Japan is building cardboard suicide drones | Hacker News Reader

Japan is building cardboard suicide drones

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98 pointsBrajeshwar68 comments

"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it." - The Hunt for Red October

"I've planned ahead. We're just three miles from a primary target. A millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized. Much more fortunate than millions who wander sightless through the smoldering aftermath. We'll be spared the horror of survival." -- War Games

I'm glad I live only a few miles from Moffit Airfield, which is almost certainly a primary target (given that besides taking out NASA you'd also get Google HQ). Knowing that I most likely wouldn't even perceive a nuclear attack is strangely comforting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qc8jJ0TjSY

Kid: What started it?

Col: I don't know two toughest Kids on the Block I guess sooner or later they're going to fight.

Kid: That simple?

Col: Maybe somebody just forgot what it was like.

Kid: Well who is on our side?

Col: 600 million screaming Chinese.

Kid: Last I heard there were a billion screaming Chinese.

Col: There were.

Red Dawn.

Australia has been making cardboard drones for military purposes for a while now: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-03/ukraine-war-australia...

EDIT: The company that makes them first pitched them to the ADF in 2018: https://www.sypaq.com.au/news/sypaq-wins-for-the-cardboard-d...

From the headline I was picturing flying futurama-style suicide booths.

Depending on who invades who, that's more or less what we have.

The airframe is the cheapest part of the drone though. You can make it out of Balsa wood and foam like traditional "model planes" and there won't be any major performance differences. Modern CAD is very good at simulating stress on the frame and as long as your engine's powerful enough, most materials should hold up fine at those scales for single use (anything smaller than than a Cessna basically).

You can flatpack the cardboard frame.

Aren't they worried the cardboard will catch fire on impact and cause damage?

We have different interpretations of what suicide means

if another country towed a raft full of thousands of cheap drone off a US coast and launched them into the country we have absolutely no defense

they could take out all water and power utilities on the entire east coast over 24 hours

our million dollar missiles would be useless even if Whiskey-Pete was more than willing to use them over crowded cities

North Korea, Russia, China, et al

and considering we've depleted a decade's worth of weapons and half of the fleet is overseas, we're pretty darn vulnerable right now thanks to those in power

I wonder how far away we are from "dirty drones" where they don't even need a bomb, just radioactive material or toxic chemicals as dust

But where is battery, engine, controller board, camera, optic cable etc from?

I wouldn't be surprised if the battery, camera and optic cable and such could be harvested from a smartphone nowadays

Engine probably still needs to be custom but lightweight drone engines are off the shelf products so...

AliExpress?

In bulk, that'll cost you what, $50 or so?

The same place as the Ukrainians and the Russians get their stuff.

$2000 apiece for cardboard?!

I presume that includes the engine, sensors, etc.

its Military-grade cardboard

It works even down to -60°C.

One scary aspect of drones is that they can loiter around an area. Unlike shelling or traditional missiles, you can spam an enemy city with drones and they can remain operational and waiting, until people emerge from their bunkers. And soon enough (some psychopath is vibecoding it this very second for sure) drone control will be surrendered to some LLM based system to make the final life/death decision.

Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken. You just get blown up even if you are clearly cornered, and helpless and in a traditional setting you'd have surrendered your weapon and became a POW.

Prisoners do get taken in situations where they'd be taken without drones. Drones hitting support groups behind enemy lines are akin to airstrikes. When drones are used on the frontline to support ground forces, the enemy will emerge and surrender. Some Russian units in the current invasion of Ukraine have surrendered to drones when ground forces haven't been as close as they'd like to accept the surrender.

There will always be war crimes in a conflict of any scale. That is human nature even if we don't like it. If both sides aren't doing it with drones they are doing it with something else. You now see the action in every situation because there are cameras everywhere and incentive for all sides to shape the narrative with this content.

As far as AI is concerned, there is the huge risk for problems. That said, you can have entire sectors of a battlefield that are kill zones for artillery but now you have drones taking more targeted action. Western artillery capabilities and approaches are more precise than those used by the likes of Russia, but it's a still a case of pummeling certain places. Drones hitting within a sector aren't much different and possibly have some long-term benefits.

I actually am not super worried about "robot killing machines." The trigger is "pulled" when the commander decides to deploy them. A pilot fires a missile or drops a "smart" bomb and it's guided onto it's target. I hardly see this as being any different.

