4 ms·

The barrier is getting so low, that a dispersed group, 1000 miles from a target could all 3D print the same drone, powered by an efficient commercially availabl

by jmpman 7y ago

The barrier is getting so low, that a dispersed group, 1000 miles from a target could all 3D print the same drone, powered by an efficient commercially available RC engine, using a GPS guided computer (cell phone) with the capabilities to switch to visual terrain guidance and inertial navigation (making them immune to RF jamming), could all be launched at the same time, and deliver their payloads on the same target at exactly the same millisecond. All the software is available on GitHub today. The model airplane community has proven flights of 1888 miles, with 3 quarts of fuel, flying at 50mph. So 1000 miles plus a payload equivalent to the weight of 1 quart of kerosene has been demonstrated to be possible. The technology is proven. How many people in a 1000 mile diameter from a sensitive target could be motivated enough to build such a device and launch them simultaneously? Depending upon the fanaticism, I could imagine 10,000 of these drone, all swarming in from every direction, from every altitude, overwhelming any defense. How does a society defend themselves from such an attack? With such a swarm, the final 500 yards from a target is covered in 30 seconds. I don’t know of anything that can stop 10,000 RF shielded drones in 30 seconds. That dystopia is our future.

Jd 7y ago
All the more reason to support a social media platform that creates extreme groupthink?
- jmpman 7y ago
  Add in Tor and bitcoin, there’s complete anonymity, a funding mechanism and virtually zero possibility for response. When groups felt wronged, they “voted from the rooftops”. Now they will be able to anonymously vote from their basements.
voldacar 7y ago
There's opensource visual terrain guidance software on github? I would love a link
- jmpman 7y ago
  Here you go: https://github.com/agtbaskara/dsmac-drone https://github.com/agtbaskara/dsmac-drone
  - voldacar 7y ago
    Not sure if I'm missing anything but I only see one commit, which is a readme without further information
    - jmpman 7y ago
      Sorry, I just spent 5min researching on Wikipedia on what algorithms are used for this capability and then threw it into Github search. If you wanted to piece together from open source tools, you can probably recreate the capability in OpenCV. Or search on Github.
      - voldacar 7y ago
        Ah. Yeah I did a github search and didn't find any other implementations of that algorithm. I'll do some more research though, it seems like an interesting topic
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The real question is how many people within 1000 miles of a target are capable of building and testing a working drone and equipping it with some kind of explosive or other weaponised payload? Currently that number is extremely low. It will remain low until 3D printing is a complete zero-effort solution - which is going to take a very long time. The reality is that this kind of open source terrorism is an incredibly unlikely threat. Numerically there are almost no terrorists, and the terrorists that do exist have almost no engineering skills. Weaponised engineer terrorists would be a scary thing, but they don't exist in non-trivial numbers. And unless something very bad happens, that's unlikely to change. As for the drone scenario - it's not exactly stealthy. At 50mph there's roughly 20 hours of warning - plenty of time to put up drone catcher nets, or even launch a suicide drone swarm. It's not that drone attacks aren't a threat, but they're going to need to be more robust than anything a DIY off-the-server design can produce for some time to come.
- jmpman 7y ago
