Not really. The Turkish drone projects were created basically because Turkish engineers looked at all the drone stuff happening in the west and went "look at all these idiot westerners using all these amazing weapons as toys". Everyone who joined those companies knew from the start what field they were in.
And while the original Kargus didn't have explosives, that doesn't mean they weren't weapons. In the military sense, a radio that's being used to call in artillery is a weapon. Whether the bomb is on the drone itself or is fired at something the drone is surveilling doesn't change what the drone is.
Yup, and I've watched YT videos on that drone before...all the comments are filled with Turks who are proud of their country's killing machines. That said, there are people who are proud of MQ-1s etc as well.
Do you think the Ardupilot people were blind to the military applications of what they were making? I personally can't imagine anyone bright enough to work on drone autopilots to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications.
I know several people who've contributed to Ardupilot who are 100% "hobby guys". I've modified Ardupilot (and BetaFlight and iNav) for my own hobby use (but nothing really worth or in a state to contribute back).
While it's true drone technology "could be used for harmful applications", that's also true for, say, compilers. Do you hold the gcc/clang developers to account for being "blind to the military applications of what they were making"? Or OpenStreetMap contributors? Or the engineers who designed the HiLux? Or the Casio F-91W watch designers? None of those were "designed for military application" yet all ended up being used for them.
Where does the line need to get drawn? between my rights to design/build/fly drones as a hobby, commercial/industrial rights to use drones for photography or cinematograpy or crop monitoring or search and rescue or shark surveillance at swimming beachs - and the need to restrict "military applications" of that?
Are people who, say, write blog posts explaining how to use microcontroller RTOS libraries for hard real time guarantees, with mentioned examples like nuclear power plant control "blind to the military applications of what they're making"? (Yeah, sorry. I profile stalked you a little there...)
I don't mind the profile stalking, but if you stalked me more you'd have seen that I'm a former weapons engineer for the Dutch navy, so making things with potential military applications does not bother me as much as you might think. (Ironically, that arduino CoPilot library is based on software specifically designed for drone applications, so does that count as military software redirected towards civilian applications?)
In any case, this discussion is pretty similar to the "AWS is running my FOSS database as a service without paying me" debate. If you don't want your software to be used for certain applications, don't release it under a license stating that you can do anything with it. If you think the good that you do for the world by releasing some good new tech is greater than the harm done to the world, spread it as widely as you can. Ardupilot is in this category IMO: even if some militias try to make their own combat drones with it, the overall good done by making drone technology available to all could well be greater. The idea that you can make something "perfect" (that is with no imaginable harmful applications whatsoever) is probably not viable in this imperfect world filled with less than perfect people. Even very harmless things like teddy bears can be used to enable violent acts, but that does not mean we should stop making them.
Yeah, I guess I was reacting (badly) to "to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications".
I, personally, don't ever want to let that argument stop me from building shit that I want to build for fun. Like I pointed out, Hiluxes and F-19Ws have become well know "tools of trade" for freedom fighters and terrorists. Obviously totally not the intend ofd the designers, and even in retrospect nobody sane would say "Toyota should never have built and sold the HiLux because it's too easy to mount a machine gun in the tray!"
Could my ongoing projects to build sub 100g autonomous drones be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my experimenting with LoRa Mesh Networking be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my project to try using GPS and ADSB to aim a camera with a high powered zoom lens on a gimbal to take pics of planes be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Am I going to stop doing any of those things because of that? Nope. On the other hand, would I experiment with a drone carrying explosives? Nope. Would I mount a laser on the camera gimbal auto aiming at planes? Nope. I don't know if my personal lines in the sand have any valid arguments behind them other than "that's just where my personal morals/ethics draws the line", and I wouldn't hold other people to account for having their own lines drawn somewhat differently. But I will judge both far ends of the bell curve there as "way too irresponsible" or "way too paranoid".
Having said that, two companies in another comment of mine here DroneSheild and EOS have both tried to headhunt me (DroneShield directly, EOS I'm 98% certain it was them the recruiter was trying to pimp me to..) And both times I was _seriously_ tempted just because the technical challeneges seem like so much fun. I declined both approaches though, having decided I didn't want to work in that industry. My dad was a defence contractor pretty much his entire career, so I don't judge people who _do_ choose that industry. It can certainly be lucrative, and _most_ of what dad worked on at least was defence or training, rather than attack weapons.
This isn't really a new thing - the military can and will use open source code to more effectively kill people. That happens with every new technology. Drone tech is going to be the biggest killer this century assuming that we don't have a war where ICBMs get deployed.
The laser has to disable the drone in seconds, though. Wouldn't a laser with sufficient power to do so cause collateral vision damage from the diffused reflection? Think of a drone flying low and fast into a political rally with a crowd. You don't know the intentions of the pilot so it must be disabled immediately. Many people will look up at the source of noise and thus be exposed. I wonder if e.g. a birdshot cannon would actually be safer.
