wildly off target, and some ran into the ground, which is consistent with, say, few of them being hit by gusts of strong wind which overwhelmed the INS, or some of them getting a freak barometric input.

And unlike with early ICBMs, precise accelerometer and airspeed inputs can provide quite good measure of lateral forces.

Were they had a satellite, or used HF comms, somebody would've either timed the satellite, or spotted the HF signal long ago. And there were no sign of a huge satellite dish one needs to communicate to satellites in high orbit in found drone remainings.