Slashdot Mirror
Defending Against Drones
theodp writes "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones."
Defense? The purpose of the US military as per the US Constitution? Heck, our military and political leaders forgot about defense a loooong time ago. It's been all about offense since the end of WWII. The US hasn't been involved in any military action that we didn't start in the first place, so this should be a tough one for the brass to wrap their heads around.
I don't respond to AC's.
what about bullets? They have been in the market for quite long already.
It would seem to me if every citizen knew how to properly shoot a rifle, odds are pretty good one of those things could be knocked out of the sky with a barrett. It would cost all of us a heck of a lot less money too.
In fact... this is exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was written for. "The people" defending themselves from attack.
Not like they used to. Air burst rounds will likely be the next iteration in the infantry arms race: Essentially a grenade that files in a flat trajectory and can detonate where ever you tell it to, such as "that line of sandbags, plus 1m" and then you aim above the sandbags.
They certainly will come in handy against your average "terrorist" armed with an AK-47, but once these types of guns are available to both sides of a conflict it will get real ugly. I certainly hope they remain a technology demonstrator only by some gentlemans agreement. But the next iteration of ground warfare is already in progress...
It's always easier to destroy than to build. This is what makes terrorism so effective. It takes millions of dollars to defend against weapons costing only a few thousand dollars. A 20 thousand dollar missile can take out a 200 million dollar airplane. A boat loaded with explosives can sink a ship costing several hundred million dollars. It's expensive being on the defensive.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that I can disable a $500 drone with little less than a portable radio, my laptop and a couple of bucks worth of radioshack equipment. Thing about the drones is that they TOO have weaknesses. And a safe, unbreakable, unhackable, wireless, remote control interface costs a LOT more than $500. And an EM emitter, or even just a remote jamming device, or in case of a wireguided or automated drone a laser to interfere with or destroy the optics seems like pretty easy to come by and cheap solutions.
And for those really high tech drones that can survive these kinds of odds. I'm sure we can spend a cheap stinger on. Why anyone would WANT to make the leap all the way to a patriot missile, made for smashing down objects the size of a spaceshuttle is beyond me.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I don't understand: Drones are easy to take down. A couple of dragoons or zealots should do the trick nicely, or maybe a few marines instead. Heck, you can go at em with SCVs and have a fighting chance.
I am officially gone from
It's not about the cost of what you have to shoot down but what you have to defend.
Read about the history of air warfare during WWI, with the rise of airplanes. The situation is analogous to drones. Ultimately, drones will have defenses and counter-attacks. It's not been a big deal yet because we're fighting people who don't have access to the technology, but that will change.
Do you have ESP?
Would it be possible to build tripod mounted lasers to lock onto a drone and just keep firing at it until the battery explodes / circuitry melts? Locking on should be easy since $500 drones won't be going at 200 meters per second. A laser working with household level power should be able to fry a drone in a few minutes.
Seriously. If we can shoot down mosquitos with optically guided lasers for $50, surely we can shoot down drones?
Actually smells like the SDI that precipitated the fall of the USSR.. only in reverse.
As long as we give billions of dollars to the military/security interests, to protect us against marginal or very distant threats, they, and the terrorists, win.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
A 500 buck drone, capable of carrying 250g of c4, with a range of 5 km and an endurance of 30 minutes, could bring a country to its knees.
Targets?
Satellite dish LNBs, High Tension cable insulators, refinery pipework, radar dishes on weaponry, etc etc etc.
use two, the first the blow an access into a window, and EVERY important computer is a target, bank computers, traffic control computers, air traffic control, industrial process, etc etc etc.
Use 5, meshed together, and the fifth could be flown inside a rabbit warren, SCRAM control sensors in a reactor plant, you name it.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
In fact a private drone (from a university) has already done that years ago, across the Atlantic. It certainly cost a lot more than $500, but components have gone down in price quite a lot.
My crappy EasyStar ($60 of glorified styrofoam) can fly for almost an hour with a brushless motor on a 11V, 1200mA.h battery that costs around $30. It wouldn't be too hard in the near future to build a drone covered with lightweight solar cells, and enough batteries to stay airborne during the night. The EasyStar can already easily accommodate 200g of payload, for a total weight of one kg or two.
With an Arduino it's already super easy to build a drone with GPS guiding. But even if GPS is jammed it's not much harder to implement inertial positioning, and beyond that cell phone relay trilateration to lock in on a target. Each of those features can be had in a 1g integrated package.
