Electronic Warfare has very little to do with the electric slide. But not nothing.

[@Ve-om7lf]

"And I wish them a happy glassing of them and everything within 100 meters" has now joined "we were the good guys, they were the bad guys and they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor!" As perhaps the most cheery expression of righteous retribution.

[@Krahazik]

I think I see a B5 reference. happys

[@Ve-om7lf]

@Krahazik that is simultaneously my favorite, and most hated episode of that entire show.

[@atigerclaw]

"Con, ELINT. We've got a swarm of gnats coming in." "ELINT, con. You know the drill. Slap em in the microwave and cook on 'high' for thirty." "A-FIRM, con."

[@noahdoyle6780]

@@atigerclaw There's a 'popcorn button' joke in here somewhere.

[@fakshen1973]

Back in the 1980's, a sailor came into high school chemistry class to talk about naval technology and get us interested. Crispy-crittering seagulls was among those discussions.

[@mattlewandowski73]

I knew a former air force wire biter who talked to hit electronics repair students about how they used to toss frozen turkeys in the path of their radars when he was in the service in the early 80s stationed in Alaska. Word is your home microwave has nothing on an air force radar emitter :)

[@fakshen1973]

@mattlewandowski73 yeah, he was talking about locking up a bogey rather than searching. Poof.

[@TheSlaughtermatic]

It might be worth mentioning that the first generation of proximity fuses couldn't tell the difference between birds and target aircraft. The last 80 or so years of military technology development has been really hard on seagulls.

[@derekburge5294]

Good! Snack-stealing fucks that they are.

[@widgren87]

"Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please." Also that Warheads to foreheads bit made me think of EW as Scientific Un-Healthcare... And now I want to watch some more Chubby Electron Guy content ;-)

[@travisbishop782]

Go watch his video on the cocaine hippos.

[@widgren87]

@@travisbishop782 I have seen that one, went and watched some of his older videos

[@carbonwolf3865]

I like that. "Scientific Un-Heathcare" im gonna use this, now. Thank you

[@widgren87]

@@carbonwolf3865 Enjoy ;-)

[@blackc1479]

Red October is a classic. I remember seeing it when it came out. I was 12 or 13 and I would guess the only kid in the theater that understood what a waterfall display was.

[@daskraut]

life on board an american destroyer: lunch is cold? radar. wanna bbq? radar it is. rotisserie chicken? fire up the radar! toast marshmellows? one word. 5 letters. you guessed it: radar.

[@Sembazuru]

Reminds me of one of the early Darwin Award entries. Security guard at a microwave telephone relay station would hang out in front of the microwave dish on cold nights to warm up. He did this once Christmas eve not realizing that due to the increased traffic of people calling each other on the holiday meant that the relay station would up its power output to keep up with the extra demand. Supposedly this security guard was found the next morning sitting in a lawn chair. Not only was he cooked, but all the bottles in his 6-pack had burst open. Might be an urban legend, I haven't fact checked that story in a while.

[@relwaretep]

Back in the 70's and 80's before Australia had satellites to send TV from one side of the continent to the other, we used microwave dishes. This mostly worked fine, except for live sports events in the late afternoon to evening. As dusk fell across the continent, birds would start perching on the microwave towers scattered along the length of the largely uninhabited bits. This would degrade the signal. So the towers would up the signals. This degraded the microwave transmitter's operational life, and would eventually need early replacement. It was not uncommon to lose complete cross continent microwave comms and the folks going to replace the dish find a bunch of bbq'd birds at the foot of the tower.

[@c.a.mcdivitt9722]

I'll add that even modern tanks are in the seventy-ton range and generate 1000+ horsepower total. Compare that to a modern destroyer, 9000+ tons and 15000+ horsepower. Therefore, a modern warship can dedicate more tonnage and power generation to EW than a tank *possesses.*

[@wilemelliott]

AND cutting edge modern tank designs are starting to incorporate miniature versions of radars and CIWS for munition interception and disruption [See the TROPHY system and some of the new tanks Germany? showcased recently with radar guided 30mm airburst defensive guns]

[@jameson1239]

@@wilemelliottsky shield and AHEAD have been a thing for awhile now

[@geodkyt]

Oh, it gets better. Since almost all ships have multiple different emitter types going on the regular (if not continuously), not only can most *good* warship crews likely figure out what specific class and configuration you are (if not the precise hull), but they can make a *very* good estimate as to range, even if each system has multiple power ranges in can operate within. See, the multiple error bars those power variations for each system each constrain the potential power level of the target, allowing you to guess the range reasonably accurately.

[@enoughothis]

Signals Intelligence and Electronic Warfare is the most fascinating aspect of combat. It's very much a chess game of move and counter-move.

[@nco_gets_it]

it is mostly a field of mathematics, geolocation, and electronic design. There is, of course, "art" in the form of analytic experience and understanding, but EW is a realm of pure physics.

[@ursafan40]

Yes it is.

[@EGRJ]

"You may have outsmarted me, but I outsmarted your outsmarting!"

[@stevenclark2188]

I think one of my earliest introductions to this was a copy of the game Earthsiege, which made you choose between anti-radiation and active-homing missiles for your mech, and gave you a button to turn off active RADAR.

