Skyranger 30

Based on Wikipedia: Skyranger 30

For decades after the Berlin Wall fell, Western armies made a peculiar gamble. They dismantled their mobile air defense systems—the radar-guided guns and missiles that protected ground troops from aircraft—betting that they would never again face enemies who could seriously threaten them from the sky. It was, in hindsight, a staggeringly optimistic assumption.

The bet seemed reasonable at the time. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Who else could mount a credible air threat against NATO forces? And so, country after country sold off or scrapped their anti-aircraft vehicles. The skills to operate them atrophied. The institutional knowledge faded.

Then came the drones.

A Rude Awakening in the Caucasus

In the autumn of 2020, a brief but brutal war erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It lasted just forty-four days, but it rewrote military doctrine worldwide. Azerbaijani forces, equipped with Turkish and Israeli drones, systematically annihilated Armenian armor, artillery, and air defenses. Videos of drone strikes—clinical, devastating, inescapable—flooded social media.

Military planners in Berlin, Washington, and a dozen other capitals watched in horror. The drones hunting Armenian soldiers weren't sophisticated stealth aircraft requiring billion-dollar countermeasures. Many were essentially hobbyist quadcopters strapped with explosives. Others were "loitering munitions"—patient, circling killers that waited for the perfect moment to dive onto their targets.

The Western armies that had stripped away their mobile air defenses suddenly faced a terrifying gap in their capabilities. They had invested heavily in defending against sophisticated threats like cruise missiles and stealth fighters. But against swarms of cheap drones? Against commercially available quadcopters? They had almost nothing.

The Swiss Response

Enter Rheinmetall Air Defence AG, a Swiss company with roots stretching back to the legendary Oerlikon gun works. Oerlikon—the name alone carries weight in military circles. During World War II, Oerlikon's twenty-millimeter cannons defended ships of nearly every navy in the conflict, on both sides. The company had spent decades refining the art of shooting things out of the sky.

In 2018, even before the Nagorno-Karabakh war made the drone threat impossible to ignore, two engineers at Rheinmetall Air Defence—Michael Gerber and Moritz Vischer—began sketching a new weapon system. Gerber brought experience from developing earlier anti-aircraft systems. Vischer dove deep into the mathematics: What caliber of ammunition could reliably destroy small drones? At what range? How heavy could the turret be while still fitting on commonly available military vehicles?

The answers pointed toward a thirty-millimeter cannon. This represented a deliberate step down from Rheinmetall's existing Skyranger 35, which used a larger thirty-five-millimeter gun. The smaller cannon meant a lighter turret—weighing between two and two-and-a-half tonnes instead of something heavier—which opened up possibilities.

A lighter turret could mount on lighter vehicles. It could also carry additional weapons alongside the main gun: missiles for longer-range threats, perhaps even lasers for the cheap drones that weren't worth expensive ammunition.

The Heart of the Beast

At the center of the Skyranger 30 sits the Oerlikon KCE cannon, a weapon with an unexpected ancestry. Its parent, the Oerlikon KCA, served as the gun on Sweden's Saab 37 Viggen fighter jet during the Cold War. Adapting an aircraft cannon for ground use might seem counterintuitive, but it makes a certain brutal sense. Aircraft guns must be lightweight, reliable, and capable of firing in any orientation—exactly the qualities you want when tracking a maneuvering drone.

The KCE spits out 1,250 rounds per minute. That's nearly twenty-one rounds every second, a buzzing stream of destruction that can walk across the sky toward a target. But raw volume of fire isn't the weapon's real trick.

The ammunition is where things get interesting. Each thirty-millimeter shell contains what the industry calls "programmable airburst" technology. The fire control computer calculates exactly when the shell should detonate—not on impact, but at a precise point in space where the target will be. An instant before that moment, the shell explodes, releasing a cloud of tungsten cylinders. The current ammunition carries 162 of these dense metal fragments. A newer version in development will pack around 500.

Imagine trying to fly through an expanding sphere of supersonic tungsten pellets. You don't need a direct hit. You just need to be close.

The Turret That Thinks

A modern air defense system is far more than a gun. The Skyranger 30 integrates its weapon with a sophisticated sensor suite designed to find, track, and engage targets with minimal human intervention.

The search radar—an Active Electronically Scanned Array, or AESA, which means it can steer its beam electronically rather than mechanically rotating—scans the sky continuously. When it detects something suspicious, the system hands off to the optical tracker: a combination of thermal camera, high-definition television camera, and laser rangefinder. The thermal camera can spot the heat signature of a drone's motor or the warm body of a helicopter against the cold sky. The television camera provides visual confirmation. The laser measures distance with precision.

All of this connects to the fire control computer, which calculates trajectories, predicts where the target will be when the shells arrive, and programs each round's airburst timing as it leaves the barrel. The entire engagement sequence—detect, track, identify, engage—can happen in seconds.

The turret operates without anyone inside it. This isn't just a safety feature, though it certainly protects the crew. An unmanned turret can be smaller and lighter, with no need for hatches, vision blocks, or life support. The operators sit in the vehicle below, or potentially in another vehicle entirely, connected by secure data links.

When Bullets Aren't Enough

A thirty-millimeter cannon can engage targets out to about three kilometers. That's roughly two miles—a decent range, but not enough against every threat. Cruise missiles travel fast. Armed helicopters can launch their own missiles from beyond cannon range. And what about truly massive drone swarms, where you might need to engage dozens of targets in quick succession?

The Skyranger 30's lighter weight—that design choice Vischer made in the analysis phase—pays dividends here. The turret has room for missiles.

