"A Navy MH-60R Seahawk helicopter shot down an Outlaw surrogate threat drone with a .50-caliber gun, proving old-fashioned solutions can work fine against new-fangled threats."
Why yes, bullets will destroy aircraft of many types.
I get the feeling that someone building a scaled down version of the Phalanx CIWS to deal specifically with drones might get a fairly lucrative contract with the DOE.
Probably, but I am not convinced it would work. According to their article their smallest drone category is the size of a small child.
That means the crazyflie (https://www.bitcraze.io/crazyflie-2/) is entirely outside of what they are considering. Which is too bad because it is pretty fast, computer controlled and absolutely tiny. Yes its take of weight is only 42 grams meaning you can pack about 15g of c4 on that thing and land it on somebodies head.
Now I am not sure 15g is enough to do any serious damage, and I don't know if you can alter it to use frequency-hopping jamming-prof radio but I do know this: technology only gets better, faster and smaller.
And it would really ruin my day if I was to hold a speech and 15g of c4 went of right over my head - especially since the attacker has a real chance of getting away with it.
Well this little video says it shows twice that amount, 1 oz, (https://youtu.be/AwyniA5ryhY?t=40) for what that is worth. Doesn't look like something I would want going off near my head.
But I would think slow/predictably moving and fixed targets are in more danger, since the attacker can get away with overloading the vehicle a bit (don't need the full flight envelope), and navigating to the target(s) becomes much easier. I'm thinking something like an stolen delivery/repairman van parked in a neighborhood, a few hours later the top opens, and out come some thermite delivering drones which fly to the top of houses and start setting the neighborhood aflame. Houses are easy to GPS target, lightly defended, and have a very high psychological impact.
No, because you need line-of-sight from your position with the gun, whereas with the drone you need line of sight from the drone which, because it flies, has more options, including dropping straight down - fast and from an angle the authorities don't expect.
I like this idea, but the challenge will be building effective ammunition (I suspect depleted uranium might not be the best option here) for frequent engagement, and minimal (read: no) collateral damage.
I get the feeling you want something tough enough to take down the drone but not penetrating enough to be any danger to the concrete containment building.
Thinking about it, shotgun shells should work. Flechette rounds would probably be a good choice.
The bigger problem would be the quick ID on the drone as opposed to a bird. You shoot down an eagle and you should expect to get hammered in the press. I would also expect some protests if you are constantly using radar.
I would note that the birds did not exactly survive that encounter so you can expect some protests at your "bird swarm defense" grand opening. I would also imagine the method you use to make the birds take flight might also generate some publicity. Now, seagulls are not universally loved (quite the contrary), but I do believe you might get some pushback.
It would probably work and be the cheapest solution.
Damn i didnt even think of that. Radar would return differently id imagine, but then you would have people trying to match an eagles radar cross section haha.
I get the feeling the moving parts on a bird versus a drone could be your key identifies.
After reading nogridbag's solution, I'm starting to think golf driving range nets[1] that are used to keep golf balls from flying into the road. You would need to put a top net and probably still have to have an active defense for that one drone to blow the net, the second to run into the plant situation.
> British officials are worried ISIS may try to bomb festival crowds using small drones
Yeah this would be pretty bad. I'm not sure how you'd defend against this, other than relying on the fact that generally terrorists are pretty incompetent.
I'm the last one to try to support the theatre of fear the media and government maintain, but the dollars and skill required to acquire and operate an RC vehicle have dropped massively in the last few years. Yes, 20 years ago you could build from balsa a sweet RC airplane that had tremendous range (and try to strap some home made explosives to it for nefarious purposes). You could build an RC helicopter but you were going to have a hell of a time learning to fly it (and probably wreck your first few helis before you get the hang of it).
That required serious patience and skill on the model building front. It required decent understanding of the radio, setting up the servos and trimming for flight, and to be honest the damn things (planes) are hard to fly at first. (RC helicopters border on impossible!) You also needed to find a field with room to practice take off and landing, etc.
Today I can buy a pre-built quad-copter that can fly for 15-20 minutes with no assembly required. It's stabilized and ridiculously easy to start flying. I can practice for hours in private (in my living room, or back yard). That same quad copter can be given an autonomous course to follow, becoming a "fire and forget" delivery vehicle which can be discretely launched far enough away from a target to be completely unobserved.
What if I load it up with as much anthrax as it can carry and set up a timed trigger to open the bag as it flies over a crowded festival, protest or some other gathering? How many victims would result from the downwash at 30' above ground level?
I don't think this can be solved with legislation to be honest (you won't ever be able to stop a bad actor from getting the equipment, and bad actors will not register their gear). I also don't think this is a nightmare scenario - but I do think it's a legitimate concern we should be talking about.
So we have to make sure nobody with the means to perform such an attack would ever have the motive. That means better social equality, better access to healthcare, etc.
I think this is 100% on point. Removing the reason is the best defence we could ever have. There always have been many ways to hurt a lot of people, as it gets easier we are learning that we cant defend against everything.
Promoting social equality is the best way to get as many people as possible slaughtered as brutally as possible. Oppressors tend to lash out when their power is threatened.
