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Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell. I bet you could do aiming and firing in less than 0.1
by Veserv 7mo ago
Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell.
I bet you could do aiming and firing in less than 0.1 seconds with nearly 100% accuracy in the 50 meter range which would enable ~10 destroyed drones per unit if the drones are going 150 km/h.
Shotgun pellets are also basically entirely safe when shot into the air as they have low falling velocity enabling usage when shooting over populated areas.
- bink 7mo agoAnd some Canada Gooses too?
- sjkoelle 7mo agotrust the gooses
- speed_spread 7mo agoHow long till Canada wires up gooses brains and straps then with bombs for the ultimate biodrones? They already swarm naturally in attack formation!
- Teever 7mo agoHow many shotguns? How do they reload? What happens when they run out of ammo? Can they be hacked, or duped into firing at friendly aircraft? How will they deal with the enemy adapting their drones to have camoflage? There's no way automatic turret mounted shotguns are the solution to this problem. It simply isn't economical to produce, install and maintain all of these things, and now you've sunk a massive amount of resources into this infrastructure when the enemy doesn't even really have to launch a real attack.
- prepend 7mo agoI suspect they will run out of ammo much after the enemy runs out of drones.
- kibwen 7mo agoWhat's their supply chain for being restocked with ammo? Is that supply chain susceptible to drone attacks along any part? Then you still lose eventually.
- prepend 7mo agoI don’t think so as shotgun shells are cheaper and smaller than drones. When drones become cheaper then it’s a problem.
- rationalist 7mo agoThey might reload the same way semi-automatic shotguns reload. Without writing an essay, I can definitely see automatic turtent mounted shotguns as an effective solution.
- Teever 7mo agoImagine you're playing tower defense. Now picture an American military base. They're pretty big, right? Now imagine how many of these shotgun towers you need to secure the paremeter based on the firing range of these weapons, then imagine how many you shotgun towers you need to defend the interior of the base from drones that don't attack from the side but instead come in from the middle because they can fly. How much ammunition can each of these shotgun towers hold? What happens when it runs out? Does a human have to go over there and refill it? What kind of equipment do they use to do that? How much time does this take and how much fuel does it consume? What is the opportunity cost of this? Now that's just one military installation. How many does the US have? Are you going to put these shotgun towers outside the homes of high ranking military officers? The roads that they take to go to work? What's stopping someone from doing this kind of drone attack on the highway to the military installation timed with the morning or evening commute? What's the counter to that? Automated shotguns are not an economically viable defense to the threats that I described in my previous post.
- AftHurrahWinch 7mo agoGreat questions, I will reinstall Factorio for research purposes and get right back to you.
- lelanthran 7mo ago> Automatic turret-mounted anti-air shotguns. Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell. Yeah, doable. I went to a clay pigeon range last week (company outing). These are targets that move quite fast. They don't spring out from the same spot and some roll over the ground. I had never handled a gun before. I am 50, with the attendant poor eyesight and lack of twitch reflexes. And yet, I still nailed 20/25 moving targets. A turret with a shotgun is going to hit much more than that.
- 05 7mo agoWhich only protect a small area, so drones just need to target less obvious things. Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander. Attackers are always advantaged since you have to protect _everything_ and they only need to target what's left unprotected. Some drones just drop grenades, I somehow don't see your shotgun hitting either the drone (too high) or a grenade (too fast and small).
- Veserv 7mo ago> Which only protect a small area We have these things called wheels. Or you could mount it on a drone. > Meanwhile your guns shoot birds and once in a while - an occasional bystander We are discussing protecting military bases or military assets. > Some drones just drop grenades That requires flying above the target. See counter-point 1. Please put in the minimal effort needed to follow through at least a few steps of argument and counter-argument in your head. I assure you I am not putting in as little effort into my arguments as you did.
- kibwen 7mo ago> Blow up 100 $ drones for the cost of a 0.50 $ shotgun shell. Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH. Your emplacement costs more than $200 and can only fire in one direction at a time. Or, as we've seen in Ukraine, once your disposable low-cost drones have precisely identified a high-value, high-effectiveness static emplacement, you send in a cruise missile to clear it out, and then the drones continue sweeping forward.
- rtkwe 7mo agoDrones that can move that fast have extremely little cargo capacity for explosive charges and it's not fast enough to simply use the kinetic energy of the drone for much.
- Veserv 7mo ago> Then two drones approach from opposite sides at 200 MPH. A drone that can go 300 km/h is way more than 100 $, you are in the thousands of dollar range at that point. Turret wins if it blows up one. Also, it could probably blow up more than one since at 300 km/h you would get 0.5 seconds to respond and I was arguing 0.1 seconds per target anywhere in a full 360. 0.25 seconds for anywhere on a full 360 would be enough for 2 and that is within human capability. > you send in a cruise missile to clear it out Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins. Also you can put wheels on the turret, so it might not even be there. Now you are probably going to argue about a drone that goes 1000 km/h at which point what you have is a cruise missile which costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At that point the entire argument about drones being too cheap to cost-effectively stop is moot. Or you might argue that the drones just go high. 50 m is a ludicrously low flight ceiling. But then your drone can not explode on contact. You could use a drone that drops explosives, but that still requires flying over the target. High flying drones are easier to detect, and you could counter that with flying shotgun drones or turret mounted machine guns which have ranges in the hundreds to thousands of meters and would still only cost a few dollars of ammo per kill. My main point is that bullets can easily disable a cheap drone and are much cheaper than a cheap drone. You just need a cost-effective way of deploying mass bullets against mass drones. Logical answers are ground deployments around targets or drones with bullets that cost-effectively shoot down drones without bullets. You will then likely get into a arms race of fighter drones to protect your bomber drones. And scale up your drones until they are not easily bullet-destroyable. But then your drone costs have likely increased to the point where anti-air cannons shooting 100 $ explosive shells are cost-effective. And so on and so forth.