It's the real deal, lots of challenges with high emf. Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors their controllers which are using back emf to set their waveform phase get it wrong and the motors stop spinning, spin backwards, and sometimes just go back and forth like tiny washing machine motors.
Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.
This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.
> Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors
No, that doesn't happen. Currents can be induced in the wires to the motors, but not in the motors themselves. For one thing, the outside surface of the motors is the aluminum rotor which is an extremely effective faraday cage. For another, coils don't act like antennas. Loops of wire in an electric field have the exact same voltage difference as a straight wire.
> Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Shielding adds virtually zero weight; carrying a spool of fiber optic cable adds a lot of weight. All the drones in Ukraine right now are fiber optic but most of them are unshielded... the reason why is not that shielding is heavy, it's just that there are lots of jammers but very few truck-sized weapons intended to totally disable drones.
That's also assuming it would even work on a drone without an antenna. If these weapons are not relatively broad-spectrum then they will be very sensitive to the particulars of the circuitry, and they won't always work.
But typically with a much smaller number of turns. A motor coil should have a decently high inductance and thus act as an antenna only for pretty low frequencies.
Drone defence (detection and neutralisation) has to move fast because it’s quite asymmetric warfare (i.e drone worth $4K and take out a tank worth $30m) - over the last week for many nights Denmark’s airports and military installations has had drones disrupt air traffic and cause a lot of angst in the population and they were completely not prepared, haven’t wanted to shoot them down, and they don’t know where they’re coming from or where they’re going - scary that they’re caught so much on the back foot
Bullets are spin-stabilized: if you shoot at something in the air and miss, the bullet will generally still be lethal when it eventually returns to the ground. That’s a no-no in densely populated areas.
Shooting at flying things in densely populated areas is generally a bad idea because when you miss, whatever ammunition you used falls on somebody on the ground. And if you hit, the debris falls on someone on the ground.
This seems like an ideal application of the electrolaser. This was an ultraviolet laser that would ionize a channel through air and then a high voltage pulse could be sent over that channel to a target. Originally they were talking about this being like a long range taser as a non-lethal stun weapon, but maybe more suited for anti-drone technology.
I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.
How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
> How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
1 millisecond pulses and 70 kW continuous usage[1] which is roughly equivalent to the AN/TPQ-53[2]. 2 km range.
> Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
That is not how this kind of thing works. Capacitors are a terrible energy source. Their voltage drops off exponentially as they discharge and almost all electronic are very particular about the voltage they require. A railgun wants current and does not care about voltage. Radio transmitters care a lot about voltage.
Regardless, a 70 kW generator fits on a small trailer. Smaller than the weapon itself. It will run for days on a good sized tank of diesel.
I was wondering the same thing, but haven't found much. Sounds like it's only ever been a mobile installation - on a trailer, stryker, and a ship. Except for the ship, that probably means a relatively limited power supply. And its limited range probably means that stationary installations don't make much sense.
Sure seems like NATO would love to get a hold of some of these.
Lasers and masers are not inherently collimated or straight lines. The only thing specific to lasers/masers is that all the light is the same wavelength. Beam, parabolic and phased antennas are all very capable of making much tighter beams than your average laser.
In fact at the limits of performance lasers (and particularly masers) are quite bad at generating straight beams, because they are quite small sources of light and divergence is inversely proportional to the width of the emitter. It is a misconception that they are low-etendue.
Lasers are coherent emitters, which means that they behave like a perfect point source and the beam forming is limited only by diffraction. The collimation is limited only by the lens diameter and quality.
Cruising altitude is ~40k feet or 12 km and the range of the weapon is 2km. The system only works because of all the exposed wiring on quadcopters; everything in a plane is enclosed in a highly conductive aluminum shell and is very well protected. The windows are large enough to let in microwaves, but not very well. Some antennas might be in danger but in general planes are built to survive lighting. It would be a real freak accident for something to break.
Probably would work once or twice, and then some kid will notice copper foil tape makes great Faraday shields. Hams already do this cage technique all the time to help lower the noise floor on cheap equipment.
Probably better off with #12 or #9 bird shot shells, or a cool pet falcon named Xavier. =3
The starting cost for a drone show is around $20k USD, so it wouldn't be hard to fake what they are doing. It's hard to say if this a functioning system that can take down drone swarms, or someone is testing the market for a system that can.
It's a cool demo but I'm pretty sure if this become widely deployed, enemies would just start to wrap drones in copper tape or something to make this far less effective.
This type of weapon reflects the West's approach to drone warfare—multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment that will need to be right on the front line to defend troops and positions. I'll tell you right now, it would last about 10 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine. What many people don't realize is the sheer volume of drones being used in some of the battles along the front—it's not hundreds, but thousands. Trenches are being abandoned, and everyone is going underground. Ground drones can’t even be sent in to support front line troops anymore, as vehicles are taken out within minutes. This is a weapon of last resort, to take out what gets through to the rear. We need front line solutions which don't exist yet.
Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin
>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.
I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.
