US Army Wants Weapon To Destroy Drone Swarms 208
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. military loves to use drones against enemies who have no defense against them: think terrorist cells, ISIS/IS/ISIL, the Taliban etc. However, drones are getting cheaper to make, easier to use, and more technologically sophisticated. The day is coming when U.S. military planners will have to defend against drones. And they may have to fight off lots of them.
They already seem to have some ideas — their research proposal says such an anti-drone weapon would "disrupt these platforms' autonomous flight-control and navigation capabilities or cueing a weapons system like the Remotely-Operated Weapon Station (RWS) or other medium or large-caliber weapon." The system would be mounted on vehicles or at Army installations. More interesting, the Army proposal also notes that it might be mounted on UAVs, which raises the possibility of using drones to shoot down other drones.
They already seem to have some ideas — their research proposal says such an anti-drone weapon would "disrupt these platforms' autonomous flight-control and navigation capabilities or cueing a weapons system like the Remotely-Operated Weapon Station (RWS) or other medium or large-caliber weapon." The system would be mounted on vehicles or at Army installations. More interesting, the Army proposal also notes that it might be mounted on UAVs, which raises the possibility of using drones to shoot down other drones.
That would be (Score:4, Interesting)
an EMP!
That would be a Directed EMP (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with an EMP is you can't focus it. Focus an EMP and blast the electronics out of the sky. If anything you could disrupt the motors.
These things are going to become a major problem. If you have enough of them, you could outfit them with grapeshot and basically saturate an area. If they're cheap enough you could cover a really, really, really large area. Put lots of plastic explosive on them and you could do some serious damage to buildings and depots.
Today, a drone swarm would be basically unstoppable. Take a bunch of parrot AR drones and some plastic explosive and you'd be able to destroy or heavily damage any facility from afar. Good luck trying to stop them with anything.
Re:That would be a Directed EMP (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with an EMP is you can't focus it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
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IMO they should consider a Battlestar Galactica style flak shield.
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I had this thought pretty much immediately, as well. However, at the current sizes of commercially-available "drones", the military already has a such a system that could be easily adapted for anti-drone use - chaff.
Otherwise, if they can be detected using radar, IR, etc., a CWIS-style system (though probably a little lighter caliber round) would be just as effective.
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I had this thought pretty much immediately, as well. However, at the current sizes of commercially-available "drones", the military already has a such a system that could be easily adapted for anti-drone use - chaff.
Chaff falls out of the sky quickly - you'd probably want proximity shells full of it (plus some BBs), or a flail drone.
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These things are going to become a major problem. If you have enough of them, you could outfit them with grapeshot and basically saturate an area. If they're cheap enough you could cover a really, really, really large area. Put lots of plastic explosive on them and you could do some serious damage to buildings and depots.
That is what mortars do, an they do it quite a bit cheaper.
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Mortars have horrible accuracy, you would be lucky to get within a hundred yards of a particular target with a conventional mortar. Whats more they are easy to spot for return fire.
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You are terribly out of date. I've seen guys hit a target a few hundred meters behind a hill with surprising accuracy. The first mortar misses, every one after that falls dead-on.
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Well I would be the first to admit I am old and in my day yeah mortars were about the cheapest artillery you could get. Is that still true ? I know there was work on smart shells and automated mortars awhile back, which begs the question how cheap are they now.
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I don't know how much they cost, but they don't look much more than oversized M203 shells from what I remember. I'm not referring to 'smart' shells, but rather a skilled operator and probably very fine manufacturing tolerances (which allow the repeatability). They were being aimed by kicking the tube a bit to the left, a small shove to the right :)
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Mortars are not going to disappear because they are useful, but there are many known practical countermeasures to mortars, including mortar counter fire.
Drones offer a special new kind of threat because it is easy to imagine them having the intelligence to home in from many locales miles away and create an overwhelming & lethal swarm in a particular area. The ability to mass firepower is a basic combat strategy. Drones offer new ways to mass firepower quicker than ever from disparate military units sp
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You don't have someone come look for you.
Radar tracks the trajectory of the mortar round, calculates it's original (since it's only a ballistic flight arc, that is trivial) and can feed that co-ordinate back to friendly units instantly
With automated fire control system, the return fire is normally in the air before you fire the second round.
