Fly and Fight!

Man had barely learned to fly when he decided to both fly and fight. This is an opening sentence of an excellent article about the early history of air wars during WWI.

https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/machine-guns-take-flight-during-the-great-war/

Substituting “Man” with “AI” in the opening sentence, on the other hand, you bring history forward by more than a century to today’s battle fields, where small UAVs are having a field day virtually everyday spying, bombing and disturbingly suiciding, for example in Ukraine. These robot flyers are doing exactly what their manned counterparts were doing in the previous European trench war 100 years ago. With this historical parallel in mind, one may ask: “Where are the dogfighting little birds (drones)?”

It turns out that they may have gotten knocked down, so to speak, from the sky by recoil. That is the recoil of machine guns. Take the infamous Russian Orlan-10 as an example. The small Orlan weighs 15 kg, has a 5 kg payload capacity and is effective for spying or electronic support and warfare missions. It can stay in the air continuously for 16 hours, powered by a small engine generating about 1 HP.  That is a pitifully weak engine when compared to what is generally available to a manned airplane (easily in the hundreds and thousands HP).

Relative to machine guns, even the little 9mm Glock pistol generates about 1/4 - 1/3 HP of recoil in full auto blasting, for example. Clearly, the small UAV can be easily overpowered by machine gun recoil, especially of more powerful calibers. As a result, the poor little drone will have difficulty struggling to stay in the air during automatic shooting, let alone hitting a target any meaningful distance away with its gunfire.

There are brilliant techniques being developed by some innovative companies trying to manage the recoil. Even with that, there is still a lot of powerful recoil for a small bird to swallow and no easy way of getting around Physics. Alternatively, though, perhaps a good solution to a problem is just not having the problem and therefore a good way to deal with a gun recoil problem could just be a machine gun having zero-recoil.

Will a zero-recoil machine gun help a little bird (drone) dogfight in the air, not in a computer game but in the real world?

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