Capacitance relay is basically impossible to fool into a false negative, but easy to feed a false positive. Any conductive object of sufficient size is the same to it, even just foil on paper base.

Radar can be more selective, but… it’s a well-known beast. IMO any version useful in a fuse (very limited in time to process the targets, mass-produced in grenade size, let alone micro-grenade) is unlikely to perform well against any countermeasures beyond basic dipole chaff.

All in all, with a radar-controlled weapon, timed fuses would be cheaper and likely no worse in performance than proximity fuses will be once countermeasures appear (which will happen anyway, vs targeting radars).

Not to mention soldiers must have a way of returning fire or it’s over psychologically.

The greatest 2nd Amendment type mobilization in history was North Vietnam giving every man a rifle and telling him to shoot at the aircraft. Not only did it greatly complicate the problem under 2000 feet, far more importantly it mobilized in their minds every man and boy in North Vietnam. Nothing is more positive commitment than shooting at the enemy.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA455868.pdf

Tungsten-nylon would be very soft and possibly also quite brittle — a weird combination of properties.

This page, though, makes it seem as though “Hevi-Shot” is just another variety of W-Fe-Ni alloy — though on the extreme iron-rich side of the spectrum: https://www.ballisticproducts.com/Hevi-Shot/products/67/

That’s a lot harder than lead, though, that’s for sure.

It would be funny if clay pigeon shooting becomes a component of tomorrow’s infantryman training.

Anyway, this seems a reiteration of the same old problem with different parameters. Air defense, but even more widely distributed. So “anti-air artillery, but lighter, cheaper, and traversing fast” seems to be the most likely solution. And various military industries already worked on airburst grenades, indeed.

Maybe even integrated “point defense turret lite”, in that UAV and UGV must be detected and tracked first, and then why not feed targets to fire control directly?

I would think a 40-mm round of steel shot would be cheap and maybe effective, and not require such a specialized weapon.

And most soldiers aren’t skilled shotgunners.

Pure tungsten is much more dense than lead. It weighs in at ~19.25 gm/cc, whereas lead is about 11.35 gm/cc. (Steel, for reference’s sake, at about 7.8 gm/cc.)

Pure tungsten is even more dense than depleted uranium, which is 19.1 gm/cc.

Thing is, almost nobody uses pure or near-pure tungsten. Cemented tungsten carbide is a lot closer to lead, at about 14 gm/cc. The “tungsten heavy alloys,” which are usually W-Fe-Ni, are about 17-18 gm/cc.

Anyway, this is all kind of academic. “AD-LER can deliver effective fire up to 60 meters” means that it’s damn near useless, as most drones will close and move at around 500 meters in altitude, unless they’re the ground-hugging fiber optic (tethered) type. In either case, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get one shot.

A better weapon would be something like the old OICW — an airburst grenade launcher that can sight range and might have various proximity sensors. It’s said that the OICW was a complex weapon to use, a bit beyond the average infantryman’s capabilities. More elite or selected soldiers supposedly found it very effective. With today’s tech and modern sensors and optics, it might be possible to introduce an improved model that even conscripts can use effectively. This could be a drone-killer out to 500m and beyond.