Best Main Battle Tank!

[Ned]

I think the real problem is heat signature/optical acquisition. Surrounding the tank, including its top, with a camouflage of some type will certainly help. Dragging a decoy hot box could work in the same way as a plane's flares.

[Patroklos]

The US Army has tiny, remotely-operated planes that fly over the battlefield and give it effective over-the-horizon capability for rockets, artillery and motars.

Why is a tank round more lethal and an anti-tank rocket?

There is no UAV that I know of that passes targeting data like that. You would have to link the systems of the UAV and the Stryker in a way that could not possibly be accomplished with such small vehicles. If the Navy isn't doing it with SM2s and Harpoons, then the Army isn't doing it with TOWs.

Artillery/Mortors just need coordinates to saturate, AT missiles need skin to skin.

[Kuciwalker]

There is no UAV that I know of that passes targeting data like that. You would have to link the systems of the UAV and the Stryker in a way that could not possibly be accomplished with such small vehicles.

I doubt that. In fact, I can think of several effective ways of doing it.

[Patroklos]

If you can find one that can I would appreciate it. The UAV we used in the Gulf had video data only. Perhaps if you connected a laser designater on the UAV it could guide in bombs but most AT missiles, and definetly not TOWs, don't work like that.

Out of a battalion of Strykers, how would the UAV know which one to talk too? UHF, the UAV would have to be line of sight. It would have to be a none wire guided missile since it is shooting over the horizon. The UAV would have to be stable enough to keep a laser designator exactly on target, and the ones I have worked with could barely keep the target in a video camera.

[Kuciwalker]

If it can transmit video data in realtime, it certainly has enough bandwidth to add a bit of metadata like GPS.

Out of a battalion of Strykers, how would the UAV know which one to talk too? UHF, the UAV would have to be line of sight.

No, you set it up as a network. You could make it a wireless ad hoc network (information is routed through the vehicles to their destination), you could have a different drone flying higher that routes information to the appropriate vehicle, or even use satellites.

If you put a laser rangefinder on the drone and have it human-operated (computers can't currently do the sort of image-recognition you'd need), you can determine the location of the target from the GPS and orientation of the drone, the orientation of the laser, and the range. Knowing also the location of the firing platform you could then get a firing solution for your artillery platform.

[Kuciwalker]

This is just a computer-assisted version of flying scouts in WWI. I assume we do something similar already, just not in quite real-time with a direct link between computers on the scout and the firing platform.

[Patroklos]

It all sounds great, but it is not happening like that now. The technical and problems and complexily of such a network would make it useless on a rapidly moving battlefield.

you can determine the location of the target from the GPS and orientation of the drone

This they can do and do, which is fine for artillery spoting for area saturation and targeting stationary targets, but AT weapons are skin to skin. Two meters off may as well be 1000, and of course if the target is moving...

And everything you just said could easily be accomplished by tried and proven, not to mention easier means.

[Kuciwalker]

It all sounds great, but it is not happening like that now. The technical and problems and complexily of such a network would make it useless on a rapidly moving battlefield.

It's not that complex and can be made to degrade gracefully. The upshot of the system is that you can get a really good response time for fire support - the drone controllers can essentially click on a target and hit it in about as much time as it takes to reorient the gun and fire the shell.

This they can do and do, which is fine for artillery spoting for area saturation and targeting stationary targets, but AT weapons are skin to skin. Two meters off may as well be 1000, and of course if the target is moving...

If the target is moving then you have to have a guided missile anyway if you're firing over the horizon. Might as well use a laser-guided missile or artillery shell directed by the drone.

