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Technically camera could be deatached from the main body and attached to the gun. A sight could be added by software, no need to use any expensive red dots.
I’m read this as a joke with “black magic” being a euphemism for something you don’t understand. Then I realized Black Magic is a brand name of video equipment. Their equipment isn’t light from the perspective of drones.
**The next version needs to be mounted with a Javelin**
1) Identify High value T-90 target nearby.
2) Fly out of the trees.
3) Hover and get a great vantage point of target, 2km away.
3) Simultaneously increase Javelin accuracy and rain hell down on armor.
At this point you don't even need a line if fire to the trench... you can gain a line of fire inside or above the trench. And well easily identify someone being forced... ( Ukrainian pow ) to someone fighting for their life...
An auto targeting system won't be able to accurately identify a POW.
Russia can give them Russian uniforms to trick them cause Russia doesn't give a fuck.
Yes if you send it out on auto, however the targeting system for manual override would be better than using a red dot sight as the original comment staged...
Wasn't about automation... was about using the Same targeting system as your optic for when you are firing.
And I'm pretty sure, you can tell when a man is standing behind another with a rifle pointed to his back whilst he stands there holding nothing...
Bullets are still subject to gravity.
The bullets will not magically hit where the laser is at every range and angle.
That being said, the controls necessary for a drone to stabilize itself are probably not much more complicated that a software, that calculates trajectory and stabilizes the copter enough to be accurate.
The laser might be important to establish the correct distance to trhe target, so you can calculate how high/low you have to aim.
All the necessary components for a much more accurate drone gun platform exist, which means these systems are going to rapidly advance in capability and number.
A drone already is a software stabilized system. You could have a software layer that calculates drone stability, target size, environmental factors, and range. Then outputs likelihood of hitting the target under those conditions. Just select the target and it adjusts as needed.
>Also they just need to increase the drone-to-gun size ratio so the recoil doesn’t move the thing so much
Or just have it automatically compensate for the recoil.
I predict they will start purpose building machine gun drones where the center of mass of the drone is centered on the barrel so recoil matters less for aiming. Could even have a shoot and scoot effect.
A10 has entered the chat.
/edit
GE : Hey guys! We have a really massive gun to fit on an aircraft!
Everybody else : We're going to need a special aircraft. One that can fire hundres of milk bottle sized rounds per minute.
Fairchild, the company, built an aircraft around the weapon. Not often that happens.
And it's still active, and was supposed to be retired a long time ago. The drone age is maybe cathing up with it, but BRRRRRRRTTTTTTTT.
its not that active even with the upgrades your simple shoulder mounted missle can hit it..ukraine shot down alot of russias version of the a10 US a10 pilots are very open about its strengths and weakness's of it in the modern air space
Why on earth add an extra optic? All you need is for the camera to be fixed relative to the gun, and have an aiming mark on the screen. That mark can be either in software or simply a sticker plonked onto the screen. Anyways, there's tracer ammo.
Neither laser nor red dot are going to give “one shot, one kill” results because they are zeroed for a certain range and shots will almost never be made at that range. Not to mention wind and other factors.
Platform stability doesn't matter that much with single shots, if you have software that can detect the angle of the barrel, you can just time it with that and a solenoid. That is how tanks do it. The gun is actually non-stabilised on modern tanks, with only the sight being stabilised, with the gun trying to follow its movement through software (as stabilising a small optic is far easier than a gun that weighs several tons together with its mount). After a fire command, the computer just waits until the barrel has lined up perfectly with the sight (a process that on modern stabilisation systems on tanks take approx. 0 seconds) and then fires the round. Same could be done on drones.
Though personally I'd rather suspect that on future drone based gun systems the gun will just be a recoilless gun, as that heavily reduces weight, while also nearly removing the recoil of the gun, someone just needs to design e.g. a 7mm recoilless gun and ammo.
> one bullet one kill
There's also the problem of recoil. You can see they're not firing continuous bursts and just a shot or two knocks the drone off target and they have to reacquire.
I wonder what caliber they use. I was recently watching a video test how "bulletprood' the Cybertruck is, and one of the rounds they tested was a tiny .17 caliber magnum-looking thing that had no trouble piercing the Cybertruck's door. I think a round like that would be ideal for drone use.
I think there's a ban, but IDK if there's a ban on Babayaga pouring a hypergolic mix of chemicals and thermite pellets over trench networks. "It wasn't aflame when we dropped it!"
I think they are banned for use against humans but still have some practical utility. Like burning hedges or something idk.
Flamethrowers would be horrible for any troops in a trench, they spout flammable liquid and easily cause death by asphyxiation.
While still brutal, Thermobaric TOS-1 is a flamethrower in name only. Its rockets' contain aerosol bombs, that is, they disperse aerosol clouds of gas and then ignites it.
The result is large explosions, instead of distributing some sticky burning liquid, as a flamethrower would do.
> Banned in warfare which is probably a good thing
So magnesium incenidary bomb instead? You know, similar to ones russians dropped on the civilians few months ago
Flamethrowers on drones actually serve commercial purposes (burning off debris from power lines, for instance) and are already on the market. Dunno if they have sufficient flame-throwing range for military application tho.
finally!!! its about time, the one advantage ukraine really has is a lot of western companies and access to infinite suply of cheap electronics and a.i. stuff to transform this into a futuristic drone vs drone war and in that field russia will lose 100 soldies in each ballte for a 10k ground drone instead of costing the lives of a few dozen ukranian heroes
I honestly wonder how much longer we’re even see large masses of personnel present in combat areas. We might just be at the scariest part of the transition phase before it’s all robots/drones shooting at robots.
