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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>designed specifically for the challenge of keeping up with the car at speeds of over 300kph.

So using relatively inexpensive parts they built an artillery shell shaped drone that can travel at over 300 kmph ... for just one lap.

Do you hear that? It's the sound of every military in the world ringing their phones.

For context, commercial DJI drones are heavily used in Ukraine right now by both sides mostly for recon (and more), but since they're slow, they often get shot down by rifle/small arms fire form soldiers. However, if you could make them go 300+ kmph, even John Wick couldn't shoot them down while they do a recon lap.

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Ukraine AND Russia have both used off the shelf/even custom built racing drones for various "kamikaze" styled attacks. This is also one of the stated reasons from China about their recent export restrictions on drone parts. Just search for "Ukraine/Russia FPV drones".

Building this stuff is trivial too. Anyone who can solder a few components and follow a 30 minute youtube tutorial can have one of these.

Seems sad that the first thing I thought was "bet that would be hard to shoot down" - not sure if that's more of a reflection of me, or the state of affairs. That aside, if you'd told me when I was a teenager in the 90s that a fancy RC helicopter would go faster than an F1 car before I'm even an old man, not sure if I would have believed you, we've come a hell of a long way in drone tech - and that's impressive. Kudos to you drone engineer folks.

It's already next to impossible to shoot down a dji style drone if you don't have a shotgun with birdshot

Birdshot doesn’t travel far enough to reliably harm a drone flying at even the US-legal maximum of 400’ AGL.

The travel distance for #9.5 birdshot is only 700’ - and that’s ground distance covered when fired at optimal angle, not vertical reach.

The suicide drones pop a 0' from you, 700' is plenty, even a third would save you.

I've seen videos of Russians throwing rocks or magazines at drones, they'd have better odds with shotguns and birdshots

As a matter of fact, their phone is ringing constantly after the world watched this video.

"The phone of Thomas de Koster from Middelburg has been ringing off the hook since the video came online yesterday afternoon."

https://www.omroepzeeland.nl/nieuws/16315140/snelle-drone-va... (Dutch)

https://www.dutchdronegods.com/

Does it really have a lot of military applications ?

I presume weight is heavily optimized to get 300kmph. So it won’t go that fast if it carries explosives. Could be used for high value target killing. Like literally a bullet you can control, might be able to make that work.

But for reconnaissance can’t the drone just go high up ? And then can’t really be shot down with a rifle ? You just need better optics.

Maybe just paint the target with a laser and follow it until the others get it.

>Like literally a bullet you can control, might be able to make that work.

Please stop speedrunning scifi dystopias

That cat has been out of the bag for at least seven years. The Slaughterbots video was for arms-control advocacy[0,1], but definitely speedrunning near-real dystopias way more than anything here...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

>The Future of Smart Bullets

https://youtu.be/KAqSGhOuGm4?si=ZlklaMzN06SeG238

>but since they're slow, they often get shot down by rifle/small arms fire form soldiers

Do they? I have an old and basic Mavic Air, but I can't imagine the skill it would require to shoot it down with a rifle if it's moving high up in the air.

It's difficult enough to even spot it.

I'm sure they do get shot down sometimes, but 'often' enough for it to be a problem?

I'm not sure what happens in real world drone shoot down attempts, but I read the specs, and the Mavic supposedely tops out around 40mph.

Certainly hunters have had enough luck shooting ducks and other waterfowl with similar speed. Albeit with shotguns.

To be fair, ducks don't maneuver the way a drone can.

Your average duck is far more maneuverable than a Mavic.

Since when do ducks fly to the side? Or vertically?

> I'm sure they do get shot down sometimes, but 'often' enough for it to be a problem?

For one person with a bolt-action rifle, no.

For a battalion of conscripts with automatic rifles? I’m sure it happens quite a bit.

Not that many drones get shot down, and when it happens it’s so noteworthy that the one doing the shooting down can’t actually believe his luck. And they usually use shotguns for that, using rifles is really just 100% pure luck.