[@jhdix6731]

To me it was Harpoon (the 1989 Computer adaption of Larry Bonds Tabletop) on Amiga, which came with quite a good manual. Especially the articles in the accompanying "waypoint" magazine were very interesting.

[@grimlock1471]

I could never get that game to run🙁

[@thorinpalladino2826]

Read David Webber's Honor Harrington series. Electronic warfare is a huge component of individual ship duels and fleet actions. For this series think Horatio Hornblower in space.

[@travisbishop782]

Those are great books.

[@osarkthegoat7038]

Bleek!

[@arthurmoore9488]

Just don't look into the politics too closely. Webber is an amazing writer, but there are parts it's best to gloss over. That plus the time he massively miscalculated a ships mass. One of the more interesting parts about Honor Harrington is it speed runs interstellar naval warfare. Starting from (missile) broadsides, all the way to fighters and everyone throwing around Rapid Dragon style pods. Though you probably wouldn't notice the tech issues if you only read the first book, which is free only.

[@leechowning2712]

​@@arthurmoore9488 you can find the whole set if you look for Baen CD free.

[@geodkyt]

I wouldn't want to bet money on a COTS component drone with commercial transceivers *surviving * a later SLQ 32 with EA (Electronic Attack), lest the electronics in the drone comms/data links just decide to get too hot and shout, "Peace, out!" Yeah, SPY 1 against *anything* commercial grade? Zorch, probably on the first pulse.

[@jhdix6731]

I agree. To be fair, I guess even a helicopter-mounted ECM-Pod should be able to do the job.

[@Allegheny500]

The drone equipped with a pair of rifle grenades and improvised shuttle cock stabilizers took me off guard.

[@shawn6860]

I saw that too and shook my head.

[@Comicsluvr]

In the Hunt for Red October novel, Jonesey (the sonar genius) had a catalog of enemy subs, including Typhoon-class ones. In one case, he could pick out a specific sub because it had a defective rudder and sounded like it was dragging something. It would not surprise me if a skilled radar operator could pick out a specific enemy ship based on some quirk of their signal.

[@Tula-cs1ef]

I met an old Airforce vet who told me, "we used to tell where the planes tracking us were based based on how they flew them."

[@mowgli2071]

Since we're mentioning sci-fi ship to ship combat, I'll mention Jack Campbell's _The Lost Fleet_ book series where each book is about 55% space battlecruiser combat.

[@kuhljager2429]

A really good book series. Probably one of my favorites

[@Schwarzenfels]

Yes, but dectection of other ships there is majorly done by optical systems, nothing that can be jammed, or at least, I don't remember them using lasers to blind optical sensors.

[@kuhljager2429]

@@Schwarzenfels there were optical camo systems used, as well as EMCOM and similar used. Stealth shuttles and stealth battle armor mostly, nothing on a full sized ship

[@witherwolf3316]

Using quadcopter drones against warships are a horrible idea. Ukraine has, however, been using "drone boats" packed with explosives called Magura 5 to much success against the Russian Navy. Though that could just be an example of an outdated system in use by Russia being destroyed by very skilled... Would it be UNV? Unmanned Naval Vehicle? Or Maritime vehicle? Whatever, the squishy controlling the boat from far away could just be very smart about how they use it. I guess in a way it's just an evolution of a torpedo though. And one that can sit in wait for hours, or navigate for several hours.

[@jgowin14]

Apparently, every navy except for the Russian Black Sea Fleet...

[@Philistine47]

They have EW systems. Said systems may not be maintained in operational condition; and even if they're nominally operable, they may not be switched on (possibly because they interfere with other electronic communications and/or detection systems), but Russian naval vessels certainly have EW systems.

[@jgowin14]

@@Philistine47 If you crew the ship with half literate conscripts who are incapable of maintaining the system and likely to sell off parts of it, why bother having it in the first place?

[@Philistine47]

@@jgowin14 Fair, but it seems like you could ask the same question about a _lot_ of the Russian armed forces.

[@jlvfr]

@@Philistine47 this. The Moskva was the ONLY ship of it's classe not upgraded, still used all the original soviet era systems. And these were poorly maintained.

[@jgowin14]

@@Philistine47We are seeing exactly that. The systems which they can run effectively were originally designed for use by illiterate conscripts. Most of their tanks are powered by variants of a diesel tractor engine designed in the 1930s. And the stupid proofing of the AK family of rifles is nearly an incipient religion. But has the far larger Russian Air Force been able to establish air superiority? Have Russian S-400 systems been anywhere near as successful as Patriot systems? Has any high tech Russian weapon system been of use?

[@Philistine47]

Distances are another major problem for COTS quadcopter drones trying to attack ships. It's one thing to zip out a kilometer or two from the tree line to where enemy tanks are; ranges in modern naval combat can be two orders of magnitude greater. (Or more, if one side brought an aircraft carrier to the party.) Unrelated, naval use of EW dates back to at least World War One, as the British Royal Navy used radio direction finding to tell them when the German Kaiserliche Marine was at sea.

[@herpderp264]

Still remember a saying, not certain from where I heard it but it refers to the EW suite on a B-52 being strong enough to blow up every TV in a certain range.