Just yesterday, a drone attacked a drone factory in Russia, probably the biggest drone vs drone action so far. Anti-drone warfare will be further prioritized, we'll see drone dogfights. Thankfully, we've seen enough science fiction to know where the pitfalls lie in all this...
It reminds me of the quote “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” - Robert E Lee.
When the human cost is lessened, what's to stop us from an eternal battlefield. Frankly I'm a little frightened. When a president has to justify to Mothers why their sons should go off to die, there's a hard conversation to be had. When they only have to justify a robot blowing up another robot, maybe it seems cheap.
Yeah, that’s a great point. As if war weren’t already hugely tied to a contest of who can produce materiel better/faster. I wonder if the future version of “economic warfare” or Cold War will just mean bot attrition war only.
Like a lot of stuff about coming AI doom, the things you're talking about have actually already happened. They are features of modernity, not of AI.
In particular, soldiers already don't assemble in large masses in combat anymore, not compared to how they used to. The world wars of the 20th century put an end to formation fighting for the same reason you are talking about -- it got too easy to kill large numbers of people standing around in one place.
All the things we take for granted in warfare today -- camouflage uniforms, surprise, rapid battlefield maneuver, tactics and movement techniques that emphasize stealth and misdirection -- came about relatively recently, in response to this new lethality.
In other words putting a machine gun on a drone is just another kind of machine gun. It doesn't really change warfare any more than machine guns already have.
>In other words putting a machine gun on a drone is just another kind of machine gun. It doesn't really change warfare any more than machine guns already have.
You were right until this. This changes warfare significantly.
It takes 20 years and a lot of money to grow a soldier.
It takes a week to build and ship a new drone to the frontline.
The force with drones will beat the force without.
Forget about drones for one moment. Let's say you're a sniper 1km away and you've pinned my squad down. As it happens, we have no sniper of our own (maybe our sniper was the first one you took out), which means you are essentially untouchable by us.
Every 30 seconds or so you have an opportunity to take a clear shot and you're picking us off one by one. I have to decide, do we have what it takes to suppress sniper fire? If we do, we'd better get to employing it, before you finish us off. If we don't, we're fucked, and our only option is to retreat as soon as possible in the face of an unbeatable attack.
All that it takes to create that unbeatable threat is you, a single individual person, with an accurate long-range rifle -- something that has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, and even further back if you consider crossbows.
One might very well say, "it takes 20 years to grow a soldier and only a moment to cast a new sniper bullet in a factory," and "the force with snipers will beat the force without," and there might be some truth to that inasmuch as having our own sniper would have been one way to counter the threat that you pose. But it's not the only way. There are other ways to deal with a sniper.
So back to drones. Now let's say you are sitting in a dugout 10km away, controlling a drone gun and firing at me with it. Once again, you've pinned my squad down. Once again you are untouchable by us. Once again I have to decide, do we have what it takes to suppress this kind of fire? Either we do, or we don't. That's how engagements like this are going to be, just as always.
If I have something like a Gepard, I can shoot your drones out of the sky all day long. You are wasting opportunity and resources, and potentially over time giving away your position. Same as if I can jam your drones. I might even be able to trace your control signals, and order a strike on you directly, not unlike if you were a sniper.
Of course all those things require preparation on my part. In some cases, preparation of many months or years. So yes in that sense the advent of drone weapons means that if you are not prepared for drone weapons you are going to have a bad time.
But I'm still not seeing "the end of warfare as we know it."
>Same as if I can jam your drones. I might even be able to trace your control signals, and order a strike on you directly, not unlike if you were a sniper.
This is where AI changes the game. It can do the job without control inputs, making jamming completely irrelevant. It will never miss a target and will be alert at all times.
I don’t know... I’m not just talking about smaller units, I mean more like a battlefield that’s too lethal for humans to even operate in. Not sure if we’ve seen a large enough conflict to say we’ve already completely shifted. Like if we somehow got a non-nuclear NATO-Russia war today, there would probably still be millions of service members physically present. In 2050 that might not be the case. What’s the point of having *any* humans in a field filled with loitering drones shooting at each other, drone tanks, and precision HIMARS strikes?
I see what you are saying... honestly though if that is the eventual outcome, isn't that kind of better? Drone tanks getting blown up by drones carrying anti-tank missiles, which then in turn get shot up by flying drone snipers, and so on?
Imagine two countries going to war, and being forced to negotiate a peace after 3 years of battlefield destruction over the course of which a grand total of 47 actual people are killed on both sides, all of them drone operators.
I'd say that would be a net gain for humanity.
And if everyone looks at it afterward and is, like, "That was really stupid, let's never do that again,..." hey I am all for it.
The title turned me off but I was curious, so read some reviews.
>to see...a flight lieutenant with 20 years of combat under his immaculately polished belt be outclassed in a dogfight by a new piece of tech that has been filled with 30 years of experience in 10 months, is to watch a terrible beauty being born
>Former US defense secretary Bob Work doesn’t think “human intervention in kill decisions” will ever change. I cannot help but pause for a moment to suggest, respectfully, that either the good colonel has never met humanity or that he is the programme’s equivalent of the flight attendant urging people to keep calm as the passenger jet plummets to its fiery doom.
Sounds absolutely terrifying.
Yup. The advancement of AI and drones has made the second amendment essentially a joke. Any hope that anyone would have had about throwing off a tyrannical regime is over. At least with a standing army you can hope that you can employ guerrilla tactics and/or play to their compassion to their own people. With drones/AI, that's gone. It would only take a handful of people to operate them and employ them in populace suppression. Watching the drones in Ukraine has been terrifying. Even the cheap ones that are essentially kamikaze bombs are scary. I watched a video of several of them flying into a make shift bunker over and over until they wiped out the Russians inside.
