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Comment by YurgenJurgensen | Hacker News Reader

You’re talking about dodging bullets or shrapnel here. Source on that a multi rotor has that level of manoeuvrability while also carrying a lethal payload and enough battery for a viable engagement range?

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Pre-programmed evasion. Give the drone a flight path, it's expected to position itself randomly within a certain distance of that flight path. At longer ranges it's feasible to dodge a bullet that way (which is why soldiers do a highly evasive path against a sniper) and even at short ranges if you can beat the tracking system it doesn't matter if you can beat the bullet.

That’s not the problem. These machines only have so much thrust, and are only aerodynamic in one direction. Sudden high-speed lateral acceleration is very costly from an energy budget perspective. Randomly dodging around bleeds off speed and may actually reduce survivability by increasing the time taken to cross the danger zone. This is made worse by most of the time the drone needs to aim for a weak spot or critical system to do damage, so terminal guidance is already fairly constrained. You don’t see drone pilots trying to jink around because the best move is to punch the accelerator and try to minimise the time your opponent has to react.

/r/CombatFootage will show that even with strong explosive payloads the modern quads used by Ukraine are surprisingly mobile. They’re incredibly quick and manoeuvrable still, much to my surprise.

I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.

There’s a pretty big gulf between “very quick” and “capable of dodging air bursting autocannon rounds without sacrificing forward momentum”.

Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.

Right. There is no way a drone can dodge a stream of bullets. They essentially arrive instantaneously at the drone from its perspective. A bullet from these flies at 1km/s and there are a lot of bullets. The bigger problem is getting a good lock on the drone but if you can track it any AA cannon will turn it into mashed drone.

I can’t quantify the “viable engagement range” you had, but in our tests we had around 50min endurance, around 35lb payload, and 14in body but with larger props. Now larger props do impact prop acceleration to a degree, so it’s not “racing” level maneuverability, but good enough to dodge shotgun shots, and again, this is all with the presumption that you know where it is and from where it’s coming and heading.

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