Drone killer

Anyone remember a much less expensive ’80s sci-fi movie called “The Last Starfighter”? Fun movie in which a kid from a trailer park discovers that the Space-Invader-type game in his trailer park is actually a recruiting tool for an intergalactic war when he gets recruited for one of the sides – and then becomes the sole defense against the bad guy’s armada. Lance Guest stars, the recruiter Centauri is played by Robert Preston in one of his last roles, Barbara Bosson (Steven Bochco’s then-wife) is his mom, and Dan O’Herlihy his lizard weapons officer. (In one of the best lines of any movie ever, O’Herlihy is referred to as a “gung-ho iguana”.) The  crucial weapon is the Death Star, which kills dozens of foes within seconds.

Wouldn’t that be cool if we had something like that, like to counter-act these drone swarm we keep hearing about? It’s nice to say “my old Mossy/870/etc. would kill one of ’em easy”, and maybe inside 40-50 yards it would. But what if the baddies armed it, with a range of say 250 meters? What if there are 100 of them at a time? I don’t care if you can shoot like Jerry Miculek, you are in some deep doodoo.  Enter a new toy: The Leonidas AR.

I know I don’t have to explain the name Leonidas, the AR stands for Autonomous Robot.

Anti-drone weaponry has become a major subset of military development, with specialized weapons seeking to target a drone’s weak points rather than fight them like manned aircraft. The Leonidas AR is such a weapon developed by Epirus and General Dynamics Land Systems. Instead of wasting bullets and explosives to knock enemy drones out of the sky, this weapon is designed to precision-target their vulnerable internal circuitry, instantly knocking them out and rendering them inoperable.

Drones have been vulnerable to electronic attacks like meaconing, jamming (look up MIJI) . Some have gone to fiber-optic controls, some have to be preprogrammed to hit X before they take off, all in the effort to make them unassailable by the enemy’s countermeasures – the Leonidas is taking another tack. Regardless of how it’s guided, the drone has to have electronics on board, right?

The Leonidas AR is made up of two major components produced by its parent companies. From General Dynamics Land Systems, we have the Tracked Robot 10-Ton (TRX), an exceptionally hefty autonomous vehicle made to roll around unstable terrain on equally hefty tank treads. That vehicle is equipped with the titular Leonidas weapon developed by Epirus, a high-powered microwave weapon.

In a nutshell, the Leonidas AR takes aim at incoming unmanned vehicles and aircraft and fires off an invisible pulse of powerful, high-pulse microwave energy. The microwaves don’t affect the targets externally, but instead target their sensitive internal circuitry, flash-frying them in an instant.

Think of your old Boy Scout flashlight (that L-shaped double D-celled turd the Army issued) and compare it with a high-powered laser. Now do the same thing with your kitchen’s microwave –  make it multiple orders of magnitude stronger, and more importantly, focused tightly. What I come up envisioning  is a focused EMP weapon.

In a promo video posted on the Epirus YouTube channel, we can see a demonstration of the Leonidas’ efficacy on a large swarm of remote drones in various shapes and sizes. The weapon fires completely silently, and in a single second, every single drone falls right out of the sky, completely disabled.

Operators of the weapon can also fine-tune its frequency and firing range to prevent any kind of interference with allied drones and weaponry, and with its 360-degree radar, it can detect most incoming threats and even target them autonomously if an operator isn’t available. BGR

Here’s hoping it can fulfill its promise. Must look like a Hollywood special effect to see all that burned-out equipment falling out of the sky like a bad movie.

Category: Science and Technology