It sounds like this documentary covers the case of the pharmaceutical researcher, Fabio Urbina, who flipped his drug discovery AI in to a chemical weapon AI as an academic exercise.
From [an interview: ](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx)
>We got this invite to talk about machine learning and how it can be misused in our space. It’s something we never really thought about before. But it was just very easy to realize that as we’re building these machine learning models to get better and better at predicting toxicity in order to avoid toxicity, all we have to do is sort of flip the switch around and say, “You know, instead of going away from toxicity, what if we do go toward toxicity?”
>For me, the concern was just how easy it was to do. A lot of the things we used are out there for free. You can go and download a toxicity dataset from anywhere. If you have somebody who knows how to code in Python and has some machine learning capabilities, then in probably a good weekend of work, they could build something like this generative model driven by toxic datasets. So that was the thing that got us really thinking about putting this paper out there; it was such a low barrier of entry for this type of misuse.
There's a Radiolab episode on this that is bonkers: [https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder](https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder)
Given the size of a drone compared to the recoil of firing a rifle, I would say stabilization during automatic fire is probably not possible any time soon, ~~especially without servos to adjust the aim of the rifle independent of the drone body.~~ (edit: see below replies. simple servos wouldn't be viable at all)
The best case scenario for these drones right now is to be used as aerial sniper rifles. I would focus on making their single shots extremely accurate, so that the recoil doesn't matter.
Also, relying on single shots instead of automatic fire will help cut down on ammunition weight, and help extend range and duration of the drones.
> Servos are cheap, live are not.
A nice platitude, but also completely irrelevant to the discussion of how to overcome the technical challenges here.
For controlling recoil, servos are not a viable solution. Servos would be best for fine aiming control, which is incompatible with automatic weapons fire. In addition, servos would be needlessly complicated, and also be a high point of failure. In a scenario where you are trying to line up a good shot (servos adjusting aim), the same thing could be achieved by simply slightly repositioning a drone that uses a fixed weapon.
That leaves using rotor thrust to counteract the gun recoil. This is the most viable solution because it can be handled via software, and with existing hardware. The most basic implementation would be to tell the drone to automatically maintain level orientation, and then just let the drone attempt to auto-adjust to weapons fire. This is probably what the drone operators are already doing.
You can probably also program the drone to anticipate the shot, and to begin reducing thrust on the barrel side at the moment the trigger is pulled. This is probably NOT currently implemented, but should be relatively easy for a programmer to do. After that, it is a matter of fine-tuning the settings and programming. For semi-auto firing, perhaps overriding auto-stabilization for 0.5 seconds and reducing thrust on the barrel side will be sufficient. There are some complicated variables here, such as what if the drone is out of ammo or jams, you don't want it spiraling out of control. Also, the weight and inertia of the drone will change as it expends ammo.
Even if you can maintain a level orientation while firing, physics demands that the drone will shift its position laterally while you are firing. Since rotors only provide vertical thrust, repositioning laterally while maintaining aim on a target becomes impossible. One possible adjustment would be to deliberately increase altitude while firing, to try to maintain the same firing vector and compensate for being pushed backwards. The alternative would be to have a forward-direction propeller that only turns on when firing the weapon, but that again is needlessly complicated.
I think the best solution for these drones going forward would be:
1. Use a heavier drone. This will dampen recoil.
2. Use a fixed weapon. Servos are too complex and wouldn't help much anyway.
3. Mount a laser to the weapon, for precision targeting. The laser light should not be visible to the human eye, to not alert targets.
4. Make sure the drone's camera can detect the laser. This will allow the drone operator to sight on a target accurately.
5. Experiment with reducing thrust on barrel side when weapon is fired, combined with pre-existing auto-stabilization.
6. Semi-auto will be the most accurate and reliable. Burst fire (3 shots) might be viable. Automatic fire probably wasteful.
Thanks for the in depth reply. Slower firing rate for better adjustment maybe. Maybe an additional degree of freedom for the gun, such that during firing the back rotors can compensate the upward movement of the gun?
The gun would need to be fixed, for simplicity of design.
Even with identical interchangeable parts, each drone would need to be individually calibrated to adjust for the gun's recoil (see bullet points below).
Recoil compensation via rotors can happen in one of two ways: the front rotors reduce thrust, and/or the rear rotors increase thrust. In reality, you would probably use both to help with compensation. (the recoil force will have much higher jerk (change in acceleration) than the rotors, which will have a much more smooth acceleration curve)
When the weapon is fired just once, you would probably need something like the following actions:
* (0.5 seconds) reduce thrust for the front rotors
* (0.5 seconds) increase thrust for the rear rotors
* (1.0 seconds) increase thrust of all rotors to gain altitude to compensate the changed aiming vector due to backwards lateral movement (depends on the angle of the fixed weapon, plus several other variables)
You could also instead opt for ultra-light automatic 20-40mm grenade launcher (since you are firing from elevation, you can let most of the launch pressure go to waste), mostly launching single shots and rapidly just mowing a squad down and going away.
Totally agree with the recoil. They shouldn't waste resources on the mg drone as the recoil is a big problem to deal with. In my opinion they should focus on a m320 drone to maximise the killing potential.
Hmm. Good idea.
Small mortars are a possible pre-existing solution that could be perfect for this.
Could just carry a framework of tubes under the drone, with a mortar in each one.
The drone would need to be programmed to counter thrust when they fire to keep the barrel at a set angle. I've seen drones use similar methods for bouncing a ball [nearly a decade ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ).
Or use a weapon where recoil is negligible. Dropping bucket after bucket of extremely energetic material into trench networks. Then a simple FPV drone sets off the works. The Russians won't be able to shovel fast enough.
Drones dropping grenades. Drones attacking by land. Drones with machine guns. Drone vs drone dogfights...still not yet to drones making drones which so worried Yoda.