[@hvymtal8566]

I've heard one about the EC-130H Compass Call's suite being strong enough to cause blackouts in half of Los Angeles County

[@basher20]

@@hvymtal8566 And Commando Solo is said to be able to override radio and TV signals on known broadcast channels.

[@RvnKnight]

Regarding jamming, you don't always have to be the loudest to jam up a frequency. We tend to use the loudest kid on the block method because it is the easiest to implement. To my understanding, if you have the processing power and speed, you can invert the signal and just cancel it out as it essentially nullifies/neutralizes the wavelength. Of course, you have to be FAST with it because even a pico-second off and it may not work fully. That's part of why it's not used. You can also just make the device not respond to the owner by squelching capture which is almost undetectable to the owner.

[@tarmaque]

Basically just noise cancelling earphone technology in reverse. Yes.

[@Krahazik]

What can make this harder is frequency hopping tech as found in some military radios.

[@RvnKnight]

@@Krahazik true, which is why it will not always work. It does work on civilian models though.

[@RipRoaringGarage]

The seagull thing reminded me of something I forgot. Squishy brain starting to fail in old age lol I worked on the Ostrich. A big flightless bird, because, a hangar queen if you will. Radar was fine on it, Just a stubborn plane, with lots og gremlins. Anyway, this AWACS had a fluke, and when we did live fire radar tests, it would regularly cook birds mid flight. People didnt believe us, when we told the stories. But then again, we told them the rotodome detached mid flight, would saucer around the ocean and land (?) in the water, where the Navy would pick it up. And wed tell them, thats why the civilians saw so many Navy cats...in a landlocked AFB, because they would return to rotodomes. Yes, we told them the dome was manned too. And people would then look at the Tacamo birds and thing, yes, theres an AWACS that detached its dome! It was always fun when a story would come full circle at a bar or something, and then good luck trying to convince them no, thats not true. So..yeah, sorry early 2000s internet conspiracy guys. My buddy and I invented that story while he was at a dealership trying to buy a Ford Ranger LOL

[@jlvfr]

EW is so poorly known and understood it's not even funny, and yet it started pretty much the day someone started transmiting. The French in WWI had a massive listening station on the Eiffel tower that picked all the german transmissions, because the sermans had near zero security. One often ignored role was in ASW warfare in WWII. The British had outstanding land and ship based triangulation systems that allowed them to mark the position of U-boats, because Doenitz insisted on constant radio reports. So, even when the RN couldn't understand Enigma, they where it was coming _from_ . And on D-Day german shore radars were spoofed by RAF Airborne decoys that created entire fake convoys heading into Calais...

[@robertkalinic335]

EW being poorly understood... for the past two months i am trying to learn dcs and this quote rhymes with my experience. The most detailed sim out here cant give you better description of jammers than... it makes noise and its complicated. I had to sit through two months of dcs content to find red players who can actually describe what it does cause it degrades modern missiles like amraam into active radar better sparrows that cant jump on you from above with few seconds of warning. That and it also masks your speed, altitude, flight direction and range at the cost of giving everyone your direction and small possibility of home on jam missile into the face. All of this and yet it somehow didn't make it into manuals.

[@jlvfr]

@@robertkalinic335 don't think we'll ever see a good civilian EW simulation; it's too complex and has no real bang-bang action... we'll maybe get on/off switches for jammers and radio/radar silencie and that's it.

[@robertkalinic335]

@@jlvfr We are already lagging behind against the real modern tech, stealth is only barely present in modern sims and yet its kinda old fashioned compared to the networking that real top notch air powers are trying to do. You will get missile on you from the plane that doesn't necessarily need to turn on any sensors, network can tell you are there and whats your wifi password by combining all the radar and signal intel it has got. Honestly i would rather pick up sim with fake made up planes that represent abilities of modern tech instead of trying to chase realistic details.

[@jlvfr]

@@robertkalinic335 yeah. Tbh stealth is too hard to sim, there are too many variables and too many secrets. Pretty planes in Sims it is.

[@josephvarno5623]

Yeah. Drones vs warships. Aegis is gonna have them have a bad day. And warships have protective measures. Like several types of missiles and CWIS.

[@Octa9on]

not to mention that just turning up the active radar power a couple notches is probably enough to fry the electronics on a typical drone

[@arthurmoore9488]

Reminder that one way those groups "win" is by disproportionate costs. Where the interceptor systems cost far more than the munitions they're being deployed against. Which is why Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) is such a big deal. In this case, it's RADAR acting as a DEW!

[@CptJistuce]

@@arthurmoore9488 Disproportionate costs only works if they can actually afford to keep it up. Because yes, a drone might be a few decimal places cheaper than an interceptor missile... it might also be a much larger portion of one side's available combat budget.

[@alandavis5820]

AN/SLQ-32 is old tech. It's being phased out now along with the AN/SPY-1. Now the AMDR program is phasing all that out. That DDG you showed at 14:42 with the funky superstructure is that next generation, and it's going to slowly be phased into the existing DDGs. As for the SPY-1, at full power the crew is not allowed outside the skin of the ship to avoid being cooked themselves.

[@Ariccio123]

It's chonky not funky The wide boi flight

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Do you think that me talking about cutting-edge tech would be good for my terrestrial downlink location?

