18 ms·

Wonder how many watts that thing is putting out, and at what frequencies. In theory it could kill a person if it pulsed the correct harmonics. Will be interesti

• deleted 10y ago
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• jerf 10y ago
  Looking ahead to the next 20-30 years of warfare, I've often thought that despite the fun we're currently having with aerial drones, a lot of the real drone future is going to be with autonomous ground drones, because of their ability to carry more armor, shielding, etc., without having to literally carry it into the air. Our current conception of a "drone" is really hard to bring up to military spec once this sort of countermeasure becomes militarily common. I don't mean that air-based drones will be useless, I just think they're going to see more constrained missions than we might currently be imagining. And I do mean just the common conception of drones... things arguably properly described as "autonomous planes" will continue to be important and will probably continue to grow both in importance and in physical size.
  • Cieplak 10y ago
    I think you're right. Once you factor in high efficiency solar panels (like the germanium ones in satellites) land based drones can infiltrate enemy territory and sleep for months or years until they're needed.
    • dtparr 10y ago
      Sleeper photovoltaic cells?
  • germinalphrase 10y ago
    For someone who has been out for a hike and been startled by a rattlesnake a step away, I can imagine a terrifying world of small, ground-based area denial robots that spring to action faster than our reaction time can avoid them.
    • coldcode 10y ago
      Like a mine with a brain.
      • takingflac 10y ago
        As scary as that sounds, I feel it is better than the mindless landmines laying around from past wars. In theory, when the war is done you could hit the disarm or recall button unlike conventional mines.
        • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
          Unless the drone mine gets hacked. It might even have a protocol to shield itself from a fuel-air bomb, which is a common form of mass-mine detonation.
          • woodman 10y ago
            I've never heard of a fuel-air bomb used for demining... APOBS is used a lot, and no matter how clever the mine is - it can't ignore a chain of explosives going off on top of it.
    • cestith 10y ago
      It's not objectively the best Sci-Fi I've seen, but I have a soft spot for Crichton's film "Runaway" which has some of that in it.
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  • Pica_soO 10y ago
    Imagine - a mobile drone factory, digging itself in in the hinterlands, harvesting solar energy and water, producing mobile hydrogen-IEDs - the minefields of the future will be hard to undo.
    • coupdejarnac 10y ago
      This is pretty much the premise of Philip Dick's Second Variety, made into the movie Screamers.
      • cscharenberg 10y ago
        Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that one had any kind of movie adaptation.
        • kbart 10y ago
          Screamers is surprisingly underrated. It's one of the best pop-sci-fi movies from nineties imho.
      • angersock 10y ago
        The ending to that story was particularly delightful.
    • clock_tower 10y ago
      Does that sound like a paperclip optimizer? Because it certainly looks like a paperclip optimizer. Think of it: eventually humanity goes extinct because the whole world is land mines...
    • trhway 10y ago
      arms race has it all taken care of - in response to autonomous IED making drones there will be autonomous drones clearing up the minefields and hunting down those IED making and installing drones. Of course to deal with the hunter drones the IED making/installing drones will have special protector drones ... Humans just need to relax in the deep soft chair and enjoy the popcorn.
  • narrator 10y ago
    The Russians are focusing on ground based combat drones almost exclusively. Their air drones seem to be geared toward surveillance.
    • dogma1138 10y ago
      Because Russia's war will be next door and on the ground. The US relies on air power tho if you look at BDA imagery released not a small percentage of the so called drone strikes are more likely than not to have been conducted by mannned strike fighters as drones can't carry things that would leave that big of a crater.
  • bsder 10y ago
    > Our current conception of a "drone" is really hard to bring up to military spec once this sort of countermeasure becomes militarily common. This isn't really for drones. It's for frying ground-based electronics like cell phones. Drones are the smoke screen to hide that fact. As for drones, motors and batteries are quite hardy against quick microwave pulses. A bit of aluminum foil makes a good, light Faraday cage. Optocouplers can isolate radio and GPS modules from the actual motor control systems. I would expect you can fry an RC drone, but an autonomous one operating inertially or capable of switching so when radio/GPS goes away is probably pretty easy to shield. In addition, this kind of system is always going to have a range vs width tradeoff. Can the drones get inside this thing's range where they can still be effective even if they are "ballistic"? Dumb old bombs are really effective if you just give them a little bit of GPS to improve their accuracy. You don't have to get very close for the GPS adjustment to be devastatingly effective.