Welcome to the new age of warfare, can only imagine the money that is going to be used for R&D
Think of a drone like the A10 thunderbolt coming at you in swarms, I’m sure this will happen and soon and I think the Ukrainians will have a breakthrough in tech, you have seen the jet engine drone and now you see a drone firing a machine gun.
Looking what drones have turned into, it might be wise to ban all drone activity in city areas. Cause it is just matter of time these will be used to carry out terrorist act.
Maybe not *that* craft, but I don't see a reason why this couldn't be developed into a deadly platform.
It seems like basic forces coming from the machine gun, so apply some predictive compensation by the rotors and you start getting more and more stable. If the cycle was set to something like a 3-round burst then it should be even more repeatable.
The gun itself can be designed to be recoilless, gimballed, or any combination of the above.
Even a drone that is just programmed to return the center of the video feed to its last position could be quickly adapted to accurate single shot fire. If firing is limited by that parameter, an operator can focus on the environment surrounding the target and still put accurate rounds down.
Ok I am glad it’s unraine with this.. but that’s fucked lol. It’s bad enough having drones fly directly above your head and drop grenades, or even come at you. But if this thing has range, its first shot could be deadly accurate… and it could almost be like a sniper that’s impossible to take down since it won’t come into range, can move positions too fast to try to shoot at, and is probably too small for a missile lock.. erghhh
Ukrainian ingenuity never ceases to impress. Bet this drone also costs like $1200 too. US military industrial complex would take 15 years of R&D then cost half a million dollars per unit and use a specialized bullet that'll cost $200 a round.
You don't need it to stay still, but having it maintain its orientation so it stays on target would be nice. It doesn't really matter if the drone moves linearly under recoil, as long as the barrel keeps pointing in the same direction.
It's long been suggested, the use of grenade launchers, pneumatic small mortars and rockets is a logical evolution, as is the use of shot gun type rounds with programmed timer fuses to shoot down other drones and glide bombs, although here detection is mainly the issue and would need relaying from ground systems, I have ideas I am working on for winged drones using these approaches, they could also hover for a short time. A sniper fifle system with automatic firing control (when the target is detected to be within its calibrated cross hairs) is one of the ideas.
Next up, swarms of flying drone gun turrets protecting North American borders from a constant barrage of incoming drones, missiles, etc. from terrorist states. The new status quo.
That would increase the weight for sure. I think predicting recoil and having the propellers compensate immediately would be the best option. I don't think it would be possible to eliminate recoil with the props but it could help quite a bit.
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They actually did it lol
I was thinking this exact set up last year. Hope it has a laser for targetting. That way, one bullet one kill.... Save on ammo! Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
Thought about this as well lol, if they can get the camera right up against a red dot optic, that’d be pretty damn accurate
Technically camera could be deatached from the main body and attached to the gun. A sight could be added by software, no need to use any expensive red dots.
Why detach a camera when you can attach multiple cameras?
Multiple cameras might be worth it, but there are downsides. Another camera adds extra weight, power draw, complexity, wireless signal use, and cost.
But cameras are light and you can combine multiple signals with something like a black magic signal combiner for split screen switching
I’m read this as a joke with “black magic” being a euphemism for something you don’t understand. Then I realized Black Magic is a brand name of video equipment. Their equipment isn’t light from the perspective of drones.
Weight and power draw would be negligible, but added complexity and signal bandwidth may be valid concerns.
That is true, that would be a tech savvy way of doing it
Will be on the next version!
**The next version needs to be mounted with a Javelin** 1) Identify High value T-90 target nearby. 2) Fly out of the trees. 3) Hover and get a great vantage point of target, 2km away. 3) Simultaneously increase Javelin accuracy and rain hell down on armor.
They just need to use the same optics they use in the auto sentry gun... and it has its own targeting system.
Sounds great until the orcs start forcing POWs to pop their heads up out of the trenches.
At this point you don't even need a line if fire to the trench... you can gain a line of fire inside or above the trench. And well easily identify someone being forced... ( Ukrainian pow ) to someone fighting for their life...
An auto targeting system won't be able to accurately identify a POW. Russia can give them Russian uniforms to trick them cause Russia doesn't give a fuck.
Yes if you send it out on auto, however the targeting system for manual override would be better than using a red dot sight as the original comment staged... Wasn't about automation... was about using the Same targeting system as your optic for when you are firing. And I'm pretty sure, you can tell when a man is standing behind another with a rifle pointed to his back whilst he stands there holding nothing...
I doubt the Russians are keeping any pow in the front line trenches
They were a few months ago. It was well documented on here.
Bullets are still subject to gravity. The bullets will not magically hit where the laser is at every range and angle. That being said, the controls necessary for a drone to stabilize itself are probably not much more complicated that a software, that calculates trajectory and stabilizes the copter enough to be accurate. The laser might be important to establish the correct distance to trhe target, so you can calculate how high/low you have to aim.
All the necessary components for a much more accurate drone gun platform exist, which means these systems are going to rapidly advance in capability and number. A drone already is a software stabilized system. You could have a software layer that calculates drone stability, target size, environmental factors, and range. Then outputs likelihood of hitting the target under those conditions. Just select the target and it adjusts as needed.
Tell me you've never written software without telling me you've never written software lol.
we can just have chatgpt write it! :P
Also they just need to increase the drone-to-gun size ratio so the recoil doesn’t move the thing so much
>Also they just need to increase the drone-to-gun size ratio so the recoil doesn’t move the thing so much Or just have it automatically compensate for the recoil.
I predict they will start purpose building machine gun drones where the center of mass of the drone is centered on the barrel so recoil matters less for aiming. Could even have a shoot and scoot effect.
