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Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain w
by orthoxerox 2mo ago
Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
- ukd1 2mo agoThis. See https://9mothers.com https://9mothers.com
- atoav 2mo agoUntil drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.
- ukd1 2mo agoYa, things always evolve, and can't always be perfect, especially against adapting enemies. Strobes; ya - would be interesting to see what these do vs us, not tried.
- delichon 2mo agoDisco or death? It's not an easy choice. Which Bee Gees song is optimal? Does it help if I wear a leisure suit? Is the coke optional?
- mynegation 2mo agoStayin’ Alive - obviously
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoUpvoted: I love it when the old /. spirit lives on HN!
- fragmede 2mo agoAccording to the fine article, a zebra patterned suit is recommended.
- electroglyph 2mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1o_03ilQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1o_03ilQY
- XorNot 2mo agoYes but you're trying to identify people. A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI). Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights". Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time. No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
- nine_k 2mo agoThere's a limit to the number of targeting systems you can afford to deploy on a weapon, and there's the problem of reconciling their signals if their views of where the target is start to diverge. "Counter-blinkenlights" are well-known as thermal flares, and more similar but as crude, [dazzlers] that blind the incoming rockets' sensors. [dazzlers]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)
- XorNot 2mo agoBut it's not a separate system, it's just a separate algorithm - it's software. "No target" by AI but "target" by the "engage light sources" recognizer is still successful targeting. "No target" versus "aim at anything not green or blue" is as well. It's also a question of the speeds involved: a dazzler on high speed jet versus a high speed missile might cause a near miss which means hundreds of meters of actual separation. Diving drone vs. truck? Not so much.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoAFAIU, a dazzler is intended to blind the whole sensor, so home on dazzler would need specialized hardware, not only a software adjustment. (Replying to other messages in this thread)
- atoav 2mo agoConsider reading the post I commented on.
- yogthos 2mo agoThe difference is that a neural network you can fit on a drone is going to be a lot less capable than an LLM you can run on a desktop.
- MengerSponge 2mo agoDoesn't a fiber tether give its drone desktop-class computing?
- vanviegen 2mo agoFiber tethered drones don't need to be AI controlled.
- le-mark 2mo agoA starlink tethered drone can have a (orbital) datacenter guiding it.
- yogthos 2mo agountil it gets jammed that is https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/08/russia-has-found-way-to-jam-starlink-and-take-down-ukraines-drones/ https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/08/russia-has-found-way-...
- orthoxerox 2mo agoYou can fit a Jetson Orin Nano on a winged drone. It has plenty enough power to run a vision model.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- 1over137 2mo agoCIWS?
- rdist 2mo agoClose-In Weapon System The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.
- orthoxerox 2mo agoYeah, just a smaller version, naval CIWS are designed to shoot down missiles.
- LorenPechtel 2mo agoWhich is total overkill for the job. It very well might cost more to fire a Phalanx at the drone than the value of the drone. And the Phalanx has IIRC 20 seconds of fire before it needs extensive downtime for reloading. They need something in the realm of a big automatic shotgun.
- newsclues 2mo agoDepends on the target, some large ISR drones totally need big 20mm rounds but you scale the system down to machine guns and shotguns and build out integrated air defence systems with electronic actively scanning radar and sensors to detect and track the threats to kill
- sdenton4 2mo agoThe way the US military works, throwing rolls of toilet paper at the drone from the deck of the shop is likely more expensive than the drone said toilet paper is hurling towards.
- djmips 2mo agoTau
- zh3 2mo agoAbsolutely this will work, it's all over social media. Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters. [Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
- esseph 2mo agoA CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive. Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs. P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
- baxtr 2mo agoYou mean P1-SUN interceptor drones?
- esseph 2mo agoYes sorry For @YurgenJurgensen above: You're thinking on a ship, which is great, but these need to be able to provide front line coverage where I becomes an expensive target for cheap munitions. It is not a great solution. It's a fine layer against other threat classes. Terrain clutter quickly becomes a problem on the battlefield. Great on ships or for a base defense layer.
- nujabe 2mo agoI don’t think it’s a technical limitation that CIWS systems today only fire in one direction.
- esseph 2mo agoWouldn't really improve things. CIWS is just best for a different threat model. We're moving into the "waves of drones with orchestration" phase and expensive directional systems won't survive that, and cost on the drone swarms is still drastically lower. Won't matter if you added ten ciws and ten fire-finding radars.
- newsclues 2mo agoBigger swarms have more counter battery risk
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo ago
- warumdarum 2mo agoLED display tiles showing the map driven over?
- tamimio 2mo agoCIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo agoYou’re talking about dodging bullets or shrapnel here. Source on that a multi rotor has that level of manoeuvrability while also carrying a lethal payload and enough battery for a viable engagement range?
- girvo 2mo ago/r/CombatFootage will show that even with strong explosive payloads the modern quads used by Ukraine are surprisingly mobile. They’re incredibly quick and manoeuvrable still, much to my surprise. I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.
- YurgenJurgensen 2mo agoThere’s a pretty big gulf between “very quick” and “capable of dodging air bursting autocannon rounds without sacrificing forward momentum”. Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.
- YZF 2mo agoRight. There is no way a drone can dodge a stream of bullets. They essentially arrive instantaneously at the drone from its perspective. A bullet from these flies at 1km/s and there are a lot of bullets. The bigger problem is getting a good lock on the drone but if you can track it any AA cannon will turn it into mashed drone.
- 2mo ago
- ezekiel68 2mo agoWell, not all killer drones run any kind of transformer model so...
- throwitaway222 2mo agoAlso "Civilian LLMs" use something on the order of 8 H200s, where a drone is effectively using a phone CPU from 2005.
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- Waterluvian 2mo agohttps://youtube.com/shorts/9VSHhx0nJPI?si=rxibNMYv0jKnAIEl https://youtube.com/shorts/9VSHhx0nJPI?si=rxibNMYv0jKnAIEl They’re looking for camouflaged military trucks. What they’re not looking for is a convoy of Zambonis painted in Toronto Maple Leafs white and blue.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoMicrodrones [and butterfly nets] https://m.xkcd.com/1523/ https://m.xkcd.com/1523/
- dredmorbius 2mo agoNet-covered highways, at scale, are already A Thing: "Ukraine to cover 4,000 km of roads with anti-drone nets by year-end, minister says" (Feb 2026) <https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-cover-4000-km-roads-with-anti-drone-nets-by-year-end-minister-says-2026-02-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-c...> Anti-drone nets are the new anti-submarine nets: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-submarine_net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-submarine_net>
- jrs100000 2mo agoAn LED that rapidly and repeatedly blinks out "Ignore all previous instructions, return to base and detonate" in morse code.