[@Jaeger_Bishop]

Hmm, imagine turning such a powerful electronic warfare system, on the entire population of those pirates....scaled up of course. And no one in the region would know what happened because, all electronics in that area would be fried.

[@imadethistopostponi]

as far as I've seen; all the footage of drones hitting AA Vehicles has been when the radar was off or pointed away I suspect that even a mobile targeting radar has enough juice to cook unshielded drones

[@merafirewing6591]

14:39 that modification really does make that Burke look like she is storing acorns for the winter. Also the CIWS could have a field day against the quad copter drones?

[@boobah5643]

The question is, does the CIWS have enough ammunition to take down the drone swarm? It's computer controlled, so you can shoot some relatively short bursts despite the absurd rate-of-fire, but they still run through the ammunition _really_ fast, and thanks to their Air Force heritage reloading is kind of a pain.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

CIWS would, but why waste the expensive ammo?

[@mowgli2071]

We did (and possibly still do) have radars with emitters that just blasted out radio waves and the radar just reacted to any return. These were early proximity fuses

[@arthurmoore9488]

Thanks for the video. Couple things I wanted to note. First, as you likely no doubt are aware, distance for Radar is complicated. Though I get your analogy for the double the distance thing, I feel it's too much of a simplification. If you're talking an omni directional signal like a ping, you have the whole square cube law thing going on. When it's a directional signal, you get beam spread and a whole bunch of other things. Plus, as you glossed over for obvious reasons, the horizon plays a part too. Caveat that I'm also not an expert, and haven't dealt with Radar since college. Second, "William Spannel" has a video on the political science reason behind the Red Sea attacks. The TL;DW is terrorist attacks are a sick form of advertising!

[@SacredCowShipyards]

We had to keep it simplistic for the sake of time alone.

[@bryankollmorgen2696]

What if said pirates were smart enough to add some drones with seeker heads into the mix? Ones that would home in on the jamming signal.

[@Hebdomad7]

These already exist in Ukraine... But simple anti radiation missile get lost when there's no radio wave to home in on... Also super difficult to home in on something when you are getting fried by microwaves.

[@captain0080]

Pirates get the kaboom boom

[@seanrea550]

Pirates get incorporated into their own cube.

[@ericwilner1403]

Remember, kids: the "twice as far" is a considerable understatement, given how little of the incident beam is reflected toward the originating station (unless it's a tight beam hitting a corner reflector, of course). Aside from the laughable scale of those badminton grenades for ship-attacking purposes, making small holes above the waterline isn't the most effective way of attacking a ship, is it? I mean, unless there's a Tallboy version, dropped from a really big quadcopter, that'll crash through the decks until it reaches something important.

[@Sembazuru]

Well, Ukraine did have some successful strikes on Russian ships with their boat drones. At least one I saw where one boat drone breached the hull and the next one just drove in through that hole to detonate inside the target ship. But those weren't quad-copters so could carry a significantly larger charge.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

I can't very well go giving you specifics ;).

[@ThrawnFett123]

I have some expertise applicable to these specific scenarios regarding drone swarms and radar. The issue is that while I could counter every single one of these issues you've brought up, the amount of money effort and time required to do so takes the drone swarm for insurgency and puts it right back into near peer levels. Its the "return to crab" meme where no matter what happens everything keeps trying to become a crab, and things like the Horseshoe crab "stop" evolving because congratulations they won. They win evolution, it was a crab all along. I could counter the radio recievers with laser line of sight. I could counter the burnout with shielding and a wire to sea. Counter radar burning with sacrificial lead drones with a mylar sail. But then it all requires a bigger package... okay I can just make them a little bigger, 50 instead of 60 isnt that bad. But then they have to hide behind a sail so they're gonna be slower... okay i can just add a rocket motor for the terminal phase, but thats gonna add more weight, down to 40... The issue with any drone swarm is that by the time you counter all the problems with it, you're basically right back to the cost and sophistication level of "why not just make the fastest most powerful missile I can and send as many as I can make at them?" Which is exactly what we already do in near peer anyway

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Everything's always counterable. I don't expect a bunch of cave-dwelling genetic dead-ends to be able to sort the details, for a variety of reasons.

[@warshield924]

I think in sci-fi the best use of EW has to be anything written by David Weber but especially the Honor Harrington series. The use of jamming/counter jamming, recon drones and targeting systems. In fact, one of the books has a scene where one warship fries the recon drone of another using the method you describe.

[@davidmonaghan1896]

"Shooty shooty bang bang" is overwriing "Chitty chitty bang bang" as an earworm in my mental archive now.

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

That array radar sounds like a good way to get an easy meal, nothing quite like roast seagull.

[@hughgordon6435]

but,but if a squishy gets in the way? an easy way to get thk?

[@irystocrattakodachithatmooms]

@@hughgordon6435 Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by thk.

[@hughgordon6435]

@@irystocrattakodachithatmooms two headed kids!!

[@DanielDracohun]

Yeah but aren't the civilian cargo ships are the main target? I doubt they have electronic warfare capabilities. Keeping warships on constant patrols will be costly in money and I am pretty sure that most navies doesn't have the necessary numbers to keep rotating in and out ships.

