Image Credits: Wikipedia Chinese military researchers say large naval guns could be useful against drone swarms, giving some support to a part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for a new class of battleships. The researchers looked at shells that can explode close to a group of drones and spread thousands of fragments. They say this could allow one shell to damage more than one drone without hitting each drone directly. The study was published last month in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Command Control & Simulation. The proposed battleships would carry 9 large naval guns, along with a large number of missiles and other electromagnetic weapons. Chinese researchers test the idea Wang Lei and his team from PLA’s Dalian Naval Academy studied how large-calibre guns could be used against a group of small unmanned weapons. They did not treat the shell as a weapon that had to hit one drone. Instead, they looked at what would happen if the shell exploded near the group and sent fragments in different directions. For their example, the researchers used 30 Russian-made Lancet-3 loitering munitions. Each Lancet-3 has a maximum take-off mass of about 12 kg (26 lb) and can carry a payload of up to 3 kg. The researchers assumed that one shell would create 2,000 fragments. They estimated that 1,589 of those fragments would be heavy enough to cause damage. Their model also used a fragment-cloud kill radius of 15 metres (49 feet). With those assumptions, the researchers calculated a 3.95% chance of damaging any one drone. For a swarm of 30 drones, one shell could therefore damage about 1.19 drones, according to the study. These are results from the researchers’ model. They are not based on a battlefield test. Guns would not work alone The researchers said the system would need accurate detection and tracking. It would also need good fire-control systems and programmable fuses. They suggested using the guns together with electronic warfare, lasers and com