  Where you and I live, there may be no terrorists, and you and I may not be a target, but there are some parts of the world with an overrepresentation of terrorists. ISIS numbered over 100,000 at their peak. What was within 1000 mile range of ISIS held territory? Did ISIS have 100 competent engineers each capable of guiding 10 others? It would be underestimating your enemy to believe they didn’t. How hard is it to build a Qassam rocket? Over 2000 were launched in 2008. I expect this type of drone would take the same level of engineering skills once the kinks were worked out. As for the stealth factor. Let’s assume the drones are launched evenly throughout the 1000 mile diameter range, all at the same time. That’s a search area of 3M sq miles, or one drone every 3000 sq miles. Half way through the journey, with T-10 hours, all drones in the swarm could be evenly distributed in 785k sq miles, with one drone every 785 sq miles. An hour away, they’re all in a 7850 sq mile search area, or one drone every 7.8 sq miles. 5 minutes out, still a search area of 54 sq miles, and the drones are spaced out by over 1000 feet. 1 minute out, they’re all a bit less than a mile from the target, but up to 6000 feet up. An army of 10,000 soldiers armed with AR-15s couldn’t hit the drones at this point. 30 seconds out, the drones are 3000 feet up and still out of range. 10 seconds out and the drones are 1000 feet up, barely within range, but it doesn’t matter because they’re all on a terminal trajectory. Now you’re trying to shoot 10000 armed hand grenades falling from the sky. Good luck. As for drone catcher nets? Let’s say half the drones are each armed with 1 pound of thermite, and ignite during a terminal trajectory from 1000 feet. What’s going to stop 5000 lbs of thermite followed by 5000 lbs of tnt? These drones can climb to a few thousand feet, and weigh around 10 pounds. Can you visually identify such a drone versus an eagle? At night? When they’re 1000 feet away - 10 seconds from impact? Can you hear them at 5000ft? 10,000ft? The same RC hobbiest who flew 1888 miles also set an altitude record of 26k feet. Or they could fly at 50 feet above the ground, obscured by trees. Dismissed as your neighbor flying his RC plane, too low to be seen by radar, and looking like a cell phone in a car for all RF purposes. Such a swarm goes from almost invisible to the explosive power of an F/A18 in seconds. Besides the radar signature of a half pound engine, how else can they be detected? They have the same RF signature of a common cell phone. I can 3D print amazing RC planes in 24 hours. Are they capable of 1888 mile range? No. That took an expert thousands of hours to perfect. But you can probably get an electric powered 3D printed plane capable of flying 50mph for an hour - today. Tomorrow maybe for two hours. In a decade, maybe 4.
sjtindell 7y ago
The Israeli’s Iron Curtain is an example of a possible defensive model. Computer controlled machine guns running ML models could probably take down a lot of drones.
- jmpman 7y ago
  Iron Curtain only works for objects that are detected. If the drones are flying at 50 feet AGL, Iron Curtain isn’t going to work as they’re not going to detected by radar, and exploding an Iron Curtain interceptor 50 feet above someone’s house isn’t going to go well. Flying at 10,000 ft, how far away can an RC motor be detected and not look like a bird? Iron Curtain currently has 10-15 batteries at four launchers per battery with 20 interceptors per launcher. So, 800-1200 interceptors. With only 1200 interceptors, they can be overwhelmed by distributed terrorists launching simultaneously over a 1000 mile diameter. Each interceptor is $40k. I expect a drone would be under $500, so you’ve got an 80:1 cost differential. $400M to stop 10,000 drones. As for machine guns, let’s say the effective range is 2000 yards. You have roughly 60 seconds to engage all targets. Assume 100 rounds fired to successfully terminate a single drone, with 10,000 drones inbound, you need to fire 1M bullets in 60 seconds. Assuming a machine gun firing at 1000rds/min, that’s 1000 machine guns with perfectly coordinated fire. At $10k/machine gun (a very conservative estimate) how many buildings can you protect for $10M each? Maybe you can protect your capital building with such a lead shield. Your oil refineries.. should probably do that. And now you’ve just sprayed 1M bullets into the air above an oil refinery. Sounds like a bad idea. And then the terrorist just need to attack with 20,000 drone swarm, and all your facilities are exposed until you double your defenses at all locations. Financially, I don’t see a solution.