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The U.S. military has been testing mortar rounds that can alter their trajectory mid-flight for quite a while now. I remember seeing some "documentaries" on one of the more pro-military channels a few years back showing just how a system works. They were even testing rounds with active seeker heads and fins so they could do target analysis mid-flight and adjust to the target's movement, acquire an alternate target, or even self-detonate in the air (assuming no targets are present) so no "duds" would be le
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With automated fire control system, the return fire is normally in the air before you fire the second round.
Since there are also systems that will shoot down the incoming round, the return fire is probably in the air before the first round even hits the ground (if it makes it that far).
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Since there are also systems that will shoot down the incoming round, the return fire is probably in the air before the first round even hits the ground (if it makes it that far).
The larger mortars have such a long flight time that you can normally have 2-3 shells in the air before the first even hits. So you're both right.
For that matter, with artillery there are techniques where you deliberately fire the first shells on indirect paths, then get more direct(faster) as you fire, timing your shots so that they all hit within seconds of each other - even if it took you minutes to fire everything. 'Time on Target' [wikipedia.org] for multiple batteries in different locations all hitting at the same
Re: That would be a Directed EMP (Score:3)
The problem is plastic explosives are difficult to focus. Try blowing up a building using at drones. You need to blow one up for every window. And most doors will require several drones with explosives to get through.
To get a better idea of the effectiveness of kamkize attacks review the pacific sea battles of world war 2. You need to expend a lot of ordnance for minimal damage.
Shove a firecracker up your ass and blow apart your legs. Set a firecracker off at your feet and you might get burned. Explosive
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The problem is plastic explosives are difficult to focus. Try blowing up a building using at drones. You need to blow one up for every window. And most doors will require several drones with explosives to get through.
... I think you need to step back and reconsider this post.
First, plastic explosives are easy to focus. I've watched EOD guys do it by hand.
If you're using 'kamikaze drones', I feel the need to point out that we already have them under a different name. They're called 'Missiles'. Blowing up a building would only require multiple missiles if you're using undersized ones for some reason - trying to limit the damage to neighboring buildings, the building itself is huge and armored, etc...
200kg of explosives
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Update: Actually went back and read the GP. I take back most of my post - a swarm of tiny drones with miniscule charges aren't going to do much. If you want to destroy a building, bite the bullet, build a big(ish) missile and hit the target with that.
Not that a tiny swarm couldn't be useful - it's a standard axiom that properly distributed charges can do more damage than a single large one. The problem with tiny drones is the 'proper' part.
A couple dozen explosions on the lower levels of a building, eve
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"Take a bunch of parrot AR drones and some plastic explosive and you'd be able to destroy or heavily damage any facility from afar."
No not really. I do not care if you take 500 AR drones and put plastic explosives on them you will not damage a bunker. The do not carry enough. Now if you used shaped charges maybe but even that is going to be iffy at best.
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Why not just make a "suicide" drone, i.e. a drone with an EMP mounted on board. It fries itself, but also fries everything in front of it. Focusing would be significantly less of an issue from 10 ft away...
Maybe because Xzibit isn't the one in charge of R&D for the US military?
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Actually, last year Hamas did fly a UAV into Israel. It was shot down by a Tamir missile but it did return video footage back to Hamas.
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This one? [wikipedia.org] I suppose they would be as much an expert on drone warfare as anybody.
Throw the FAA at 'em (Score:5, Funny)
Other ways to disrupt drone attack? (Score:4, Interesting)
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buckshot (Score:2)
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buckshot
Oh, I think we'll see something new on the shelves really soon from Remington, Federal, Winchester, Fiocchi, etc.
Droneshot
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buckshot
Oh, I think we'll see something new on the shelves really soon from Remington, Federal, Winchester, Fiocchi, etc.
Droneshot
That, or just ask the licensed drone hunters [yahoo.com] in Colorado what load they're using.
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Phalanx CIWS (Score:2)
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A new system can be exported and then has to have new support contracts. Nations are then fully locked deep into US export grade command and control systems.
