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Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

baesystems.com

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Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#161

Post by jack_riminton »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #145
Sideloader wrote: post #105

Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers. Governments in most western countries…

Drones are fucking loud, and the video stream can be detected while transmitted via the air (with an sdr card or something similar). Signals can also be jammed, and combined with gps jamming, the drone will "get lost", and probably land at its current location (and hopefully not just drop out of the sky when the batteries are empty). And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better…

Yeah it’s designed for the battlefield so amongst all the bangs it’ll most definitely go unnoticed

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#162

Post by kolp »

jeswin wrote: post #150
secfirstmd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa that's a bit of a US Centric broad brush there. "Most Western Countries" - there's more to the West than the US, UK and less than half a dozenish who have or are doing that. I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people. True, but that's comparable only if these countries had the same responsibilities (it's like comparing people, say a soldier vs a librarian). Ireland for instance has no Air Force, and has to call on the RAF to provide air defence (as it happened when Russian Tu-95s intruded…

Ireland does have an Air Force, called the Irish Air Corps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Air_Corps

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#163

Post by yetihehe »

epicureanideal wrote: post #28
bencollier49 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It boasts a stealthy low visual profile The one in the article's picture looks like a flying brick. A lot of money to be made in this field - there's a low barrier to entry in the market.

The problem as I see it is that many, many people have the skills to compete, but not the capital. And often are working so much that they don't have spare energy to invest every weekend for years to build an MVP. I know some will say that sounds like making excuses, but the examples I've seen of entrepreneurs have been people who haven't actually had to work very hard at their day jobs. They aren't totally burned ou…

Your comment should be made into article or at least maybe some question on economic stack-overflow. I too don't know solution yet. There are many people who have an idea, but many of those ideas will just fail because it's not sustainable or there are better ways already. The biggest problem is discovering those best ideas from noise. Some dedicated think tanks of specialists disseminating ideas would be best, but currently there is simply too much noise to filter.

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#164

Post by dash2 »

Leherenn wrote: post #155
dash2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably bigger worries in the surveillance area already (smartphones etc). I’d be more concerned about their potential use for assassination. How heavy does a bomb have to be?

Assassination of whom? The result isn't exactly discreet, it's not going to be used locally to target inconvenient persons in the UK. If we're talking about conflicts, then I don't see how it's better or worse than a predator.

What if you wanted to kill a foreign head of state and not to reveal who did it? Would this be easier to hide than with a Predator?

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#165

Post by alkonaut »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #159

Introducing the counter-strike drone. Analysing the streamed data of the surveilance drone, triangulating the source of the control signal and launching a projectile to take it out. Never has been peace & quiet more easy.

These should be autonomous and able to do surveillance of an area by pre-programmed routes or loitering. Most transmission will be from the drone to the operator in that case. If you intend to do active control, you should be ready to move since your position is exposed.

The more autonomous the drone is, the less transmission you'll need. If you are looking for a specific type of vehicle for example, it should be easy to have the drone do it autonomously and not even transmit anything itself until it finds it (and possibly never - it could keep the footage until it returns to the operator). A drone (or a dozen of them) asked to find enemy armor within a map area with zero commincation either to or from the drone would be extremely difficult to hide from. This is a capability that has existed for years with large drones or satellites but they have been expensive, limited use in bad weather, and most importantly not available to individual soldiers on the ground without needing to coordinate that support.

> launching a projectile to take it out

The problem with anti-drone weapons is that so long as the projectile is heavier/larger/more expensive than the drone, the drone is winning even when taken out. It's an active area of research but other than another drone, the only viable BVR counter-drone I have seen so far is a trained bird...

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#166

Post by thom »

XorNot wrote: post #116
Sideloader wrote: post #105

Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers. Governments in most western countries…

This is just ridiculous. Why if you were going to illegally spy on people would you use a highly visible and noisy drone when the vast majority of the population live in urban areas where CCTV cameras are common and phone lines conveniently run out to steel covers in the streets (and the entire population is carrying GPS enabled tracking devices full of security flaws?) There's "oh no our liberties" but that train ca…

I'm not overly worried by what the government plans to do with this tech, more than any other tech they use for nefarious purposes.

I _am_ worried by the endgame of publicly available drone tech though, because it's very difficult to see how technically or legislatively we can avoid a future with tiny untraceable drones with long battery lives, that record audio and video and can go anywhere. The arms race that is going to be necessary to secure your home and workplace against these is going to be very expensive and ugly, and many people are going to have to settle with every conversation and sexual encounter they have being in public, if only for the lulz.

Privacy, like the fight against piracy, isn't going to be defeated because it's desirable or not, but rather just because the technology and temptation is inevitable.

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#167

Post by tleb_ »

I have searched around a bit, but could not recognize the motors. Here is the best picture available, in which we can clearly see graphical content that would only be on commercial motors[0].

One of the other drone made by the same company uses Align motors[1], taken from a picture[2]. Those are however not used for this bug drone.

[0]: https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bug-Nano-Ima... [1]: http://www.align.com.tw/en/ [2]: https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/hex-Mini-1C-...

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#168

Post by playcache »

dash2 wrote: post #164
Leherenn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assassination of whom? The result isn't exactly discreet, it's not going to be used locally to target inconvenient persons in the UK. If we're talking about conflicts, then I don't see how it's better or worse than a predator.

What if you wanted to kill a foreign head of state and not to reveal who did it? Would this be easier to hide than with a Predator?

There are much easier methods to hide than a drone. They typically use vulnerable or compromised individuals with no paper trial back to the perputrators to do these sorts of assassinations.

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#169

Post by notretarded »

tleb_ wrote: post #167

I have searched around a bit, but could not recognize the motors. Here is the best picture available, in which we can clearly see graphical content that would only be on commercial motors[0]. One of the other drone made by the same company uses Align motors[1], taken from a picture[2]. Those are however not used for this bug drone. [0]: https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bug-Nano-Ima... [1]: http://www.a…

https://de.amaxshop.com/index.php?route=product/product&prod...

Nothing special.

Re: Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

#170

Post by zed88 »

The last thing we need in the world messed up by Covid and the military industrial complex is more war machines and normalisation of meaningless wars (all of which have an undertone of neo-colonialism, where we use buzzwords to justify our acts by painting the other side as less of a human).

We could use the technology though, in solving real problems.

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