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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I think a more fundamental problem is cost: Building one more explosive-drone is probably cheaper than raising and training one more bird, so an attacker would just send N+1 drones against N birds, and whichever drones detect interference can explode into shrapnel.

> Given the brittle, hollow nature of bird bones

Maybe they could make them little reinforced booties of kevlar and steel-sheathed talons? :P

Over in the realm of sci-fi, its interesting to contemplate bird-safe EMP grenades, or a neural-tap that makes the birds part of a spotter/targeting system for ground-based lasers.

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> Maybe they could make them little reinforced booties of kevlar and steel-sheathed talons? :P

From TFA:

> "The military is designing mittens of leather and Kevlar, an anti-blast material, to protect their talons," Agence France-Presse reported.

The problem for terrorists is not the cost of drones, but to acquire the explosives.

For that matter, the drones don't solve any problem real-world terrorists really have. They are usually discovered while planning attacks or acquiring weapons and explosives. Putting a bomb near a lot of people is comparatively easy.

Uhm... I don't think it's hard at all to acquire the materials to build a bomb. I'm not disputing it's still the hard part of planning a terrorist attack, still... A teenager can get a kilo of ammonium nitrate online for 10 dollars, at least where I live.

Maybe ANFO bombs aren't that powerful, but those can't be the only easy options for DIY bombs.

I don't really see how it's a useful priority to try to physically stop terrorist attacks. There obviously aren't that many people who successfully commit them (because the number of related deaths is tiny) and the talk of "well we're stopping a load of them you just don't know because it's classified", yeah... they say that, but why should I believe unqualified statements about other people's secrets?

Why not focus on the factors that make people radicalize, and work on reducing those?

I guess it makes shitty headlines compared to "Kevlar-coated military drone hunting eagles kick evil khaki-person ass".

Explosives that are powerfull enough to cause serious damage in quantities small enough to be carried by an off the shelf drone are much harder to acquire than ammonium nitrate.

Also buying the large quantities of DIY explosive components needed to build large bombs will raise red flags.

Hell, I never even considered multiple quads. Look at how "prey" birds avoid falcons and eagles right now, flocks, or in a more cool fashion, murmurations, which in addition to being super cool, are also an effective defense against them- and intel's swarming technology could be a downright prefect representation of the same idea.

Another cheap defence for the drone is simply to change direction or altitude radically when an appropriate sensor detects an incoming eagle. The eagle is in a dive and has limited maneuverability.

Or, if the eagle does grab you, simply explode (as already stated elsewhere) and take out the defence, while one of your swarm buddies completes the mission.

Even better, use cheap drones to kill the birds with explosives say, leaving your mission-critical drone to do its job.

With decent propellers, you won't even need explosives if the bird tries to catch it - so simply use decoy drones, carrying random junk of mass equal to that of the bomb, just like decoys on MIRV payloads.

>Building one more explosive-drone is probably cheaper than raising and training one more bird, so an attacker would just send N+1 drones against N birds

I'm not sure terrorist organisations, people using drones to fly over restricted airspace (many french cities are), etc, have the same budget than western miltaries...

For every terrorist organisation (whatever that means) that I can name, I can also name a nation that has funded them often western. Britain, USA, France, Israel and Russia come to mind. I'm sure others can be readily found.

Yeah but unless a VIP constantly travels with two trucks full of birds, N will always be a small number, even if the country can afford more.

They could also just use one of these[1] jamming devices to take down the drone.

[1]http://newatlas.com/battelles-dronedefender-beam-gun-uavs/39...

Control systems for drones typically run on 2.4GHz, but they don't have to. The 70cm band (433MHz typical) is available for people with amateur radio licenses (or people who don't care). There are also 3G chips (Particle Electron) that you can use to send telemetry commands if your drone has a GPS and a compatible auto-pilot flight controller.

Getting a video signal back is normally done on 5.8GHz, but there is hardware readily available for 900MHz, 1.2GHz, 2.4GHz, and 3.3GHz. And if you're an enterprising fellow you can send the video on any frequency (NTSC or PAL).

Basically, you can't block it all without serious collateral "damage".

Edit: I've been building and flying drones for over two years, both FPV racing types and larger photography/videography platforms.

This is becoming a tad complicated and with a lots of steps involved for just bombing things isn't it? I mean Tony Stark could it in a cave, but could Joe Terrorist do it?

ps: I shouldn't talk about the costs effectiveness of terror bombing, but it doesnt' seem like something those guys would do, car bombing seem like a "good" enough approach in general.

As a constant follower of the /r/syriancivilwar sub-reddit for the last 2 and a half years all I can say is that one should never under-estimate the technical capabilities and know-how of the other side, be they religious fundamentalists like ISIS or tha AQ-affiliated factions from outside Aleppo and from the province of Idlib. Judging by the many videos of ISIS in action thag I've seen I can say that they were pretty quick in using and mastering drones for their military purposes, along with satellite maps and (I think custom-made) tablet apps.

I agree. It's the XXI century. There is Internet. Point any country on Earth, and you can bet you'll find there many software developers and electrical engineers, be it hobby or professional.

I've seen this or other similar ideas a number of times, and I have no faith that they would work outside commercial copters- I mean, right off the bat, the jamming is more likely to explode any bombs than anything else- and the military already has anti-jamming technology, or you could just use a nonstandard frequency, which from what I understand would also circumvent any jamming.

As far as I'm concerned, almost all anti-drone devices are complete shams.

Then they just use what the military call an "anti radiation" method of target homing.

A crude suicidal drone with programming to 'avoid obstacles' + 'head to the source of the jamming signal' + 'blow up as near to the target as possible'.

Side note: "Anti Radiation Drone" sounds like some sort of scifi awesome sauce if you ask me.

The military already uses anti-radiation missiles with home-on-jam capabilities extensively.

Here's the US model, which will carry a 66kg HE warhead to 150 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM

The Israeli Harop[0] and Harpy[1] are literally Anti-Radiation drones in service today.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harpy

Doesn't work if the drone is autonomous.

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