[pchang]

Please enlighten me

It would seem that Kuci is talking about an IP type network on the battlefield using packet radio. However, in an active battlefield we have the following problems:

1) To fully integrate the battlefield, you would have lots and lots of network members. IPv6 would solve this problem.
2) Bandwidth is limited by your radio frequencies. You would have to subdivide the battlefield in sections so you could reuse the frequencies in different areas of the battle. This would effectively be like subnetting based on geography and would require the individual transmitters and receivers to be relatively short ranged (probably line of sight). Thus, you would need contiguous coverage by units in the battlefield to maintain network connectivity for all units. You would also have collisions for units near the boundaries of these broadcast areas.
3) To have broadcast areas, you would need to have mobile base units that would provide a DHCP type of service. Individual units would have to disconnect and reconnect to the network as they crossed boundary areas. I think current DHCP reconnect times are longer than I would feel comfortable with on a battlefield and would certainly pose a huge problem for rapidly moving things like aircraft and missiles/other projectiles.
4) To have broadcast areas, you would need to have mofile base units that would provide routing (probably the same physical things for requirement 3 above). Mobile routers would need a dynamic discovery and routing method (something like BGP is probably sufficient for this). These mobile routers would become very high value targets. How do you hide/protect such assets?
5) The whole network would have to secure. Are current standards like WPA good enough? This might be very expensive in both dollars and computation capability (think FIPS standard) which would probably also add weight to the systems. Not so much a problem for tanks, but would be a problem for missiles, light aircraft (including helicopters), and infantry.
6) The whole network would have to be resistant to jamming. Some type of CDMA approach over a large enough frequency range might do the trick here.

Am I missing anything here?

[Kuciwalker]

2) Bandwidth is limited by your radio frequencies. You would have to subdivide the battlefield in sections so you could reuse the frequencies in different areas of the battle. This would effectively be like subnetting based on geography and would require the individual transmitters and receivers to be relatively short ranged (probably line of sight). Thus, you would need contiguous coverage by units in the battlefield to maintain network connectivity for all units. You would also have collisions for units near the boundaries of these broadcast areas.

Alternative: don't guarantee connectivity by all units. Other alternative: use aerial drones as [additional] nodes in the network.

3) To have broadcast areas, you would need to have mobile base units that would provide a DHCP type of service. Individual units would have to disconnect and reconnect to the network as they crossed boundary areas. I think current DHCP reconnect times are longer than I would feel comfortable with on a battlefield and would certainly pose a huge problem for rapidly moving things like aircraft and missiles/other projectiles.

Why connect the missiles to the network? If you do have to guide them with GPS instead of lasers, you could use an entirely different connection directly between the scout drone and the missile.

Also, IME DHCP reconnect takes on the order of ten seconds. This system wouldn't be necessary for shooting at things you could see, just shooting things you can't. 10 seconds without something to automatically target things out of site for you doesn't seem too bad.

[Kuciwalker]

4) To have broadcast areas, you would need to have mofile base units that would provide routing (probably the same physical things for requirement 3 above). Mobile routers would need a dynamic discovery and routing method (something like BGP is probably sufficient for this). These mobile routers would become very high value targets. How do you hide/protect such assets?

A lot of drones, some of which could just be blanks. IIRC they're also working on drones that are hard to detect, though I don't know how well that would work actively routing signals.

5) The whole network would have to secure. Are current standards like WPA good enough? This might be very expensive in both dollars and computation capability (think FIPS standard) which would probably also add weight to the systems. Not so much a problem for tanks, but would be a problem for missiles, light aircraft (including helicopters), and infantry.

Doesn't the network only have to be secure for the amount of time it would take to crack the encryption? WEP takes ~20 minutes to crack, IIRC; I don't know how long WPA takes, but if you change the keys more regularly than that, you'd be fine.

[Ned]

I have actually seen these small drones in action on the Military Channel. The particular example, IIRC, was a small mortar unit in Afghanistan who in were in one valley and were firing over the hill, accurately, at enemy in the next. Now they could be just looking at the video of where their shots were landing, but I think they were also using GPS data from the drone to locate their targets.

As to GPS missiles, they just need the location of the target before they shoot. If the missile gets there fast enough, the target cannot have moved far if it moves from the spot it was located.

Regardless, these drones are making the battlefield a lot more hostile to tanks, especially if gound forces can call in the Air Force to land some area munitions on a tank formations before the tanks in the formation can even see potential line of sight targets.

[Zkribbler]

Did you see that "steel rain" missle?? It breaks open over a tank formation, and the individual bomblets target their molten copper warheads on the heat signatures of tanks. That is one nasty mofo.

[pchang]

I worked on that

in the early 90s. Shows you how long things take to get from development to deployment.

[Kuciwalker]

Weren't those featured in a Tom Clancy book?