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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Compared to nuclear and biological weapons, drones don't get my pulse up.

A future where terrorist groups can produce their own weapons of mass destruction seems like it may well be on the horizon. Through exponential improvements in the underlying technology. Crispr for biology and laser based uranium enrichment for nuclear.

I think it's entirely possible that the great filter might be ahead of us and might consist of our own weapons exceeding our ability to manage them responsibly.

Happy New Year all!

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Sure but even then, those groups could use these long-ranged and relatively cheap drones to deliver all those horrific weapons. Huge rockets and such is fortunately prohibitively expensive and hard to manage. Whereas drones compared to rockets, are much cheaper and easier to manage could easily substitute those rockets and they would also probably be able to evade our defensive systems. For example, Turkish drones destroying Russian anti-air defense in the Armenian/Azerbajian war.

Hundreds of thousands of autonomous drone killbots the size of bats flying around do get my pulse up.

Why do this when you can gas a bunch of people or blow them up old school for way cheaper? Not sold

Harder to do at range.

I'm glad I'm not the Secret Service. A drone swarm has to be rapidly becoming one of their scary scenarios for something like inaugurations.

A single medium-caliber mortar is a five-hundred-year-old piece of technology that can be carried and assembled by two men, has an effective range of ~1,000 to 5,000 yards, does not require line of sight to the target, can be operated by a high-school dropout, and has a kill radius of 30 meters.

One can probably be picked up from an army surplus warehouse somewhere in the former Soviet Union/(some current conflict zone), for an ~$X,000 USD bribe, or alternatively, manufactured by a literate, mildly motivated individual with a high tolerance for personal risk, a welder, a lathe, a tool-shed, and an outhouse in the mountains.

Given that we live in a world where gunpowder has been invented, you will have to pardon me if I'm more concerned about the dangers of lunatics with mundane explosives, and delivery systems thereof.

Mortar is hard to aim (even with modern aids), in a terrain that you haven't ranged already.

With a cell phone and Google Maps, you can get distance, elevation, obstacles, and more with good-enough precision.

Or, even use our own mission planning software against us - ATAK[1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Team_Awareness_Kit

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atakmap.ap...

Yes, these are the kind of modern aids I mentioned. You're still likely to miss your first one.

Mortar is not a precision weapon, it's a Monte Carlo prop.

Does it need to be a precision weapon to be a weapon of terror?

And with a kill zone of 20-30 meters... you can miss by quite a lot and still do a ton of damage.

Sure, but in the context of assassinating the VIP it does.

Mortar attacks for this are not unprecedented†, but are not terribly effective.

[†] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack#T...

For an assassination of a specific target - even with military equipment and technology, it would be dubious to use a mortar. They simply are not precision weapons, as you already pointed out.

But, for inflicting terror and great loss of life in a populated area - they could be used very effectively.

Any particular reason someone couldn't build a steerable mortar? It wouldn't take much in the way of gas jets to do the job.

You can do all sorts of guided munitions with all kinds of weapons, but then the simplicity vs drone attack point is kinda moot.

Thanks for joining me on whatever list we are now on :)

Expert disruptive innovators, the Irish Republican Army, repeatedly proved this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=IRA+%22mortar+at...

Amongst other things, shooting down a helicopter, and having a go, separately, at the queen and the prime minister.

And yet, fairly skilled operators in Afghanistan and Iraq still regularly miss American forward operating bases and their fixed buildings with them.

We don't live in a James Bond movie, any non-state actor who wants to kill people will have a much easier time of doing something incredibly boring and mundane, like buying an automatic weapon, or building a bomb.

You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of anything in secrecy.

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