Those are still vulnerable to military jamming, but at a significant cost to the target. There are other ways around this: sun tracking has not been done AFAIK but it shouldn't be too hard to do. We have *slightly* better clocks than mariners of the old time and that's what they used. At night, star tracking is also a possibility. Then some DIY drone people are experimenting with magnetic sensors, which is what migratory birds use.
In conclusion, drones are gonna be a problem, and I suspect states are going to try to ban them, to obviously no effect since all it takes are cell phone components (lithium batteries, microcontrollers, GPS receivers), some styrofoam and a few cheap power electronics components (brushless motors, controllers, and servos). Oh and duct tape. They better ban duct tape quick.
http://www.mikrokopter.de/
For 1250 (a bit more expensive than 500, ok) you can get the hexacopter, which:
- has 20 to 40 minutes endurance
- is fully automatic
- can fly to GPS coordinates without outside commands
- can carry over 1 kg payload.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
We gotta keep finding new threats. Otherwise defense contractor stock would drop! We can't have that!
Tinfoil hats should protect everyone from falling bullets. At least according to what I read here about these wonderful inventions.
Probably.
You might want a set of tinfoil shoulder pads as well.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Consider a small freighter, 200 km off New York. It launches a few hundred small unmanned planes, guided by a small computer autopilot. Each plane carries four thermite stick bombs, similar to the ones used in WWII. When the planes reach the vicinity of New York they climb to a few hundred meters altitude and start dropping the thermite devices. What was cutting edge tech 70 years ago is garage tech today.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
--Winston Churchill.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
As someone who likes flying model helicopters, I can see it won't be long until the government bans that on fears that "I might be a terrorist wanting to fly my T-Rex 600 into something", closing off yet another avenue of harmless pleasure.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Let's say you engage in a behaviour like eating sugary things (like gobbling up a huge amount of the world's resources and supporting evil regimes) that attracts bees and Wasps (terrorists, drones, etc.). Sure, you can spend PILES of money on insecticides (patriot missiles, TSA, etc.), or, you could simply stop engaging in the behaviour that attracts bees and wasps.
Duh. But people like you are greedy, lazy, and stupid, and can't live without their SUVs, McMansions, and daily intake of beef, sugar, and Salads in February, and so rather than change your behaviour, you would rather ramp up the insecticide production. Tards. Keep it up, and expect people to bomb the crap out of you. It's really very simple, almost Newtonian in structure.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You really put a lot of thought into this didn't you? No, the odds are far from "pretty good". There's a reason why people hunt flying birds with shotguns: the spray of pellets is much more likely to hit a fast-moving target than a single projectile, and while there are any number of people in the U.S. who are quite proficient with shotguns, only a very, very few have the requisite skill necessary to hit a bird with a rifle, much less a drone, which would probably be flying MUCH faster than a bird, and if flying low, would be in sight for only a fraction of a second.
As to your suggestion that citizens be armed with Barrett sniper rifles, it takes months of intensive training to become a proficient sniper, and they start off with expert marksmen. Even then, the very best snipers would probably be ineffecive against a target such as a drone, which, given the the advances in small off-the-shelf turbine engines that are readily available to R/C hobbyists, would be travelling at a couple hundred mph, and if flying at low altitude, would only be visible for a split second. Add to that the mass of the Barrett, which makes it difficult to maneuver quickly enough to track a fast-moving target. Plus there is the wholly unanswered question of readiness: how to alert this civilian air defense artillery corps and give them useful targeting data IN TIME to be effective. What are they going to do? Lug a large heavy weapon plus ammunition with them to work, the beach, on dates etc, on the off chance that they might be alerted to incoming drones? The idea of training large numbers of ordinary citizens to the level of proficiency required is not a tenable one, to put it charitably, and would be FAR from cost-effective.
There is also the danger of falling bullets, as another poster pointed out. And if you don't think the danger is real, tell that to my friend Cathy, whose uncle was killed about four years ago in Miami by a falling bullet. He was sitting on his back patio with his wife watching the New Year's fireworks and having a glass of champagne when he slumped to the ground dead. The first thought was that he had suffered a massive heart attack, but the medical examiner noticed a small hole near his collarbone, and the autopsy revealed that he had been killed by a small caliber handgun bullet falling from a steep angle, fired into the sky by some unknown, and unknowing, person celebrating the fireworks. The thought of masses of people firing enormous volumes of .50 caliber rounds into the sky over populated areas is a terrifying one to me personally.