A Desert Hawk being launched from a WMIK Land Rover
The Desert Hawk III is a battery-powered small drone in service with the British Army. It was developed by Lockheed Martin in 2002 and has been through a number of upgrades.The drone is hand-launched and can fly for around one hour with a radius of around fifteen kilometres. In April 2020 the MoD reported that there were 229 Desert Hawk III drones held by UK armed forces, with around a total of £70 million spent on the system.
The FLIR Black Hornet 3 Personal Reconnaissance System is a nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — so small, you can hardly see it, but oh so big when it comes to surveillance.
It’s extremely light, about the size of a cellphone, nearly silent and can fly up to 25 minutes — but most importantly, it can locate the enemy and provide a distinct military advantage in combat.
Below are my 28mm Empress Miniatures equivalents:
Really like those- any idea how you are going to implement them in a set of rules?
Cheers,
Pete.
Even if you have a UAV model this does not mean it will be available every turn. This only occurs on a D6 roll of 5+. If a drone is present you can automatically PID insurgent forces, making it easier to engage them without creating a “Charlie Foxtrot” event role for hitting civilians etc. Otherwise you can only PID forces if you come within range or the insurgents shoot at you. UAV’s can therefor be very powerful and allow ISAF forces to use their overwhelming fire power effectively.
Sorry Pete forgot to add that there are “attack” UAV’s that can be used like any other off-table heavy support, but because they are guided are more accurate. Again you need to PID the enemy beforehand or you are tempting political fate.
That sounds pretty good to me. At what level were the drones deployed? I know that the USMC has recently reorganised its basic squad to include a drone operator but having 1 drone per squad seems a lot to me. Especially if the platoon commander is getting 3x feeds too as well as intel from high level assests….
Cheers,
Pete.
Once you have chosen your standard force of grunts there is only limited “points” for the purchase of other supports.
We find that this tends to limit the purchase of lot’s of funnies. As we are concentrating on small unit actions we do not want lots of theater level support options.
From a game design viewpoint the objective was to allow players to choose whatever support options they felt they needed to achieve their mission, but to limit this by the use of points to purchase these. Often you are choosing between IED detection, PID options, off table support like mortars, heavy machine guns, a sniper or Javelins (or the like). Note as the table is representing a maximum of 300 to 500 metres even snipers are an off table support. Snipers also assist with PID so can be a useful dual option support.
FYI
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06493/SN06493.pdf
I did not answer at what level drones are deployed. There limited numbers of drones and all have various capacities and these determine their level of deployment. There is no one size fits all.
The latest designed for the AIF can be fired from standard 40mm grenade launchers and are therefore deployed at squad level. These Drone 40’s from DefendTex have recently been deployed in Mali by British forces.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38909/british-troops-get-small-swarming-drones-they-can-fire-from-40mm-grenade-launchers
Thanks for that extra detail- have downloaded the pdf and will give it a read through.
Cheers,
Pete.
Nice models there, Dave! 🙂
Thanks John.
Those are very, very cool, thanks for sharing this.
Cheers Roger.
Thanks Roger