Monday, September 16, 2019

Drones

The attack on the Saudi oil facilities brings questions about drones back to the public eye again. Over the years I've thought a little about the consequences of the use of drones in warfare and in civil disturbances: "Enjoy it while you can", and "Drone wars".

I did come up with a not-altogether-unserious proposal for mitigating internal misuse of arial drones by mobilizing our distributed civilian expertise and firepower: Hunt drones. In peacetime nobody would buy in, but maybe the virtues of the idea are a little more obvious now.

Sell hunting licenses for them. A downed drone becomes the property of the hunter. Within city limits, allow birdshot or launched nets only; a few other minor restrictions seem reasonable. Damage or injury caused by the crash is the responsibility of the most recent controller of the drone. Sorry, Amazon; yours are targets too.

Yes, I know nighttime hunting wouldn't be popular, and the machines are useful in finding out what's going on in disasters.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can explain what happened. I have built and flown drones, I own a racing one.

The only hard part about the attack was the actual drone. One with that much fuel for the distances flown is not an easy thing to build. I assume the Yemenis did as they said and discount the other stories as ass covering efforts.

This was a GPS attack. You can buy off the shelf drones from DJI and others that easily do GPS waypoints. The parts for building your own are easily available from Baangood among others for ridiculous prices.

The actual targets were probably marked by a guy standing next them and recording his GPS position on his cell phone some weeks before. The routing around waypoints to dodge the 120 degree Patriot's view was very well done. They are getting good at this.

I could build you everything except the drone. ;)

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah. The master and why we fly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfpkqfD4Kr0

Anonymous said...

One more, perhaps more appropriate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1RJvCGBz_w