Much like a shell that gets fired, after the gun goes off there's no way to make the bullet come back. Same with a rifle for that matter? Autonomous hunter-killer robots that look for things that appear to be the enemy are almost certainly better than what we have now...

If you're fighting a war, a machine that "kills everything that looks like a human with more than 65% accuracy" in a region that is run off of a series of Haar Cascades would probably be better than shelling the region into oblivion.

I don't know, I get the hate and reticence to give decision making over to the robot, but... maybe the real answer is we should stop having wars?

>Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken.

This isn't true, you can surrender and there are videos of people doing so.

You've perhaps seen videos of drones loitering, waiting a bit, and then moving in when the soldier does nothing. This is often waiting for a surrender sign.

Normally the soldier in these videos is Russian. Why don't they surrender? First they may be shot by their own side if they try to follow the drone.

Second, Russian soldiers have generally been recruited with large bonuses and even larger bonuses paid out in the event of their death, paid to their families. However, if they try to surrender and are shot for desertion there is no payout. Whereas if they stay still and die the Russian government gives their family money.

> One scary aspect of drones is that they can loiter around an area.

There are some new ones that work like landmines, too; they sit on the ground until they detect something worth going after.

> Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender.

You can. First one happened in 1991.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/featured/humans-surrendered-t...

It happens fairly regularly in Ukraine.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukrai...

I have seen the videos where they surrender. I have also seen the countless videos where they would clearly have surrendered if given a chance, but instead, they were blown up.

Sure; the same is true for humans shooting at you with machine guns and artillery. You don't always get a chance to surrender.

> I have also seen the countless videos where they would clearly have surrendered if given a chance, but instead, they were blown up.

surrender is likely usually accepted when its possible, but with drones it is often logistically difficult because frontline is very wide now.

There are plenty of videos of russians fake surrendering. They are specifically instructed to put armed grenades on their body to kill those accepting surrender.

> There are some new ones that work like landmines, too; they sit on the ground until they detect something worth going after.

Half-life 2 manhack vibes.

> And soon enough (some psychopath is vibecoding it this very second for sure) drone control will be surrendered to some LLM based system to make the final life/death decision. Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken. You just get blown up even if you are clearly cornered, and helpless and in a traditional setting you'd have surrendered your weapon and became a POW.

Okay I need to refute some of this.

1. LLMs haven't been used so much for terminal phase targeting to my knowledge. There's not really any benefit. It takes a lot of power and electronics that aren't needed when you can just do optical image matching.

2. Drones have taken a fair amount of prisoners. They're way more valuable alive than dead for intelligence purposes and prisoner swaps.

https://www.facebook.com/NYPost/videos/ukraine-drone-spares-...

Counterpoint from my time in a brutal warzone, as a civilian.

Maybe if you voluntarily join the military of a country known for invasions and war, you're not that helpless to begin with. And, if you get sent to another country with the goal to kill soldiers and civilians, and you yourself get killed by a drone it’s not that chilling.

I'm not American and I was not thinking from the perspective of an American inclined to join the US military.

Moreover consider that the situation sucks both for the soldier being blown up and also for the one doing the blowing up. If I were to be a soldier, I would like the option of taking the enemy prisoner if I could, instead of having to needlessly turn them into minced meat. I think, it is a very human desire to make war, less cruel.

The positive aspect of drones is that maybe war will turn in a purely economic contest, drones against drones, until one side has exhausted their supply and are forced to declare defeat.

> I'm not American and I was not thinking from the perspective of an American inclined to join the US military.

I would have thought your first inclination would be to say you're not Russian and not thinking from the perspective of a Russian inclined to join in on the unjust invasion of Ukraine.

But you could also perhaps look at it from the perspective of someone who is a member of Hamas, bombing and attacking civilian targets, or the IRGC launching one of the hundreds to thousands of drone attacks unjustly.

> The positive aspect of drones is that maybe war will turn in a purely economic contest, drones against drones, until one side has exhausted their supply and are forced to declare defeat.

I think in an age of more deadly drone warfare and less human intervention you'll start to see more deaths and more destruction.

So what about when your warzone turns into a peace zone, civilians start to move back in, and autonomous drones left behind by militaries start to kill them?

There are still countries in the world that have landmines from previous wars, after all.

Batteries don't last that long

I suspect that some clever engineer could figure that out. Small solar cells or something maybe, idk.

You're trying to invent a problem :)

Agree. However the key word there is "voluntarily". If a war gets too ugly, the supply of volunteers will dry up. And then you're looking at a draft.

