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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.
This sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol
True, but the idea of low-cost accurate cruise missiles was too much to ask for a couple decades ago. I don't see a reason the counter technologies (and current FPV drones seem weak to hard counters) can't see a similar volume production tradeoff.
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