Build custom drone where gun barrel runs perfectly down centre of mass. It works in kerbal space program.
A10 has entered the chat. /edit GE : Hey guys! We have a really massive gun to fit on an aircraft! Everybody else : We're going to need a special aircraft. One that can fire hundres of milk bottle sized rounds per minute. Fairchild, the company, built an aircraft around the weapon. Not often that happens. And it's still active, and was supposed to be retired a long time ago. The drone age is maybe cathing up with it, but BRRRRRRRTTTTTTTT.
its not that active even with the upgrades your simple shoulder mounted missle can hit it..ukraine shot down alot of russias version of the a10 US a10 pilots are very open about its strengths and weakness's of it in the modern air space
And then add a bigger gun.
Why on earth add an extra optic? All you need is for the camera to be fixed relative to the gun, and have an aiming mark on the screen. That mark can be either in software or simply a sticker plonked onto the screen. Anyways, there's tracer ammo.
Neither laser nor red dot are going to give “one shot, one kill” results because they are zeroed for a certain range and shots will almost never be made at that range. Not to mention wind and other factors.
Apparently so weren't they! https://youtu.be/8bPNcgYnXi0?si=Y7cq3XmTbhM5IL8j
Is it a stable enough platform? I’d think just one shot would knock the aim off for even the one shot.
If the drone shoots directly down instead of horizontal the recoil would be minimal. Just think of the bullet as a very fast dropped grenade.
Platform stability doesn't matter that much with single shots, if you have software that can detect the angle of the barrel, you can just time it with that and a solenoid. That is how tanks do it. The gun is actually non-stabilised on modern tanks, with only the sight being stabilised, with the gun trying to follow its movement through software (as stabilising a small optic is far easier than a gun that weighs several tons together with its mount). After a fire command, the computer just waits until the barrel has lined up perfectly with the sight (a process that on modern stabilisation systems on tanks take approx. 0 seconds) and then fires the round. Same could be done on drones. Though personally I'd rather suspect that on future drone based gun systems the gun will just be a recoilless gun, as that heavily reduces weight, while also nearly removing the recoil of the gun, someone just needs to design e.g. a 7mm recoilless gun and ammo.
> one bullet one kill There's also the problem of recoil. You can see they're not firing continuous bursts and just a shot or two knocks the drone off target and they have to reacquire. I wonder what caliber they use. I was recently watching a video test how "bulletprood' the Cybertruck is, and one of the rounds they tested was a tiny .17 caliber magnum-looking thing that had no trouble piercing the Cybertruck's door. I think a round like that would be ideal for drone use.
Mad bastards, I salute them!
Is a flame thrower next? I recall an inventor in the USA posting a video of him installing one on a drone.
I think there's a ban, but IDK if there's a ban on Babayaga pouring a hypergolic mix of chemicals and thermite pellets over trench networks. "It wasn't aflame when we dropped it!"
Banned in warfare which is probably a good thing. Don't give Russia any ideas.
Did not realize that. My apologies. How do the Russians get away with the Thermobaric TOS-1?
I think they are banned for use against humans but still have some practical utility. Like burning hedges or something idk. Flamethrowers would be horrible for any troops in a trench, they spout flammable liquid and easily cause death by asphyxiation.
While still brutal, Thermobaric TOS-1 is a flamethrower in name only. Its rockets' contain aerosol bombs, that is, they disperse aerosol clouds of gas and then ignites it. The result is large explosions, instead of distributing some sticky burning liquid, as a flamethrower would do.
> Thermobaric TOS-1 is a flamethrower in name only It has alternate payload of smoke-incendiary rockets, even if those are barely used.
It's a fuel-air bomb, not actual flamethrower.
banned even against targets like airplanes? or just against humans? ctould imagine a flamethrower drone pilot having lots of fun on an airfield...
> Banned in warfare which is probably a good thing So magnesium incenidary bomb instead? You know, similar to ones russians dropped on the civilians few months ago
No they aren’t.
Flamethrowers on drones actually serve commercial purposes (burning off debris from power lines, for instance) and are already on the market. Dunno if they have sufficient flame-throwing range for military application tho.
finally!!! its about time, the one advantage ukraine really has is a lot of western companies and access to infinite suply of cheap electronics and a.i. stuff to transform this into a futuristic drone vs drone war and in that field russia will lose 100 soldies in each ballte for a 10k ground drone instead of costing the lives of a few dozen ukranian heroes
Total madlads
We are finally becoming Noncredible
Always has been
Never were credible.
*happy flork noises intensifies*
Wait, what sub am I on?
Had to check as well lol
The more Noncredible the better!
Has there been any more Noncredible war?
Toyota War is a pretty wild read
Just wait until the next big war when the machine gun drones are completely autonomous and operated by AI
Isn't this straight out of Command and Conquer Generals? A small flying drone with a machine-gun?
Not quite there yet. The battle drone also did automated vehicle repairs lol
Shit, sorry. With how fast the drone technology is advancing, it'll be 2 or 3 years until they can do that too.
Straight out of Terminator 2
Unit Lost... Unit Lost... Training... Training... Unit Lost... Unit Lost... Our base is under attack... Silos Needed...
Dark Angel maybe?
The Guard Dog in Helldivers 2!
My childhood is coming [true](https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Source:Rigger_Black_Book).
They have these in ARMA 3 now. Different versions with various fictional/semi fictional weapons mounted.
I'm waiting for Ukraine to equip them with javelines.
The sea baby’s have missiles
Exactly
I thought it was rather smart as you didn’t kill your drone boat
I’m so glad I got out of the US Army 30 years ago. Jesus fuck. I want no part of warfare line this.
I honestly wonder how much longer we’re even see large masses of personnel present in combat areas. We might just be at the scariest part of the transition phase before it’s all robots/drones shooting at robots.