The other fear is reload time and the computer systems tracking a lot of moving objects.
Exocet or a few 1970's Soviet systems?
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Maybe these guys [youtube.com] are on to something...
a really big net (Score:2)
Like the old fashioned barrage balloons? or is that too simple?
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Nobody, but nobody is going to hand over many billions of dollars to develop "a big net", so no... its way to simple, obvious and probably workable for the defence industry to get involved with.
So um...WW2 era flak shells anyone? (Score:2)
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And how fast do the drones they expect to face fly? Much more slowly than a missile I'd wager.
US Army is running cover stories I see (Score:2, Interesting)
They already have a substantial network of directed energy weapon technology, which are quite capable of remotely knocking drones out of the sky, through a variety of means including destruction and EMP to disable it. There's also remote control potential through Signals Intelligence. I don't think the US is in true danger of attack as they say..
In fact this is patented technology. Look up Raytheon's multi-functional radio frequency directed energy system. That patent says,
"An RFDE system includes an RFDE t
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Flak (Score:4, Informative)
A very simple WW2 weapon that worked very well against tightly clustered enemy airplanes.
It doesn't work as well today for a lot of reasons but mostly it is that you don't see raids by 100 bombers anymore.
If you want to drop SWARMS of flying aircraft, flak is great. They bunch up and they die the same way everyone in a foxhole dies if someone throws a grenade in there. It doesn't matter if there were ten people in that fox hole... they're done.
Same thing with flak. Set it up so it is computer controlled with timed fuses the same way they had timed fuses in WW2.
In WW2, the flak shells were set to explode at specific altitudes that the bombers were all flying in. So you could have massed flak fire from the ground all detonating in the flight path of the bomber swarm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Ships still use Flak to defend themselves. I believe they call it "defensive artillery"... the concept being that if a missile is coming at the ship, they can fire a salvo of exploding shells to create a wall of death that the missile cannot cross intact.
The same thing could be used against a swarm of small drones.
Re:Flak (Score:4, Interesting)
FYI, Flak is a German acronym for Anti-Aircraft Artillery.
It should also be noted that it wasn't terribly effective at stopping bombers. Note the second Schweinfurt raid as an example (considered to be one of the worst raids for damage to the attacking planes) - 291 unescorted bombers, set upon by both enemy fighters and flak, lost only 60 bombers (another dozen or so were so badly damaged they were scrapped AFTER they got back home).
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The losses of US and UK bombers in the day was a serious problem actually. The enemy fighters worked nearly as well at night as during the day. But enemy flak during the night was not nearly as accurate.
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Losing 60 bombers out of 291 is plenty good enough--they may not have stopped that raid, but there's no way you can sustain a bombing effort with those kinds of losses. Fortunately, the Schweinfurt raid was exceptionally bad--and flak, by the way, was responsible for only a small part of those losses. German fighters were the main line of defense against Allied bombers, not flak. Until the invention of surface-to-air missiles, ground fire was little more than an annoyance to most aerial attacks.
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That style of FLAK is not effective any longer and really was never very effective. We still have AAA today but the gun is radar or ir directed and the shells use proximity fuzes.
The real issue that the drone will be low altitude and the shells would be going off very near your own troops... Not a good solution. At sea it would be better.
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We're talking about low flying, slow, unarmored toy drones... A flak shell will fucking murder those things. Kindly stop repeating something you misheard in a documentary.
Flak was very effective in WW2. If it were not then why were the bombers flying at such a high altitude? Have any idea what the survival rate of bombers would be if they flew a bit above tree level? Ground fire would annihilate them.
The B17s could operate at well above 6 miles above sea level. Why were they flying that high? Were they tryi
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Or high explosive fragmentation shells... which ever you think is going to be more effective.
We're talking about war here... not fucking tiddly winks. So I'm inclined to be brutal because brutal works. And when you're pinned down by enemy fire, shard of concrete and blood going everywhere... fuck the enemy. Eat a high explosive lead cocktail, fuckers.
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You would use a massed drone attack because you don't control the land you are attacking, you'd get within drone range, hit the attack button then retreat.