It's been a while since the vietnam war, but we (the general public in the US) have forgotten how ugly a war can be.

This is where just a refusal to participate comes in. I think I've posted this or other Tolstoy stuff on here before, but Tolstoy makes the best point about this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1968/02/advice-...

> And to this question, for a person who understands the true meaning of military service and who wants to be moral, there is only one clear and incontrovertible answer: such a person must refuse to take part in military service no matter what consequences this refusal may have.

I’d say the USA has collectively forgotten the last time they were in a “civilians involved” war, which I’d place back to the Civil War.

WWII gave us Rosie the Riveter, rationing of materials and goods, internment, Pearl Harbor, etc.

9/11 was narrow geographically but had a large emotional, political, and economic impact stateside.

All those are true but they didn’t have bombs dropping on them.

In the civil war not only might your son be sent to the front, but the front might end up in your yard.

Yeah, it's been awhile since then. Normally when bombs get dropped on Americans we do to ourselves. (Tulsa, for example)

That's fine while we're talking about countries with all volunteer militaries, but that list does not include any of Russia, Ukraine, Iran, nor Israel.

Misleading headline, not sure if the article is misleading because it is paywalled, but so far, these are drones used as targets for anti-drone practice.

> Naoki said that the AirKamuy 150 could carry around three pounds, which is just enough to carry a small amount of supplies or munitions to a target and it’s not hard to imagine swarms of incendiary cardboard drones slamming into targets in the near future.

"so far" is for the next five minutes or so.

It's a bit silly to claim a misleading headline when you can't read the article. https://archive.is/5Pqg6

It's sad to see Japan completely ditch their "unconditional peace" brand after WWII.

> "unconditional peace" brand after WWII.

It was not by choice.

Kamikaze was always Japanese either it planes in world war 2 or drones for world war 3

Ballistic missiles are also kamikazi. Also, proximity detecting artillery shells. and torpedos.

None of the above carry a human that is willing to die with the target.

Nor do these drones

Kamikazes have been described as anti-ship missiles before it was possible to build anti-ship missiles.

Doolittle: “What is your one purpose in life?”

Bomb: “To explode, of course.”

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?"

"You blow yourself up."

"OH MY GOD"

> The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield

Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.

I had a similar reaction to the headline. The idea that munitions 'suicide' doesn't seem novel enough to have it in the headline. We don't say suicide icbms, or suicide cruise missiles etc.

A drone isn't necessarily a munition.

Some carry things like air to air missiles or act as communications relays for other drones.

Some have multiple munitions.

Some are the munition.

They must have been tempted to write "Kamikaze drones". Anyway, interesting development, I wonder why it hasn't been popular to use cardboard so far. Maybe cardboard weighs more, cutting in to payload capability?

Cardboard is heavy and not very strong. Quadcopter drones carry their payload all by the motors' thrust, and experience large accelerations; they would break if made out of cardboard.

OTOH small airplanes like the one pictured derive most of their lift from wings, and are not expected to do aerobatic, so they have somehow lower requirements for strength, and cost considerations can take over.

I wonder what would be the military usefulness of such a drone: it's much more visible, likely has rather low payload capacity, and cannot hover. It could work as a recon drone, or a retransmitter for extending communications range. It may be significantly more quiet than a quadcopter, it could even glide with the motor off, so it could sneak towards manned positions, especially in the dark.

> I wonder what would be the military usefulness of such a drone

If you're talking about the cardboard drone specifically: it's incredibly cheap to manufacture, which means you can easily deploy a gazillion of them. They're bullet sponges - a modern day Zerg rush.

> I wonder what would be the military usefulness of such a drone

To deplete anti-drone defenses; to provide cover for heavier Shahed type drones.

> it could even glide with the motor off, so it could sneak towards manned positions, especially in the dark.

Return of the Night Witches.

The airframe isn't the main cost driver for these things and cardboard is aerodynamically inefficient. You could blow mould or a million other techniques and get a better, possibly cheaper airframe.

Styrofoam works great for short to medium range glide interceptors that are supposed to be cheaper than the attacking airframe (less weight, less fuel/energy required, less explosive required etc.).

Ukraine seems to be pouring a lot of these right now.

Styrofoam has been used in model aircraft for decades. It's easily shaped with a hot wire.

weather and protecting it from it?

I'd suspect almost all drones lose significant range if wet or stormy. But in Ukraine the drone war seemed to go on all winter

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