• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    18·
    23 days ago

    Precisely!

    It is shocking, but it is also shocking that tiny seabirds like Godwits can fly vast distances while actively flying and it points to a basic wisdom that our intuition with aircraft that bigger aircraft = longer distance capable is actually not really true.

    There are certainly economies with scale with larger aircraft that will always make them superior at certain things to smaller aircraft, but distance is not one of those things… something that the natural world has of course known for a very long time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwit

    A female bar-tailed godwit made a flight of 29,000 km (18,000 mi), flying 11,680 km (7,260 mi) of it without stopping.[2] In 2020 a male bar-tailed godwit flew about 12,200 km (7,600 mi) non-stop in its migration from Alaska to New Zealand, previously a record for avian non-stop flight.[3] In October 2022, a 5 month old, male bar-tailed godwit was tracked from Alaska to Tasmania, a trip that took 11 days, and recorded a non-stop flight of 13,500 km (8,400 mi).[4]

    The defense against these kinds of long distance small unit, slow speed attacks isn’t distance, it is competent, diffuse multilayered air defense networks that are in good effective communication and thus respond intelligently when it matters. This is not something you can create overnight and it is something russia hasn’t really been industriously addressing for quite some time, russia will catch up but Ukraine is so far ahead here that russia in contrast is forced to resort to jet powered shaheds in order to just get them through diffuse Ukrainian air defense to any significant depth.

    • gegil@sopuli.xyz
      10·
      23 days ago

      It looks like huge distances are actually a downside in modern long range war. Its impossile to protect everything when all of things are spread out so much.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      9·
      23 days ago

      Honestly, I think there’s a real place for an attack drone that’s lighter than air and solar powered.

      Very slow, but cheap* and able to travel basically unlimited distance before dropping either a bomb or a guided FPV drone/glider as its payload. If necessary, it could also loiter in an assigned area for a very long time, waiting and searching for targets – great for area denial or setting up an ambush or just for surveillance/artillery spotting. It only needs to be fast enough to maintain headway against the worst wind currents you can’t avoid.

      *To enhance the cheapness, they can be filled with cheap, abundant hydrogen. Hydrogen is more dangerous than helium, but lighter and actually works better. And, again, most importantly: much cheaper and easier to get. Hydrogen blimps became very unpopular after the Hindenburg disaster, but the fire risk is much more acceptable in a disposable unmanned vehicle. (Although, come to think of it, they don’t even really have to be disposable. If you wanted, they could travel to their target, drop their payload, and then return all the way back to be reloaded and used again.)