Outside the vagaries of this conflict, this FPV drone bomb is a terrifying weapon. It’s cheap and effective. It’s faster and more agile than humans. It’s portable and concealable. The operator does not need to be in harms way. I think it would be difficult to defend against.
I wonder if we’ll start to see more “bombings” around the world that are launched from this platform.
These drones aren’t even purpose built. They are hobby racing drones built out of DIY components and off the shelf parts, with a grenade or other small explosive strapped to the bottom. Once these start being custom designed, they will be half as large, half as noisy, and a single central computer will fly literal swarms of them with automated mission parameters. This will be an area denial weapon- you’ll be able to set up a base station, a larger recon drone will do overflights, and you can task the system ‘kill anything that moves in this area’. The system can then select a drone (small anti-personnel drone or larger anti-vehicle drone) to dispatch to eliminate any intruder. Or a larger drone like a Bayraktar will have racks of these that it can drop on command to precisely target an enemy.
Oh geez, you’re right. As an area denial weapon this would be extremely effective. There is no upper bound to the number of drones in the sky over any given area aside from the budget. A large spotter fleet with IR vision could operate continuously from high above in the dark.
When a target is spotted it can command the swarm to go take it out.
I think a similar attack could be used selectively against a VIP target where a spotter identifies the location and sends waves of cheap grenade drones to pay a visit.
So the original method of jam-resistant secure comms was spread-spectrum technology, which consumer drones use these days. Apparently modern jam-resistance involves frequency-hopping to unjammed frequencies, but it’s an arms race. I assume it involves things like the jammers monitoring for frequencies that are being used and switching to jam them, which basically means they’re playing whack-a-mole with the frequencies. Jamming every frequency is very energy-intensive and also blacks out your own comms, which could be exploited to make you go dark by simulating a drone attack and instead of actually attacking, using the enemy’s own jammer as cover. There’s always something to exploit.
Anyway, they apparently already are doing swarm communications with up to 5 drones, and they’re trying to up that to about 50 or so. I guess part of the challenge would be that when you’ve got that many signals flying around the airwaves, it’s a lot easier to jam at least a portion of them. That makes your jamming issue a lot harder. I mean clearly they don’t think it’s impossible because they’re trying it, but you might not be able to do hundreds or thousands for instance.
Robert Evans reporting on the Rojavan fight against ISIS said the generals were terrified of the sound of buzzing drones. He said they had no good defence against them.
After a lot of missing some of them started to get more consistent shots on target, and they could take the drone out after only one or two passes. I expect if they had full auto weapons or semi-auto shotguns with shot or anti-drone rounds it would’ve been a lot easier. Although if the drone was just attacking and not flying in circles inside a limited cone of fire that was safe for bystanders, they wouldn’t have had time to make the shots.
That said this drone was spending a lot of time loitering in one spot trying to panic them. If they’d been equipped or trained for anti-drone tactics, they might’ve had a decent chance of shooting it down. Especially since it looked like it was trying to separate them from the vehicle, they could’ve used it as cover to take some shots.
I mean it’s easy to sit here on my phone spectating and giving criticism, but it’s reviewing footage like this that lets soldiers come up with counter-tactics. The generals talking about ISIS drones were from quite a few years ago. Things must’ve advanced since then.
We’ve all see those drone swarms that are used with lights to create cool designs in the sky at outdoor shows.
Knowing these cheap drones can all be centrally controlled like this to act as a “unified” entity makes me imagine how effective it would be to attack an enemy position from every direction at once with many kamikaze units. Back them up with roving AI movement detection units in an outer orbit followed by human controlled FPV units and damn… It would be tough to evade an attack.
Yeah, that’s another level, and it would be exponentially more expensive, but that’s what arms races do. The benefit to these hobby-level drone bombs is that they are cheap.
That said there were already two drones here, one attack drone and one observer, so it’s possible they couldn’t easily identify which was the attacker. Add three or four just manually piloted and you make it much harder to defend against, even without special swarming tech. In the end you only need one of them to go off, the others could fly back home and be reused.
I fly drones for over a decade and i totally get why it’s hard to defend against. The buzzing even from bigger drones is very easy to hear, but when they’re on a slower pace and too far up in the air, it’s getting really hard. And that is when there is no war around. Someone could just fire around to pollute the noise. Use one empty drone and use another drone with a payload. Or multiple payloads. Fly with the sun in the back. Shit people have to be so paranoid when they hear a drone that all their eyes are up in the air, to make it easier to ambush people.