[@jenniferdement3490]

As a former EW tech, I can neither confirm or deny the accuracy of this post ... but I approve of it. 😅

[@ghostdog0424]

With enough weebs, femboys, furries, and time, any EW system can do pretty much anything

[@Relkond]

Thoughts.... Can you bounce a signal off the stratosphere and look for the return across the surface? Idea being to not reveal your precise location. Caveat being you'd probably be lit up by it bouncing back, same as other ships. Can you craft multiple emitters and use them simultaneously to make it difficult to isolate any one emitter? Granted, that may make it difficult to meaningfully interpret the returns, but the notion is to avoid giving a precise, addressable position for the transmitter. Make a low-signature drone with decent sensors and laser comms, and send it straight up - launch it into the virtual crows nest high above the ship and ask it to (visually or otherwise) look for things. Would it see anything interesting enough to justify?

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Most radar systems are line-of-sight, but not all.

[@reecewestmoreland6137]

I know i've a few Royal navy guys refer to there EW systems as Carol Beer, as "Computer says No".

[@TheGenericavatar]

Drone bombing of a pirate-captured CIVILIAN ships or would-be pirates could potentially be somewhat effective if you're explicitly targeting the exposed pirates on deck, and to a lesser extent against the small ships often used by would-be pirates. Not so much(?) the ones using helicopters to land pirates on a ship (which may be more common currently in the Red Sea region). But they are potentially vulnerable while standing outside on deck. Lots of chiseling use of weasel-words like 'potentially' and 'could', I know. :| Good video, though. :)

[@AlucardNoir]

And this is why drone systems should use point to point lasers to communicate with one another and not radio.

[@shawn6860]

the potentially tricky part is movement for that to work. Does not seem undoable, just tougher than it looks. Maybe a point to point with burst comms would work and plan movements in stages?

[@AlucardNoir]

@@shawn6860 You'd probably want the drones to know where each one is at launch and have some good gyros on them for the drones to be able to know where they are in relation to both a static map and one another, and then use laser bursts to transmit information with updated coordinates and other pertinent information. And maybe use metal or metal foil on the outside for a Faraday cage effect.

[@ConnorAustin]

Ah triangulation my favorite part of trig

[@lch3778]

As an old EW-1731 I find it interesting to see you bring up the field that I lived and breathed for 6 years at the end of the cold war. Good job.

[@hossmcgregor3853]

Triangulation is how we used to find Emergency Location Transmitters (ELT). A lot of modern ELT transmit GPS coordinates as well.

[@randomconstructions4513]

see the issue with the idea of autonomous swarm drones is A: you need a lot and B: they are essentially slightly improved mines. the first barrier is quantity. using less than a few thousand per deployment is more or less futile. much like a mine system they need to have a certain concentration to be effective. next is attack profile. your average drone quad copter has operation time measured in minutes. this means that traveling more than a couple miles will be dumb. hence the optimal time for a drone attack is when the target is approaching the limit of the operational distance behind the first line of drones deployed to an area. hence the drone swarm will sit motionless on the territory that they are assigned until a drone that has an assigned 'effective' position sends out the first attack signal. this would be quickly followed by sighting time and position from drones that have previously been passed by the target to more effectively direct the further drones toward where the current track of the target is. Hence the drones do not begin an attack from the horizon but from as close as hundreds of meters from the target. remember that i mentioned that the drones are more or less mines? it would not be terribly difficult to waterproof a drone to the extent that it could be made neutrally buoyant with little more than a small radio antenna to send or receive the singular kill instruction present above the surface. on land this can be discounted since they would instead settle into any foliage or obstruction that provided suitable operation conditions. finally attack direction detection and countermeasures. assuming that your ship convoy or platoon can withstand or destroy the first wave of drones that number in the tens and appeared seemingly out of nowhere the shielding needed to prevent damage to electronics from even relatively high powered radiation is known commonly as a sheet of aluminum foil. Maybe two layers if you need about 20db^2 of reduction. So you're shit out of luck with radio weapons if the drones rely on image differential and visual flow instead of radio signals to find their target and decided to disconnect their antenna at launch. we can separate out maybe a dozen or two of the second wave of hundreds of drones to relay your position to the third swarm at intervals. Or have a randomized distance or time to impact that every drone in every wave will reconnect their antenna briefly to blast your current position and heading to anyone that will listen before beginning the attack run. finally if you are destroyed and no other targets are identified in the range of operation the surviving drones the survivors send out a signal to reorganize the swarm to cover the area previously depleted of forces by the contact with the enemy. rather than considering a drone swarm as a standard missile airborne or assault threat it is more accurate to consider it a tactically mobile and self healing minefield that aggressively pursues targets that enter it's operational range. Hence to adequately combat it you must detect it in advance and deploy measures to destroy their communication/micro controller before their kill signal is sent out. This is relatively difficult since to detect them you must find a radio silent object the size of a toaster that takes a picture and runs a simple comparison with a previous image to detect changes over a certain magnitude every couple seconds. so you hope that you or your drone swarm spots the sleeping drones before you get in a tactically difficult situation. and that is why drone swarms are scary, because living minefield not because they are particularly difficult to destroy or detect once attacking.

