Drones Raining from the Sky in Zhengzhou
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The phyles' populaces themselves rarely see this conflict in their own airspace. Rather, it plays itself out in the Leased Territories and no-man's-lands between phyle enclaves. The thetes (classless members of no phyle, who live in these no-man's-lands), on the other hand, intermittently find their air full of clashing mites, flashing lidar, and the resulting microscopic debris. ```
I think this is one of the reasons he has such a loyal following - he gets current tech trends and knows how to extrapolate it into the future very well.
I suggest Stanisław Lem’s “Weapon systems of the 21st century.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STM_Kargu
:/
>>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.
You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo, but that only slightly mitigates it. Against drone swarms you kinda want directed energy weapons, either microwave or laser. Which don't exist, currently.
Also note that Phalanx is radar based, leaving it open to the usual suite of radar jamming/ECW/antiradiation attacks.
You can tip the odds back in your favor by emplacing more Phalanx systems, but at ten million bucks each, that limits you to stuff like defending small-size/high-value targets like the White House, rather than numerous and sprawling US military bases.
I mean, I can see how it’s less than ideal, but I don’t think it’s safe to assume you’d do more harm than good.
(Of course by the time you have to guard political rallies so much that "grenade attacks by drone swarms" becomes a reasonable threat scenario, you may have to rethink things and probably just cancel the rally for now.)
Or maybe release a bunch nylon filaments that will entangle any propellers and make the thing fall down ?
Second thought: is there something like a "constant airgun"? Where you just drop in pellets from a hopper into a high speed airstream?
That's pretty crazy to think of ... I guess the only justification for that is that the assets that are protected by such a system are worth more than that.
> You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo
If I learned anything from games, it's that you want AoE damage for swarming enemies ;-)
Emptying 6 or 8 4500 round Phalanx turrets at the half dozen cruise missile locked onto your aircraft carrier seems like a pretty sensible way to spend a million bucks.
These guys reckon they can detect, locate, and take down drones and drone swarms by jamming them with directed RF (not energy weapons as such): https://www.droneshield.com
These guys build "remotely operated weapons" that include 5.56mm up to 30mm cannons (as well as grenade launchers and missile launchers), and a "Counter Drone Defence System" that can drive them: https://www.eos-aus.com/defence/
I don't know it this works anything like as well on moving targets, but what you see at about 30 secs in this video looks like it'd take down most significanbtly-smaller-than-Predator drones pretty reliably at 900m out: https://vimeo.com/429825806 And I suspect 7.65 or 5.56 would probably work just as well as 50cal for that (though perhaps less accurately at long range?)
Not anything like as vicious as Phalanx, but if you're trying to protect against quadcopter or fixed wing drone swarms instead of cruise missiles, I'd bet they're remarkably more cost effective.
https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/rheinmetall_ag/press/themen_i...
As they are small, they do not need a lot of energy to be disabled, especially if they are jammed first.
This is already a thing due to the widespread use of laser rangefinders, designators, and the like, as well as the fact that the Chinese have fielded blinding laser weapons.
I could see larger, military versions of this being effective. Drones are pretty fragile and easy to take down.
So probably developed in part by people who had no idea they were building weapons.
And while the original Kargus didn't have explosives, that doesn't mean they weren't weapons. In the military sense, a radio that's being used to call in artillery is a weapon. Whether the bomb is on the drone itself or is fired at something the drone is surveilling doesn't change what the drone is.
How much would you bet against open source projects like Ardupilot having their code swiped and used by defence contractors or weapons manufacturers.
What are the GPL requirements for making the source available to people targeted by drones running stolen GPL code?
While it's true drone technology "could be used for harmful applications", that's also true for, say, compilers. Do you hold the gcc/clang developers to account for being "blind to the military applications of what they were making"? Or OpenStreetMap contributors? Or the engineers who designed the HiLux? Or the Casio F-91W watch designers? None of those were "designed for military application" yet all ended up being used for them.
Where does the line need to get drawn? between my rights to design/build/fly drones as a hobby, commercial/industrial rights to use drones for photography or cinematograpy or crop monitoring or search and rescue or shark surveillance at swimming beachs - and the need to restrict "military applications" of that?
Are people who, say, write blog posts explaining how to use microcontroller RTOS libraries for hard real time guarantees, with mentioned examples like nuclear power plant control "blind to the military applications of what they're making"? (Yeah, sorry. I profile stalked you a little there...)
