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> I think flying above 400 ft is already illegal though So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this syste

> I think flying above 400 ft is already illegal though So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this system you propose? > I don't think it's nearly that expensive, as outlined above. To cover what area? If you mean something like the White House, sure, the cost would very likely be justified. If you are talking covering the entire United States, or even just everything important, you are insane (not meant to be rude, but a trillion dollars wouldn’t be unrealistic estimate there). I think a key point you are missing is what real threat a consumer grade drone is in reality. $500 Drone - might be able to lift a hand grenade. Keyword there might. $1500 Drone - the hand grenade is now pretty solidly possible depending on the type of grenade (M67, doable, but anything bigger less likely). In the best case you might get up to a pound of cargo weight, but it’s significantly going to impact maneuverability and flight time. $10k+ drone - once we get into this category, sure, we can get up to 5lbs or maybe slightly higher in cargo weight, but then we are in the category of 4ft or larger hexacopters or octocopters. They are very noticeable and very loud. I think that’s the real reason we’ve not seen much (and likely won’t see much unless drones dramatically change in lifting capacity) terrorism from drones. To put it bluntly, there are just too many ways to deliver tiny explosives that are more practical and less likely to fail than are with drones. For the realistic payload of something like an M67 grenade, the “kill radius” is only 5 meters. If I saw a drone with something attached to it (or even if not) within 5m of me, I’m already going to be getting out of the area. Sure, you could argue someone may intend to drop it from altitude, but even then do you really think the accuracy of dropping something like that is actually going to be very precise? The terrorism angle is in reality pure FUD and is used as an excuse to appeal to the uninformed masses.

kbenson 8y ago
> So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this system you propose? No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply. > To cover what area? If you mean something like the White House, sure, the cost would very likely be justified. High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc. > If you are talking covering the entire United States, or even just everything important, you are insane (not meant to be rude, but a trillion dollars wouldn’t be unrealistic estimate there). Assuming 10,000 locations across the U.S., and assuming 50 $50,000 average installation cost (which might be low, but we can scale it easily for ballpark costs after), that's $500 million. If we double locations and quadruple average install cost (which is supposed to account for locations with multiple towers, etc), that's still just $8 billion. That's totally doable when it comes to stuff tagged as national defense. > I think a key point you are missing is what real threat a consumer grade drone is in reality. Your prices and payloads are way off. A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more. > For the realistic payload of something like an M67 grenade, the “kill radius” is only 5 meters. Grenades are not optimized for damage. They are a compromise that takes into account explosive power, compact size, and delivery. The fact they are meant to be hand delivered to within a few tens of feet means a large blast radius is actually detrimental to their design. 10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets, probably allows for quite a different set of compromises. > The terrorism angle is in reality pure FUD and is used as an excuse to appeal to the uninformed masses. There's a lot of FUD, but I don't think it's complete FUD. It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations, I think it's possible it will have the best cost to benefit ratio (since the chances of finding the perpetrator would be virtually nil, and the cost is relatively low), and that's all it takes for it to be used. 1: https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/top-heavy-lift-drones.html https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/top-heavy-lift-drones...
- learc83 8y ago
  >High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc. You take out dense metro downtowns and I think that's perfectly sensible. It doesn't require any kind of licensing, or national database, or wide scale distributed systems of any kind. Drones are off limits in the those areas just like aircraft are. If you have an automated defense system and you need a drone for some exceptional reason, you clear it with whoever manages the local system and they install a friend or foe transponder on the drone. Wide scale drone licensing enforcement isn't required or effective if your goal is to protect high threat targets from drone attacks. It solves completely different problems. >No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply. You need a much higher density of radar installations, with an exponentially higher cost since drones are much smaller than aircraft. >$8 billion That's off by a few orders of magnitude if you're talking about a wide-scale system including towers, radar, personnel, drone take down capability etc... >10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets You’re still talking pipe bomb levels. It’s still much more effective to leave a bag in a trashcan in a crowded space. > A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more. You're looking at a list of maximum payloads from the marketing department. Not maximum realistic operational loads. And the drones with 40lb payloads are huge. >It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations, There are no feasible large scale mitigations that are effective enough to change the calculus. Again if you’re talking local mostly automated drone defense, then sure that’s feasible and probably necessary at some point.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I'm not feeling this is a particularly constructive discussion anymore. You seem to be picking specific statements to counter, while ignoring the context of the statements and explanations that address your counterargument I've made in a prior comment or within the same comment. For example, drone payload, where you focus on smaller sizes, and say they can't do much damage, and then either ignore larger size payloads as marketing lies (with no evidence to back it up, or to at least show actual payloads in practice), or that those drones are huge... which would make them easier to track, which was one of my earlier points that makes the system easier to develop. Feasible drones for attacks will likely be larger, and this easier to detect. Time an again, I've tried to come up with real data or approximate numbers, with all calculations and reasons for such outlined so you or anyone else could question where you thought my assumptions were wrong, but I haven't seen that. Instead, I get blanket rejections without evidence, or even much explanation of reasoning.

