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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

#241

Post by pvaldes »

I assume that an attempt on assasination on a really relevant figure, president and so, could end with the entire cartel city nuked in retaliation. There is always a bigger fish, so there is a limit to what you can do with this.

My bet would be that this is a PR stunt and what they are really trying is to discourage people from catching drones that transport thousands of dollars in drugs to steal the cargo. Beware!, They could have a bomb included! so let them pass without shooting down it, specially in urban areas. Once the police and population take the message, the delivery drones will be safe.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #36
loceng wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's talked about this on stage, where easily could have 1,000 to 100,000 of them with just a tiny amount of C4 - and then have them swarm at one or many targets using AI or other training/data.

Killbots is a scifi short based on this. Don't watch if you're squirmish though.

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by baq »

Yc4win wrote: post #97
anitil wrote: post #85

I actually work in the drone detection/jamming field. My only surprise is that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. We already see drones used for drug smuggling and privacy violations, as well as the use of drones to carry IED payloads. Drones are an amazing tool but as with any tool, they can be used in nefarious ways.

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

strong narrow fabric jams the rotors.

there was a hunter drone product doing exactly that from above. can't google it now, maybe there was no business.

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

#244

Post by imtringued »

zdragnar wrote: post #13
Teever wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue will be enforcement of these laws. How will you regulate the possession and distribution of IMUs and electric motors? Hell most of the parts you need to build a drone are available in a used cellphone and many of the rest can be 3d printed.

It is quite easy to make your own bombs and firearms as well, all with perfectly legal materials. They may not have the effectiveness of commercially made versions, but they'll get the job done in a pinch. Typically, I think, laws against possession of such homemade illegal goods are enforced as add-on charges to other crimes, unless you are selling them.

There was a German terrorist trying to shoot up a Synagogue in Halle. He had an impressive stash of homemade firearms yet none of them were powerful enough to actually open the thick wooden gate to the synagogue. A ladder and a knife would have killed more people.

You're going to run into the same situation with drones. It is easy to imagine some super complicated drone based attack scheme when there are far simpler and more effective methods of taking care of a target involving firearms.

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

#245

Post by ben_w »

DuskStar wrote: post #186
sudosysgen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but kinetic countermeasures scale really badly. The definition of "drone" is also quite flexible here, a couple guys with shotguns, falcons, or your own anti-drones work fine against a few slow drones, badly against a few dozen slow flying drones, not at all against a few hundred slow flying drones, are essentially useless against one jet-powered drone (microjet engines are very cheap!) don't have a hope against…

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”?

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

#246

Post by stiray »

imtringued wrote: post #235
JackFr wrote: post #123

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…

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 there is nothing preventing (except the price) launching few of them.

I think that those drones are posing a real threat even more as probably the drug cartels have the money to realize it, if they can afford to build parallel cellular network [2], they surely can also perform this.

Their use case probably is not killing an average Joe but rather assassinations on high profile targets that are heavily guarded. And quite frankly I am really interested how bodyguards can tackle this as drone can literally fall from the sky, without any electricity being used so jamming (or frying electronics if feasible) wont work here. I think this is going to become a real nightmare in the future.

[1] 4g of RDX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Qj1qSZDKg or 100g of "something" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_664jlLwqI

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...

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

#247

Post by drran »

imtringued wrote: post #235
JackFr wrote: post #123

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…

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…

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...

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

#248

Post by robocat »

anitil wrote: post #85

I actually work in the drone detection/jamming field. My only surprise is that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. We already see drones used for drug smuggling and privacy violations, as well as the use of drones to carry IED payloads. Drones are an amazing tool but as with any tool, they can be used in nefarious ways.

I presume the cheapest protection would be fine netting.

Is there any indication of netting being used as protection against drones?

Or would netting be to obvious that there was a target worth targeting?

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

#249

Post by ben_w »

nostrademons wrote: post #198
nikkwong wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my layman opinion the correct solution would be a directed-energy weapon. The most obvious one that comes to mind would be a laser (or an array of lasers, for your dozen-fast flying drone scenario). Imagine the large collection of lights that point multi-directionally behind rockstars at concerts; except, in the future, these are all defensive lasers to defend against a worst-case scenario. Ha, would probably be v…

There're relatively easy countermeasures against that too: reflective paint and a rolling airframe. To be effective the laser needs to heat the airframe fast enough to cause structural damage before the energy is dissipated away. This is relatively easy when you're targeting a black plastic drone that remains stationary in the sky. It becomes orders of magnitude less effective when the drone is white or metallic and…

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.

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

#250

Post by jacquesm »

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”?

I take it that's a culture reference, if it isn't then congratulations, you are in good company.
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