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Ask HN: I see lots of drones in Ukraine with bombs, but none with guns?

1 points by andrewstuart ↗ HN
YouTube is full of videos of drones dropping bombs or directing artillery or mortars.

But I’ve seen none with guns attacking infantry.

Why is that? And will it change?

3 comments

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eimrine
Because of law of conservation of momentum and because of difficultness in RC of them (they are going to be extremely prone to buzz) and because of absence of armor.
ice_cold_etoh
Mounting a gun on drone will require mechanism to aim, fire and reload it, and it would be quite hard to keep it stable while firing I would imagine.

Why bother with all these technical hassles when you can just use bombs which is way easier and probably more effective at killing.

viraptor
When a gun fires, there's a significant kick in the opposite direction. It's not a problem when you (or a vehicle) have your whole mass to absorb it. But for a small drone that's basically impossible. Not for a light drone anyway.

Then you'd need to aim... more than once with each shot rotating the drone. And you need to aim either semi-automatically or manually with a non-trivial delay.

None of those problems apply if you're just dropping something straight down.