Older systems are known to struggle with drones, but swapping out single solid rounds for something that fragments like FLAK, such that the system can spew a cloud of metal instead of a stream, feels like it would do well against drones.

The whole point of FLAK is AOE, but the more precise your automatic targeting, the less of that you need, so I feel like some middle ground is likely to emerge.

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Definitely, however a major advantage of flak over solid rounds (especially with modern automatic range finding and programmable munitions) is that it's a very easy and cheap way to turn a 1 m miss on that 30 cm drone at 1 km distance into a hit.

The weapons shooting these munitions typically shoot anything from 12.7 mm to 30-40 mm munitions, while even bird shot is enough to take out a drone. With that in mind, there's really no reason to not make that 30 mm shell fragment into a dispersed cloud of bird shot that would barely harm a plane, since it makes it so much easier to take out the thousands of drones attacking you. Whenever the occasional heavier target shows up, you can just disable the fragmentation effect (programmable munitions) and you basically have a CIWS.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 points 4 months ago

Exactly.

Or if you really need to save, have two ammo feeds.