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Comment by m4rtink | Hacker News Reader

Actually proximity fuzed rounds should work the best, each taking outv many swarm memvers. Its not like these things could be armored rather than as light as possible.

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Proximity fused rounds do have the significant downside that using them near built up areas will cause significant collateral damage. For example, if a drone swarm attacks an election rally somewhere in the US then you can't really detonate airburst shells above the crowd to take out the drones, since you would do more harm than good with that.

Hmm, a slightly Rube Goldberg type idea - what about firing proximity fuzed "airbag rounds" ? A Kevlar bag + car airbag style gas generator. If fuzed and timed just right it could potentially punch the drone from the sky, either breaking it or casing enough flight path distortion it migh not recover.

Or maybe release a bunch nylon filaments that will entangle any propellers and make the thing fall down ?

Would you? What if the drones are carrying grenades?

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.

If you can say for certain beforehand that the drones are carrying grenades, then _maybe_. But if they are "just" carrying a sharpened stick to try and skewer whichever politician is holding the rally with, then killing a large amount of the audience will be really unpopular Also, not killing them but allowing the politician to be killed will be really unpopular too. Lasers on the other hand don't run out of ammo, cause much less collateral damage and are quite effective against lightweight drones.

(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.)

Lasers still can cause potentially blinding unwanted reflections. Still likely a better option than supersonic shrapnel from standard proximity fuzed rounds though as collateral damage goes.

Yes lasers are not perfect either, for example the chances are often fairly high that a shot-down drone will fall onto something (or someone). Like I mentioned before, if drone swarm attacks are a part of the threat model then you might want to reconsider if you want to let civilians near the event at all.

Or just load up birdshot haha.

Birdshot at 100 shots per second ;-)

Second thought: is there something like a "constant airgun"? Where you just drop in pellets from a hopper into a high speed airstream?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyC-F_7QXtk

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