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I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.
Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble. Better off with electro-optical or infra-red, something passive.
What if they come in like a flock, 5 or 10 or 20 from multiple angles to overwhelm the turret? I've seen videos of that happening against even these up-armoured, orky looking vehicles. They achieve mission-kill eventually, then the crew have to flee because they're stuck. Then they die. 5 or 10 or 20 FPV drones won't cost that much compared to the minigun CIWS integration, especially if AI guided. And the drones kill not just the CIWS but the vehicle as well.
For now, you could go with 80 GHz automotive radars. Extremely short range, most current military radar equipment won't detect those ultra high frequencies, and it always could just be a newer Mercedes on adaptive cruise control.
Also, the sensors are cheap (because automotive sensors are a cut-throat business) completely integrated packages (even the phased antenna array needs to be directly on-chip), and at that frequency it's trivial to not only detect the quadcopter, you detect every single moving blade of its propellers, and the rounds you're shooting at it.
The bigger issue is also just that if your countermeasure is close range CIWS you're not in a great spot to begin with. That's deep in the survivability onion.
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