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Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

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Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#331

Post by ISL »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #324
gleapsite wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> violate both a personal code and what I imagine to be the spirit of HN. Thanks for throwing up the Ethics flag. Discussing/brainstorming this in a public forum is volunteering your brainpower in support of murderers.

> Discussing/brainstorming this in a public forum is volunteering your brainpower in support of murderers. If you think that you in a few moments on the back of a napkin will come up with something that someone funded and fuelled by an ideology that they are willing to die for can't with months of planning, then that's arrogance of an epic scale. This is as ridiculous as don't talk about hacking/spoofing/phishing bec…

A worldwide forum discussion among dozens of creative people out to one-up one another on clever strategies for killing another human may well put an effective idea in front of someone who might put it into practice.

There are occasions for discussing mechanisms by which one might construct such a weapon. I feel that this moment isn't one of them. Just because we can talk about it (and must be willing to defend the right to talk about it) doesn't mean that we should do so in this context.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#332

Post by drran »

fuoqi wrote: post #277
drran wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russians use drones at regular basis to throw[1] old ВОГ-17[0] grenades for automatic grenade launchers at Ukrainian soldier at Donbas. [0]: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%9E%D0%93-17 [1] https://www.slovoidilo.ua/2020/06/11/novyna/bezpeka/bojovyky...

You mean mostly Ukranian citizens against Ukrainian army which was unconstitutionally deployed against them? (note that I do not deny Russian involvement, but foreign involvement in civil wars is a really common matter) Ukrainian army uses similar simple drones to throw grenades at rebels as well [0][1]. And interestingly enough Chinese develop similar drones [2], so I think they will be more and more common in futur…

Yep. Ukrainian Voluntary Army used them too. Ukrainian army bought military drones from Turkey, which did show in Syria.

BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#333

Post by NikolaeVarius »

asdff wrote: post #177
Yc4win wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any progress with coming up with a system that can _reliably_ jam them?

I don't know if you could ever stop a low cost drone short of using a shotgun. Even if you had some sort of directed EMP technology, the drone could position itself along the correct precomputed vector from far away, cut off electric, and glide the bomb to the target silently.

Its really not that easy to shoot a drone down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGLxKXtkHpY

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#334

Post by NikolaeVarius »

ben_w wrote: post #245
DuskStar wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bigger isn't necessarily better, here. There's a term for "small jet turbine powered autonomous suicide drone" already - "cruise missile" - and it's something that the US military has put a lot of work into stopping. Small drones aren't really part of the same threat profile, near as I can tell.

Cruise missiles currently target large things, these would be anti-personnel drones. I guess we could call them “knife missiles”?

Already exists https://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-u-s-missile-aims-to-kill...

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#335

Post by fuoqi »

drran wrote: post #332
fuoqi wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean mostly Ukranian citizens against Ukrainian army which was unconstitutionally deployed against them? (note that I do not deny Russian involvement, but foreign involvement in civil wars is a really common matter) Ukrainian army uses similar simple drones to throw grenades at rebels as well [0][1]. And interestingly enough Chinese develop similar drones [2], so I think they will be more and more common in futur…

Yep. Ukrainian Voluntary Army used them too. Ukrainian army bought military drones from Turkey, which did show in Syria. BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

Those Turkish drones have been bought in 2019 and AFAIK barely seen deployment for the fear of losing them. While the cheap drones are widely used by the army at the very least for reconnaissance. It's very hard to distinguish the Ukrainian army from the "volunteers", but the drone from the link in my previous comment was shot down just in 2020.

>BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

No, because those collaborationist have stayed mostly in the rear (e.g. see deployments of the SS "Galizien"), while on front lines fought forces from the invading countries. Also it's a matter of ratio. USSR was invaded by a 3.8M strong force, so even if you include those collaborationist, more than 50% of the invading force were foreigners. Meanwhile in today's DNR/LNR militia more than 90% of personnel are Ukrainian citizens (well, de jure, most of them don't think about themselves as Ukrainians anymore) and by a very strange coincidence in all recent prisoner swaps Ukrainian citizens were swapped for Ukrainian citizens. A very strange "Russo-Ukrainian war", don't you think?