That means from a defense point of view, you are going to be facing a massed drone attack at low altitude over Forward Operating Bases, Friendly Populations etc. Is that where you want to be firing frag shells into the air? You'd cause more damage than the drones would have.
It's been mentioned above, but sh
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I don't agree with your scenario.
1. I would situate military assets with a clear field of fire if I were on the defensive. This is regardless of whether I am invading or defending. The only situation where I might have to worry about civilian causalities would be invading an enemy city. In that case, I'm not sure how effective small drone attackers are going to be in dense city streets. But if I were actually worried about these stupid things then I would probably take up a defensive posture outside the cit
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You don't always get to choose where you get attacked. As someone pointed out further up the threads, imagine someone got even a few 10s of these drones into a US city, each one carrying 1 hand grenade and the waypoint at which to drop it and then to return to collect more grenades - especially if the pick up is automated as well so you don't have to be there when they find that pickup location.
Only looking for the most destructive defense possible limits the locations where the defense can be deployed. Bas
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explain to me why a shotgun loaded with bird shot would not drop such a drone? Any police officer could drop that drone.
Pop. And done.
Now might this be a surprising weapon the first time it was used? Sure.
Would it be effective at doing anything more then scaring a few people? not really.
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explain to me why a shotgun loaded with bird shot would not drop such a drone?
A thin sheet of aluminum would be all that's needed to armor it against bird shot. Of course, it depends on the bird shot - Consider Cheney's lawyer friend. Shot intended for a pheasant or quail doesn't penetrate even human skin very far. Shot intended for turkeys would work better.
Armoring against rifle fire is orders of magnitude harder, but so isn't hitting a flying object with said rifle, thus the use of computer aiming with radar assistance combined with high speed automatic weapons.
If you're trying
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Which is basically a tiny flak cannon vs birds.
You might as well have it operated by trained rats, or maybe marmosets for full on cute.
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It would be a fitting response to a toy drone swarm.
Alternatively you could issue children with spud launchers to see if they can knock the drones down with pneumatically propelled potatoes.
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Why would I use uranium when the targets are unarmored? Cheap little drones will be fragile. Lead is sufficient.
Depleted Uranium slugs were designed to punch through soviet tanks.
That is why we built that weapon. Not to screw over little countries or whatever. But as a weapon to fight the big one.
Did we use it in smaller wars? Against soviet tanks.... yep.
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Blast open the door with what? Why do you think a drone can carry more fire power then just some dude walking around?
I weigh about 170 pounds. I can carry about 200 pounds short distances without a lot of trouble. If have to carry it long distances, then I'd like to keep the weight under 50 pounds.
How many pounds do you think a drone can carry?
A toy drone is not as threatening as you make it out to be especially if the thing is flying/hovering. If it is rolling around on wheels then it could perhaps pack so
Test them in Ukraine today... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ukrainian troops fighting in the East of the country suffer a great deal from the separatists' Russia-provided drones — those transmit signals to Russian artillery right across the border, which then targets Ukrainians with devastating precision. If they could kick those drones out of the sky, life would become much easier.
It would seem, any counter-measure America can help with could be field-tested right away — all without hurting a single human enemy.
How to do it? I used to think, small rockets could be used. Miniaturized copies of the early SAMs, created by the long declassified designs — current generation of drones aren't really made for evading such a thing...
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How to do it? I used to think, small rockets could be used. Miniaturized copies of the early SAMs, created by the long declassified designs — current generation of drones aren't really made for evading such a thing...
The problem with fighting $500 drones with $100,000 missiles is that your enemy can drain you financially very quickly. This is the same mistake that the IDF has made with the Iron Dome: the thing is so expensive that, barring loss of life, it would cost less to just repair whatever damage the Hamas missiles do rather than to shoot them down.
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You got the equation wrong. Your numbers may be in the ballpark for the IDF vs. Arabs situation — where the cheap but fast-traveling unguided missiles require expensive and sophisticated interception.
The military drones cost a lot more than $500 — they require avionics, reliable remote control, cameras with decent optics, etc. They are also flying a lot slower and so can be intercepted much easier — by a much cheaper missile. Oh,
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One fell right outside my house. My building and all the surrounding buildings took damage. Every vehicle on the street was destroyed. Luckily, the alarms sounded and everyone outside was in a shelter at the time (including myself and my family) so there were no human injuries..