  - sjtindell 7y ago
    Good points. Your answer would pass the systems design interview and mine would not.
    - jmpman 7y ago
      A laser however... probably works for this scenario. But even then, there’s a required dwell time, and more sophisticated terrorists would adapt to using ablative skins, or maybe even materials transparent to the laser wavelength... anything to increase the required dwell time and overwhelm through sheer numbers.
bythckr 7y ago
I broke a sweat reading. I have a question, please remember that I am a weapon noob. Isn't this similar to the hand-held bazookas that are daily fried into Israel & well defended by Iron dome?
- jmpman 7y ago
  Sorry to trigger your anxiety. The Qassam rockets are basically the same as an Estes model rocket, if constructed from steel, with a TNT warhead. They have a ballistic trajectory, arcing high into the air making them visible to radar, are fired from a location limited by the rocket range (under a few dozen miles) and their exact location at each time until they explode can be calculated and fed into an Iron Dome to intercept. It’s very difficult to coordinate the launch, difficult to launch more than a few simultaneously, and very difficult to get them to land in the same location at the same time. For the defenders, it’s easy to identify where they were launched from (responding with a Hellfire from a waiting Apache), and easy to detect on radar - meter long metal pipes have a much different radar cross section than a bird. The drones I’m suggesting are possible would have a 1000 mile range. Instead of launching a couple dozen Qassam rocket to be shot down in an evening, the same group could build hundreds of drones, and then launch them over the course of an entire night (or two), from throughout the Gaza Strip, flying not to their destination immediately, but out into the Mediterranean, where they will spread out to fly at a few meters off the ocean until they need to head back to land for their detonation. At that point, these hundreds of drones are all converging on a single location, at a single time, from many different directions. Some high, and some just 50 feet above ground level. They would be very difficult to detect due to their size, altitude (low to avoid radar, or high to avoid human perception), dispersion and speed. From a radar perspective, the metal engine components could be small enough to be outside most radar wavelengths and shaped to minimize radar cross section, while encased in basically a plastic/wooden frame. From radar, it’ll probably look like a bird. Unlike with the Qassam, it’s not just Sderot which is in range.
  - bythckr 7y ago
    Please don't be sorry, it's important to know the risk we face daily. Trillions are spend globally on security, but we are more insecure daily. There needs to be a change in the way we ensure safety. The elected officials who are suppose to do this are too busy in bed with the military industrial complex. Basically the dog is napping and letting the wolfs "watch over" the sheep. This is a security nightmare. I presumed that the Saudi attack happened due to the incapabilities of Saudi forces. I did read that despite all the fancy toys from Uncle Sam, they dont know how to use the toys well. How is it compared to the Russian s400? For the trillions that the Americans pour into their defence, do they have some way to fight this "swarm of drones"? Aren't the US leading in drone technology? Guess in an IT lingo, I can say that distributed systems are better than a monolithic system.