To get a sense why it's a civil war, just watch footage from the early days of the conflict [0][1]. You can see that moving military forces have been actively blocked by simple folk who understood, that this unlawful deployment will simply result in Ukrainians killing other Ukrainians for political gain of the fresh-installed government.

BTW I do think that Chechen wars can be viewed as a civil war, even though the rebel forces were supported by Saudi and Kuwait money, and foreign mercenaries have actively participated in it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xp4I-prrk0 [1]: https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=039_1397631470

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#336

Post by ashtonkem »

dvdkhlng wrote: post #238
ashtonkem wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot one: shotguns. The most reliable means to take out a drone might be some good old fashioned birdshot.

And what about good old water cannons? I can't imagine how the drone's rotor would be able to generate predictable lift when hit by a lot of water.

Water canons would work too, but only for fixed positions. Shotguns are pretty light, and can do double duty against more common threats simply by swapping out the ammunition from birdshot to buckshot.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#337

Post by ashtonkem »

dogma1138 wrote: post #283
peteretep wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like more hassle than a mortar for about the same effect?

You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone. Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications. All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators. E…

Mortars also have the nasty habit of drawing counter-battery fire, which occasionally leaves you short of a mortar and mortar crew. Drones are much lower risk to the operator, which is exactly why the US uses them too.

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#338

Post by ashtonkem »

throwanem wrote: post #281
chongli wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerve agents could be attached to much smaller delivery platforms. If you could build a drone the size of a mosquito you could use it to deliver a tiny, fatal dose of nerve agent to your target. No chemical explosive could match that level of miniaturization. It may be sci fi at this point but it seems entirely possible to me. After all, mosquitoes exist and their behaviour is quite sophisticated. They’re able to loc…

Even if we grant the possibility, which is a real courtesy, that still would be a lot more expensive than a Mavic with a Tupperware bomb. And for what? Dead is dead.

And worse still, using a nerve agent would draw a lot of unpleasant international attention. Why risk pissing off your large northern neighbor when they’ve been trained to ignore more normal types of violence you commit every day?

Look at this forum, the delivery of explosives via drone is consider an interesting novelty, not something that any other country really should do something about. Narco-terrorism is the norm in that part of the world, and we’re clearly used to it.

The first time a cartel uses an honest to god weapon of mass destruction, the response would be very different, with some serious calls for America to invade and sort the issue out itself. While it’s far from obvious if America would (or should) do that, why risk it when they’ll just totally ignore everything else?

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#339

Post by grimjack00 »

ISL wrote: post #331
Pet_Ant wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discussing/brainstorming this in a public forum is volunteering your brainpower in support of murderers. If you think that you in a few moments on the back of a napkin will come up with something that someone funded and fuelled by an ideology that they are willing to die for can't with months of planning, then that's arrogance of an epic scale. This is as ridiculous as don't talk about hacking/spoofing/phishing bec…

A worldwide forum discussion among dozens of creative people out to one-up one another on clever strategies for killing another human may well put an effective idea in front of someone who might put it into practice. There are occasions for discussing mechanisms by which one might construct such a weapon. I feel that this moment isn't one of them. Just because we can talk about it (and must be willing to defend the r…

> A worldwide forum discussion among dozens of creative people out to one-up one another on clever strategies for killing another human may well put an effective idea in front of someone who might put it into practice.

You mean writers forums?

Re: Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones

#340

Post by ben_w »

sudosysgen wrote: post #290
ben_w wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lasers have been demonstrated strong enough that those countermeasures are insufficient. Bigger problem is, if you’re a politician and this scenario plays out during a rally, you just blinded your own supporters by shining a metal-melting laser at a shiny bauble while it was just above their heads.

I haven't seen any demonstration of a laser destroying a rolling airframe with reflective coatings. The only practical demonstration I could find anywhere was a laser on a boat burning one single drone that was gray in color, from only about 800m away. And it took about ten seconds to do so. Anyways, I'd love your source.

I think I know the demo you’re talking about.

Most of my search results today are CGI propaganda pieces, the closest I can find is this from 2013, which is just a normal non-shiny and probably non-spinning missile, but from 1.5km and being destroyed 4s after launch: https://youtu.be/kgUnDeED9MM

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