251–260 of 369 posts
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Well, if you managed to detect and track an incoming drone you could ‘jam’ its camera with a high-powered laser - or something that threw up a curtain of flares or burning magnesium, or whatever.
Does that work for a fleet of 10 drones? 100 drones? 1,000 drones?
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Is it unreasonable for small drones to be tracked? It's way too easy to get footage of private property or through otherwise obscured windows with drones. Regulation doesn't have to be unreasonable.
I work in this field. There's two components to this. There is the possibility to track devices from the manufacturer via serial numbers etc. Regulation will help here. This isn't useful until after the fact for evidence gathering. The second is to track them in the sky. DJI has a product AeroScope that tracks their drones, my company has a competing product (this isn't a plug so won't mention the name). The issue wi…
This is actually the most effective anti drone defense. The only meaningful benefit of a drone vs a firearm is that the pilot is unknown. If you can link a drone to its pilot then you can just use conventional law enforcement. This would force abusers to build their own drones and thereby limit the impact of drone attacks significantly.
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Honestly, the only explanation I can think of is that it is easy to see a quadrocopter fly and do its thing but it is actually hard to actually notice its real life impracticality unless you own one of them. I don't know what specific model is shown in the picture but if it is a DJI Mavic Air 2 then it only weighs 570 gram and can only fly for 34 minutes. When you compare a quadrocopter with a real life bomber then p…
I understood it as they dont intend to get the drone back. I did some searching, letter bombs were using 50g of RDX [1] and were able to kill a person so driving (and exploding) a drone with 171g of RDX into someone is more than enough. If you take its 18km of reach (while I doubt the controls are able to go that far although with a 4g sim card this could be doable) you get a poor mans cruising "missile" for $1k. And…
Also, no way the FAA would issue waivers for this sort of mission. /s
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Is it unreasonable for small drones to be tracked? It's way too easy to get footage of private property or through otherwise obscured windows with drones. Regulation doesn't have to be unreasonable.
Next thing you know will be 3d printed drone for the body with the battery, microelectronics and propulsion(?) sourced from Shenzhen, or salvaged from 2nd hand drone and smartphone. For the software, with a few million dollars, probably, cartels might hire engineers to fork open source autopilot software to do the bidding. Everything done on darknet paid with cryptocurrency.
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I understood it as they dont intend to get the drone back. I did some searching, letter bombs were using 50g of RDX [1] and were able to kill a person so driving (and exploding) a drone with 171g of RDX into someone is more than enough. If you take its 18km of reach (while I doubt the controls are able to go that far although with a 4g sim card this could be doable) you get a poor mans cruising "missile" for $1k. And…
Hmm, isn't the idea of letter bombs that the bomb is literally within arm's length, whereas that sort of proximity for a noisy drone, keeping it close enough to a possibly moving target, while setting it off may not be super practical. It may be more realistic to get within, say, 10 meters? Also, no way the FAA would issue waivers for this sort of mission. /s
I would imagine that replacing the motors and adding larger battery while keeping the control system shouldnt be an issue.
Also within an article there is a picture of a box with 4 motors, if lower part would be made from something like copper, it could be used as shaped charge [1] or adding shrapnel would also be an option. Or just make it to carry the normal hand grenade. The noise is surely an issue if you dont keep the distance, so I would imagine that you fly high over the target and then go into free fall.
In either case, this has a potential to become something really nasty.
Anyway, enough of this talk, it is surely an interesting technological challenge and interesting debate, but there are some really sick people on this planet and I dont want to give them any ideas. Also I bet there are some red lights blinking in some 3 letter agency somewhere :D :D :D
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Honestly, the only explanation I can think of is that it is easy to see a quadrocopter fly and do its thing but it is actually hard to actually notice its real life impracticality unless you own one of them. I don't know what specific model is shown in the picture but if it is a DJI Mavic Air 2 then it only weighs 570 gram and can only fly for 34 minutes. When you compare a quadrocopter with a real life bomber then p…
I understood it as they dont intend to get the drone back. I did some searching, letter bombs were using 50g of RDX [1] and were able to kill a person so driving (and exploding) a drone with 171g of RDX into someone is more than enough. If you take its 18km of reach (while I doubt the controls are able to go that far although with a 4g sim card this could be doable) you get a poor mans cruising "missile" for $1k. And…
Printing the air frame is a huge cost saver.
Cheap motors are everywhere, plenty of places to scavenge tiny hobby motors (doesn't have to fly super fast or lift 2000 grams)
Cheap arduino's for brains and motor control, not much to it.
You can get away with having a tiny lipo battery for powering the motors since it's a one way trip for the drone anyways...
With the right choice of materials you could get a drone BOM down to $100-150 [not included transmitter remote control] Needless to say, having a cartel budget you can really pump up production to few 100 a week if needed....
Making sumthing that's going to be used for a one way trip isn't hard, when your objective is to make a impact on target.
This is the new battlefield.
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An interesting example (or maybe counterexample) is thinking about how your first paragraph is relevant at any point in history. Compared to sticks, a bow causes asymmetrical damage.
I think this is part of what makes it so scary. The current changes are nothing new, it's just that we're approaching the point where these threats can be existential. Once that happens, unless something really massive has changed in human society, it's probably game over.
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Next thing you know will be 3d printed drone for the body with the battery, microelectronics and propulsion(?) sourced from Shenzhen, or salvaged from 2nd hand drone and smartphone. For the software, with a few million dollars, probably, cartels might hire engineers to fork open source autopilot software to do the bidding. Everything done on darknet paid with cryptocurrency.
I was told drones were "cheap". What you just said is not cheap at all. Sure the cartel might be able to afford this but a lot of people in this thread are worrying about attacks against politicians and celebrities being committed by individual actors. That's not going to happen if the drone pilot can't get away with it.
As I read the article, there was not actually a single confirmed death by explosive armed drone. I suspect that ultimately it’s likely impractical To kill people by drone as compared, on a cost basis, to other more pedestrian means of killing people. Drones may be cheap, but drones that can lift more than 2 kilos aren’t. The logistics of getting a drone near enough to the intended target to kill them are going to be…
But, that's not really how the economics of violence works. It's more of a whatever-works, and whatever you can get your hands on element. Guns, bombs, hard men, threats and bribes are still in use. Infantry still exists, even though ICBMs exist. They don't have to choose.
This is quasi military conflict we are talking about. Air power, however meager is a game changer in military conflict. At the fully militarized level, drones have seen a lot of use. They can be deployed everywhere that full air power is impractical, either for tactical or political reasons. A drone base can be orders of magnitude smaller than a traditional air base, even a floating one.
A 2kg payload (or even 200g) is enough to carry a grenade. Grenades kill. It seems likely that drones will be used this way.