Posted on 12/06/2021 3:40:36 PM PST by devane617
The killer drone whooshed out of its launch tube, spreading its carbon wings and shooting into the sky.
Flying too fast for the naked eye to track, the battery-powered robot circled the Utah desert, hunting for the target it had been programmed to strike. Moments later, the drone sailed through the driver’s side window of an empty pick-up truck and exploded in a fireball.
“Good hit,” exclaimed an operator from AeroVironment, the company that produces the drone and sells it to the U.S. military.
NBC News traveled to a military testing center for exclusive access to the first-ever public demonstration of the Switchblade 300, a small, low-cost “kamikaze” drone made by AeroVironment that sources say has been used quietly for years by the U.S. military in targeted killing operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The demonstration told a story of promise and peril.
“This video will wake some of you up…”
And, that is exactly what the concern is—o a small scale or large scale we need tech to counteract these things.
If autonomous weapon drones are outlawed, then only Chinese-ISIS-Norks-Iran will have ...
We’ve had countermeasures for these things since the mid 1990’s. They made briefcase-sized kits for diplomats and wealthy businessman years ago - they’re probably down to cell phone size by now.
Thats a big fat TRUE
Their people
Our people
You have to wonder how far behind us in this technology our enemies are. The battlefield is getting alot more deadly recently.
Doesn’t matter, Iran, Russia and China all have military here..
Coming 3 am phone calls:
1 Day After Olympics end: Iran tests nuclear weapon
2 Days after Olympics:Russia invades Ukraine
3 Days after Olympics: China invades Taiwan
4 Days after Olympics “Hello, 911? The President isn’t breathing!”
On Day 4, 3:05 am: VP Harris —“WHAT? Really? Oh, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!
3:10: “I don’t know, she won’t wake up!”
3:15: “ ah, yes, ah yes it is this ah you see this ah is Speaker Pelosi, and ah, ah , it’s quite a uh un Precedented I mean un Presi ah dented, I mean Bo Jiden , I meant hunt..Hunter uh no no uh uh you’ll see uh something when uh I uh do something. Oh dear, where are my pearls?!
They had drones flying in perfect formation at the Tokyo Olympics. They will definitely be a military problem.
Wasn’t the first rule of robotics supposed to be “Do not harm humans”?
“Only way to defeat that is to have a frequency jammer, thus making every cell phone in the stadium unusable.”
Just nuke the nation that sponsors this against us.
“Oh wait, didn’t we just and continue to fly in, thousands of folks who would love to do this”
IRONY: the CEO of the drone company in this article was born in Afghanistan.
From what I was told the drone swarms will be able support Marines ashore from the MEU or a special MAGTAF until either they complete their mission or the Army brings in the heavy stuff. The question nobody wants to discuss are the countermeasures, There will be a constant battle to address countermeasures, especially as the countermeasure become smaller, easily accessible and easier to deploy. What happens when the enemy deploys it's own swarms and when they develop and deploy swarms of drone killers?
It was.
In fiction.
Drones can deploy all kinds of nasties, from incendiaries to covert surveillance devices with robotic features to anti-personnel mines to biological agents to chemical agents to whatever else formerly required a more cumbersome method of delivery.
At this moment, if you’re someone with serious enemies and drones can actually land on your dwelling, your security and privacy are already compromised. If you walk outside you are at risk day or night, but more so at night.
If you’re a target and walk outside, a quiet winged drone could be orbiting with night vision and waiting for you to appear. When it uses facial recognition or is manually directed to target you, it will turn off engines, arm the charge in its nose and dive at your person. In your last instant of life you might hear a whooshing sound.
What is a threat to VIPs now will be a threat to many of us later as the parameters of this kind of force become more commonly known and explored, and the technology gets cheaper and commercialized. This is why I see a future of underground dwellings and toughened vehicles (Cybertruck is interestingly timely...)
And netting. Lots and lots of netting over places where people by necessity have to be outdoors, such as sidewalks. People will shroud their homes and yards in netting.
Vulnerable infrastructure such as refineries will have to be hardened against drone attack, and will probably need layered defenses both active and passive.
Drone defenses of all kinds will become an industry.
How many fps is that?
It depends upon the size of the drone. I read many years ago that a normal person, with a little practice, can track a bullet that is going just under 1000 ft per second (FPS) if it is fired into the sky. I tried this while shooting 45 ACP at about 900 FPS and after a few rounds I could could track the bullet for a while. But I was much younger and my eyes were much better. Having said that, I have also seen a jet fly at twice the speed of sound and I was easily able to track it. OBTW the speed of sound is 1125 FPS.
Inventions of that and the robot-dog-guns are going to be the undoing of a whole lot of things. So many of the pieces are not far from off-the-shelf, and will get there soon.
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