As per the speed, on their way down current (very cheap) drones are already way too fast for anyone to try and shoot them, the taking down (when it rarely happens) usually takes place when the drone is in the middle of a hovering pattern. Were the drones to always go at full speed (100 kph, 300 kph, it doesn’t really matter) then the operators controlling them would have no way to tell which is which on the ground.

What surprises me is that these kinds of drones aren't already standard equipment. Even in the mid 2000s I thought that these types of drones were the future of warfare.

If you have enough of them you could use them to sweep out areas. Launch a bunch and have them map out the place. You can have them carry weapons and other such things, eg laser communications networks.

Back then I figured that by the 2020-2030s ships would exist that would primarily carry (larger) drones. Those drones could then carry these smaller drones into their locations to do all the things they need to do.

> what about a turret that shoots smaller turrets?

- Torbjörn, Overwatch

There's heavy use of EW on both sides. You need a fairly decent signal to pilot a drone like this as it has to support both sending video back to the operator and commands to the drone. As I understand things both sides are using these sorts of piloted drones extensively to attack any armored vehicles where possible and bunkers on the front line otherwise.

For example this rather depressing article cites Russian manufacturing capacity as outstripping Ukraine: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-losing-drone-...

The thing is, they probably do exist. Especially in the US possession. You just don't get to see or hear about them.

I think they've been researching these for a while now: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM&pp=ygUfRmlyc3QgYXJ...

One F1 lap is like 4 miles at maximum. I doubt that would be enough for recon, since you'd have to calculate the distance it needs to cover to return to its handler.

Why do you need it to return? Seems like you can stream out the data feed and then self destruct after use.

And if it self destructs by hitting an ammo depot or the expensive optics on a tank or a commanding officer in the head, even better. The RoI of such drones would be insane.

The modern battlefield is getting even more scary. Soldiers are gonna have PTSD from the drone motor whine when they return home.

The drone is very loud. You can hear it from hundreds of meters away. The rotors are moving at 0.8 Mach in order to achieve this speed. It's not obvious from this specific video, but if you watch a similar one from an almost identical drone you can realize how impossible it would be to get it close to anything critical unnoticed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbYEzEWvjr8&t=98s

What's the point of recon if you're going to loudly announce where your drone went?

I guess for military use you need both high efficiency to travel longer distances and some payload capacity to carry explosives. Off the shelf camera drones usually can't fly further than 10-15km on one charge. This is probably not enough for a lot of reconnaissance tasks.

Another problem of multicopters is the loud noise they produce, not really suitable for warfare.

I think there is a reason that most military drones are fixed-wing aircrafts, similar to regular model airplanes

Kinetic impact aside, I've seen videos out of Ukraine of this but the drones also have explosives strapped to them. Its safe to say this has already happened.

Not John Wick perhaps, but a radar controlled machine gun

They already have German Gepards with 35 × 228 mm radar guided auto-cannons to shoot down the Iranian Shahed drones, but those drones are much larger and easier to shoot down since they're 3.5m (11 ft) by 2.5m (8.2 ft), plus they cost almost $200k a pop.

Using multi milion euro tracked vehicles firing expensive 35 × 228 mm ammo to shoot down drones the size of a Starbucks Venti costing less than and Apple Vision Pro is like using your AR-15 to shoot mosquitos. While I'm sure someone in Florida has already attempted that, it's the definition of asymmetric warfare.

> Using multi milion euro tracked vehicles firing expensive 35 × 228 mm ammo to shoot down drones the size of a Starbucks Venti costing less than and Apple Vision Pro is like using your AR-15 to shoot mosquitos.

Yes. The Royal Navy has used £1.2M Sea Viper missiles to shoot down drones in the recent Red Sea conflict. They have also used their Phalanx guns to shoot down drones, which is much cheaper than the Sea Viper.

> it's the definition of asymmetric warfare.

Totally. My point though was that it is possible for modern counter measures to shoot down fast moving drones, even if John Wickes can't. IIRC Phalanx was used to shoot down incoming mortar rounds for base protection in Afghanistan.

This form factor is already well-established, though 300 km/h is still very fast.

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