The options read like a catalog of modern air defense weaponry. The FIM-92 Stinger, America's shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile famous for its role in Afghanistan during the 1980s, can mount in a quad-launcher configuration. The French Mistral missile, already in service with several European armies, offers similar capability. For specialized threats like incoming artillery shells or guided munitions, there's the SkyKnight from the United Arab Emirates' Halcon company.

Most intriguing is the MBDA DefendAir, a small missile specifically designed to kill drones. Based on MBDA's Enforcer infantry weapon, it can reach out to five or six kilometers. The turret can carry up to twelve of these compact interceptors. Against a swarm of cheap drones, you'd use the cheap missiles first, saving the expensive cannon ammunition for threats that warrant it.

The economics matter. A single Stinger missile costs over $100,000. Even the smaller DefendAir isn't cheap. But a thirty-millimeter airburst round might cost a few hundred dollars. And a laser—well, a laser costs essentially nothing per shot beyond the electricity.

The Promise of Directed Energy

In late 2021, Rheinmetall unveiled something that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago: the Skyranger 30 High-Energy Laser variant. Instead of (or alongside) the cannon, this version mounts a laser weapon.

The initial system produces twenty kilowatts of power—enough to burn through a drone's composite body or detonate its payload in seconds. Rheinmetall's immediate goal is fifty kilowatts, with an ideal target of one hundred kilowatts. At that power level, the laser could engage hardened targets at significant range.

Why bother with lasers when guns work perfectly well? Three reasons.

First, cost. A laser shot costs a few dollars in electricity. Against a swarm of fifty cheap drones, you could engage all of them for less than the price of a single missile.

Second, depth of magazine. A cannon runs out of ammunition. A laser runs out only when the generator stops producing power or the cooling system fails.

Third, precision. A laser can disable a drone without destroying it—useful if you're not entirely sure whether that quadcopter belongs to an enemy or a confused civilian. The graduated response ladder goes from "disable" to "destroy" without requiring different ammunition types.

Who's Buying

The Skyranger 30 has attracted orders from across Europe, particularly from nations watching the war in Ukraine with growing alarm.

Germany, after years of allowing its military capabilities to atrophy, placed an order for nineteen systems mounted on Boxer armored vehicles. The German configuration will include DefendAir missiles—nine per turret—creating a hybrid system that can engage threats across a wide envelope.

Austria ordered thirty-six systems on Pandur wheeled vehicles, with options for nine more. The Austrians chose to pair their turrets with Mistral missiles, which they already operate as man-portable air defense systems, simplifying logistics and training.

The Netherlands took a particularly interesting approach. Their variant can operate either mounted on an armored vehicle or deployed statically on the ground. This flexibility means the same turret can protect a moving convoy or defend a fixed position like an airfield or command post.

Hungary became the first customer for a tracked version, based on the Lynx infantry fighting vehicle, signing their contract in December 2023. Denmark selected the system for mounting on Piranha wheeled vehicles. Italy is expected to follow with Lynx-based systems of their own.

The Broader Context

The Skyranger 30 represents one answer to a question that militaries worldwide are frantically trying to solve: How do you defend against cheap, numerous, and increasingly autonomous aerial threats?

The old model of air defense assumed relatively few, relatively expensive targets. A squadron of aircraft. A handful of cruise missiles. You could afford to engage each one individually with a dedicated interceptor.

The new threat environment looks different. A single commercial drone costs a few hundred dollars. The Shaheed-type loitering munitions Iran produces and supplies to Russia cost perhaps ten to twenty thousand dollars each—still cheap enough to launch in quantity. Against these swarms, you need something that can engage many targets quickly and economically.

The Skyranger 30's approach—high rate of fire, airburst ammunition, integrated sensors, optional missiles and lasers—represents an attempt to cover the full spectrum. Use the laser against the cheapest threats. Use the cannon against anything more substantial. Save the missiles for the fast movers and the distant targets.

The Technology Race Continues

Meanwhile, Rheinmetall isn't standing still. The company has demonstrated the turret on an M5 Ripsaw uncrewed ground vehicle—a fully autonomous platform that could potentially hunt for drones without any human present. Indonesia has shown interest in mounting the system on locally-produced Pindad Badak vehicles.

Electronic warfare capabilities are under development: sensors to detect the radio signals between drones and their operators, jammers to sever those links without firing a shot. Against the simplest commercial drones, jamming might be the most economical response of all.

The turret itself continues to evolve. Early prototypes included a hatch for a commander to observe the battlefield directly and a coaxial machine gun for close-range self-defense. Production versions have apparently dropped both features, trusting entirely to the cameras and sensors—a telling indication of how much confidence engineers now place in electronic eyes over human ones.

Learning From History

There's a certain historical irony in all of this. During World War II, the Swiss firm Oerlikon made its name producing anti-aircraft guns that defended against the threat of the day: manned aircraft dropping bombs. The weapons were analog, mechanical, aimed by human gunners tracking their targets by eye.

Eighty years later, the successor company produces a weapon that shares the same basic purpose—shooting things out of the sky—but would be unrecognizable to those wartime gunners. The target is often no larger than a bird, flies autonomously or by remote control, and might cost less than a good bicycle. The weapon finds its prey with radar and thermal cameras, calculates intercept solutions faster than any human could, and fires ammunition that knows when to explode.

The fundamental problem, though, remains unchanged. Something dangerous is flying toward you. You need to stop it. The Skyranger 30 is the latest iteration of humanity's long effort to master the sky above the battlefield.

Whether it will prove adequate to the challenges ahead—against ever-cheaper drones, against artificial intelligence that might someday control swarms, against threats we haven't yet imagined—only time and the harsh laboratory of actual combat will tell. But for the moment, it represents the cutting edge of what engineers can build to defend against the new aerial threat. The gamble that Western armies made after the Cold War, the bet that the sky would remain friendly, has finally been acknowledged as lost.

Now comes the scramble to catch up.