I would like to see a mini quad copter take the recoil of a 1 g "shaped charge" (aka bullet).
EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable:
still, pretty worrisome.
EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable:
still, pretty worrisome.
"Contrary to a widespread misconception (possibly resulting from the acronym HEAT) the shaped charge does not depend in any way on heating or melting for its effectiveness; that is, the jet from a shaped charge does not melt its way through armor, as its effect is purely kinetic in nature"
What the Wikipedia article is saying is that the explosive forms its own projectile out of the molten metal casing, which is expelled at high velocity from the explosive and then penetrates through kinetic energy. It's a matter of where the energy for penetration comes from: what both Wikipedia and I are saying is that it comes from the explosive charge itself, not the velocity of the projectile, and hence there's no need for recoil when fired from a drone.
They don't rely on any kinetic energy at all to penetrate
to...
"which is expelled at high velocity from the explosive and then penetrates through kinetic energy"
I agee. But these projectiles only work under 2 conditions. (1) They have something very solid behind them, like the ground, or a metal gun, or (2) they are hurling toward the object at great speed. And if the drones are simply going to be kamikaze diving from 1000 feet above, almost anything you attach to it will cause significant damage. However that'd be a pretty low-precision maneuver, and sort of defeats the purpose of all those weeks spent training to perform image recognition.
Reactionless motion is not possible. The drone will recoil.
That said, it only need fire once given the mission in question.
https://i.imgur.com/LU4jzeY.jpg
It probably weighs about 5 grams, mostly due to the battery, which lasts all of 3 minutes (i.e. I wasn't thinking of millions of drones the size of that in the video I linked above)
Check out the EFP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator
EFPs were what turned out Humvees to swiss-cheese in Iraq before we switched over the MRAPs.
"An EFP 20 cm (8 inches) in diameter threw a 3 kg (7 lbs) copper slug at Mach 6, or 2,000 meters per second. (A .50-caliber bullet, among the most devastating projectiles on the battlefield, weighs less than two ounces and has a muzzle velocity of 900 meters per second.)
— Rick Atkinson, The Washington Post"
"very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter that can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,”
...and fire a bullet from it, and let me know what goes farther, the bullet or the quad.
If this happened to even a few hundred people, let alone thousands, then hospitals would be completely overwhelmed and people would be dying everywhere. It would cause a mass panic.
Injection with ricin was how Georgi Markov was assassinated [2]. It was shocking to say the least.
I just don't believe we will see a day when tiny drones with epipens pose a greater threat than guns.