Zyklon B was a pesticide, and all that.
In any case, this discussion is pretty similar to the "AWS is running my FOSS database as a service without paying me" debate. If you don't want your software to be used for certain applications, don't release it under a license stating that you can do anything with it. If you think the good that you do for the world by releasing some good new tech is greater than the harm done to the world, spread it as widely as you can. Ardupilot is in this category IMO: even if some militias try to make their own combat drones with it, the overall good done by making drone technology available to all could well be greater. The idea that you can make something "perfect" (that is with no imaginable harmful applications whatsoever) is probably not viable in this imperfect world filled with less than perfect people. Even very harmless things like teddy bears can be used to enable violent acts, but that does not mean we should stop making them.
I, personally, don't ever want to let that argument stop me from building shit that I want to build for fun. Like I pointed out, Hiluxes and F-19Ws have become well know "tools of trade" for freedom fighters and terrorists. Obviously totally not the intend ofd the designers, and even in retrospect nobody sane would say "Toyota should never have built and sold the HiLux because it's too easy to mount a machine gun in the tray!"
Could my ongoing projects to build sub 100g autonomous drones be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my experimenting with LoRa Mesh Networking be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my project to try using GPS and ADSB to aim a camera with a high powered zoom lens on a gimbal to take pics of planes be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Am I going to stop doing any of those things because of that? Nope. On the other hand, would I experiment with a drone carrying explosives? Nope. Would I mount a laser on the camera gimbal auto aiming at planes? Nope. I don't know if my personal lines in the sand have any valid arguments behind them other than "that's just where my personal morals/ethics draws the line", and I wouldn't hold other people to account for having their own lines drawn somewhat differently. But I will judge both far ends of the bell curve there as "way too irresponsible" or "way too paranoid".
Having said that, two companies in another comment of mine here DroneSheild and EOS have both tried to headhunt me (DroneShield directly, EOS I'm 98% certain it was them the recruiter was trying to pimp me to..) And both times I was _seriously_ tempted just because the technical challeneges seem like so much fun. I declined both approaches though, having decided I didn't want to work in that industry. My dad was a defence contractor pretty much his entire career, so I don't judge people who _do_ choose that industry. It can certainly be lucrative, and _most_ of what dad worked on at least was defence or training, rather than attack weapons.
If you want to read some more about how they work and how they're priced, I wrote about it here - https://propwash.nihalmohan.com/issues/are-drone-light-shows...
I'm guessing they tried to run the show too long. It looks like they all start attempting to land before their batteries run out, around the same time...
That doesn’t immediately sound very plausible to me (as a layman who’s never dealt with drones but has dealt with battery-powered devices): I can’t imagine auto-power-down being based on flight time: surely it would be driven by battery voltage measurements, since batteries vary somewhat to begin with and vary a lot more as they age; and I then wouldn’t expect such homogeneity of battery lives that they would all drop out of the sky in such a short range of time.
You could say that their not all behaving in the same way at the same time supports the idea of low-battery emergency landing, but I think that could be adequately explained by network congestion effects too, which could line up with the claim of an attack if such an attack were some sort of frequency jamming or network saturation thing (I don’t know what wireless systems such drones use).
(The second video, “another view”, is much more interesting than the first, showing the constellation going from full strength to about two dozen left 30 seconds later, with another dozen subsequently failing very close to simultaneously in the last second of the video—I wish the video had gone for even two seconds more.)
Well, they have all been doing a synchronised routine. Presumably they were purchased as a batch, and operated together.
And if these were mini-drones that only had a 10 minute battery life to begin with? I could believe they'd all run flat within 60 seconds of one another.
The flat battery hypothesis also feels unlikely because it’s too obvious a failure mode. On the other hand, I suppose it’d be possible to have them send the drones up, then get told to delay by a few minutes, and so exceed the planned flight time. But the drones aren’t that high up (much less than 30 seconds of controlled descent), so that doesn’t feel so likely.
No, it's driven by a battery management system that measures battery voltage, temperature and input/output current in order to get a more accurate estimate.
The one at 0:25 is seriously out of juice or didn't expect the ground where it is.
edit: looks like they really just run out of juice: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1445119043199913990
Then all the drones drop out of the sky after 2 minutes because the "10,000mAHr" cells only store about 500mAHr:
I’ve never done this large a coordinated display before, but have ten years UAV flying experience (quads, hexes, octo, and double stacked octo) and have done smaller scale test flights with a dozen choreographed drones.
