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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Per other news reports, kinetic kills were ruled out because of unacceptable risk of bullets/shells hitting something they shouldn't — the whole of South-East England is populated at a density that Americans would call suburbia. (All of England is only one and a half times as large as Greater Los Angeles County: lots of small towns, villages, and homes in the vicinity of Gatwick.)

I'm surprised they don't have specialist anti-drone transmitters, but as Police spending in England and Wales has been cut by over 30% since 2010, maybe it wasn't seen as a priority.

Tracking down the operators should be possible, but this looks like a well-planned attempt to shut down the airport: whoever is behind it probably planned to move around in order to evade the Airport Police.

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There's a lot of clay pigeon shooting in England. I think the shot looses too much velocity to do much damage on the way back down. It could work ok if the drones were below say 300 ft.

I'd be fairly comfortable using #7 or so birdshot in a suburban environment in limited quantity if people were evacuated or indoors (risking property damage is much better than injury or death). It won't break skin at 100-150 yards. I assume you'd either shoot from the ground or, if it's out of that range, from a helicopter.

Actually pretty curious about shotgun-vs-drone best practice, now. Most of the shotgun data I have is for horizontal ranges. This might be a good way to use up some cheap drones out in the desert next time. The other question is how much damage various kinds of shot with various levels of energy will do to different drones.

The rotors will bring a lot of energy into the equation on their own. It may be sufficient just to put some steel or lead in their path.

I'd be more concerned about the crashing drone than the shot. People are hit with falling shot fairly regularly when bird hunting and as far as I know it's not considered a serious problem.

> whoever is behind it probably planned to move around in order to evade the Airport Police.

If it were me and I wasn't using a preprogrammed route I'd just set up a transceiver that either replays or relays controls. Hide it in a bush and be on the other side of the country while everything is going off.

Welcome to MI5's watch list.

I hope they enjoy watching me commit atrocities in Rimworld.

Making hats is illegal in the UK?

Or use a cell phone radio and send data over the internet.

> All of England is only one and a half times as large as Greater Los Angeles County

What? That's not even close to true by land area or population.

Greater Los Angeles - 87,490 km2 England - 130,279 km2

87,490 * 1.5 = 131,235

Pretty close if you ask me.

That's if you include all of San Bernadino and Riverside Counties, which stretch north and east up to Las Vegas and Arizona.

Which is complete nonsense.

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