The crazy thing about this war is that i never did any military training at all, ever and never plan to, but if war breaks out, i might become an asset.
Yeah, I’m an anarchist who’s into 3d printing, CNC, CAD, drones, software, computer control loops, firearm design… I wonder how many goverment lists I’m on. TO THE FEDERAL AGENT READING THIS I WOULD LIKE TO REITERATE THAT I DO NOT BELIEVE IN OFFENSIVE REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE THIS IS A SINCERE POSITION AND NOT SOME COY “IN MINECRAFT” JOKE.
Ahem.
With the new toroidal propellors they’re going to get even quieter too because they’re getting rid of the tip vortices and spinning slower. It’s a bad time to be an imperial invader, but this is really a leveling of the battlefield. I can’t help but feel like all this tech is somewhat democratising access to lethal force.
The thing that’s really chilling about this to me is that the attack is so personal and specific. It’s not like people sitting in foxholes taking potshots, or directing a bombardment from an observer’s spot miles away, you see the footage get right up close to your enemy and you have video of the entire thing from like 20m away. You watch how they respond to you specifically.
Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here podcasts. He also covered the conflict in Rojava when he worked for Cracked and later for his miniseries podcast Women’s War.
He may also own a restaurant chain but if he does he plays it close to the chest, which makes sense since it would be a betrayal of his anarchist ideals. I have no strong evidence he and Bob Evans are different people, although i haven’t looked for it. I’ve certainly never seen them together.
The CIA tried to use something similar to assassinate Maduro, but they failed. Seems like it would be effective in the hands of a more competent group.
Outside the vagaries of this conflict, this FPV drone bomb is a terrifying weapon. It’s cheap and effective. It’s faster and more agile than humans. It’s portable and concealable. The operator does not need to be in harms way. I think it would be difficult to defend against.
I wonder if we’ll start to see more “bombings” around the world that are launched from this platform.
You nailed it.
These drones aren’t even purpose built. They are hobby racing drones built out of DIY components and off the shelf parts, with a grenade or other small explosive strapped to the bottom. Once these start being custom designed, they will be half as large, half as noisy, and a single central computer will fly literal swarms of them with automated mission parameters. This will be an area denial weapon- you’ll be able to set up a base station, a larger recon drone will do overflights, and you can task the system ‘kill anything that moves in this area’. The system can then select a drone (small anti-personnel drone or larger anti-vehicle drone) to dispatch to eliminate any intruder. Or a larger drone like a Bayraktar will have racks of these that it can drop on command to precisely target an enemy.
Oh geez, you’re right. As an area denial weapon this would be extremely effective. There is no upper bound to the number of drones in the sky over any given area aside from the budget. A large spotter fleet with IR vision could operate continuously from high above in the dark.
When a target is spotted it can command the swarm to go take it out.
I think a similar attack could be used selectively against a VIP target where a spotter identifies the location and sends waves of cheap grenade drones to pay a visit.
There is a potential limit beyond the budget - communications.
I found this article talking about how they’re making jam-resistant drones: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a42922481/tricopter-drone-atlaspro-resists-russian-jamming/
So the original method of jam-resistant secure comms was spread-spectrum technology, which consumer drones use these days. Apparently modern jam-resistance involves frequency-hopping to unjammed frequencies, but it’s an arms race. I assume it involves things like the jammers monitoring for frequencies that are being used and switching to jam them, which basically means they’re playing whack-a-mole with the frequencies. Jamming every frequency is very energy-intensive and also blacks out your own comms, which could be exploited to make you go dark by simulating a drone attack and instead of actually attacking, using the enemy’s own jammer as cover. There’s always something to exploit.
Anyway, they apparently already are doing swarm communications with up to 5 drones, and they’re trying to up that to about 50 or so. I guess part of the challenge would be that when you’ve got that many signals flying around the airwaves, it’s a lot easier to jam at least a portion of them. That makes your jamming issue a lot harder. I mean clearly they don’t think it’s impossible because they’re trying it, but you might not be able to do hundreds or thousands for instance.
Informative reply, thanks for posting!
