I've been meaning to read Kill Decision for quite some time. Daniel Suarez has some really unique perspectives using near-future fiction. Daemon and Freedom™ were fascinating glimpses into the potential of the future of modern day technology.
Kill Decision was fantastic. Not as good as the Daemon series in my opinion but anyone who liked that series will not be disappointed with Kill Decision.
Now imagine what happens when drones with explosives/guns/chemical weapons start flying into sports stadiums, concert halls, etc in unpredictable swarms.
Yes, but then you need to carry said shrapnel packed around the explosive core. Ball bearings, metal shards, caltrops etc. all weigh a considerable amount - at least in quantities required to do wide area damage.
Quads take less skill to operate, because they hover and are self-stabilizing. Also first person video hardware did not exist in the past, so finding a target is much easier.
It's easier than ever to fly several kilos of something somewhere a few hundred meters away.
If an 8 year old can learn to fly in an afternoon a determined attacker can do so also, lets stop pretending that barrier to entry is a thing for people who strap 20kg of PETN and ball bearings to their chests.
Not that expensive overall cheaper than say a modern DJI.
As for the better you'd be surprised but the only thing that has improved really is the camera.
FPV is still transmitted today in the same analog manner as it always was.
As for the skill required, it's still the same level of skill if you are planning such an attack you'll train the drones executing it regardless if you are using a quad or an 1986 RC plane.
The hovering and stabilizing are functions of the electronics on board, the same electronics can be applicable to helicopters and planes (replace hovering with a holding pattern).
Quads aren't new, they've been around for a long time waiting for the electronics to make them feasible.
I can't say I'm surprised I'm only shocked they didn't really prepare for the eventuality. A small vehicle that can travel in 3 dimensions can easily carry explosives and other weaponery. It's only a matter of time before this is common place and with the ability to throw a drone out of your backpack and send it flying it's going to get worse.
I always remember FPSRussia's drone [1] and I'm surprised they haven't made these in mass over there.
Yup! He's so over the top I had a feeling he wasn't really Russian. Still entertained on the off chance I pass by a video of his. Watching a video of him without the accent is so weird.
I didn't RTFM, but drone defense has been a high priority for the Pentagon and they've been rapidly testing and developing various options.
A big challenge is doing it cost-effectively, AFAIK. Legacy anti-air technology is designed for shooting down airplanes and uses missiles that may cost 100-1000x the drone; it's not affordable to build missiles to shoot down all of an enemy's drones. I've seen reports of sniper rifles, lasers (less than $1 marginal cost per shot, reportedly), electromagnetic weapons that fry the drone's electronics, old-fashioned anti-aircraft guns, etc.
Not only can drones carry explosives, but apparently the Russians very effectively use drones as artillery spotters in Ukraine, and it's not just a battlefield problem: What happens when someone targets a drone at major public events or at VIPs such as the U.S. President? How do you stop it?
> why not an anti-drone drone? would it be cost effective to fit a weapon capable of downing a drone onto a drone?
A guess: It would cost the defender the same as the attacker. That's a big improvement over anti-air missiles, but you want the equation heavily in your favor. If you can do it with sniper rifles, for example, your enemy will almost certainly run out of drones before you run out of bullets.
I can't say I'm surprised I'm only shocked they didn't really prepare for the eventuality.
One of the countermeasures we can expect is "persistent aerial surveillance" (airship based eye-in-the-sky platforms), which are semi-secret platforms being used in battlefields by the US currently. I wonder how rapidly one of these systems can detect an unknown drone in the air.
No but I don't see any reason why it isn't feasible to some degree. Wasn't it some CoD promotion? I just wanted to use it as an example of what I was talking about. It's a cool example :)
That long range beam forming microwave weapon (DEW?) they were working on could probably do the trick. It'll be a pain to have to monitor for this crap though.
No need. There are automated machine guns that use microphones to automatically do counter-sniper fire. I'd imagine a platform like that will emerge to counter this threat.
The problem is with missing all the time. With the DEW, your ordinance intercepts at the speed of light, and covers lots of area down range. With machine guns, you have a 1/many chance of hitting the thing any given second.
After reading "unmanned: illusion of perfect war", it seems American military has more drones than all countries combined. American drones have killed quite a lot of civilians. While I don't like war, it was about time someone gave US a taste of their own curry.
It's one of those things that outrages everyone, until they get the same capability, and then is utterly adopted. We do a lot of things wrong, mostly to do with overuse of our assets, but there is nothing inherently wrong with drones.
Our policy of using them so freely on the other hand...
