Palmer Luckey's drone killing robot takes to the skies

[HEXUS]

Counter-drone system from Anduril Ind. is a drone that rams other drones at high velocity.

Read more.

[philehidiot]

Why not just attach a circular saw to the thing and use that without wasting your drone? Sure it might lose control briefly but it should have enough altitude to recover. And it's a CIRCULAR saw. Circles are soft. No one could get hurt, so why worry? It'd also be super cool. Or, given you're gonna send prop blades everywhere anyway, why not a drone that shoots shurikens at the target drone? Or bird shot? If there's a drone around all air traffic will be cleared and ground personnel will have to be clear before you can engage given the risk of spinning bits of falling drone.

Or, just do the sensible thing and fry it with radar? You have a giant primary radar dish, jam it into a mains outlet and point. How hard can it be? Aircraft have to be at least 3 miles away from a type 45 destroyer when its radar is at full chooch. I'm sure you could weaponise that. Continuous-wave radar. Job done. Toasty, possibly on fire drone. Everyone happy.

Or, better yet, just get a nerd with a long range wifi antenna, point it at the drone and let them go nuts. They're pretty insecure. Or just jam 2.4GHz in its general direction. What's the worst that could happen? The drone should, in that situation, land immediately / return to home, nice and safely.

This seems like an expensive, wasteful and generally excessive way of doing what could be achieved with the kind of kit airports already have and can therefore operate and maintain - i.e. powerful, directional transmission kit.

[loftie]

While shooting at drones may be an 18th century solution to a 21st century problem, ramming drones with other drones is using a technique that's far far older.

[PC-LAD]

why not a net cannon that wraps the thing and keeps hold of it so debris doesn't go everywhere

[philehidiot]

why not a net cannon that wraps the thing and keeps hold of it so debris doesn't go everywhere

Drone to drone cannon. I like it.

Or you could just get me to pop up with my gun. Just buy me enough ammunition to keep me happy for the day. I won't hit it, but it'll look like you're doing something, I'll be happy and stop making silly suggestions and the drone will run out of battery eventually.


OOOH! FIRE SHIPS! Set a drone on fire and ram the other drone!!

[TeePee]

CRAM? Pretty sure this has been around for a while...

[Xlucine]

Anti-drone systems are interesting, in that there's probably a military/police need for them so everyone+their dog is throwing everything at the wall in the hope that something will stick and get a contract

why not a net cannon that wraps the thing and keeps hold of it so debris doesn't go everywhere

There's quite a few offerings of that on the market already

CRAM? Pretty sure this has been around for a while...

Firing that upwards in the middle of a populated area (i.e. heathrow) would have one hell of a risk assessment

[TeePee]

Firing that upwards in the middle of a populated area (i.e. heathrow) would have one hell of a risk assessment

But so entertaining!!

[peterb]

Why not just attach a circular saw to the thing and use that without wasting your drone? Sure it might lose control briefly but it should have enough altitude to recover. And it's a CIRCULAR saw. Circles are soft. No one could get hurt, so why worry? It'd also be super cool. Or, given you're gonna send prop blades everywhere anyway, why not a drone that shoots shurikens at the target drone? Or bird shot? If there's a drone around all air traffic will be cleared and ground personnel will have to be clear before you can engage given the risk of spinning bits of falling drone.

Or, just do the sensible thing and fry it with radar? You have a giant primary radar dish, jam it into a mains outlet and point. How hard can it be? Aircraft have to be at least 3 miles away from a type 45 destroyer when its radar is at full chooch. I'm sure you could weaponise that. Continuous-wave radar. Job done. Toasty, possibly on fire drone. Everyone happy.

Or, better yet, just get a nerd with a long range wifi antenna, point it at the drone and let them go nuts. They're pretty insecure. Or just jam 2.4GHz in its general direction. What's the worst that could happen? The drone should, in that situation, land immediately / return to home, nice and safely.

This seems like an expensive, wasteful and generally excessive way of doing what could be achieved with the kind of kit airports already have and can therefore operate and maintain - i.e. powerful, directional transmission kit.

Spread spectrum transmissions can be hard to jam and require relatively large amounts of RF power.

While I take your point about a T45 destroyer radar, a full size aircraft presents a much bigger cross sectional area than a tiny drone. Tracking a drone with directed energy is not necessarily a trivial task. And the object is to destroy the drone, not get it safely home to base for re-use!

[azrael-]

<SNIP>
This seems like an expensive, wasteful and generally excessive way of doing what could be achieved with the kind of kit airports already have and can therefore operate and maintain - i.e. powerful, directional transmission kit.

Isn't it obvious? Each destroyed drone means one extra sale to replace it.

[philehidiot]

Spread spectrum transmissions can be hard to jam and require relatively large amounts of RF power.

While I take your point about a T45 destroyer radar, a full size aircraft presents a much bigger cross sectional area than a tiny drone. Tracking a drone with directed energy is not necessarily a trivial task. And the object is to destroy the drone, not get it safely home to base for re-use!

I can't remember rightly but jamming GPS is very effective against drones.

I thought the issue with radar was the potential for causing things like single bit errors in chips and so on, causing aircraft to malfunction rather than to actually catch fire.... although enough chooch to the radar will certainly do that.

I think letting the drone return to the user who is robbed of control is a fantastic idea. Might as well leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Also, if it does a forced landing on the spot, that's fine also as it'll be inside the controlled area of the airport. Then you send security up there to do two things.... firstly, for the news, video themselves take a large steaming..... I mean to just smash it to hell or pop a bullet into it.

Or, on the subject of Type 45s, just pop one of them in the airport. Then you have the ability to jam everything and put some neat little gaps in where you might need to talk to pilots, etc. If all else fails, you have a VLS and a radar which can target a couple of hundred airborne threats...

....and no one has to learn to swim.

EDIT: Oh and did I mention a lot of drones are flying FTP servers that you can Telnet into and run a script already on the machine called "shutdown" which makes it drop out of the air? So just put me in the airport with my 4 mile range 2.4GHz antenna and my Hackintosh and I will solve your drone problem. Because I am an arse.

[Iota]

it will speed at high velocity towards the 'enemy' drone and simply ram it out of the sky.

If that was over an airport, wouldn't that potentially leave lots of shrapnel / sharp pieces on the runway? Which would then have to be cleared prior to aircraft landing, not an insignificant task and definitely time consuming. Wouldn't a more sage approach be to have a drone that can shoot some form of netting to ensnare rotors of offending drones which can then also be landed by the drone shooting the netting?

[Friesiansam]

If that was over an airport, wouldn't that potentially leave lots of shrapnel / sharp pieces on the runway? Which would then have to be cleared prior to aircraft landing, not an insignificant task and definitely time consuming. Wouldn't a more sage approach be to have a drone that can shoot some form of netting to ensnare rotors of offending drones which can then also be landed by the drone shooting the netting?

Runways are already swept and cleaned of rubber deposits frequently. I'm sure mopping up the remains of some drone wouldn't take long.

[Ttaskmaster]

Just take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...

[philehidiot]

Just take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...

Or, just get on the tw*tter and spread the word that some bunnies are being abused somewhere. They'll then have to abandon the climate thing in order to "save" the bunnies.

This is kind awful:
https://nypost.com/2019/09/09/vegan-...rocess-report/