Technologies are obsoleted at a ridiculous rates during the war. Anyone still remember how HIMARS was supposed to win the war? Indeed it was absolutely fantastic at first, but everyone sort of stopped talking about it. It turns out Russians zoomed in on the weakest spot of these types of weapons - reliance on GPS. As soon as they started jamming that, the effectiveness of a whole slew of those types of weapons went way down. So now there is a whole rush to create anti-jammable GPS technology.
Same thing with drones. They are a game changer but then Russians figured out they can use drones too. Moreover, they were the first ones to field fiber optic drones. Those things are bonkers. As in, if someone told me "this defense company is creating fiber optic drones" I could have bet it's a corruption scheme as the idea just seems to implausible yet here it is, now both sides use them.
Hit their cheap drone with your cheap drone? Seems like mg bullets are cheaper as well. Hook up an mg to a webcam with motion tracking and stick it in a bush. Might not even need sophisticated tracking with sufficient volume of fire.
A faraday foil layer will save electronics and shielded cable runs will block air induced pulses. Wired motor coils will tolerate, and fiber optic are immune.
You can even control via IR data using a bidirectional LED with a faraday copper window screen protecting the electronics. The police use a microwave car stopper that uses pulsed EMI.
Just new armor = new chinks = the race continues.
They make conductive spray paint for this sort of thing [1], so it can be applied to the inside cover of electronics. Usual use is targeted application for EMI suppression.
You'll sometimes find a squirt this on the inside of consumer electronics, for a quick radiated emissions compliance fix.
There was a nice video, I've seen at some point where a "DJI Phantom 3 drone gets hit with an electrical impulse of 1.4MV - basically, a lightning strike."
And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...
It's the real deal, lots of challenges with high emf. Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors their controllers which are using back emf to set their waveform phase get it wrong and the motors stop spinning, spin backwards, and sometimes just go back and forth like tiny washing machine motors.
Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.
This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.
[1] https://www.weibelradars.com/drone-detection/
> Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors
No, that doesn't happen. Currents can be induced in the wires to the motors, but not in the motors themselves. For one thing, the outside surface of the motors is the aluminum rotor which is an extremely effective faraday cage. For another, coils don't act like antennas. Loops of wire in an electric field have the exact same voltage difference as a straight wire.
> Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.
Shielding adds virtually zero weight; carrying a spool of fiber optic cable adds a lot of weight. All the drones in Ukraine right now are fiber optic but most of them are unshielded... the reason why is not that shielding is heavy, it's just that there are lots of jammers but very few truck-sized weapons intended to totally disable drones.
That's also assuming it would even work on a drone without an antenna. If these weapons are not relatively broad-spectrum then they will be very sensitive to the particulars of the circuitry, and they won't always work.
For another, coils don't act like antennas
Coiled antennas are fairly common and have been around since at least the 1960s...
But typically with a much smaller number of turns. A motor coil should have a decently high inductance and thus act as an antenna only for pretty low frequencies.
Drone defence (detection and neutralisation) has to move fast because it’s quite asymmetric warfare (i.e drone worth $4K and take out a tank worth $30m) - over the last week for many nights Denmark’s airports and military installations has had drones disrupt air traffic and cause a lot of angst in the population and they were completely not prepared, haven’t wanted to shoot them down, and they don’t know where they’re coming from or where they’re going - scary that they’re caught so much on the back foot
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-25/denmark-defence-minis...
Why don’t they want to shoot them down?
Bullets are spin-stabilized: if you shoot at something in the air and miss, the bullet will generally still be lethal when it eventually returns to the ground. That’s a no-no in densely populated areas.
Shooting at flying things in densely populated areas is generally a bad idea because when you miss, whatever ammunition you used falls on somebody on the ground. And if you hit, the debris falls on someone on the ground.
This seems like an ideal application of the electrolaser. This was an ultraviolet laser that would ionize a channel through air and then a high voltage pulse could be sent over that channel to a target. Originally they were talking about this being like a long range taser as a non-lethal stun weapon, but maybe more suited for anti-drone technology.
I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
This article is sparse on details.
How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
> How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?
1 millisecond pulses and 70 kW continuous usage[1] which is roughly equivalent to the AN/TPQ-53[2]. 2 km range.
> Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.
That is not how this kind of thing works. Capacitors are a terrible energy source. Their voltage drops off exponentially as they discharge and almost all electronic are very particular about the voltage they require. A railgun wants current and does not care about voltage. Radio transmitters care a lot about voltage.
Regardless, a 70 kW generator fits on a small trailer. Smaller than the weapon itself. It will run for days on a good sized tank of diesel.
[1] https://www.twz.com/land/army-puts-50m-bet-on-next-gen-leoni...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPQ-53_Quick_Reaction_Capab...
I was wondering the same thing, but haven't found much. Sounds like it's only ever been a mobile installation - on a trailer, stryker, and a ship. Except for the ship, that probably means a relatively limited power supply. And its limited range probably means that stationary installations don't make much sense.
Sure seems like NATO would love to get a hold of some of these.
