'Vampire drone' can leech electricity from power lines to live forever | Hacker News Reader

'Vampire drone' can leech electricity from power lines to live forever

bgr.com

80 pointsEduard34 comments

>You can see the vampire drone in action in the video above. It’s actually a cool design, and a far cry from the concerning AI attack drones we’ve seen other engineers putting together.

If you can recognize, attach, and leech from the power line, you can probably also attack the power line

Gives new meaning to the term "drop bears"

Scary.

A swarm of these drones could disable the powerlines of an entire country in a war situation.

I think their ability to remain functional indefinitely in populated enemy territory without a support network and increased attack range are the broader implications here. But yeah, you probably could have them all get into position and blow all lines at once using the range and loitering ability this affords.

They could then hide in forests and hibernate for a week or two then seek more powerlines to destroy.

Feels sad that my mind is brainstorming destruction.

if you publish it online, it becomes training data for LLMs.

sometimes silence is best?

You do not need sophisticated methods to shutdown the power grid. There have been a few recent stories about some jerk shooting an electrical substation, taking down power for thousands of people. The grid backbone is enormous and impossible to secure.

Just drive a truck into a few key transformers or backbone connections could probably cut power for millions.

Here is one story (https://www.npr.org/2022/12/05/1140775417/north-carolina-sub...) where (probably) single gunman disrupted power for 100,000 people.

Yep, a rifle shot will comprehensively destroy a transformer. HV transformers are very expensive, very hard to make and if you need any number of them, already have lead times in the years. In fact anything that requires trained personnel, equipment and a supply chain for spares will be out of service indefinitely if the attacks overwhelm the repair capacity. And you only have to injure one linesman or mine one plyon to multiply the difficulty of repairs enormously by requiring armed escort and area sweeping for every repaired pylon hanger.

In any kind of concerted guerilla effort against it, the grid cannot be defended. That said, the first strikes will be easy enough, but anyone who is caught disabling electrical infrastructure or workers after the first few days--once the water, medical and food supplies have gone down and the lethal gravity of the situation is clear--will probably be treated unsympathetically by the locals.

There are also now enough people with solar that it may not be catastrophic. Many of those solar + battery systems have enough electronics to make syncing to grid relatively straightforward.

I wonder how quickly you would see small neighborhood subgrids pop up.

Well, maybe in more affluent suburban areas and rural areas. But in denser cities, the population density doesn't really support that.

Moreover, it's not homes you need to keep powered for critical life functions for millions of people (a few medical exceptions notwithstanding): it's hospitals, food infrastructure (e.g. some very big ovens, sterilisers, fridges, etc), water treatment and so on. Fuel refineries take prodigious amounts of electricity, and those logistics vehicles don't run on batteries yet, and reserves will only go so far. Telecoms also, or how will you order more food, medicine and spare parts? And that's all internet-based now, so you need at least some servers running and a lot of exchanges, towers and cabinets to be working. Ham radio might work to link onesie-twosie farmstead communities, but not for millions of people.

I guess it really depends if it's local, so you can evacuate and ship in supplies like in a natural disaster, or more widespread where there's no external resource buffer.

The US already used graphite bombs to disable 85% of the Iraqi electrical system in the 90s. Drones that autonomously target anything with insulator discs on it would make it rather cheaper, though.

It's still probably a war crime to target civilian infrastructure, however, so either win or deny using the drones and blame saboteurs now that the drones are cheap enough to reasonably suggest guerilla usage is possible.

Yeah, its weird how they think this wouldn't be used for attack drones. Seems like extending the range would be a pretty big combat advantage. Pair this with facial recognition and you'd have assassin bots that could be launched countries away and still find their targets.

Add one more to the list of "inevitable specialities of impending apocalyptic combined arms drone swarms" to lose sleep over.

Does this technique consumes "usable" electricity of the powerline company or just emissions which would be lost otherwise?

There's only one kind because heat recovery would require different technology. It's such a small amount so it doesn't matter.

Of course it's usable. First law of thermodynamics. It's basically electricity theft wether one does it directly or through induction. It's called a vampire drone for a very good reason.

Yes, inductively coupling to something increases the load on the primary (or any transformer would be a free energy generator). If it were using only the heat differential between the conductor and the air, like a Stirling engine, then no. In fact, if it acted to cool the powerline, it would probably increase efficiency, to a microscopic degree. And at that point, you'd get better performance from a solar panel.

However, inductively stealing a drone-portable battery on any practical time scale would be all but imperceptible on a powerline at 100kV carrying 500 amps (50MW).

If it's a UHVDC line (or any kind of DC), inductive coupling won't work at all.

How long until someone attaches a bitcoin miner to one of these drones?

If it can generate enough revenue from Bitcoin mining that it can pay for it's own spare parts / maintenance, then it's truly self-sufficient!

Especially when the factory that makes them is also autonomous. The trick then becomes self-replicating done factories.

Why stop at one?

A nationwide fleet of illicit, unregistered hexacopters that sling 10 GPUs, a server, and LTE connectivity. Upon discovery, they fly off and find other power lines to mooch from.

Miner? That's short sighted. They'll likely attach some AI that collects intel, because electricity theft is quite illegal otherwise, so one would be using such a nuisance drone against an adversary. Send'em to Russia or China to watch out for threats.

I would love to see it beat two months flying time.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/longest-ever-continuous-f...

False title. The correct one is "Revolutionary new drone feeds on electricity from power lines and flies forever".

The title tag disagrees. And that's what for example the HN bookmarklet uses.

> The title tag disagrees.

I'd say the title tag fails to accord.

> And that's what for example the HN bookmarklet uses.

Probably not a great idea, given everyone sees the article title but only a minority see the page title.

Publications very often A/B test titles on the public before settling on a final one

But "dateModified":"2024-05-08T21:12:24+00:00"

Thread with 170 comments from 35 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39945733

This has allegedly already been happening for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real

"The movement claims that all birds in the United States were exterminated by the federal government between 1959 and 1971 and replaced by lookalike drones used by the government to spy on citizens... They claim that birds sit on power lines to recharge themselves"

(Note: Birds Aren't Real is a satirical conspiracy theory)

> Birds Aren't Real is a satirical conspiracy theory

Sure, but Phoenix built a giant trap to catch the malfunctioning ones which have gone rogue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Secret_Is_Patience

Good. Phase 2 prep of paperclip production continues as planned.

if it flies it spies

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