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Comment by samuelizdat | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the solution be jamming or EMP related? Of course, because the technological system must propagate itself at any cost this idea is counter-intuitive. Technological progress is seen as bending towards an inherent good. People never stop to think if it will be bad. Now people are to live in fear of drone swarms because nobody has autonomy in the technological system. People think they control technology, but it is really technology that controls us.

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There is no practical way to use EMP as a defense against small drones. That's something that only works in movies, not real life. Generating enough power to disrupt electronics at a useful range requires a powerful explosion.

The military uses a mix of jammers, small missiles, guns, and (soon) lasers.

There are some jammers, but they're not too useful if the drone is programmed to head out of jammer range if jammed. Currently, the most useful weapons against small drones are compressed air guns that fire nets.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/M6tT1GapCe4

If we're talking a commercial quadcopter drone, is it feasible to auto-target it via microphones and then shoot some CIWS at it? Something like this https://youtu.be/LThD0FMvTFU?t=42 but drones and bullets instead of mortars and lasers.

It's be nice if you could slap an anti-drone turret onto your vehicle to protect the airspace for a hundred meters.

Maybe jamming exceeds commercial drones' flight ceiling, but if not, dropping stuff from high up always does damage.

There are a number of bulky systems intended for larger targets which will work against drones, but most are not very portable. Ship-mounted systems such as CWIS do work.[1] But all those shells that don't hit the target land someplace.

[1] https://youtu.be/3UVuV5WvraQ

The land based CIWS uses self destructing shells so any that didn't hit the target explode into small, relatively safe fragments. But it's still risky to use in populated areas

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36412/centurions-roari...

> But all those shells that don't hit the target land someplace.

Just don't miss! It's only a few hundred meters out.

Oh CWIS are only ship-mounted? I thought it was a general term. I like PDC better anyway. #TheExpanse

Nice video—are those all tracers though?

The land-based version of CIWS is called Centurion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS#Centurion_C-RAM

C-RAM shells are supposed to self-destruct, but EOD guys will tell you that fuzes do not have a 100% operational rate. Another problem is cost and magazine size:

>The Block 1A and newer (pneumatic driven) CIWS mounts fire at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute with a 1,550-round magazine.

>Shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target.[14]

So it's about three grand to zap one drone, and you get 15 shootdowns before a human needs to shovel more ammo into the turret. That would make it vulnerable to a saturation attack. A hundred drones carrying grenades that home in on the CIWS radar would be tough to counter.

> Nice video—are those all tracers though?

Well, it's video game footage (ARMA 3, according to the title).

Jamming would address inter-swarm communications, but then they'd revert to solo operations. EMP isn't realistic, but microwave systems have already been tested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmf032NmHU

Birds and insects are able to swarm without telepathy, and the dynamics of this are fairly well understood. I don't think this is going to be such a big issue for drones; if anything, you'll get swarms of ultra-cheap tiny drones whose job is to swoop around chirping to each other until they get jammed, then take note of where the jamming signal seems to originate, GTFO, and convey that geographical information back to base at the earliest opportunity. The more enthusiastically you jam, the sooner you become the target of a ballistic mortar or guided missile that's fatally attracted to your jamming device.

Jamming wouldn't break line-of-sight or optical communication. Imagine drones that can simply see one another, and communicate by changing color (e.g. with LEDs).

Lasers are already used for inter-satellite communications, so there's no need to just use gross color shifting (though perhaps the BOM impact would be less).

Related side story: my resume had something about PKI in it so I kept getting calls from Boeing recruiters trying to fit me into a job doing said satellite laser comms (presumably using PKI). I kept telling them I knew nothing optics-related aside from basic Newtonian stuff, and they kept calling me back. I hope they finally found someone.

Why would you use lasers if you can use Li-Fi?

I'd back up and say it might be even more simple from a cybersec perspective, holding off the military drone capabilities and related hardening.

Embedded consumer electronics/IoT generally have awful security configs and an internet connection. Consumer-grade, and I bet a fair bit of the more high powered drones, are vulnerable to this same risk.

I'd love an educated opinion on this, but to the extent I've thought about this as well - many of these drones must be vuln to some form of remote code exploitation and shutdowns, if you can get a targeted signal to hit their admin "beacon" or w/e.

As consumer drones do show up in warfare a fair bit, this feels like a possible counter-drone route to explore.

>People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors

I'm interesting to know what kinds of crimes people are commiting with quadcopters. Is it more of a spying/industrial espionage thing? Or stealing Amazon packages off of people's doorsteps? Arsonists?

Sorry, crimes is a too generic term!

Counter-drone fight in Iraq/Syria includes consumer drones dropping what are basically grenades.

Another recent example was a souped up quadcopter that scouted out a mil base in AZ and then outran a few LEO rotary wings recently. But, if it was that modified of a drone, it's possible other aspects of the connection/remote access were hardened as well.

I've heard of cross-border drug trafficking: https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/narcodrones-1809749...

I suspect that jamming would push people to make drones fully autonomous, so that they're capable of carrying out their mission even is comms are down.

At least in the US we're already surrounded by people with firearms. The situation isn't really very new IMO. People have already started committing crimes using quadcoptors and everyone knows about them now. You don't hear about them shooting people because that's already illegal and we have social structures in place to deal with it.

TL;DR if anything this is an improvement because it makes the 2A thing make more sense (almost no one is building guided missiles in their backyard except that one youtuber who's trying to make his model rockets land on their own.)

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