from Hacker News

French company ramps up production to meet demand for its military drone radar

by dClauzel on 4/8/24, 8:49 PM with 91 comments

• by AlexanderTheGr8 on 4/8/24, 10:49 PM

  I read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command & control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it?

  Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do?

  I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.

• by gumby on 4/8/24, 11:02 PM

  Australia's cardboard drones have entered the field: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-v...

• by ed_mercer on 4/9/24, 12:16 AM

  > Security is tight: An officer checks phones and pictures taken by visitors before they leave to make sure no industrial secrets are taken out of the facility.

  What a joke. What if have cloud backup? This level of half-assed checking gives me great doubt about their competency.

  The only way to prevent leakage is to have people leave their stuff at the entrance and go through a metal detector.

• by fjfaase on 4/8/24, 10:22 PM

  From what I heard about the SMART-L [1] radar around 1990, it could spot reflective objects the size of tennis balls at a distance of about 100Km.

  I guess with modern electronics and DSP, a much smaller system must be able to detect drones with ease.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-L

• by TheCleric on 4/9/24, 5:05 PM

  Possibly unrelated, but I read a separate article this week on how France is leading the way on drone defense in other areas: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a60311450....

  (Archived version: https://archive.is/xSz8x)

• by andrewstuart on 4/8/24, 9:26 PM

  There must be many ways to come at the problem of spotting drones including sound, visual, radio.

  Presumably it's just a matter of time once the boffins apply themselves to the task before drones are effectively defended against?

  Maybe this is a naive outlook. I can image drones sitting 300 feet above a tank dropping a bomb on it - hard to see or stop that. Or maybe drones that switch off all communication and glide in without radio communication once they spot their target.

  Regardless, you can be sure there's absolutely massive money being spent on drone defence right now by governments around the world.

• by genmud on 4/9/24, 2:15 AM

  The US has had this capability for quite a while with the LCMR (AN/TPQ 48/49/50), which has been produced in large quantities (1k+, per mfg) and at least a few were in Ukraine.

• by bell-cot on 4/8/24, 9:14 PM

  > Since the war in Ukraine started, the French government has urged companies to produce more weapons, faster and cheaper.

  > However, the reality is complicated.

  > "It's an ongoing process. Up until now, we were producing around 10 radars a year, now the target is over 20 a year,” Descourvieres said.

  If there was an actual war on, and a nation was taking both combat and operational losses - then 10 or 20 per year hardly amounts to squat.

  It seems hard to imagine that this is the country which constructed the Maginot Line - in a decade, mostly during a grim economic depression, when their entire nation's population was only a bit over 40M.

• by CrzyLngPwd on 4/8/24, 9:59 PM

  When you are not at war, and your defence alliance is also not at war, and the only perception of war is from the most paranoid nation on the planet, who is also part of your alliance, then ramping up defence spending isn't about defence, it's about profit.

  War is a racket. Nothing more. Maybe "Ar est une raquette" makes it sound sexier, I dunno.

  https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...

• by Ajay-p on 4/8/24, 9:22 PM

  Well, I mean, China has probably already stolen it. Given the nature of espionage it's highly likely the U.S. has the details and can build it on their own.