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A bold-faced lie — by an anonymous asshole, no less. The statistics of Iron Dome's effectiveness are being discussed all over the net. The site of consensus [wikipedia.org] cites the following numbers:
Iron Dome (Score:2)
So, 2/3rds — not 99% — were deemed not worth intercepting. 270 of the remaining 300 were intercepted. If the thirty rockets, that did get through managed to kill 3 Israelis between them, it is fair to extrapolate, that — without the system in place — the 30 would've been killed.
Not to support the AC's figure, but Hamas rockets tend to be erratic, there's always some uncertainty as to their impact point. Especially when you're deciding whether to intercept well before impact.
So, logically speaking, some portion of the 1/3rd they decide to engage would also land in a spot that wouldn't cause damage they care enough about to justify the expense of interception, but because the impact uncertainly zone contains stuff they DO care about, they intercept anyways.
So you could have a situa
And yet somehow (Score:2)
Hollywood predicted the future [wikipedia.org].
Great! (Score:3)
Drones against drones seems to be finally the right way to spend military expenditures. Anything is better than continuing to use drones against innocent people in deliberate political killings on souvereign foreign soil conducted outside of police authority, judicial oversight and jurisdiction and violating ratified human rights chartas.
Re:Great! Battle Bots! (Score:2)
Robotic warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
No doubt, these drones will be more and more automatic, where commands from their human controllers become more and more abstract. Maybe now they're being flown like an RC aircraft, soon it'll be "go to this location, launch bomb to hit that location", or "fly search patterns in this area and shoot anything that doesn't respond to your coded signals out of the sky".
And so, step by step, we enter the era of robotic warfare. No matter how often the various militaries and politicians pledge that this will not happen.
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No doubt, these drones will be more and more automatic, where commands from their human controllers become more and more abstract. Maybe now they're being flown like an RC aircraft, soon it'll be "go to this location, launch bomb to hit that location", or "fly search patterns in this area and shoot anything that doesn't respond to your coded signals out of the sky".
And so, step by step, we enter the era of robotic warfare. No matter how often the various militaries and politicians pledge that this will not happen.
Neil Stephenson brought this idea right down to nano level in The Diamond Age
Already invented. (Score:2)
There's this machine that can shoot lots of mosquitoes out of the air with lasers.
Just upgrade the lasers.
Re:Upgrade path (Score:2)
So, something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Old school AA (Score:2, Insightful)
The solutions presented seem overly complex and over engineered to me.
Given shotgun are effective against small fast targets like birds I would expect a rapid fire automatic shotgun to be at least effective against the small & miniature infantry support drones. Also using air burst ammo for existing grenade launchers.
Against larger drones then use rapid fire AA guns with air burst cannon shells.
Thus the ultimate folly of arms races (Score:2)
Why not just build robots to do all the work instead, so we were not using drones to prop up repressive social orders based on wage slavery?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
"Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00... [imdb.com]
rail guns and lasers (Score:2)
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What they should probably do is marry the control system for the Phalanx with something like Metal Storm, which uses cartridgeless ammunition stacked in the barrels, to make a man or crew-operated portable device that can put a lot of rounds into the air very quickly without having a whole lot of moving parts. It would essentially be a sentry gun, but close anti-air instead of long-range anti-air or anti-personnel.
And I don't doubt that they are concerned about tiny little bits
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A mini drone can fly around the hill in a manner an artillery shell or mortar cant and into your tent with soft squishy humans in it then explode.
Sort of like this [tinypic.com].
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Jamming won't work for long (Score:2)
Some decent planning and either satellite imagery or on the ground surveillance and you can simply pre-plot the flight path. Want to take it a step further, outfit the units with more cruise missile tech like TERCOM or DSMAC.
Sure current gen cruise missiles can use GPS and / or satellite guidance via the tail fin cameras they carry, but they work pretty we
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What happens when the drones are self-controlled and their internals hardened against RF interference?