Robert Evans reporting on the Rojavan fight against ISIS said the generals were terrified of the sound of buzzing drones. He said they had no good defence against them.
There’s an episode of a youtube show called Rotor Riot where they got cops to try to shoot down FPV racing drones with pistols. They were super cocky till they saw how the drones were flying, then they started to realise how hard the task was.
After a lot of missing some of them started to get more consistent shots on target, and they could take the drone out after only one or two passes. I expect if they had full auto weapons or semi-auto shotguns with shot or anti-drone rounds it would’ve been a lot easier. Although if the drone was just attacking and not flying in circles inside a limited cone of fire that was safe for bystanders, they wouldn’t have had time to make the shots.
That said this drone was spending a lot of time loitering in one spot trying to panic them. If they’d been equipped or trained for anti-drone tactics, they might’ve had a decent chance of shooting it down. Especially since it looked like it was trying to separate them from the vehicle, they could’ve used it as cover to take some shots.
I mean it’s easy to sit here on my phone spectating and giving criticism, but it’s reviewing footage like this that lets soldiers come up with counter-tactics. The generals talking about ISIS drones were from quite a few years ago. Things must’ve advanced since then.
We’ve all see those drone swarms that are used with lights to create cool designs in the sky at outdoor shows.
Knowing these cheap drones can all be centrally controlled like this to act as a “unified” entity makes me imagine how effective it would be to attack an enemy position from every direction at once with many kamikaze units. Back them up with roving AI movement detection units in an outer orbit followed by human controlled FPV units and damn… It would be tough to evade an attack.
Scary
Yeah, that’s another level, and it would be exponentially more expensive, but that’s what arms races do. The benefit to these hobby-level drone bombs is that they are cheap.
That said there were already two drones here, one attack drone and one observer, so it’s possible they couldn’t easily identify which was the attacker. Add three or four just manually piloted and you make it much harder to defend against, even without special swarming tech. In the end you only need one of them to go off, the others could fly back home and be reused.
The drones cost like $500, one US switchblade costs $52k, that’s over 100 drones!
Hmmm… yeah 100 drones would probably be enough lol.
I fly drones for over a decade and i totally get why it’s hard to defend against. The buzzing even from bigger drones is very easy to hear, but when they’re on a slower pace and too far up in the air, it’s getting really hard. And that is when there is no war around. Someone could just fire around to pollute the noise. Use one empty drone and use another drone with a payload. Or multiple payloads. Fly with the sun in the back. Shit people have to be so paranoid when they hear a drone that all their eyes are up in the air, to make it easier to ambush people.
The crazy thing about this war is that i never did any military training at all, ever and never plan to, but if war breaks out, i might become an asset.
Yeah, I’m an anarchist who’s into 3d printing, CNC, CAD, drones, software, computer control loops, firearm design… I wonder how many goverment lists I’m on. TO THE FEDERAL AGENT READING THIS I WOULD LIKE TO REITERATE THAT I DO NOT BELIEVE IN OFFENSIVE REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE THIS IS A SINCERE POSITION AND NOT SOME COY “IN MINECRAFT” JOKE.
Ahem.
With the new toroidal propellors they’re going to get even quieter too because they’re getting rid of the tip vortices and spinning slower. It’s a bad time to be an imperial invader, but this is really a leveling of the battlefield. I can’t help but feel like all this tech is somewhat democratising access to lethal force.
The thing that’s really chilling about this to me is that the attack is so personal and specific. It’s not like people sitting in foxholes taking potshots, or directing a bombardment from an observer’s spot miles away, you see the footage get right up close to your enemy and you have video of the entire thing from like 20m away. You watch how they respond to you specifically.
Bob Evans is taking a break from his restaurant chain to help with the war? How nice
Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards and It Could Happen Here podcasts. He also covered the conflict in Rojava when he worked for Cracked and later for his miniseries podcast Women’s War.
He may also own a restaurant chain but if he does he plays it close to the chest, which makes sense since it would be a betrayal of his anarchist ideals. I have no strong evidence he and Bob Evans are different people, although i haven’t looked for it. I’ve certainly never seen them together.
Our only hope will be that the massive “trump 2024” flags will slow the drones down
The CIA tried to use something similar to assassinate Maduro, but they failed. Seems like it would be effective in the hands of a more competent group.