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The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target.

Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.

Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.

My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.

If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either.

One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.

I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine.

The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place.

For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.

I guess the only solution then is to already have people in places where it counts. I would suspect military bases have more than enough people. But then again the drones can just fly too high, at which point it becomes a cost/benefit tradeoff, or futuristic laser weapons.

Anything involving people on the ground is just too slow.

It takes radars, interceptor drones, sensor networks, etc. Stuff like this is in active development but not widely deployed yet.

We need interceptor drones like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-xH6OLY_Y

something that could help Ukraine would be to make thousands in the EU. There's already a factory going up in the UK.

Actually a couple of drone factories (https://thedefensepost.com/2025/11/24/stark-uk-drone-uav-pro... and https://militarnyi.com/en/news/ukrspecsystems-in-the-united-...)

but the interceptors are Project Octopus:

>The initial pilot batch, consisting of up to 1,000 drones, will be built in the UK at state-owned facilities. The Octopus drone will become the first Ukrainian combat drone to be serially produced in a NATO country, with Ukraine retaining full intellectual property and technological control. https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/uk-to-build-pilot-bat...

and they are being secretive about the design.

> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun

It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.

That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.

How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius?

In reality it's a bit more complicated, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-a...

Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).

The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.

The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ?

Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU

I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.

For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm.

For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one.

Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.

The reality doesn't match all these armchair specialists takes on HN though. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defend their critical infrastructure... and they're all in, at war, with 0 regards for safety and side effects.

What happens if you interceptors locks in on the plane behind the drone, of falls down on the school behind the naval base ? Planes are shot down all the time, even military planes by friendly fire. I even doubt European countries have legal ways to start shooting down aircrafts during peace time

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1p9scu3/turk...

I guess I'm talking about drone defense in more of a "Coast Guard" scenario than a "Navy" one. If there is some mass drone swarm coming at your cities you probably want to take a Navy approach and shoot them down by whatever means necessary.

In the case we're talking about though, the Russians are just able to fly their drones over European countries with impunity. Now these may not yet be armed, but you can't just let another country violate your sovereignty. If a drone is operating very close to a commercial aircraft, or there's a good chance of collateral damage, you may choose not to shoot it down, but you do need to demonstrate that you have some defense and that there's a good chance that they will be shot down.

Shutting down a drone with a machine gun is difficult, there are lot of videos where you can see it. There is even video of a Russian-Iranian drone destroying a car with a machine gun which cannot even protect itself. What is efficient against drones, are Soviet ground-air missiles (which might be dangerous to use around airports), and interceptor drones (which Europe doesn't have). Jamming the radio/GPS probably won't help because drones have antennas on top which form a simple phased array, to ignore the signal from the ground. Drones might also use mobile networks, and there were reports that Russia used Starlink antennas on some drones.

> Are any of those drones being shot down?

Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.

... and Russians will find new reasons not to shoot their drones, which they will happily share with EU residents via social networks. They are the masters of excuses.