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Being Pestered By Drones? Buy a Drone-Hunting Drone
schwit1 writes, "Are paparazzi flying drones over your garden to snap you sunbathing? You may need the Rapere, the drone-hunting drone which uses 'tangle-lines' to quickly down its prey."
From The Telegraph's article: It has been designed to be faster and more agile than other drones to ensure that they can't escape - partly by limiting flight time and therefore reducing weight.
“Having worked in the UAS industry for years, we've collectively never come across any bogus use of drones. However it's inevitable that will happen, and for people such as celebrities, where there is profit to be made in illegally invading their privacy, there should be an option to thwart it,” the group say on their website.
This seems more efficient than going after those pesky paparazzi drones with fighting kites (video), but it should also inspire some skepticism: CNET notes that the team behind it is anonymous, and that "Rapere works in a lab setting, however there aren't any photos or videos of the killer drone in action. The website instead has only a slideshow of the concept."
There was that old sf story by Robert Silverberg, I think, that went like this: They made automated police drones (they weren't called drones back then) that prevented any violent crime from happening. Unfortunately they had learning circuits and decided even killing animals for food or harvesting crops was violent crime, and the society ended up starving. The solution was to create a new kind of drone to kill the existing drones - but this also had learning circuits and it decided it had to kill everyone.
Looks pretty realistic these days. Anyone remember the name of the story, and the author if i got it wrong?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Put 4 big helium ballons and place nylon wires between them. Operates 24h a day and is cheap.
Don't forget that guy in New Zealand who designed and built an inexpensive home-built cruise missile that could be launched from a pickup truck. It wasn't big, but it was effectively unstoppable and theoretically pretty easy to launch and escape without getting caught.
The important part here, is that he built a guidance system for it. Adapt that for a small drone platform, and suddenly you don't need to be at the controls or within visual range of the thing.