by jmpman 7y ago

Jd 7y ago

All the more reason to support a social media platform that creates extreme groupthink?

jmpman 7y ago
Add in Tor and bitcoin, there’s complete anonymity, a funding mechanism and virtually zero possibility for response. When groups felt wronged, they “voted from the rooftops”. Now they will be able to anonymously vote from their basements.

voldacar 7y ago

There's opensource visual terrain guidance software on github? I would love a link

jmpman 7y ago
Here you go: https://github.com/agtbaskara/dsmac-drone https://github.com/agtbaskara/dsmac-drone
- voldacar 7y ago
  Not sure if I'm missing anything but I only see one commit, which is a readme without further information
  - jmpman 7y ago
    Sorry, I just spent 5min researching on Wikipedia on what algorithms are used for this capability and then threw it into Github search. If you wanted to piece together from open source tools, you can probably recreate the capability in OpenCV. Or search on Github.
    - voldacar 7y ago
      Ah. Yeah I did a github search and didn't find any other implementations of that algorithm. I'll do some more research though, it seems like an interesting topic

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

The real question is how many people within 1000 miles of a target are capable of building and testing a working drone and equipping it with some kind of explosive or other weaponised payload? Currently that number is extremely low. It will remain low until 3D printing is a complete zero-effort solution - which is going to take a very long time. The reality is that this kind of open source terrorism is an incredibly unlikely threat. Numerically there are almost no terrorists, and the terrorists that do exist have almost no engineering skills. Weaponised engineer terrorists would be a scary thing, but they don't exist in non-trivial numbers. And unless something very bad happens, that's unlikely to change. As for the drone scenario - it's not exactly stealthy. At 50mph there's roughly 20 hours of warning - plenty of time to put up drone catcher nets, or even launch a suicide drone swarm. It's not that drone attacks aren't a threat, but they're going to need to be more robust than anything a DIY off-the-server design can produce for some time to come.

jmpman 7y ago
Where you and I live, there may be no terrorists, and you and I may not be a target, but there are some parts of the world with an overrepresentation of terrorists. ISIS numbered over 100,000 at their peak. What was within 1000 mile range of ISIS held territory? Did ISIS have 100 competent engineers each capable of guiding 10 others? It would be underestimating your enemy to believe they didn’t. How hard is it to build a Qassam rocket? Over 2000 were launched in 2008. I expect this type of drone would take the same level of engineering skills once the kinks were worked out. As for the stealth factor. Let’s assume the drones are launched evenly throughout the 1000 mile diameter range, all at the same time. That’s a search area of 3M sq miles, or one drone every 3000 sq miles. Half way through the journey, with T-10 hours, all drones in the swarm could be evenly distributed in 785k sq miles, with one drone every 785 sq miles. An hour away, they’re all in a 7850 sq mile search area, or one drone every 7.8 sq miles. 5 minutes out, still a search area of 54 sq miles, and the drones are spaced out by over 1000 feet. 1 minute out, they’re all a bit less than a mile from the target, but up to 6000 feet up. An army of 10,000 soldiers armed with AR-15s couldn’t hit the drones at this point. 30 seconds out, the drones are 3000 feet up and still out of range. 10 seconds out and the drones are 1000 feet up, barely within range, but it doesn’t matter because they’re all on a terminal trajectory. Now you’re trying to shoot 10000 armed hand grenades falling from the sky. Good luck. As for drone catcher nets? Let’s say half the drones are each armed with 1 pound of thermite, and ignite during a terminal trajectory from 1000 feet. What’s going to stop 5000 lbs of thermite followed by 5000 lbs of tnt? These drones can climb to a few thousand feet, and weigh around 10 pounds. Can you visually identify such a drone versus an eagle? At night? When they’re 1000 feet away - 10 seconds from impact? Can you hear them at 5000ft? 10,000ft? The same RC hobbiest who flew 1888 miles also set an altitude record of 26k feet. Or they could fly at 50 feet above the ground, obscured by trees. Dismissed as your neighbor flying his RC plane, too low to be seen by radar, and looking like a cell phone in a car for all RF purposes. Such a swarm goes from almost invisible to the explosive power of an F/A18 in seconds. Besides the radar signature of a half pound engine, how else can they be detected? They have the same RF signature of a common cell phone. I can 3D print amazing RC planes in 24 hours. Are they capable of 1888 mile range? No. That took an expert thousands of hours to perfect. But you can probably get an electric powered 3D printed plane capable of flying 50mph for an hour - today. Tomorrow maybe for two hours. In a decade, maybe 4.

sjtindell 7y ago

The Israeli’s Iron Curtain is an example of a possible defensive model. Computer controlled machine guns running ML models could probably take down a lot of drones.