How is that self-controlled navigation working - image recognition based on ground features? Because otherwise, they're navigating using GPS or the equivalent. Interfere with that by saturating them with the same freqs, and they'll have no idea where they are. Sure some sort of inertial navigation system might be viable, but probably not with the precision needed to get some small drone as close to its specific target as such small devices would need to be (presuming they're not just spraying bio-hazards a
Re:yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
Go look at the source code to one of the open source projects like OpenPilot,
they integrate accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, barometric altimeter and GPS for their navigation system,
modern GPS chips also have anti-hijacking/jamming, eg SiRFstarIV GSD4t consumer device chipset,
and the off the shelf radio control kit can do encrypted spread-spectrum comms.
It is not trivial to stop one by jamming, a shotgun up close is way more effective
Re: yeah... (Score:2)
You're ignoring the lessons learned the hard way when ECM was initially developed: when you fire up a jammer, all the missile has to do is home on the jammers signal instead.
A drone with some basic laser ranging/altimetering and an antenna would have no trouble locating and attacking such a thing.
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all the missile has to do is home on the jammers signal instead.
The next step is that you detach the jammer - put the transmission equipment other than the antenna into a hardened shelter, and attach multiple (cheapish) antennas by long cables.
Sure, you lose an antenna and some cable per attack, but antennas are cheaper than guided missiles unless you're doing something horribly wrong.
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the average third world drone is most likely of the variety limited to 500 feet and maybe full bicycle groundspeed. The F-35 on the other hand...
So is this really a military need?
What's scary is not necessarily military use of these, but possible terrorist use of these.
Imagine some terrorists launching a large swarm of cheap low-flying drones in NYC with programming to seek out large groups of people and armed with high yield explosives and capable of putting out large amounts of shrapnel relentless
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The Russians made a half pound air fuel grenade, you could probably fit several of those on each drone and then fly them into relatively enclosed spaces like subway entrances and roadway tunnels, or use them against densely packed areas. Hell they'd probably make for a great assasination tool, fly one in through each window and doorway, it'd incinerate most structures very fast. Although if the doors or windows were hardened at all using Russian Heat/air full RPG rounds would probably be best.
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Read the book "Kill Decision". This is basically the plot.
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Thing is, it's pretty easy to think of, and viable with current technology.
Designing, procuring, building and deploying without detection is about the only real barrier between major metropolitan areas and a serious terrorist incident.
Planning how to detect and thwart such an attack is pretty sensible if your job is national defense. That's not fear, that's risk recognition and mitigation.
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Some music, national colors and activate the drone patrol system. An advanced computer tracks each of the cheap drones, an animated engage sequence and they all fail.
Its all in the sales pitch, music and fear of the drab third world drone.
Another nation is sold into a multi layer, decades long con
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Like the Distant Early Warning Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] but for third world drones
Think of the funding and years of contracts
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fighter: F-; Fighter, multiplace: FM-; Fighter, ul (Score:2)
Fighter planes are designated F-xx ...
FM- means fighter, multi place
So Fighter, Ultralight must be
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Birds do not have rotors.
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Re:Drones? (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on who has to be sold on the emerging drone threat.
Aeronautical engineers in South America could be working on stealthy new drones to fly in drugs. AWACS might not see that new drug drone.
A stealthy glider is released and allows a drone like control system to fly in wealthy illegal immigrants every night.
"Wealthy illegal immigrants"??? (Score:2)
Wealthy people get visas. Really wealthy people can buy them.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency... [nolo.com]
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What is a drone to the Army? Something bigger?
Everything from smaller than a hand grenade [gizmag.com], all the way up to ones bigger than a Cessna.
The small ones are intended to be used tactically in the field, the large ones are more for collecting strategic data.
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I said this earlier when you hate enough, you can make anything fit into and confirm your hatred. It's a shame slashdot is headed into the fever swamps. I enjoyed the site for many years.
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Ah yes, the old "the USA is responsible for despots everywhere" argument. I'm curious... please cite the country that has this spotless record on human rights, and has altruistically advanced such rights everywhere, regardless of their own interest? Obviously any country in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, etc are out. So I'm waiting with bated breath for this shining example to the world.
In fact, please cite ANY country throughout history that has had the kind of international power the USA has had and has