Here we have the latest Ukrainian drones resistant to Russian countermeasures.[1] There are Japanese drones able to not only survive lightning strikes, but guide them.[2]
Because the Russia-Ukraine war is so active, drones that can survive RF weapons can be expected essentially immediately. Ukraine fields a new generation of drones every three months. They have to.
You're talking about comms jamming, which has been mostly useless in Ukraine for some time now. Leonidas appears to use directed EMI upset of digital circuits as a mechanism. No existing quadcopter design is immune. And while designing an immune drone is possible, it will be an entirely different cost proposition.
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.
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
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.
I does seem like a lot of stuff is needed. He's got 2 tons of capacitors in a stack 20 feet tall to get around 35 feet of range. He although he says:
"I was surprised at just how fast the plasma cannon range scaled with increasing drive voltage and how much explosive force the shock wave can deliver to target the data suggests that a plasma cannon with just a 30t high Marx Tower could achieve 1/4 mile range"
I know military contractors will have 3 or more orders of magnitude more money to throw at their technology demos, but I suspect there's some cold hard physics which shows it's totally impractical to defend anything more then very small high value targets with a system like that.
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 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.
NATO needs to start working on more low-tech high volume solutions.
The Netherlands and Germany used to have old anti-air systems that were basically a tank undercarriage with a radar and two rapid fire machine guns. It was a system from the 1960s. Ineffective against fighter jets since those fly higher than the range of the guns, but a modern version of this would be cost effective against low tech drones.
You could build something like it using an existing armoured personnel carrier, fast movable gun and a modern radar sensor. It would be helpless against jets or tanks, but I think the way to use it would be to have high-tech air defense systems shoot the jets (with very expensive missiles) at long range and use these glorified air guns to shoot the drones at much closer range.
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.
Because this is all what they have - a fictional dramatization meant to impress layman decision makers into buying a tremendously expensive system that'll never be viable.
This would've worked in a world with no major conflict where the main enemy was a fictional one dreamed up by them to be especially vulnerable to the sort of system they make but we don't live in that world.
You have to consider that they assume that the enemy uses the standard online forum strategy of swarming the drones.
If you have enough drones for a swarm, you'd realize that losing some of them to figure out the enemies' anti air defense range would be a viable strategy, which means you'll stop swarming them.
Shit you can do when your target audience isn't "people in general", which is #1 reason why modern ads are so bland and boring. Also, I assume they're not trying to sell a specific product here, but rather an idea that someone can later invest in.
Speak of microwave anti-drone weapons, YouTube channel Tech Ingredients made one with microwave oven parts: https://youtu.be/V6XdcWToy2c?t=1298
At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.
Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.
Generally, if a motor desyncs, you need to reboot the ESC. It's very hard for the drone to take off again, though, as stuff on the ground tends to tangle up in the motors.
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.
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.
Epirus makes some good stuff from what I hear. Its use cases are limited though. Its another exquisite system. This means it will be high cost and low volume.
Sure bases and high value assets will have great protection. They already do. Stinger missiles (1 example) have been able to hit quads since the day quads took to the air. The cost asymmetry (150k+ vs 1k) means they are rarely used so you have to let most drone threats go.
The opening days of the Ukraine war showed that all you need to do to stop an army is tale out its undefended logistics tail. Fuel trucks, water, ammo, food, etc. These need to be protected also, and exquisite system like Epirus wont be part of these convoys.
Another take away from Ukraine is the lay-in-wait tactic where drones sit near the road hidden and wait for you to come by. The Epirus system (and most of the other cUAS systems) are not able to help. You are probably over a slight hill, hidden by trees, or too close to the danger zone where a bigger system would also destroy you.
Basically everything and everyone has to have a means of engaging these threats. It must be cheap (cost per kill including the initial system purchase), easy to use, and widely available.
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...
A gutted microwave oven and a satellite tv dish have been demonstrated to disable DJI drones at ranges exceeding 500m - either having them fall out of he sky or trigger return to home. That's broadband jamming on the 2.4GHz radio frequencies though, not sending enough energy to screw with electronic (apart from the sensitive radio receiver frontends).
(This was original DJI Phantom era, so maybe 10 years or so back. I'm not aware of results of similar testing against newer DJI gear, but I doubt it'd be much different, at least for consumer DJI stuff.)
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
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.
> "Epirus has improved on previous iterations by using Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors to generate microwaves instead of fragile, power-hungry magnetron vacuum tubes"
Presumably this technology could also be used to make more efficient and powerful microwave ovens. Have any consumer appliance makers started using GaN semiconductors in their microwaves?
Varying the phase between multiple antennae can enable the field distribution inside the oven to be intelligently controlled to achieve homogeneous cooking results. Furthermore, by modifying the frequency and phase to match the food in the oven, very high RF energy delivery efficiency can be attained – above 90% even for small loads.
It has been demonstrated how a steak can be cooked on the same plate as ice cream without it melting, showing the precision of the directed RF energy. In practice, one gets outstanding control over internal meat temperature, with a tight tolerance of just one degree Celsius. Therefore, food can be cooked automatically, and one simply specifies the steak “doneness” level, for example, medium rare; and the oven will measure the food’s properties and calculate the required settings. Without having to manually enter the power levels, cooking is more predictable, and the interface more user-friendly
A consumer version is e.g. the Miele Dialog oven, costing $10K
Probably not enough margin in microwaves ovens to justify putting GaN stuff in it yet. Maybe for premium products. Bigger volume! Silent operation! More efficient!
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.
[+] [-] Animats|5 months ago|reply
Because the Russia-Ukraine war is so active, drones that can survive RF weapons can be expected essentially immediately. Ukraine fields a new generation of drones every three months. They have to.