See: Boko Haram, the Taliban's reaction to buildout of civilian communications infrastructure in the backwaters of Afghanistan, etc.
Nothing quite like America coming in to your home, insulting your religion and customs, and eroding your ownership of your women to motivate you to attack it.
The price of peace is leaving horrible people alone when they do horrible things to other people.
That would certainly solve a lot of other problems. No need for gun control, knife control. No need for airport security. No need for armies, police, jails, judges... I like it! </snark>
Apologies, I know we're not meant to be snarky here, and sarcasm rarely forwards a conversation in a useful direction, but this comment really struck me as silly, as you are proposing the solution to protecting people from random bad actors who might buy a quad copter is "make the world peaceful and remove motivation for personal harm". That does not seem possible. People should have access to good healthcare and social equality, but that is orthogonal to this conversation (IMHO).
It's a heck of a lot more possible than perfect security without putting everyone into padded cells, alone. Some countries in Northern Europe are evidence of this, as are declining crime rates after the banning of leaded gasoline and legalization of abortion.
If you want to solve a problem, solve it at its roots. Focusing on the symptoms instead of the disease is a harmful attitude that is far too prevalent in America and elsewhere.
Id also be worried about the house of commons you could hop a drone over the Thames to the Veranda one would hope the the security services have thought about that scenario.
I am surprised that todays terrorists haven't tried to emulate the IRA and use timed diy mortar's back in the day they very nearly hit the cabinet at no 10
Why even bother with this? Terrorists can just blow themselves up in a festival/concert/subway/bus anyway.
In fact, you just need to leave a backpack with a pressure cooker with some nails and explosives like in Boston. No need for complicated technology and millions invested to try and counter this.
Because this makes it far easier to both get away with it, and not kill yourself in the process.
Today or in the near future, plant a bomb anywhere in public in a city and you're likely to end up on camera.
If a terrorist can accomplish the same outcome while not killing their self (suicide), they get to keep killing; it net lowers the cost of terrorism dramatically. The biggest cost in suicide bombings directed at the developed world, is getting the bomb carrying person into location (immigration, housing), feeding the person, and the time it takes to arrange it all. Drones mean you bring one person in, and they get to take action potentially numerous times.
The 2004 Madrid bombing killed 191 people and wounded 1800 without requiring neither suicides nor drones. And I think the idea that you need to "bring a person in" is outdated; there are potential recruits in any country you might want to attack. The Tamerlan Tsarnaev is a good example.
> The 2004 Madrid bombing killed 191 people and wounded 1800 without requiring neither suicides nor drones
Shakers in the 18th century made some of (in my opinion) the most beautiful wooden furniture with simple hand tools. But each piece took ages to produce and finish.
Now we have power tools and inexpensive stains and finishing products that dry quickly. The output of a legion of Shaker craftsmen can be matched by a single moderately skilled woodworker today.
Similarly, the fact that attacks were successful without drones doesn't mean that cheap, commonly available drones can't make it easier to do lots of damage. Nobody says you need these items to make a successful attack, just that they have the potential to make a bad attack much worse. Not to consider this while implementing countermeasures is irresponsible at best.
I don't see how operating a drone to deploy bombs compared to simply dropping bags with a timer in a train and leaving a few stations earlier is in any way comparable to hand vs power tools.
If I have 3 dozen bombdrones I get set them up automatically to take off at a certain time and proceed to their targets via GPS. I will have been seen absolutely nowhere near a bombing site, and could easily be out of the country before they even take off.
Hacking the connexion from the drone to the pilot is doable, and has been done. You can take control of the drone itself and bring it back to anywhere you want. I've seen all that happen in a hackathon here in France, a few months ago.
Now of course, everything's going to be easier after all drone makers have legal obligation to provide backdoors for police.
There are already multiple open drone firmwares, so the legal obligation is moot. And "hacking the connection" only works if they aren't autonomous and if the commands aren't signed, which you can't assume.
Of course, I'm talking about a military threat; to shut down idiots flying their Parrot AR near the airport and such, those countermeasures are certainly more than enough.
The Chinese did this in the late 50's with sparrows; they managed to bring them close to extinction in a (spectacularly failed) attempt to increase crop yields.
I guess the nomenclature battle is lost. To me, a drone is a UAV, the key word being "autonomous". RC quadcopters and the like are "remotely operated". I suppose even the military's Predator is RO, though from a great distance. A drone ought to have some decision-making capability of its own.
I wish we'd preserve the distinction, because we're very close to having consumer-grade autonomous technology to add on to RC vehicles (regardless of how many wheels or rotors they have). C.f. 3DR's Pixhawk, with features like return-to-home and "follow-me".
I used to agree but I'm actually coming around. The distinction between having a pilot inside the craft and not is very discrete (not drone vs. drone) whereas the degree of autonomy is a continuous spectrum.
How many craft can one operator control remotely at the same time before they each become individual drones?
Why yes, bullets will destroy aircraft of many types.
I get the feeling that someone building a scaled down version of the Phalanx CIWS to deal specifically with drones might get a fairly lucrative contract with the DOE.