Flights of fury: Drones clash in the skies over Ukraine

The war in Ukraine, unlike any other before, has become an arena for drone combat, taking forms that were recently considered theoretical. One of these is the use of drones to ram other drones.

Drones in Ukraine are used for various tasks, the most important being battlefield surveillance and guiding their artillery to detect enemy positions.

The second most popular task is kinetic attacks on vehicles or individual soldiers, carried out by one-acre FPV drones or reusable heavier bombing constructions known as "Baba Yaga".

The need for a cheap and effective method of combating drones has arisen. The simplest method is electronic warfare systems, which, depending on their power and complexity, can create a bubble with a diameter of tens of yards or even a few miles where the drone's control signal is unavailable.

However, this solution has flaws because if the opponent changes the control signal frequency or develops attacking drones offline, jammers can become useless. This has already happened. A more reliable method is the physical elimination of the drone, which is difficult to achieve at a low cost.

For vehicles, a good solution is an automatic cannon with programmable ammunition and a sound target detection system such as Skynex or the Polish "Monster from Tarnow." These systems are, however, expensive and very scarce in Ukraine. On a lesser scale, there are personal equipment options for soldiers, such as weapon modules like SMASH, which effectively eliminate drones at distances of 220-550 yards, depending on the calibre of the firearm.

These solutions are also not very widespread. Principally, the most available weapon in Ukraine is the smoothbore shotgun, which, with standard ammunition, allows for shooting down drones at a distance of up to 33-44 yards. The situation improves with new anti-drone ammunition, which increases the range to about 110 yards.

However, this is still not enough, and the question remains: how can a drone located, for example, 880 yards away be cheaply eliminated? It turns out that a decent method is to use one drone to get rid of an opponent's drone. When successfully rammed, this drone can destroy the rotor blades of the target, causing it to crash, as demonstrated in the video below.