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-tests-new-kamikaze-drone...
[2] https://dailygalaxy.com/2025/04/japan-has-successfully-used-...
[+] [-] varjag|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] russfink|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 months ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] hwillis|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bob1029|5 months ago|reply
The longer pulses the in this platform seem to be a big part of delivering effect on target. Area under the curve is where the damage happens.
[+] [-] checker659|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel_iversen|5 months ago|reply
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-25/denmark-defence-minis...
[+] [-] imglorp|5 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bigiain|5 months ago|reply
I does seem like a lot of stuff is needed. He's got 2 tons of capacitors in a stack 20 feet tall to get around 35 feet of range. He although he says:
"I was surprised at just how fast the plasma cannon range scaled with increasing drive voltage and how much explosive force the shock wave can deliver to target the data suggests that a plasma cannon with just a 30t high Marx Tower could achieve 1/4 mile range"
I know military contractors will have 3 or more orders of magnitude more money to throw at their technology demos, but I suspect there's some cold hard physics which shows it's totally impractical to defend anything more then very small high value targets with a system like that.
[+] [-] sleepyguy|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rdtsc|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] t0mas88|5 months ago|reply
The Netherlands and Germany used to have old anti-air systems that were basically a tank undercarriage with a radar and two rapid fire machine guns. It was a system from the 1960s. Ineffective against fighter jets since those fly higher than the range of the guns, but a modern version of this would be cost effective against low tech drones.
You could build something like it using an existing armoured personnel carrier, fast movable gun and a modern radar sensor. It would be helpless against jets or tanks, but I think the way to use it would be to have high-tech air defense systems shoot the jets (with very expensive missiles) at long range and use these glorified air guns to shoot the drones at much closer range.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] varenc|5 months ago|reply
It's an over the top promotional video that feels like it's out of movie. Must have cost them plenty to make it. It's like porn for military gear.
Fascinating to me that making content like that presumably helps them sell.
[+] [-] torginus|5 months ago|reply
This would've worked in a world with no major conflict where the main enemy was a fictional one dreamed up by them to be especially vulnerable to the sort of system they make but we don't live in that world.
[+] [-] imtringued|5 months ago|reply
If you have enough drones for a swarm, you'd realize that losing some of them to figure out the enemies' anti air defense range would be a viable strategy, which means you'll stop swarming them.
[+] [-] trcf22|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] michelb|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CommenterPerson|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anal_reactor|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nirui|5 months ago|reply
At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.
Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.
[+] [-] stavros|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] decker|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] g-mork|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sheepscreek|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] miketery|5 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hwillis|5 months ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] WastedCucumber|5 months ago|reply
Sure seems like NATO would love to get a hold of some of these.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dismalpedigree|5 months ago|reply
Sure bases and high value assets will have great protection. They already do. Stinger missiles (1 example) have been able to hit quads since the day quads took to the air. The cost asymmetry (150k+ vs 1k) means they are rarely used so you have to let most drone threats go.
The opening days of the Ukraine war showed that all you need to do to stop an army is tale out its undefended logistics tail. Fuel trucks, water, ammo, food, etc. These need to be protected also, and exquisite system like Epirus wont be part of these convoys.
Another take away from Ukraine is the lay-in-wait tactic where drones sit near the road hidden and wait for you to come by. The Epirus system (and most of the other cUAS systems) are not able to help. You are probably over a slight hill, hidden by trees, or too close to the danger zone where a bigger system would also destroy you.
Basically everything and everyone has to have a means of engaging these threats. It must be cheap (cost per kill including the initial system purchase), easy to use, and widely available.
[+] [-] startupsfail|5 months ago|reply
And at the end, they were able to protect the drone, with a tiny bit of shielding...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3iJjrQmEho
[+] [-] password4321|5 months ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] bigiain|5 months ago|reply
(This was original DJI Phantom era, so maybe 10 years or so back. I'm not aware of results of similar testing against newer DJI gear, but I doubt it'd be much different, at least for consumer DJI stuff.)
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|5 months ago|reply
Probably better off with #12 or #9 bird shot shells, or a cool pet falcon named Xavier. =3
[+] [-] anonymousiam|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ra|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bumseltagbaerbi|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] burnt-resistor|5 months ago|reply
Fiber lasers can direct 10's-100's of kW of power almost continuously and with a range of several km with proper optics:
https://youtu.be/BkbVeA4Lejc
https://youtu.be/lFMvesTUjAA
https://youtu.be/eFiDYFnlp7s
[+] [-] aurizon|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|5 months ago|reply
Presumably this technology could also be used to make more efficient and powerful microwave ovens. Have any consumer appliance makers started using GaN semiconductors in their microwaves?
[+] [-] WithinReason|5 months ago|reply
Varying the phase between multiple antennae can enable the field distribution inside the oven to be intelligently controlled to achieve homogeneous cooking results. Furthermore, by modifying the frequency and phase to match the food in the oven, very high RF energy delivery efficiency can be attained – above 90% even for small loads.
It has been demonstrated how a steak can be cooked on the same plate as ice cream without it melting, showing the precision of the directed RF energy. In practice, one gets outstanding control over internal meat temperature, with a tight tolerance of just one degree Celsius. Therefore, food can be cooked automatically, and one simply specifies the steak “doneness” level, for example, medium rare; and the oven will measure the food’s properties and calculate the required settings. Without having to manually enter the power levels, cooking is more predictable, and the interface more user-friendly
A consumer version is e.g. the Miele Dialog oven, costing $10K
[+] [-] nico_h|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] siliconc0w|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] henearkr|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AuthAuth|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theearling|5 months ago|reply