Hacker News Reader

Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Bullets are spin-stabilized: if you shoot at something in the air and miss, the bullet will generally still be lethal when it eventually returns to the ground. That’s a no-no in densely populated areas.

View on HN

You would not be able to hit a drone with a bullet. Statistics are against you.

You use fancy AHEAD ammunition that disintegrates, and hopefully the drone with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHEAD_ammunition

Yet, the bursts fired are expensive as fuck. Much more expensive than the drone.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag

Can't some kind of shot shell get used that just throws pellets in the direction? Shorter effective range but way better chance of hitting the drone. Also, comparatively cheap.

What you linked seems like it would only be needed for an armored drone?

This system has a range up to 5 km. Shotguns shells are sometimes effective, often not. There are enough videos of, mostly Russians, trying to shoot them down with a shotgun.

This AHDEA ammunition, while expensive, will bring down not only a drone, airplane or chopper, but also artillery grenades.

I'm fairly certain clay pigeon shooting type ammunition and aiming skills stand reasonable chances of hitting even small drones and doing sufficient damage to knock then out of the sky, but only at maybe 50m or so range. A typical attack drone like the types used in Ukraine right now are probably capable doing well over 30m/s on final approach, so it'd be a tough interception still, only about a one second window to get your shot off before it's likely to deliver it's payload ballistically even if you have scored a direct hit.

I suspect the same sort of skills displayed in Ukraine building home made Ardupilot based drones with optical final stage guidance could also be turned to building multi barrel "Phalanx-style" shotgun setups on manual plus computer-optical assisted aiming, in a form factor compact enough to be installed in the back of a Hilux. And that'd be very much the sort of mostly Commercial Off The Shelf approach that seems to do so well tipping the asymmetric warfare in Ukraine's favour in this war.

No, the range is far too short. Hitting a moving target with normal bullets is not particularly difficult but you have to consider where those bullets land. Hence why many guns designed for this purpose use larger ammo capable of self-destructing if they don’t hit the target.

I'm fairly certain they're shotting down drones with bullets in Ukraine. See for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkkdWu7Xt7o

Sure, and for those reasons of probability of a successful hit, hunters don't tend to shoot birds on the wing with rifles either. I mean it's doable, but it's a very hard shot to land with a MK-1 Eyeball.

But we've seen infantry effectively using shotguns in Ukraine as a defensive weapon against drones for the same reason hunters use shotguns to shoot birds on the wing, within your weapon's range the odds of a disabling hit are pretty high if you're trained.

So not sure why it has to be either a rifle bullet _or_ a massively overengineered defense contractor's very expensive super-duper-shotgun round.

Haha, wait, it's flak guns again, just redone for the 21st century. Ah bless.

If the choice is restricted by stand-off range, that is a different kettle of fish, maybe do bring back the, once considered entirely obsoleted by high altitude aircraft and missiles flak.

But in the here and now, regular shotguns are being used defensively, with a certain level of success, by infantry against drones in Ukraine.

Based on random videos I have seen, it seems pretty difficult to shot down a drone with a shotgun. Sure, better than nothing, probably your best bet at that point.

Clay pigeon / skeet shooting is hard too, it's a competitive sport for a reason, but then, so is shooting a target with a rifle at 400 yards, but the armed forces train you up on that. So designated drone marksman might become an interesting new speciality in the modern army.

Rheinmetall's Skynex system costs an estimate of 4k € per engagement.

That is unlikely. I think it fires bursts of 7. I assume 4k is realistic for one shot. So we are talking ballpark of 30k per "burst".

Does the spin-stabilized part have any relevance here? It doesn't have anything to do with the lethality of a falling bullet.

Spin-stabilized bullets bleed their speed at a far slower rate, greatly increasing average terminal velocity and therefore lethality.

You're right– spin-stabilized bullets would have significantly less drag, thus would travel much higher, and thus come down with way more lethality. Honestly though, unless someone's trying to shoot the drone with a musket, all bullets are going to be stabilized somehow.

Nope. Maybe the idea was that an unstabilized slug will tumble and lose velocity quickly, after which it's just some junk falling from above, mostly harmless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com