jmpman 7y ago
Iron Curtain only works for objects that are detected. If the drones are flying at 50 feet AGL, Iron Curtain isn’t going to work as they’re not going to detected by radar, and exploding an Iron Curtain interceptor 50 feet above someone’s house isn’t going to go well. Flying at 10,000 ft, how far away can an RC motor be detected and not look like a bird? Iron Curtain currently has 10-15 batteries at four launchers per battery with 20 interceptors per launcher. So, 800-1200 interceptors. With only 1200 interceptors, they can be overwhelmed by distributed terrorists launching simultaneously over a 1000 mile diameter. Each interceptor is $40k. I expect a drone would be under $500, so you’ve got an 80:1 cost differential. $400M to stop 10,000 drones. As for machine guns, let’s say the effective range is 2000 yards. You have roughly 60 seconds to engage all targets. Assume 100 rounds fired to successfully terminate a single drone, with 10,000 drones inbound, you need to fire 1M bullets in 60 seconds. Assuming a machine gun firing at 1000rds/min, that’s 1000 machine guns with perfectly coordinated fire. At $10k/machine gun (a very conservative estimate) how many buildings can you protect for $10M each? Maybe you can protect your capital building with such a lead shield. Your oil refineries.. should probably do that. And now you’ve just sprayed 1M bullets into the air above an oil refinery. Sounds like a bad idea. And then the terrorist just need to attack with 20,000 drone swarm, and all your facilities are exposed until you double your defenses at all locations. Financially, I don’t see a solution.
- sjtindell 7y ago
  Good points. Your answer would pass the systems design interview and mine would not.
  - jmpman 7y ago
    A laser however... probably works for this scenario. But even then, there’s a required dwell time, and more sophisticated terrorists would adapt to using ablative skins, or maybe even materials transparent to the laser wavelength... anything to increase the required dwell time and overwhelm through sheer numbers.

bythckr 7y ago

I broke a sweat reading. I have a question, please remember that I am a weapon noob. Isn't this similar to the hand-held bazookas that are daily fried into Israel & well defended by Iron dome?

jmpman 7y ago
Sorry to trigger your anxiety. The Qassam rockets are basically the same as an Estes model rocket, if constructed from steel, with a TNT warhead. They have a ballistic trajectory, arcing high into the air making them visible to radar, are fired from a location limited by the rocket range (under a few dozen miles) and their exact location at each time until they explode can be calculated and fed into an Iron Dome to intercept. It’s very difficult to coordinate the launch, difficult to launch more than a few simultaneously, and very difficult to get them to land in the same location at the same time. For the defenders, it’s easy to identify where they were launched from (responding with a Hellfire from a waiting Apache), and easy to detect on radar - meter long metal pipes have a much different radar cross section than a bird. The drones I’m suggesting are possible would have a 1000 mile range. Instead of launching a couple dozen Qassam rocket to be shot down in an evening, the same group could build hundreds of drones, and then launch them over the course of an entire night (or two), from throughout the Gaza Strip, flying not to their destination immediately, but out into the Mediterranean, where they will spread out to fly at a few meters off the ocean until they need to head back to land for their detonation. At that point, these hundreds of drones are all converging on a single location, at a single time, from many different directions. Some high, and some just 50 feet above ground level. They would be very difficult to detect due to their size, altitude (low to avoid radar, or high to avoid human perception), dispersion and speed. From a radar perspective, the metal engine components could be small enough to be outside most radar wavelengths and shaped to minimize radar cross section, while encased in basically a plastic/wooden frame. From radar, it’ll probably look like a bird. Unlike with the Qassam, it’s not just Sderot which is in range.
- bythckr 7y ago
  Please don't be sorry, it's important to know the risk we face daily. Trillions are spend globally on security, but we are more insecure daily. There needs to be a change in the way we ensure safety. The elected officials who are suppose to do this are too busy in bed with the military industrial complex. Basically the dog is napping and letting the wolfs "watch over" the sheep. This is a security nightmare. I presumed that the Saudi attack happened due to the incapabilities of Saudi forces. I did read that despite all the fancy toys from Uncle Sam, they dont know how to use the toys well. How is it compared to the Russian s400? For the trillions that the Americans pour into their defence, do they have some way to fight this "swarm of drones"? Aren't the US leading in drone technology? Guess in an IT lingo, I can say that distributed systems are better than a monolithic system.