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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

And even drone races are slow and predictable compared to what is possible with an applied military mind and decent tools. I suspect (or hope) we already have some decent options in the top secret space.

Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.

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>Nothing we have now (publicly) is going to do a damn against a shipping container full of 2-5 lb drones each carrying 1 lb of C4 in a swarm with cheap off the shelf sensors going 100 mph nap of the earth in a distributed pattern. And that is currently entirely doable with off the shelf drones using existing software and published techniques for peanuts. Add in some decent programming and logistics talent, and that is a huge problem.

Existing technology can take down conventional drones through Electronic Warfare and EW scales to an infinite number of drones assuming each drone is vulnerable.

That is not true. Existing technology can take out remote controlled conventional drones with EW.

I know of no existing (human proximity safe) EW that can handle optical based or internal (IMU) inertial autonomous flight, and both of those are more than good enough in this scenario (though optical may limit the upper speed bounds depending on the onboard processing capabilities). IMU based (pre programmed) could easily allow no active sensor mode, though would require pre-scouting the route.

The Indirect Fires Protection Capability (IFPC) is probably what you're looking for.

The US Army is looking to field a demonstrator by 2022 & deploy by 2024.

They're exploring both laser and microwave / EM for the counter-UAS role. In complement to existing SAMs for higher-value/capability targets.

https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/ms-ifpc_inc_2-i/

Thank god something is in the pipeline! Thank you for the links.

If you mass produce these things you are going to leave traces of your logistics supply chain. Even if you brought them into a staging are one at a time your frequent trips would lead back to where they were made or by whom.

Which wouldn’t stop someone using it in a declared war - which we haven’t had yet by an actor likely to want it. Doesn’t mean it isn’t sitting in a military port somewhere though.

And since China makes like 99% of the parts used in drones, they very well could already have a couple hundred of those lying around and we’d never know.

At some point 3d printing will make localized offgrid drone production entirely feasible.

The chips, PCB, and all electronics have their embedded serial number in them. It's very likely many of these will survive a direct explosion, and once these identifiers are extracted from them, the supplier/manufacturer/vendor/customer will be identified using standard investigation methods. So while there's little possibility of some unknown Unabomber-style decade long rampage using this tech, they could be very destructive in the short-term.

My nightmare scenario is someone flying hundreds of these in formation on a stadium full of people. They could be launched from a parking lot from a single van or pickup truck. If you sacrifice the ability to hover by giving them wings, you might get very high range and not have to risk yourself at all while launching a devastating attack.

I'm sort of surprised we haven't seen this already. It's not even that hard or expensive to build.

This made me realize something like a TAS drone race would be interesting to watch.

What is TAS? Haven’t heard that term before. total autonomous system?

"tool assisted speedrun" is a term in video game speedruns referring to the use of software/external tools to help with speedrunning games. So imagine a drone race where everything is programmed rather than remote controlled by a pilot

Tool-assisted speedruns. People use emulators and record inputs frame-by-frame, allowing nearly perfect performance and even reliable exploitation of game vulnerabilities. I remember one where the author exploited a bug in such a way that it completely reprogrammed the game:

http://tasvideos.org/5384S.html

Check it out, it's incredibly fun:

http://tasvideos.org/

There's an entire category for movies containing arbitrary code execution:

http://tasvideos.org/Movies-C3050Y.html

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