[@travisbishop782]

Great video, Dockmaster! It just brings up why we don't see more EW scenes in Sci-fi shows.

[@boobah5643]

Partially because Hollywood doesn't know anything about modern combat (and often prides itself on that) and partially because it's hard to show electronic warfare on screen. It isn't as if you can train the audience in how to read an EW set's output.

[@shawn6860]

ya, it would be real short movies. the enterprise and Klingon ship would EW fry each other and then head back to get new ships.

[@travisbishop782]

@@shawn6860 well, it could go that way, but i thought it would have been cooler to see the Enterprise jam or even take control of the enemy's photon torpedoes.

[@alenofbellwood]

Fun fact. The Enterprise-D in Best of Both Worlds Part 1 was trying to do just that, fry the Borg with their deflector dish output. Unfortunately, the Borg had already assimilated Picard, so they knew the exact frequency to cancel out. As for weapons jamming, I always figured that that was the reason for starships with 24th century computers to miss at the piddling little ranges Star Trek starships engage at.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Because shooty shooty bang bang is more fun.

[@jwb_666]

So what you're saying is instead of sending radio waves we should just send ICBMs? I agree. Totally. I mean I'd never touch something so primitive as an earthling ICBM but I agree with the sentiment.

[@assemblyrequired7342]

I find it a shame that you feel compelled to stay out of politics. It is oh so entertaining, hearing you call the Houthis some very colorful terms, and rest assured, there are plenty of other idiots that I wouldn't mind being torn a new one.

[@Andrew-qw1kq]

I fully believe we'll go more towards sensor probes to be small, fast, maybe dodgy vehicle to be your signal source. It does suck to get probed.

[@madrabbit9007]

When I was a midshipman, an instructor told us that submarines almost never use radar as it would be sending out a giant signal that "I AM AN AMERICAN SUBMARINE! I AM AN AMERICAN SUBMARINE!" EDIT: SPY-1 is so powerful that when they turned it on for the first time they thought it was broken because all the returns they were getting. They eventually realized they were picking up orbiting satellites. An engineering instructor told me they could direct the radar into a tight beam, aim it at the bridge of another vessel and fry everybody on the bridge.

[@seanrea550]

So we have heat rays madcarading as detection systems on our destroyers.

[@madrabbit9007]

@@seanrea550 That was the first generation that went into service in the late 70's. I'm sure they've upped the game to super Saiyan by now.

[@nco_gets_it]

triangulation is easier to understand as the intersection of two bearings. One need not understand the maths involved. Just draw the lines on map and where they intersect is the "x marks the spot"...LOL. BTW...this can be done from visual observation from more than one point. Also, in a process we call "resection" you can find your own position from observation of azimuth to two separated landmarks. Again, draw the azimuths on the map and where they intersect is your very own "x marks the spot".

[@richardkenney9636]

Also, can confirm that the SPY radar system can and will cook seagulls, flying fish too

[@dmcarpenter2470]

Good EW/SIGINT/ELINT piece. Your answer about quadcopter drones v warships is the same as my favorite forehead to desk question: Why didn't BB class weapons use APFSDS and HEAT rounds against other warships. Oh, 'scale', you are a pesky little fellow. Thanks again.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

"At that point, it hardly matters."

[@michaelgautreaux3168]

In a general sense, SEAD - Wild Weasel/ Iron Hand operations work the same way. A SAM unit scan/ tracks making for a choice target for anti radiation missiles.

[@richardkenney9636]

Not an Electronic Warfare Technician, but the SLQ-32 is a great example of getting something right the first time and then just making it better.

[@kentlindal5422]

Nikola Tesla: " So anyway, I took that personally."

[@mattlewandowski73]

there is ample evidence to support that his "death ray" was an early microwave transmitter.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Dude ended up right about an impressive number of things.

[@grahamhaller8181]

I have a question. In the earth series "The Expanse" they use rail gun weapons, so ship A fires a projectile and it misses it's intend target. Due to Newtons 3rd Law this projectile continues on its path forever. What are the chances that the ship A that fired this projectile arrives in a time and space that it gets killed by it's own projectile?

[@boobah5643]

Virtually nil. Unless you're accelerating on the same vector you fired the projectile, in which case you'll eventually catch up to the projectile.

[@jasonPatten]

That depends on a couple of factors, but it is EXTREMELY unlikely. For one, if the projectile exceeds solar escape velocity it just leaves the solar system. If not it's probably on an extremely long solar orbit. Possibly Years long . If it's stable, then it might eventually get back to the same place it was fired from, but the firing ship won't be there. Plus Space is big. Really big. It is so unlikely it makes playing the lottery look like a sure thing

[@KirillTheBeast]

