New American Anti-Drone Gun
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עברית (Hebrew)
The US continues to search the best, most efficient platform to intercept drones entering its territory and protect its border.
Engineers at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey successfully concluded a demonstration of its new anti-UAV platform recently by blowing a pair of airborne drones clean out of the sky from a kilometer away. However, unlike other anti-drone weapons like the Phalanx or C-RAM systems which throw walls of hot, explosive lead at incoming threats; or the laser-based HEL-MD, this new weapon takes a more old-school approach: very large bullets.
The as-of-yet unnamed weapon has been temporarily dubbed the EAPS ARDEC gun. It employs a pair of 50mm Bushmaster cannons mounted atop a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT). These batteries fire 10-round bursts of unpowered steel projectiles wrapped in a tantalum-tungsten alloy liner that shred inbound UAVs, mortars and rockets.
Each projectile can be passively steered while in flight using a radar command signal to ensure that it hits. In order to minimize the electronics on board the interceptor and to make it cheaper, all the ‘smarts’ computations are done on the ground, and the radio frequency sends the information up to the round.
The final demonstration occurred on August 19 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. During the demo, the system shot down two Griffon Outlaw drones. The gun is still in its prototyping stage though ARDEC is looking into adapting the technology into future weapons systems. Perhaps the next level in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles will be a airborne protective systems, to shield against all those missiles and bullets threatening to shoot down these flying infiltrators.
