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Comment by 8ig8 | Hacker News Reader

As a one time hooliganish teenager, I wonder if these will become targets for slingshots (or more sophisticated surface-to-air weapons).

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Not just hooliganism: there is real booty to collect.

I suppose the flying altitude should be outside te air gun range, with descent right naivete landing spot.

You can also collect booty from parked UPS and FedEx trucks.

In San Francisco, at least, the trucks' cargo areas are locked and reasonably well-secured when the vehicle is not attended, to reduce the opportunity for exactly this crime. I'm sure there are areas where sniping a few boxes from a truck as the driver is otherwise occupied is not so difficult, but that's not something one could expect to get away with repeatedly.

There's a reason the drone is made to land going directly down, vertically, once it reaches the destination.

If drones do get shot down, I'm sure Amazon will eventually deploy escort drones that sense where the shots come from. lol...

Hitting something small going 30MPH at 400 feet seems hard even with most guns. Adding some cameras you could probably track down who is attacking easily enough to discourage most people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGLxKXtkHpY

Drone is a smaller than amazon's but it's a good demonstration

When Amazon first announced their intent to use drones, one of my friends started using a phrase: "Skeet shooting, with prizes!"

From the page: "Our vehicles will be built with[...] sophisticated “sense and avoid” technology"

I can see an arms race between Amazon and would-be air-pirates; I honestly don't know what the state of the art in radar technology is, but if it can be drone-mounted, then you'll need something seriously fast to hit an intelligently-dodging vehicle.

Google showcased a radar-on-a-chip during the last IO; it looks exactly like something that could be fit onto a drone and provide short-range monitoring for incoming objects. The issue would be drone's reaction time though, especially when carrying heavy load.

As for hitting an intelligently-dodging vehicle - ever tried to throw a stick at a pigeon? I obviously don't recommend doing that, though I have some personal experience from the time when I was 9 years old, and I can tell you that suckers are damn good at avoiding projectiles. I doubt drones will reach that level of performance within next year or three, so for now, if you have something you could hit a pigeon with, you'll definitely be able to take a drone down with it.

Did you shoot at cars with a slingshot?

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