Potentially collateral damage too. You zapped some drones 100 yards away, but what about that airplane a couple miles out?
> what about that airplane a couple miles out?
Are these Masars? If not, square cubed to the rescue.
Lasers and masers are not inherently collimated or straight lines. The only thing specific to lasers/masers is that all the light is the same wavelength. Beam, parabolic and phased antennas are all very capable of making much tighter beams than your average laser.
In fact at the limits of performance lasers (and particularly masers) are quite bad at generating straight beams, because they are quite small sources of light and divergence is inversely proportional to the width of the emitter. It is a misconception that they are low-etendue.
Lasers are coherent emitters, which means that they behave like a perfect point source and the beam forming is limited only by diffraction. The collimation is limited only by the lens diameter and quality.
Cruising altitude is ~40k feet or 12 km and the range of the weapon is 2km. The system only works because of all the exposed wiring on quadcopters; everything in a plane is enclosed in a highly conductive aluminum shell and is very well protected. The windows are large enough to let in microwaves, but not very well. Some antennas might be in danger but in general planes are built to survive lighting. It would be a real freak accident for something to break.
I wonder if this will work with fibre-optic drones.
Probably would work once or twice, and then some kid will notice copper foil tape makes great Faraday shields. Hams already do this cage technique all the time to help lower the noise floor on cheap equipment.
Probably better off with #12 or #9 bird shot shells, or a cool pet falcon named Xavier. =3
Anything with a power supply and a radio receiver has some susceptibility.
No radio on fiber drones, but anything electronic is effected. Truly effective shielding gets heavy, and cuts the payload and range significantly.
yes because it attacks the coils in the motors.
Would this be safe for e.g. birds?
The starting cost for a drone show is around $20k USD, so it wouldn't be hard to fake what they are doing. It's hard to say if this a functioning system that can take down drone swarms, or someone is testing the market for a system that can.
That seems a lot more complicated than simply using cheap unshielded drones against an ineffective weapon, but I guess it's possible
They’re selling defence equipment to countries, it wouldn’t help their cause if this is just smoke and mirrors. It either works or it doesn’t.
Hasn't stopped Boeing
It's a cool demo but I'm pretty sure if this become widely deployed, enemies would just start to wrap drones in copper tape or something to make this far less effective.
Won't this be pretty easy to defend against with some shielding and optocouplers? Doubly so for fiber optic drones.
This type of weapon reflects the West's approach to drone warfare—multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment that will need to be right on the front line to defend troops and positions. I'll tell you right now, it would last about 10 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine. What many people don't realize is the sheer volume of drones being used in some of the battles along the front—it's not hundreds, but thousands. Trenches are being abandoned, and everyone is going underground. Ground drones can’t even be sent in to support front line troops anymore, as vehicles are taken out within minutes. This is a weapon of last resort, to take out what gets through to the rear. We need front line solutions which don't exist yet.
Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin
>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.
I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.
Technologies are obsoleted at a ridiculous rates during the war. Anyone still remember how HIMARS was supposed to win the war? Indeed it was absolutely fantastic at first, but everyone sort of stopped talking about it. It turns out Russians zoomed in on the weakest spot of these types of weapons - reliance on GPS. As soon as they started jamming that, the effectiveness of a whole slew of those types of weapons went way down. So now there is a whole rush to create anti-jammable GPS technology.
Same thing with drones. They are a game changer but then Russians figured out they can use drones too. Moreover, they were the first ones to field fiber optic drones. Those things are bonkers. As in, if someone told me "this defense company is creating fiber optic drones" I could have bet it's a corruption scheme as the idea just seems to implausible yet here it is, now both sides use them.
Hit their cheap drone with your cheap drone? Seems like mg bullets are cheaper as well. Hook up an mg to a webcam with motion tracking and stick it in a bush. Might not even need sophisticated tracking with sufficient volume of fire.
A faraday foil layer will save electronics and shielded cable runs will block air induced pulses. Wired motor coils will tolerate, and fiber optic are immune. You can even control via IR data using a bidirectional LED with a faraday copper window screen protecting the electronics. The police use a microwave car stopper that uses pulsed EMI. Just new armor = new chinks = the race continues.
They make conductive spray paint for this sort of thing [1], so it can be applied to the inside cover of electronics. Usual use is targeted application for EMI suppression.
You'll sometimes find a squirt this on the inside of consumer electronics, for a quick radiated emissions compliance fix.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/stores/MGChemicals/page/0ADAC495-496D...
This feels like a weird counterpart to the can of plasti-dip spray in my garage.
Combine those with the more-common juxtaposition of WD-40 versus duct-tape, and one can probably summon something eldritch.
Claims show it disabling many small, largely unhardened drones; they do not prove it can defeat a properly shielded electronics bay.
There was a nice video, I've seen at some point where a "DJI Phantom 3 drone gets hit with an electrical impulse of 1.4MV - basically, a lightning strike."
And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3iJjrQmEho
> they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding
That's not what happened in the video! Per the comments:
"I was really hoping the conductive tape lightning rod was going to work, but no."