It really says something about the culture of a group of people if they return someone else's property that ends up in their hands or not.
There's no collective so you can't "flare" for landing like a helicopter, but during autorotation the terminal velocity is still much lower than if the blades were fixed.
The drones in this video fall a lot slower though. This looks like controlled descent, not autorotation.
it's not that straightforward, whether or not braking or freewheeling causes more drag depends on the prop.
[1] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?3753127-Freew...
The first few look precipitous but you don't see them approach the ground, later in the video you see one that's coming down very fast and then makes a reasonable effort to brake when it gets near the ground.
Edit: Most of them are doing a fast controlled descent, a few seem to have just powered off and become rocks.
Everyone here and on Reddit are bitching about Chinese propaganda bots but the only thing I see is people with new accounts attacking China and an immediate accusation of shilling to anyone who doesn't criticize China or even draws a parallel between whatever is being criticized and the U.S..
Seriously, y'all need help if you keep thinking China is the most evil bogeyman in the world. First it was Iraq, then Iran, now it's China.
I am not saying China is great or even good but this whole immediate "fuck China" whenever anything happening in China is reported, is just pathetic and a symptom of brainwashing.
Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.
"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...
I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.
This is at the very least much more explicit than the control political parties in the US exert over businesses.
But yeah. I'm only here to say that equating control of giants to be very different to control of everyone.
About ten years ago there was the infamous "3Q war" where Tencent and Qihoo engaged in pretty ridiculous measures over the messenger market by blocking each others usage on consumer machines when the other one was installed, orchestrating fake media articles about pornography, police raids and at some point calling on users to go into a general strike. The war basically only ended because at some point the government stepped in and for the first time enforced anti-trust law.
This has changed to some degree but China's tech sector always was so hilariously under-regulated it makes most Western countries look socialist in comparison
My comment is straightforward: in China, it would not be surprising if an "incident" was the result of negligence (Google search "chabuduo") or sabotage, or if sabotage was used as an excuse to "save face" (Google it).
Since nothing in my comment called China "the most evil bogeyman in the world", your hyperbolic response is curious to me. In China, at a certain level of business, the state in some form is omnipresent. Feel free to not explore the implications of that and make value judgements, but this is a simple fact that you'd know if you spent any time here.
It's not about US interests or anything external. It's entirely and only about the atrocities being performed. It's about the forceful harvesting of human hair from prisoners for sale to blissfully ignorant western nations. It's about the organ harvesting of the poor and disenfranchised for the medical privilege of the elite. It's about the chattel slavery of tens of millions of Chinese citizens who are put to use at gunpoint by the power of the communist party. Kept in this world living conditions, brainwashed by the party to know their given role in life is to do nothing but farm, or labor in the fields or factories. Thedrug cartels, the human trafficking, the weapons and money provided to bad actors around the world, the unmitigated environmental destruction and pollution all over the globe.
It's about the soul corrupting oppression of hundreds of millions of human fucking beings who deserve more than willful disregard by us in the west, who'd rather not be inconvenienced by having to think about what the plight of those people means to our own place in the world. About the supply chains and economic advantages in life we enjoy because of the exploitation of those people. About what I it means to ignore the evil in favor of the easy.
So yeah, bub, sorry to burst your bubble. Some of us just aren't comfortable with the "just like us" modern happy narrative crafted by the CCP.
Because it's... a single-party Communist state? Stories about North Korea also tend to talk about its government a lot.
So you can actually tell how well the propaganda has worked on a lot of people. They just love the outrage so much that they'll censor anyone who questions them.
The brainwashing has been complete. Poor US citizens.
That been said, the actual reason for cities to use these drones is surprisingly simple: China banned firework show few years ago for environmental reasons, so cities use drones as alternative to celebrate October 1 which is China's national day and the longest holidays (the Golden Holidays).
See? Just that simple.
Also, using drones is a smarter choice: Not only it's eco-friendlier, but also cheap, fixable and safer compare to fireworks. You can even put ads in the sky to cover part of the cost after the show is over, it just make more sense.
In this very case, I think the drones are doing fail-safe landing maneuvers, probably due to lost of control signal. Reportedly the drone company has already called the police on the suspicion of sabotage.