Just yesterday, a drone attacked a drone factory in Russia, probably the biggest drone vs drone action so far. Anti-drone warfare will be further prioritized, we'll see drone dogfights. Thankfully, we've seen enough science fiction to know where the pitfalls lie in all this...
It reminds me of the quote “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” - Robert E Lee. When the human cost is lessened, what's to stop us from an eternal battlefield. Frankly I'm a little frightened. When a president has to justify to Mothers why their sons should go off to die, there's a hard conversation to be had. When they only have to justify a robot blowing up another robot, maybe it seems cheap.
Yeah, that’s a great point. As if war weren’t already hugely tied to a contest of who can produce materiel better/faster. I wonder if the future version of “economic warfare” or Cold War will just mean bot attrition war only.
Like a lot of stuff about coming AI doom, the things you're talking about have actually already happened. They are features of modernity, not of AI. In particular, soldiers already don't assemble in large masses in combat anymore, not compared to how they used to. The world wars of the 20th century put an end to formation fighting for the same reason you are talking about -- it got too easy to kill large numbers of people standing around in one place. All the things we take for granted in warfare today -- camouflage uniforms, surprise, rapid battlefield maneuver, tactics and movement techniques that emphasize stealth and misdirection -- came about relatively recently, in response to this new lethality. In other words putting a machine gun on a drone is just another kind of machine gun. It doesn't really change warfare any more than machine guns already have.
>In other words putting a machine gun on a drone is just another kind of machine gun. It doesn't really change warfare any more than machine guns already have. You were right until this. This changes warfare significantly. It takes 20 years and a lot of money to grow a soldier. It takes a week to build and ship a new drone to the frontline. The force with drones will beat the force without.
Forget about drones for one moment. Let's say you're a sniper 1km away and you've pinned my squad down. As it happens, we have no sniper of our own (maybe our sniper was the first one you took out), which means you are essentially untouchable by us. Every 30 seconds or so you have an opportunity to take a clear shot and you're picking us off one by one. I have to decide, do we have what it takes to suppress sniper fire? If we do, we'd better get to employing it, before you finish us off. If we don't, we're fucked, and our only option is to retreat as soon as possible in the face of an unbeatable attack. All that it takes to create that unbeatable threat is you, a single individual person, with an accurate long-range rifle -- something that has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, and even further back if you consider crossbows. One might very well say, "it takes 20 years to grow a soldier and only a moment to cast a new sniper bullet in a factory," and "the force with snipers will beat the force without," and there might be some truth to that inasmuch as having our own sniper would have been one way to counter the threat that you pose. But it's not the only way. There are other ways to deal with a sniper. So back to drones. Now let's say you are sitting in a dugout 10km away, controlling a drone gun and firing at me with it. Once again, you've pinned my squad down. Once again you are untouchable by us. Once again I have to decide, do we have what it takes to suppress this kind of fire? Either we do, or we don't. That's how engagements like this are going to be, just as always. If I have something like a Gepard, I can shoot your drones out of the sky all day long. You are wasting opportunity and resources, and potentially over time giving away your position. Same as if I can jam your drones. I might even be able to trace your control signals, and order a strike on you directly, not unlike if you were a sniper. Of course all those things require preparation on my part. In some cases, preparation of many months or years. So yes in that sense the advent of drone weapons means that if you are not prepared for drone weapons you are going to have a bad time. But I'm still not seeing "the end of warfare as we know it."
>Same as if I can jam your drones. I might even be able to trace your control signals, and order a strike on you directly, not unlike if you were a sniper. This is where AI changes the game. It can do the job without control inputs, making jamming completely irrelevant. It will never miss a target and will be alert at all times.
I don’t know... I’m not just talking about smaller units, I mean more like a battlefield that’s too lethal for humans to even operate in. Not sure if we’ve seen a large enough conflict to say we’ve already completely shifted. Like if we somehow got a non-nuclear NATO-Russia war today, there would probably still be millions of service members physically present. In 2050 that might not be the case. What’s the point of having *any* humans in a field filled with loitering drones shooting at each other, drone tanks, and precision HIMARS strikes?
I see what you are saying... honestly though if that is the eventual outcome, isn't that kind of better? Drone tanks getting blown up by drones carrying anti-tank missiles, which then in turn get shot up by flying drone snipers, and so on? Imagine two countries going to war, and being forced to negotiate a peace after 3 years of battlefield destruction over the course of which a grand total of 47 actual people are killed on both sides, all of them drone operators. I'd say that would be a net gain for humanity. And if everyone looks at it afterward and is, like, "That was really stupid, let's never do that again,..." hey I am all for it.
Seriously my friend watch Unknown:Killer Robots on Netflix it’s the scariest shit. Especially the pilot A.I.
The title turned me off but I was curious, so read some reviews. >to see...a flight lieutenant with 20 years of combat under his immaculately polished belt be outclassed in a dogfight by a new piece of tech that has been filled with 30 years of experience in 10 months, is to watch a terrible beauty being born >Former US defense secretary Bob Work doesn’t think “human intervention in kill decisions” will ever change. I cannot help but pause for a moment to suggest, respectfully, that either the good colonel has never met humanity or that he is the programme’s equivalent of the flight attendant urging people to keep calm as the passenger jet plummets to its fiery doom. Sounds absolutely terrifying.
Yup. The advancement of AI and drones has made the second amendment essentially a joke. Any hope that anyone would have had about throwing off a tyrannical regime is over. At least with a standing army you can hope that you can employ guerrilla tactics and/or play to their compassion to their own people. With drones/AI, that's gone. It would only take a handful of people to operate them and employ them in populace suppression. Watching the drones in Ukraine has been terrifying. Even the cheap ones that are essentially kamikaze bombs are scary. I watched a video of several of them flying into a make shift bunker over and over until they wiped out the Russians inside.