Or, to flip the viewpoint around 180, "Drone strikes are a safe, low risk, low cost and legitimate method of snuffing out the lives of people we believe and supporting, funding, training, or harbouring people who mean to do us harm with absolute impunity and no consideration for the justice system."
...until the 'other guys' start doing the same. Then it becomes a heinous, unfair act of terror.
Before I ask the question: I am not arguing with or criticizing you. I am not taking sides. I am genuinely interested in answers to my question. I am not myself sure what that answer could be. Killing anyone is horrible. We should be past these kinds of behaviors as a species.
That said, here's the question:
How would you approach eliminating terrorists, terrorist training camps, terrorist strongholds and terrorist leaders with zero collateral damage? Of course, knowing full well that the collateral damage is split between terrorist supporters and absolutely innocent people.
Remember, these are the very people who not only want to but have killed thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands innocent civilians throughout the world. If they could detonate a massive bomb in the middle of a stadium full with 50,000 people, they would.
In other words, they are coming to kill you, your family, friends and loved ones. What do you do?
In many ways it's the old "If you could save a thousand lives by taking one, would you?"
I've heard opinions ranging from "just get out of the middle east and let them rot in hell" to "one nuke, one time and it's over". Not sure what the answer is. Always interested in hearing what others might thing the solution could be.
The weapons industry is sick this way. The US doesn't want to sell? OK, maybe Russia does. Or some third party who knows how to get them, whether a front for a country or not.
People, this is so much bigger an issue than anyone is giving it credit for. This is huge. Without exception every American three letter agency, and others, are completely dropping the ball by not giving this faaaaaaaaaaar more weight than anyone is giving it. Literally there is this tiny little wall, it looks like this >< and it's like 0.5 mm wide, and the only thing separating one side from the other (safety versus a complete disaster) is the fact that it takes some intelligence to play with drones and terrorists are by definition dumb (since it means they have not even understood enlightenment philosophy, that you can disagree with someone but defend to the death their right to say or believe differently from you - a 250-300 year old advancement in civilization.) That's it. This is not a wall that you can count on remaining up, as drones become turnkey easy to use automated solutions. Agencies need to act on this now because they will not be able to put the genie back in the bottle. This is really, really serious.
EDIT: I've been downvoted, but I don't think drone software has any backdoors, safeguards, or even registration requirements, and I don't think drone manufacturers even vaguely consider that they might be making what could be part of munitions, or give a second thought to completing an order to a war zone or to anyone, except of course unless there is some kind of general embargo or difficulty (that applies to every class of products.) I think it's being left too free, to be honest, and the possibilities that will unfold naturally are not going to be well. I strongly advise agencies to put in the necessary legal and technical safeguards today, not when it is too late. Other posters point out that this stuff might apply "just as well" to model airplanes -- but I personally don't think this is true at all. A model airplane won't fly to a specific user-supplied location unattended. it's a different beast entirely and it's not being handled with enough seriousness, in my personal opinion. I don't know that much about drones though. (Just flew a small cheap model helicopter toy, like a $20 one. I'm basing this based on general reading.) I stand by my comment.
It has been obvious to some for years that small quad/hexa-copters with POV capability is the hellfire missile of an insurgency. We've talked about it here on HN lots of times.
However, as it is true with many ideas, there is the idea and there is the execution of that idea. Now that there are confirmed uses of this sort of system in the field I expect much more energy in finding ways to mitigate them. On the plus side it is easier to destroy/disable a drone than root out a sniper's nest, on the down side it is really hard to defend soft targets from pop-up deployments of them.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadAnother great near-future fiction about how modern warfare might evolve is Ghost Fleet. Fast read, and highly interesting - if a bit frightening.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/05441...
Now imagine what happens when drones with explosives/guns/chemical weapons start flying into sports stadiums, concert halls, etc in unpredictable swarms.
A cheap 100-200$ RC plane can carry 1-2kg if pushed which is considerably more than any drone at that price range.
In fact older RCs could carry more since they were still petrol based newer electrical ones tend to have considerably less power on average.
Does it have to? It's main job in these scenarios is as a high speed shrapnel dispersal device.
Suicide vests contain about 12kg of explosives usually and even they are only exceptionally effective in highly enclosed environments.
Quads take less skill to operate, because they hover and are self-stabilizing. Also first person video hardware did not exist in the past, so finding a target is much easier.
It's easier than ever to fly several kilos of something somewhere a few hundred meters away.
Helis were also stabilized with gyros.
If an 8 year old can learn to fly in an afternoon a determined attacker can do so also, lets stop pretending that barrier to entry is a thing for people who strap 20kg of PETN and ball bearings to their chests.
