5 ms·

Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a pr

by Nextgrid 10mo ago

Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a problem, shoot/neutralize them and thank Russia for the free target-practice exercise. It seems like the danger even bigger than Russia is government incompetence and the system of broken incentives where everyone does everything to appear busy but actually solving the problem. If there's a drone there, and you don't want it there, the solution is obvious. It's obvious enough to any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun (with various degrees of success, but at least they're got the right spirit). If nobody's taking out the proverbial shotgun then I have to assume the drones are not an actual problem and merely yet another excuse for busywork. Edit: I am not saying to literally use a shotgun against them. But offensive solutions need to be developed and put to use; otherwise if we sit helpless now, what will we do when those drones evolve and start carrying offensive payloads? Fear-mongering and finding endless excuses about not doing anything is not going to help.

flohofwoe 10mo ago
How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius? In reality it's a bit more complicated, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-allow-police-shoot-down-drones-2025-10-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-a... Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).
jonathanstrange 10mo ago
The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
mytailorisrich 10mo ago
[flagged]
- soco 10mo ago
  So you have an invader trying their best (which is luckily not much) to grab a neighbor's land, just at your border, and you call that "murky and overblown"? Sorry this is not the Facebook grandmas knitting group giving likes to a carrot horse, we refuse to accept such bs.
  - mytailorisrich 10mo ago
    That's a strawman argument reply... The "Russian scare" in Europe is not about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's just the premise, it is the narrative that the EU (and Western Europe at large) is next to be invaded and that we should be ready for WWIII against Russia. > trying their best (which is luckily not much) I think you've just proven my point.
    - spookie 10mo ago
      Russia hasn't stopped invading their neighbors ever since the fall of the soviet union. To state they will stop doing so while Putin is in power is either naive or on purpose to propel some agenda.
      - mytailorisrich 10mo ago
        That's both a logical fallacy and a strawman argument, not to mention an ad hominem attack. I did not claim that Russia would stop anything and even if Russia did attack several neighbours it is irrelevant. Reasoning and trying to see through the haze is not "having an agenda". My claim is that Russia is not going to invade or start a war with the EU/NATO/Western Europe (and that, consequentially the "Russia scare" is mostly fearmongering). I don't think that they ever had a plan to, but in any case their campaign in Ukraine has shown that they don't have the capability.
seszett 10mo ago
> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake. That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
exDM69 10mo ago
The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target. Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible. Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit. My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.
- zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either. One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.
  - exDM69 10mo ago
    I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine. The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place. For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.
    - 10mo ago
egorfine 10mo ago
> Are any of those drones being shot down? Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.
- yetihehe 10mo ago
  ... and Russians will find new reasons not to shoot their drones, which they will happily share with EU residents via social networks. They are the masters of excuses.
lm28469 10mo ago
The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ? Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU
- zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- cameldrv 10mo ago
  For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm. For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one. Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.
  - lm28469 10mo ago
    The reality doesn't match all these armchair specialists takes on HN though. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defend their critical infrastructure... and they're all in, at war, with 0 regards for safety and side effects. What happens if you interceptors locks in on the plane behind the drone, of falls down on the school behind the naval base ? Planes are shot down all the time, even military planes by friendly fire. I even doubt European countries have legal ways to start shooting down aircrafts during peace time https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1p9scu3/turkish_crewmen_record_in_horror_as_russian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1p9scu3/turk...
codedokode 10mo ago
Shutting down a drone with a machine gun is difficult, there are lot of videos where you can see it. There is even video of a Russian-Iranian drone destroying a car with a machine gun which cannot even protect itself. What is efficient against drones, are Soviet ground-air missiles (which might be dangerous to use around airports), and interceptor drones (which Europe doesn't have). Jamming the radio/GPS probably won't help because drones have antennas on top which form a simple phased array, to ignore the signal from the ground. Drones might also use mobile networks, and there were reports that Russia used Starlink antennas on some drones.

flohofwoe 10mo ago

How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius? In reality it's a bit more complicated, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-allow-police-shoot-down-drones-2025-10-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-a... Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).

jonathanstrange 10mo ago

The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.

mytailorisrich 10mo ago

[flagged]

soco 10mo ago
So you have an invader trying their best (which is luckily not much) to grab a neighbor's land, just at your border, and you call that "murky and overblown"? Sorry this is not the Facebook grandmas knitting group giving likes to a carrot horse, we refuse to accept such bs.
- mytailorisrich 10mo ago
  That's a strawman argument reply... The "Russian scare" in Europe is not about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's just the premise, it is the narrative that the EU (and Western Europe at large) is next to be invaded and that we should be ready for WWIII against Russia. > trying their best (which is luckily not much) I think you've just proven my point.
  - spookie 10mo ago
    Russia hasn't stopped invading their neighbors ever since the fall of the soviet union. To state they will stop doing so while Putin is in power is either naive or on purpose to propel some agenda.
    - mytailorisrich 10mo ago
      That's both a logical fallacy and a strawman argument, not to mention an ad hominem attack. I did not claim that Russia would stop anything and even if Russia did attack several neighbours it is irrelevant. Reasoning and trying to see through the haze is not "having an agenda". My claim is that Russia is not going to invade or start a war with the EU/NATO/Western Europe (and that, consequentially the "Russia scare" is mostly fearmongering). I don't think that they ever had a plan to, but in any case their campaign in Ukraine has shown that they don't have the capability.

seszett 10mo ago

> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake. That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.

exDM69 10mo ago

The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target. Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible. Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit. My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.

zelphirkalt 10mo ago
If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either. One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.
- exDM69 10mo ago
  I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine. The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place. For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.
  - 10mo ago

egorfine 10mo ago

> Are any of those drones being shot down? Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.

yetihehe 10mo ago
... and Russians will find new reasons not to shoot their drones, which they will happily share with EU residents via social networks. They are the masters of excuses.

lm28469 10mo ago

The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ? Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU

zelphirkalt 10mo ago
I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
cameldrv 10mo ago
For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm. For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one. Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.
- lm28469 10mo ago
  The reality doesn't match all these armchair specialists takes on HN though. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defend their critical infrastructure... and they're all in, at war, with 0 regards for safety and side effects. What happens if you interceptors locks in on the plane behind the drone, of falls down on the school behind the naval base ? Planes are shot down all the time, even military planes by friendly fire. I even doubt European countries have legal ways to start shooting down aircrafts during peace time https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1p9scu3/turkish_crewmen_record_in_horror_as_russian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1p9scu3/turk...

codedokode 10mo ago

Shutting down a drone with a machine gun is difficult, there are lot of videos where you can see it. There is even video of a Russian-Iranian drone destroying a car with a machine gun which cannot even protect itself. What is efficient against drones, are Soviet ground-air missiles (which might be dangerous to use around airports), and interceptor drones (which Europe doesn't have). Jamming the radio/GPS probably won't help because drones have antennas on top which form a simple phased array, to ignore the signal from the ground. Drones might also use mobile networks, and there were reports that Russia used Starlink antennas on some drones.