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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

"A Navy MH-60R Seahawk helicopter shot down an Outlaw surrogate threat drone with a .50-caliber gun, proving old-fashioned solutions can work fine against new-fangled threats."

Why yes, bullets will destroy aircraft of many types.

I get the feeling that someone building a scaled down version of the Phalanx CIWS to deal specifically with drones might get a fairly lucrative contract with the DOE.

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Probably, but I am not convinced it would work. According to their article their smallest drone category is the size of a small child.

That means the crazyflie (https://www.bitcraze.io/crazyflie-2/) is entirely outside of what they are considering. Which is too bad because it is pretty fast, computer controlled and absolutely tiny. Yes its take of weight is only 42 grams meaning you can pack about 15g of c4 on that thing and land it on somebodies head.

Now I am not sure 15g is enough to do any serious damage, and I don't know if you can alter it to use frequency-hopping jamming-prof radio but I do know this: technology only gets better, faster and smaller.

And it would really ruin my day if I was to hold a speech and 15g of c4 went of right over my head - especially since the attacker has a real chance of getting away with it.

I'd bet 15g of explosives right at the rotor of a helicopter or intake of an airplane would be catastrophic.

How about 15g consisting of a potent toxin and a spray nozzle?

You might as well shoot somebody if you are going to try to land a drone with c4 on their head

No, because you need line-of-sight from your position with the gun, whereas with the drone you need line of sight from the drone which, because it flies, has more options, including dropping straight down - fast and from an angle the authorities don't expect.

Well this little video says it shows twice that amount, 1 oz, (https://youtu.be/AwyniA5ryhY?t=40) for what that is worth. Doesn't look like something I would want going off near my head.

But I would think slow/predictably moving and fixed targets are in more danger, since the attacker can get away with overloading the vehicle a bit (don't need the full flight envelope), and navigating to the target(s) becomes much easier. I'm thinking something like an stolen delivery/repairman van parked in a neighborhood, a few hours later the top opens, and out come some thermite delivering drones which fly to the top of houses and start setting the neighborhood aflame. Houses are easy to GPS target, lightly defended, and have a very high psychological impact.

I like this idea, but the challenge will be building effective ammunition (I suspect depleted uranium might not be the best option here) for frequent engagement, and minimal (read: no) collateral damage.

Id imagine a drone based short ranged flak weapon would be rather effective.

Thinking about it though, i could get absolutely burried in details rrying to think of counters and counters-to-counters haha.

The bigger problem would be the quick ID on the drone as opposed to a bird. You shoot down an eagle and you should expect to get hammered in the press. I would also expect some protests if you are constantly using radar.

Damn i didnt even think of that. Radar would return differently id imagine, but then you would have people trying to match an eagles radar cross section haha.

I get the feeling the moving parts on a bird versus a drone could be your key identifies.

After reading nogridbag's solution, I'm starting to think golf driving range nets[1] that are used to keep golf balls from flying into the road. You would need to put a top net and probably still have to have an active defense for that one drone to blow the net, the second to run into the plant situation.

1) http://www.gourock.com/golfbarrier.html

Perhaps the birds aren't the problem, but the solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzE6-WZtOi4

I would note that the birds did not exactly survive that encounter so you can expect some protests at your "bird swarm defense" grand opening. I would also imagine the method you use to make the birds take flight might also generate some publicity. Now, seagulls are not universally loved (quite the contrary), but I do believe you might get some pushback.

It would probably work and be the cheapest solution.

I get the feeling you want something tough enough to take down the drone but not penetrating enough to be any danger to the concrete containment building.

Thinking about it, shotgun shells should work. Flechette rounds would probably be a good choice.

For some reason I find the idea of a scaled-down Phalanx gun adorable.

The result of conditioning from playing Portal?

Perhaps. I was right, though-- they're adorable-as-hell.

http://www.steelnavy.com/CIWS.htm

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