Your own troops would be issued PPE — in this case, laser protective eyewear.
This is already a thing due to the widespread use of laser rangefinders, designators, and the like, as well as the fact that the Chinese have fielded blinding laser weapons.
I am neither American nor a gun nerd, but from what I "overheard" on the internet a single Phalanx system should be able to take out drone swarms at incredible rates?
>>The Block 1A and newer (pneumatic driven) CIWS mounts fire at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute with a 1,550-round magazine.
>>Shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target.[14]
>So it's about three grand to zap one drone, and you get 15 shootdowns before a human needs to shovel more ammo into the turret. That would make it vulnerable to a saturation attack.
You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo, but that only slightly mitigates it. Against drone swarms you kinda want directed energy weapons, either microwave or laser. Which don't exist, currently.
Also note that Phalanx is radar based, leaving it open to the usual suite of radar jamming/ECW/antiradiation attacks.
You can tip the odds back in your favor by emplacing more Phalanx systems, but at ten million bucks each, that limits you to stuff like defending small-size/high-value targets like the White House, rather than numerous and sprawling US military bases.
> Against drone swarms you kinda want directed energy weapons, either microwave or laser. Which don't exist, currently.
These guys reckon they can detect, locate, and take down drones and drone swarms by jamming them with directed RF (not energy weapons as such): https://www.droneshield.com
These guys build "remotely operated weapons" that include 5.56mm up to 30mm cannons (as well as grenade launchers and missile launchers), and a "Counter Drone Defence System" that can drive them: https://www.eos-aus.com/defence/
I don't know it this works anything like as well on moving targets, but what you see at about 30 secs in this video looks like it'd take down most significanbtly-smaller-than-Predator drones pretty reliably at 900m out: https://vimeo.com/429825806 And I suspect 7.65 or 5.56 would probably work just as well as 50cal for that (though perhaps less accurately at long range?)
Not anything like as vicious as Phalanx, but if you're trying to protect against quadcopter or fixed wing drone swarms instead of cruise missiles, I'd bet they're remarkably more cost effective.
Actually proximity fuzed rounds should work the best, each taking outv many swarm memvers. Its not like these things could be armored rather than as light as possible.
Proximity fused rounds do have the significant downside that using them near built up areas will cause significant collateral damage. For example, if a drone swarm attacks an election rally somewhere in the US then you can't really detonate airburst shells above the crowd to take out the drones, since you would do more harm than good with that.
Hmm, a slightly Rube Goldberg type idea - what about firing proximity fuzed "airbag rounds" ? A Kevlar bag + car airbag style gas generator. If fuzed and timed just right it could potentially punch the drone from the sky, either breaking it or casing enough flight path distortion it migh not recover.
Or maybe release a bunch nylon filaments that will entangle any propellers and make the thing fall down ?
If you can say for certain beforehand that the drones are carrying grenades, then _maybe_. But if they are "just" carrying a sharpened stick to try and skewer whichever politician is holding the rally with, then killing a large amount of the audience will be really unpopular Also, not killing them but allowing the politician to be killed will be really unpopular too. Lasers on the other hand don't run out of ammo, cause much less collateral damage and are quite effective against lightweight drones.
(Of course by the time you have to guard political rallies so much that "grenade attacks by drone swarms" becomes a reasonable threat scenario, you may have to rethink things and probably just cancel the rally for now.)
Lasers still can cause potentially blinding unwanted reflections. Still likely a better option than supersonic shrapnel from standard proximity fuzed rounds though as collateral damage goes.
Yes lasers are not perfect either, for example the chances are often fairly high that a shot-down drone will fall onto something (or someone). Like I mentioned before, if drone swarm attacks are a part of the threat model then you might want to reconsider if you want to let civilians near the event at all.
> shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each
That's pretty crazy to think of ... I guess the only justification for that is that the assets that are protected by such a system are worth more than that.
> You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo
If I learned anything from games, it's that you want AoE damage for swarming enemies ;-)
Phalanx was designed to protect battleships and aircraft carriers from cruise missiles.
Emptying 6 or 8 4500 round Phalanx turrets at the half dozen cruise missile locked onto your aircraft carrier seems like a pretty sensible way to spend a million bucks.
It should certainly be possible to develop and use a cheaper anti-drone system than a Phalanx, but that requires a static specification to develop against. The attacker's advantage seems to be that defenders doesn't have that yet.
I think for drones of this kind you can set up mini phalanxes. They don’t quite move at the speed that a missile moves, and the caliber necessary to destroy a drone is much lower than that necessary to disable a missile.
I think we’re going to see the return of shotguns as a normal weapon issued to foot soldiers. Not useful against a thousand of these, but some birdshot will be a pretty good defense against lone ones used for observation.
i guess adverserial attacks towards the employed ai-model or some form of physical obstacle (net) would be most efficient but emp or directed energy weapons are probably more reliable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STM_Kargu
:/