Redonculously tiny. Railgun rounds go insanely fast. In "The Expanse", ships don't have FTL capabilities and have to make do with fusion reaction drives, so unless "Ship A" ends up unfathomably far away from the firing position by using the Ring Hub and coming out the other end at the place where the round ends up at the right time in the future... Yeah, no fucking way. SPOILER ALERT !!! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK !!! NO PLOT DETAILS REVEALED AND CHARACTER NAMES ARE KEPT UNDISCLOSED !!! THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT LESS OF A SPOILER, THOUGH !!! The character in question succeeds in their attempt at baiting evasive maneuvres with a railgun shot after having sprayed a huge volume with PDC rounds (faking some sort of malfunction) in the general direction towards which they know the enemy will dodge (because our character here knows what they're doing and they're not fighting the enemy ship, but the enemy pilot). The messy part of this whole idea is that both the PDC burst and the railgun salvo have to reach the enemy ship almost at the same time, even though the former travels WAY slower than the latter. Torpedoes are also there, meant only for the killing blow, though. Some of the coolest shit ever, if you ask me. -----------------------------------END OF SPOILERS---------------------------------- The point is: in "The Expanse", they think that kind of stuff through. The fairly low-tech, hard sci-fi setting lets the authors avoid the constant use of "handwavium" and allows them to mess around with how the physics of a situation play out and how characters with different levels of education and competence would react and try to adapt to that. It's a GREAT book series and I strongly recommend reading at least the main line novels. I can't vouch for all the light spinoff novels, but at least two of them are amazingly good. Seriously, those guys should be churning out short sci-fi stories like mad and we'd eat them all up.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

The chance that said projectile hits anything at all isn't technically zero, but it might as well be.

[@Delphineas]

Geometry class in HS was easy. Trig on the other hand...(My teacher was 'kind' enough to not give us homework in Trig. Just some problems in a textbook that might be similar to the graded tests. I vastly overestimated my ability to learn without homework.)

[@Sembazuru]

Another point about the scenario at about 7:00 How often would that blue ship be by itself? I would suspect there would be a couple blue ships each getting their own bearing on the radar emitter. The blue ships are probably all buddies and would share those bearings with each other allowing all of them to triangulate on the source nearly instantaneously. All that is left to do is what to do about the radar emitter and who takes the shot.

[@MrGrimsmith]

This is where something like the Manta drones come in. UUV with a payload. Fun times. Remember that to submariners there are only submarines and targets and this thing doesn't even make that distinction. That would make the ASW section suddenly a LOT more appreciated!

[@pauljs75]

Underway there's more than one way to cook a drone. I suppose the issue with them would be when tied up at a pier when things are tagged out due to servicing or simply because the effect of certain things being active wouldn't be too popular with people and their things on-shore. But then the problem isn't from pirates doing some attack, but likely places like China trying to snoop out their own intel.

[@Progection]

"Don't touch the boats!" Intensifies.

[@lordfrostwind3151]

It would seem that if we want to get around the problems of drones in land warfare, there's going to need to be advances on electronic warfare and point defenses on a mobile platform. I think there was one of the canceled programs that talked about those kind of vehicles, which I'm pretty sure they used the designs for Tom Clancy's Endwar. Although the new laser equipped Strykers could be pretty sweet.

[@chengong388]

Uber powerful radar is basically a death ray for smaller targets. It’s just that they don’t fit on tanks.

[@stratometal]

Some anime sci fi attempts to include some electronic warfare, though they display hacking the enemy ship as well. Bodacious Space Pirates and Outlaw Star come to mind. Speaking of Outlaw Star, I would love to see the Dockmaster review grappler ships. On the subject of grappler ships, Space Sweepers is a Korean Live action Sci-Fi Space "western" and that is pretty good and it also has grappler ships. Very fun.

[@HBHaga]

There's a reason that getting a detailed radar paint of an unresponsive ship's hull is considered the "Hey, stupid!" of the Honor Harrington 'verse. Guaranteed to jolt whoever is listening to comms right out of their seat and quite likely to fry their array in the process.

[@kennethschlegel870]

Being a former Navy radar tech this was ASMR to me

[@leechowning8728]

Electronically detonated explosives, more likely unshielded, flying towards a SPY-1 system? I wonder what voltage it takes to make them all self destruct?

[@giladpellaeon1691]

Another reason why it still matters to have the high ground. Also still hoping for a video on the Carrack-class light cruiser from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe.

[@shadowwalker117]

I wonder how often the galleys on ships equipped with SPY-1 serve Cornish game hen

[@braydoxastora5584]

just wanted to ask if you've played a game called Nebulous fleet command. game that leans into the importance of signal/e warfare in space

[@Raszul]

so... drone swarm vs warship here some ideas to make that work. somewhat. maybe. in theory? drones use IR coms and keep a drone swarm dispersion area of around 1km of so, thus EW pickups are unlikely to work. by using IR to communicate the drones are also immune to EM-based jamming IR also degrades relatively quickly in humid air. all of this results in an IR com detection range of no more than 3km if that much. likely much less. give the drones a stealth chassis (likely a cheap one, but just make an effort) and combined with their size their radar return signature is also fairly hard to detect then let the drones fly a few meters above the peaks of the waves (as close to the waves as they can safely do so given their sensors, wave pattern prediction, agility, adaptive navigation/maneuvering) then drones use (passie) visual sensors to keep swarm cohesion and coordinate - after all they can have a pre-determined/deterministic targeting and coordination protocol. as you said the target could already be identified thus the targeting model could also be loaded onto the drones before they are launched. this then allows the drones to just slot in the target distance, vector, speed etc vs those of the swarm plus weather etc and then use their target allocation program to determine which drone in the swarm is to target which location on the target - and drone #95 will just go for target location #95 - no communication with the other drones required that said, the payload of these drones would be minimal or one could just use a missile instead. which to me means that the best drones to use would be anti-personnel 'hunter' drones armed with a small weapon such as a low-recoil (machine) pistol and with maybe some deployable explosive (mini grenades or more likely small demolition charges) - these could then hunt for humans on the target vessel and sabotage exposed systems with their explosives though I am not sure we have the means to write the code that would be required for fully autonomous hunter-iller/saboteur drones. its just that that is the only way i could see drones having a notable effect in naval warfare. thanks for the vid!

