Picket Defense Systems is developing a next-generation counter-drone turret designed to eliminate the delays conventional systems face when targeting fast-moving, one-way attack drones or incoming swarms. This is a major vulnerability confronting the US military and allied forces as drone threats proliferate across modern battlefields that Picket plans to solve.
Its Inferno RTC uses a 54-barrel hemispherical array that continuously maintains 360-degree coverage, allowing the turret to select and fire the optimal barrel without needing to rotate and lock onto the target first.
"Fixed multi-barrel hemispherical array — no slewing delay. Sub-second detect- to-fire. No dead zones, no blind spots, no reaction time," Picket wrote in a slide deck.
Defense Blog recently explained why Picket's 54-barrel hemispherical array could represent the next evolution in turret design for defeating fast-moving drone swarms:
The aiming latency problem the Inferno is designed to solve is one of the most technically challenging aspects of close-in drone defense, and it has become increasingly urgent as adversaries have adopted tactics specifically designed to exploit it.
Conventional counter-drone gun systems, whether mounted on vehicles or fixed at a site, must physically slew a barrel to point at an incoming threat before firing, a process that takes measurable time even on fast-actuati
