EPTOn September 15 2026 22:32 Simberto wrote:
Have you seen images of German cities at the end of WW2? Here is the city center of my home town in 1945:
![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/USAAF_Hannover_Innenstadt_1945.jpg?utm_source=de.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original)
You want more air defense than that.
I guess it mostly depends what you want them to actually do. It sounds reasonable that with enough guns, you can protect an area quite well.
But if we do the numbers for something like the Ukraine war, you'd need a lot of those things, and most won't really do anything. The frontline is about 1000 km long. You probably need another 1000 km on borders to the sea or Belarus. So lets say you want to cover 2000 km. You probably don't want your guns 8 km apart, lets say 4 for some overlap. That is 500 guns you need to cover the frontline in a single file.
But Russia only needs to blow up a single one of them to get in and get drones into lots of undefended land to wreak havoc. You can have even more guns around every single important target, but there are a lot of important targets.
I think they may be part of a good air defense system, but i also doubt that there is any kind of silver bullet for this. I also think there is probably a good reason no one is currently using that kind of system, because the people who run this war are infinitely more knowledgable about it than i am.
Have you seen images of German cities at the end of WW2? Here is the city center of my home town in 1945:
You want more air defense than that.
I guess it mostly depends what you want them to actually do. It sounds reasonable that with enough guns, you can protect an area quite well.
But if we do the numbers for something like the Ukraine war, you'd need a lot of those things, and most won't really do anything. The frontline is about 1000 km long. You probably need another 1000 km on borders to the sea or Belarus. So lets say you want to cover 2000 km. You probably don't want your guns 8 km apart, lets say 4 for some overlap. That is 500 guns you need to cover the frontline in a single file.
But Russia only needs to blow up a single one of them to get in and get drones into lots of undefended land to wreak havoc. You can have even more guns around every single important target, but there are a lot of important targets.
I think they may be part of a good air defense system, but i also doubt that there is any kind of silver bullet for this. I also think there is probably a good reason no one is currently using that kind of system, because the people who run this war are infinitely more knowledgable about it than i am.
One B28 bomber is roughly 36 Gerans worth of payload, but of course much cheaper because of bombs and a reusable bomber. To level a city you need a *lot* of drones.
There is no need to cover everything with air defences. You put them up well behind your lines to cover mid level logistics and important targets, not the entire front.
My point was mainly that a WWII flak gun can be produced in large quantities and has the range to deal with jet powered drones.
Ukraine did very well with their mobile units which were just 50 caliber machine guns on trucks against the slow and low flying drones.
Russia adapted with faster and higher flying drones. It raises the cost significantly but makes the gun trucks much worse (can't intercept en route even if they pass straight over, harder to hit on the terminal strike).
The flak gun is just the ground based gun evolved.
Given the success of things like the Gepard and Skyranger I absolutely think we will start seeing flak based AA tried out. If Russia full commits on jet drones I think it could be one of the solutions.