    • windlep 10y ago
      > This isn't really for drones. It's for frying ground-based electronics like cell phones. Drones are the smoke screen to hide that fact. Or imagine a smaller system integrated on a humvee that can destroy electronics in anything along the path a few dozen meters in front and in a smaller side/side area. That'd end the IED threat from anything other than a purely mechanical IED (not sure if many of those are around anymore, as everything assumes electronics will work nowadays).
      • woodman 10y ago
        Nope, insurgents found a way around that a long time ago when convoys started including jammers. Hybrid detonation systems: radio arm the device outside of jamming range, mechanical switch detonated the IED once the vehicle triggers it.
        • kbart 10y ago
          Or they simply use long wire buried in sand.
  • fweespeech 10y ago
    For the next 20-30 years, drones will be built to fly above the range of such weapons and remain extremely effective.
    • dogma1138 10y ago
      No they won't there is an upper limit to flight and if by some means these drones would be closer to space than to the ground you put those weapons in space or on high altitude tethered platforms.
  • otoburb 10y ago
    >>I've often thought that despite the fun we're currently having with aerial drones, a lot of the real drone future is going to be with autonomous ground drones, because of their ability to carry more armor, shielding, etc., without having to literally carry it into the air. While I agree with the idea that there will be more fun ahead with ground-based drones, wouldn't an air-dominance doctrine still hold in drone-drone warfare as it exists today in conventional wars? I imagine both ground and air drone warfare evolving at similarly terrifying rates over our lifetimes.
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• SEJeff 10y ago
  With a drone encased in a full faraday cage, how would the operator control it? Therein lies the problem unless it was preprogrammed and fully autonomous. That might work.
  • Cieplak 10y ago
    Line of sight lasers are one possibility, but those are vulnerable to dazzlers.
  • foobarian 10y ago
    Good luck with getting GPS then.
    • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      With a good enough AI and a detailed aerial map onboard, you may not need it.
    • marcosdumay 10y ago
      Place the receptor outside of the cage, put a resistor and a biggish capacitor, a varistor and a fuse on the communication line, and it's good enough for any disposable machine.
  • ars 10y ago
    Faraday cages don't block DC, so use that to provide power. Then run a simple optical fiber cable for communication to an antenna that lies outside the cage. If you are really good you have multiple antennas that are kept off (with the circuit physically disconnected from the antenna). If you get hit with a pulse activate the next antenna. It's possible to make simple electronics that can survive such a pulse, with auto-reset fusible links, and you use those for activating the antenna. Or even a small door and "push" the antenna out of the Faraday cage when needed.
    • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      > Faraday cages don't block DC, so use that to provide power. Drones carry their own power source - usually a LiPo battery. What you're proposing would not work if the phaser could just keep firing (which seems likely). Onboard AI seems the solution (assuming the Faraday cage is effective enough, which remains to be seen).
• Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > In theory it could kill a person if it pulsed the correct harmonics If you're thinking about RF, then frequency doesn't matter that much. It's just that absorption and penetration slowly change with frequency, that's all. There are no "deadly frequencies" there. If you're thinking about modulating the RF with some signal matching the heart rate or some brain waves, that's... interesting, but I'm not sure if it has ever been proved to work.
  • Cieplak 10y ago
    Frequencies considered especially dangerous occur where the human body can become resonant, at 35 MHz, 70 MHz, 80-100 MHz, 400 MHz, and 1 GHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_burn At frequencies near the body's natural resonant frequency, RF energy is absorbed more efficiently, and maximum heating occurs http://www.arrl.org/rf-radiation-and-electromagnetic-field-safety http://www.arrl.org/rf-radiation-and-electromagnetic-field-s...
    • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      I stand corrected, I forgot about resonance.
    • analognoise 10y ago
      Thanks for those.
  • 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Having trouble trying to understand how what I read fits in, but the guy who designs those massive mega wattage sound systems for festivals - Funktion1 - commented in an interview about how there are, essentially, lethal sound waves of sorts. >There was this French bloke at the turn of the 20th century who built a giant whistle that produced sub-bass frequencies of around 7.1 or 7.2 Hz. The first time that he got it to work, he liquidized himself. It just turned his insides to mush—poor bugger. http://djtechtools.com/2014/04/10/funktion-ones-tony-andrews-on-setting-up-soundsystems-from-wembley-stadium-to-your-bedroom/ http://djtechtools.com/2014/04/10/funktion-ones-tony-andrews...
• ams6110 10y ago
  I always thought a Faraday cage had to be grounded but after a bit of reading I think that is not actually the case.