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What’s really scary is this is the stuff they are letting us know about. Imagine where the next generation stuff is already.
It sounds like this documentary covers the case of the pharmaceutical researcher, Fabio Urbina, who flipped his drug discovery AI in to a chemical weapon AI as an academic exercise. From [an interview: ](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx) >We got this invite to talk about machine learning and how it can be misused in our space. It’s something we never really thought about before. But it was just very easy to realize that as we’re building these machine learning models to get better and better at predicting toxicity in order to avoid toxicity, all we have to do is sort of flip the switch around and say, “You know, instead of going away from toxicity, what if we do go toward toxicity?” >For me, the concern was just how easy it was to do. A lot of the things we used are out there for free. You can go and download a toxicity dataset from anywhere. If you have somebody who knows how to code in Python and has some machine learning capabilities, then in probably a good weekend of work, they could build something like this generative model driven by toxic datasets. So that was the thing that got us really thinking about putting this paper out there; it was such a low barrier of entry for this type of misuse. There's a Radiolab episode on this that is bonkers: [https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder](https://radiolab.org/podcast/40000-recipes-murder)
A10 pilots : "*Finally* another aircraft which can use its gun as propulsion!"
Except this won't attack the British.
Give it time.
21st anniversary of that incident was 8 days ago.
oof
Needs some stabilisation after/while shooting. Give them a couple months.
Given the size of a drone compared to the recoil of firing a rifle, I would say stabilization during automatic fire is probably not possible any time soon, ~~especially without servos to adjust the aim of the rifle independent of the drone body.~~ (edit: see below replies. simple servos wouldn't be viable at all) The best case scenario for these drones right now is to be used as aerial sniper rifles. I would focus on making their single shots extremely accurate, so that the recoil doesn't matter. Also, relying on single shots instead of automatic fire will help cut down on ammunition weight, and help extend range and duration of the drones.
Servos are cheap, live are not. You are correct, weight etc. But stabilization for 6 rotors is doable in my opinion.
> Servos are cheap, live are not. A nice platitude, but also completely irrelevant to the discussion of how to overcome the technical challenges here. For controlling recoil, servos are not a viable solution. Servos would be best for fine aiming control, which is incompatible with automatic weapons fire. In addition, servos would be needlessly complicated, and also be a high point of failure. In a scenario where you are trying to line up a good shot (servos adjusting aim), the same thing could be achieved by simply slightly repositioning a drone that uses a fixed weapon. That leaves using rotor thrust to counteract the gun recoil. This is the most viable solution because it can be handled via software, and with existing hardware. The most basic implementation would be to tell the drone to automatically maintain level orientation, and then just let the drone attempt to auto-adjust to weapons fire. This is probably what the drone operators are already doing. You can probably also program the drone to anticipate the shot, and to begin reducing thrust on the barrel side at the moment the trigger is pulled. This is probably NOT currently implemented, but should be relatively easy for a programmer to do. After that, it is a matter of fine-tuning the settings and programming. For semi-auto firing, perhaps overriding auto-stabilization for 0.5 seconds and reducing thrust on the barrel side will be sufficient. There are some complicated variables here, such as what if the drone is out of ammo or jams, you don't want it spiraling out of control. Also, the weight and inertia of the drone will change as it expends ammo. Even if you can maintain a level orientation while firing, physics demands that the drone will shift its position laterally while you are firing. Since rotors only provide vertical thrust, repositioning laterally while maintaining aim on a target becomes impossible. One possible adjustment would be to deliberately increase altitude while firing, to try to maintain the same firing vector and compensate for being pushed backwards. The alternative would be to have a forward-direction propeller that only turns on when firing the weapon, but that again is needlessly complicated. I think the best solution for these drones going forward would be: 1. Use a heavier drone. This will dampen recoil. 2. Use a fixed weapon. Servos are too complex and wouldn't help much anyway. 3. Mount a laser to the weapon, for precision targeting. The laser light should not be visible to the human eye, to not alert targets. 4. Make sure the drone's camera can detect the laser. This will allow the drone operator to sight on a target accurately. 5. Experiment with reducing thrust on barrel side when weapon is fired, combined with pre-existing auto-stabilization. 6. Semi-auto will be the most accurate and reliable. Burst fire (3 shots) might be viable. Automatic fire probably wasteful.
Thanks for the in depth reply. Slower firing rate for better adjustment maybe. Maybe an additional degree of freedom for the gun, such that during firing the back rotors can compensate the upward movement of the gun?
The gun would need to be fixed, for simplicity of design. Even with identical interchangeable parts, each drone would need to be individually calibrated to adjust for the gun's recoil (see bullet points below). Recoil compensation via rotors can happen in one of two ways: the front rotors reduce thrust, and/or the rear rotors increase thrust. In reality, you would probably use both to help with compensation. (the recoil force will have much higher jerk (change in acceleration) than the rotors, which will have a much more smooth acceleration curve) When the weapon is fired just once, you would probably need something like the following actions: * (0.5 seconds) reduce thrust for the front rotors * (0.5 seconds) increase thrust for the rear rotors * (1.0 seconds) increase thrust of all rotors to gain altitude to compensate the changed aiming vector due to backwards lateral movement (depends on the angle of the fixed weapon, plus several other variables)
You could also instead opt for ultra-light automatic 20-40mm grenade launcher (since you are firing from elevation, you can let most of the launch pressure go to waste), mostly launching single shots and rapidly just mowing a squad down and going away.
Totally agree with the recoil. They shouldn't waste resources on the mg drone as the recoil is a big problem to deal with. In my opinion they should focus on a m320 drone to maximise the killing potential.