[@windoverwaves6781]

That's just... anti-ship missiles with extra steps.

[@Raszul]

@@windoverwaves6781 not exactly. more like drone-based boarding parties

[@phluphie]

Why, I'm led to believe, tracer rounds kinda suck.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

"They work both ways."

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

there's a great companion to this video on the channel HourOfPoop, titled "1 hour of silence occasionally broken by Wallace saying 'Heee'"

[@scottmcdivitt2187]

Im starting to think that modern tanks should be carrying a miniature version of Ageis. Preferably one that can hook into the bigger systems, so the ordinary grunt can give the enemy an "standard" suprise.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

Unfortunately, the power requirements for the SPY system alone - much less the rest of the AEGIS platform - is more than a single tank can generate.

[@scottmcdivitt2187]

@@SacredCowShipyards yes, but a similar platform, miniatureised, with reduced capacity, manpower needs and power requirements should be doable. After all, the F-35 can interlink with ageis, and Carries some of the same capabilities. Surely a tank could do similar. Also, Rhinemetal just announced a tank with air search and targeting radar on the remote weapons station.

[@mikemj4859]

One point that is also important is that the us navy is not the russian navy and the have safety standards, like all western navies

[@MayTheFay]

What if we made the quadcopters really fast, like with a jet engine or a rocket, then shielded it against being fried up, made it autonomous through some sort of tracking and put a bigger payload on them(today we're reinventing AShM's, we'll call it ASM 2.0[its the exact same thing])

[@Krahazik]

So basically an anti-ship missile, which the ships are EW and defensive weapons systems are designed to counter.

[@MayTheFay]

@@Krahazik that is the entire joke, its saying to turn drones into missiles, because its the only logic progression of it, but we already make missiles and the entire point of half the shit a ship carries is stopping asm's

[@almirria6753]

Just don't up someone up in front of the transmitter, or else they will be microwaved fried . We had such an incident happen at 29 Palms, Ca. in the 80s

[@davnadz]

EW blackhawk guys used to cook deer. They didn't quite know why the world suddenly got so uncomfortable.

[@alaeriia01]

Piracy was kinda cool back in the Age of Sail. Not so much today.

[@hughgordon6435]

21:47 and thats where we get THKs when its hummies that get in the path of this system? (if you know ,you know😮)

[@captainteutonica5474]

16:39 well, isn't that thing just adoreable?

[@rightousIke]

Technically, signals attenuate.

[@GusCraft460]

Are laser weapons technically electronic warfare?

[@johno-o9l]

You might have learned about triangulation if you were involved with military or radio. Or you watched Mathnet. You know back when children's shows were good.

[@DarinRWagner]

When are you going back to eviscerating sci-fi ships?

[@SacredCowShipyards]

... my last mainstream episode was exactly that.

[@ceb8189]

Not to get too… bodily about things, but you are a beautiful man.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

If I were a humie I'd be flattered.

[@NorbertPueschel]

Drone ships seem to be quite effective though.

[@HBHaga]

For some things, yes. However, they're just not what you want to take against a modern navy at this point. As low-altitude air cover against ground forces, they're quite good.

[@patrickjanecke5894]

The Russian Navy doesn't count. m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/nGqYoHWBgbR3e5I&pp=ygUSUnVzc2lhbiBuYXZ5IHN1Y2tz

[@cockatoo010]

either that, or the russians just suck at having a Navy

[@noahdoyle6780]

'Hostis humani generis'

[@Krahazik]

Tanks kind of lack the space for a comprehensive EW suite.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

And power plant.

[@a_Minion_of_Soros]

Refreshing stance on no politics. Still, attacking civilians is bad. I hope that was not controversial.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

It somehow shouldn't be.

[@26th_Primarch]

At best using a swarm of quad-copter drones to attack a large naval vessel would be barely feasible if that targeted vessel was docked in port with most of it's own systems off-line and the best those drones could do was to damage any radar/communication antennae, the bridge if lucky, any exposed weapon mounts on the hull, and maybe put a couple holes in the flight deck.

[@SacredCowShipyards]

There's... a myriad of reasons the USN only pulls into a select few ports over that way.

[@Coldwater-sw6me]

Fully agree. Nuff said.

[@albertnonymous1886]

I know you said no politics in the comments, but I'm voting Dockmaster for Admiral.

[@uuddlrlrbas9904]

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!

[@Buczo997]

Hurry up and wait

[@jollygreentank1131]

I'm sure you have heard this before. But you should do a colab with "habitual line crosser"

[@SacredCowShipyards]

I'm available.