kbenson 8y ago

> So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this system you propose? No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply. > To cover what area? If you mean something like the White House, sure, the cost would very likely be justified. High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc. > If you are talking covering the entire United States, or even just everything important, you are insane (not meant to be rude, but a trillion dollars wouldn’t be unrealistic estimate there). Assuming 10,000 locations across the U.S., and assuming 50 $50,000 average installation cost (which might be low, but we can scale it easily for ballpark costs after), that's $500 million. If we double locations and quadruple average install cost (which is supposed to account for locations with multiple towers, etc), that's still just $8 billion. That's totally doable when it comes to stuff tagged as national defense. > I think a key point you are missing is what real threat a consumer grade drone is in reality. Your prices and payloads are way off. A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more. > For the realistic payload of something like an M67 grenade, the “kill radius” is only 5 meters. Grenades are not optimized for damage. They are a compromise that takes into account explosive power, compact size, and delivery. The fact they are meant to be hand delivered to within a few tens of feet means a large blast radius is actually detrimental to their design. 10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets, probably allows for quite a different set of compromises. > The terrorism angle is in reality pure FUD and is used as an excuse to appeal to the uninformed masses. There's a lot of FUD, but I don't think it's complete FUD. It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations, I think it's possible it will have the best cost to benefit ratio (since the chances of finding the perpetrator would be virtually nil, and the cost is relatively low), and that's all it takes for it to be used. 1: https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/top-heavy-lift-drones.html https://filmora.wondershare.com/drones/top-heavy-lift-drones...

learc83 8y ago
>High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc. You take out dense metro downtowns and I think that's perfectly sensible. It doesn't require any kind of licensing, or national database, or wide scale distributed systems of any kind. Drones are off limits in the those areas just like aircraft are. If you have an automated defense system and you need a drone for some exceptional reason, you clear it with whoever manages the local system and they install a friend or foe transponder on the drone. Wide scale drone licensing enforcement isn't required or effective if your goal is to protect high threat targets from drone attacks. It solves completely different problems. >No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply. You need a much higher density of radar installations, with an exponentially higher cost since drones are much smaller than aircraft. >$8 billion That's off by a few orders of magnitude if you're talking about a wide-scale system including towers, radar, personnel, drone take down capability etc... >10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets You’re still talking pipe bomb levels. It’s still much more effective to leave a bag in a trashcan in a crowded space. > A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more. You're looking at a list of maximum payloads from the marketing department. Not maximum realistic operational loads. And the drones with 40lb payloads are huge. >It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations, There are no feasible large scale mitigations that are effective enough to change the calculus. Again if you’re talking local mostly automated drone defense, then sure that’s feasible and probably necessary at some point.
- kbenson 8y ago
  I'm not feeling this is a particularly constructive discussion anymore. You seem to be picking specific statements to counter, while ignoring the context of the statements and explanations that address your counterargument I've made in a prior comment or within the same comment. For example, drone payload, where you focus on smaller sizes, and say they can't do much damage, and then either ignore larger size payloads as marketing lies (with no evidence to back it up, or to at least show actual payloads in practice), or that those drones are huge... which would make them easier to track, which was one of my earlier points that makes the system easier to develop. Feasible drones for attacks will likely be larger, and this easier to detect. Time an again, I've tried to come up with real data or approximate numbers, with all calculations and reasons for such outlined so you or anyone else could question where you thought my assumptions were wrong, but I haven't seen that. Instead, I get blanket rejections without evidence, or even much explanation of reasoning.