And how much did your FPV unit cost? Certainly today they are cheaper and far better than they were in 1998?
As for the better you'd be surprised but the only thing that has improved really is the camera.
FPV is still transmitted today in the same analog manner as it always was.
As for the skill required, it's still the same level of skill if you are planning such an attack you'll train the drones executing it regardless if you are using a quad or an 1986 RC plane.
Quads aren't new, they've been around for a long time waiting for the electronics to make them feasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqHrTtvFFIs
I always remember FPSRussia's drone [1] and I'm surprised they haven't made these in mass over there.
[1] https://youtu.be/SNPJMk2fgJU
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPSRussia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
Looks like it's CGI.
I really hope we don't over correct out of fear because drones will be a net positive for society.
I didn't RTFM, but drone defense has been a high priority for the Pentagon and they've been rapidly testing and developing various options.
A big challenge is doing it cost-effectively, AFAIK. Legacy anti-air technology is designed for shooting down airplanes and uses missiles that may cost 100-1000x the drone; it's not affordable to build missiles to shoot down all of an enemy's drones. I've seen reports of sniper rifles, lasers (less than $1 marginal cost per shot, reportedly), electromagnetic weapons that fry the drone's electronics, old-fashioned anti-aircraft guns, etc.
Not only can drones carry explosives, but apparently the Russians very effectively use drones as artillery spotters in Ukraine, and it's not just a battlefield problem: What happens when someone targets a drone at major public events or at VIPs such as the U.S. President? How do you stop it?
why not an anti-drone drone? would it be cost effective to fit a weapon capable of downing a drone onto a drone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc_ovddVRKE
A guess: It would cost the defender the same as the attacker. That's a big improvement over anti-air missiles, but you want the equation heavily in your favor. If you can do it with sniper rifles, for example, your enemy will almost certainly run out of drones before you run out of bullets.
But their website seems to be replaced with blogspam though, so I assume they went out of business.
One of the countermeasures we can expect is "persistent aerial surveillance" (airship based eye-in-the-sky platforms), which are semi-secret platforms being used in battlefields by the US currently. I wonder how rapidly one of these systems can detect an unknown drone in the air.
Amazed you believed the FPSRussia video.
Not sure what you mean. I believed what about it, exactly?
Our policy of using them so freely on the other hand...
...until the 'other guys' start doing the same. Then it becomes a heinous, unfair act of terror.
That said, here's the question:
How would you approach eliminating terrorists, terrorist training camps, terrorist strongholds and terrorist leaders with zero collateral damage? Of course, knowing full well that the collateral damage is split between terrorist supporters and absolutely innocent people.
Remember, these are the very people who not only want to but have killed thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands innocent civilians throughout the world. If they could detonate a massive bomb in the middle of a stadium full with 50,000 people, they would.
In other words, they are coming to kill you, your family, friends and loved ones. What do you do?
In many ways it's the old "If you could save a thousand lives by taking one, would you?"
I've heard opinions ranging from "just get out of the middle east and let them rot in hell" to "one nuke, one time and it's over". Not sure what the answer is. Always interested in hearing what others might thing the solution could be.
The weapons industry is sick this way. The US doesn't want to sell? OK, maybe Russia does. Or some third party who knows how to get them, whether a front for a country or not.
Truly sick.
EDIT: I've been downvoted, but I don't think drone software has any backdoors, safeguards, or even registration requirements, and I don't think drone manufacturers even vaguely consider that they might be making what could be part of munitions, or give a second thought to completing an order to a war zone or to anyone, except of course unless there is some kind of general embargo or difficulty (that applies to every class of products.) I think it's being left too free, to be honest, and the possibilities that will unfold naturally are not going to be well. I strongly advise agencies to put in the necessary legal and technical safeguards today, not when it is too late. Other posters point out that this stuff might apply "just as well" to model airplanes -- but I personally don't think this is true at all. A model airplane won't fly to a specific user-supplied location unattended. it's a different beast entirely and it's not being handled with enough seriousness, in my personal opinion. I don't know that much about drones though. (Just flew a small cheap model helicopter toy, like a $20 one. I'm basing this based on general reading.) I stand by my comment.
Of course its an RPG.
However, as it is true with many ideas, there is the idea and there is the execution of that idea. Now that there are confirmed uses of this sort of system in the field I expect much more energy in finding ways to mitigate them. On the plus side it is easier to destroy/disable a drone than root out a sniper's nest, on the down side it is really hard to defend soft targets from pop-up deployments of them.
[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2016/10/11/irak-...