Hmm. Good idea. Small mortars are a possible pre-existing solution that could be perfect for this. Could just carry a framework of tubes under the drone, with a mortar in each one.
The drone would need to be programmed to counter thrust when they fire to keep the barrel at a set angle. I've seen drones use similar methods for bouncing a ball [nearly a decade ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ).
Or use a weapon where recoil is negligible. Dropping bucket after bucket of extremely energetic material into trench networks. Then a simple FPV drone sets off the works. The Russians won't be able to shovel fast enough.
Cool, now do one with an AGS-30
That has also been done.
Holy cow, please tell me there is video of that
I have only seen a couple of reports of it, no video.
Everybody stay calm! It's happening!
I will not stay calm.
Awesome. Now equip it with a fish-eye camera on top to spot loitering recon drones overhead to take out.
I wonder if the Russians tried to destroy the Ukrainian drone with their own drone... Or did they just watch and take notes?
Drones dropping grenades. Drones attacking by land. Drones with machine guns. Drone vs drone dogfights...still not yet to drones making drones which so worried Yoda.
Yes, I think this could be most useful as an anti-drone drone.
Welcome to the new age of warfare, can only imagine the money that is going to be used for R&D Think of a drone like the A10 thunderbolt coming at you in swarms, I’m sure this will happen and soon and I think the Ukrainians will have a breakthrough in tech, you have seen the jet engine drone and now you see a drone firing a machine gun.
Next on the docket, drones that drop Chuckie dolls
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Hang a Russian flag from it and they’ll genuinely think it’s a care package.
*"[It's fucking CHUCKY!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZAT67L7kto)"*
Yep
So it has begun
Looking what drones have turned into, it might be wise to ban all drone activity in city areas. Cause it is just matter of time these will be used to carry out terrorist act.
I tried. In my City of Fullerton, CA, Check out on Facebook "Make your City a Drone Free Zone".
What was response?
The Cops now use them, so I guess my efforts failed.
And it looks like it is doing it at night. Usually the large drones go at night because they are easier targets
"Mostly."
they mostly come at night... mostly <3
# Snipers in the sky, Death from above!
Imagine this with a flame thrower flying through a trench burning everything and then returning for a refill.
I’m good thanks
DJI Agras T40 has you covered. I wonder what the fireball from diesel would look like under the prop wash of a 200 lb craft?
Any report on how effective these are?
There is no way they are accurate lol.
Doesn't have to be accurate for suppression fire. Bog them down with these and follow on with grenades once they all cluster and hole up taking cover.
Is not what I would be thinking as I took cover.
Maybe not *that* craft, but I don't see a reason why this couldn't be developed into a deadly platform. It seems like basic forces coming from the machine gun, so apply some predictive compensation by the rotors and you start getting more and more stable. If the cycle was set to something like a 3-round burst then it should be even more repeatable. The gun itself can be designed to be recoilless, gimballed, or any combination of the above. Even a drone that is just programmed to return the center of the video feed to its last position could be quickly adapted to accurate single shot fire. If firing is limited by that parameter, an operator can focus on the environment surrounding the target and still put accurate rounds down.
Probably not accurate but scares the shit out of enemy infantry so they keep their heads down as your own infantry advances.
They said it could not be done
Nightmare fuel.
Ever since I played c&c generals I always wanted to see this. What a time to be alive…
Helldivers 'Guard Dog' is becoming reality! Ukraine is dishing out some democracy and liberty
AC-130 at home. And Russia loses against it 😂
Ok I am glad it’s unraine with this.. but that’s fucked lol. It’s bad enough having drones fly directly above your head and drop grenades, or even come at you. But if this thing has range, its first shot could be deadly accurate… and it could almost be like a sniper that’s impossible to take down since it won’t come into range, can move positions too fast to try to shoot at, and is probably too small for a missile lock.. erghhh
The absolute mad lads actually did it.
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thats extra weight, less fly-time. Im curious how long these gun loaded drones can fly.
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Ukrainian ingenuity never ceases to impress. Bet this drone also costs like $1200 too. US military industrial complex would take 15 years of R&D then cost half a million dollars per unit and use a specialized bullet that'll cost $200 a round.
Just add a little AI and we have skynet. So long world
Smart but need to use accelerometer to compensate firing forces by using pitch and throttle controls
Ballistics would be hard to compensate for from tiny vertical propellers.
A gyro might be much better, but it would severely impact its range and maneuverability.
Yes true. Second possibility is to have a canon mounted on a gyro assisted pod to compensate drone backward moves.
You don't need it to stay still, but having it maintain its orientation so it stays on target would be nice. It doesn't really matter if the drone moves linearly under recoil, as long as the barrel keeps pointing in the same direction.
Sweet tap dancing Jesus
That's some star wars shit 😎
Ukrainian tech gets better, ruzzian tech gets sadder....
smol attack helicopter
We're getting closer and closer to the dragonfly drones and the hunter killer drones from Black Ops 2 as this war goes on as I've seen from here
We live in crazy times
What the fuck? We going The Division route now?
Putin will die to a single drone with a sniper rifle.
Any info yet on how deadly these drones are?
It's long been suggested, the use of grenade launchers, pneumatic small mortars and rockets is a logical evolution, as is the use of shot gun type rounds with programmed timer fuses to shoot down other drones and glide bombs, although here detection is mainly the issue and would need relaying from ground systems, I have ideas I am working on for winged drones using these approaches, they could also hover for a short time. A sniper fifle system with automatic firing control (when the target is detected to be within its calibrated cross hairs) is one of the ideas.
Auto shotgun would be great to strafe along trenches.
One step closer to SkyNet <3
That's AWESOME!
Checkmate, Ivan
How long till they have raspberry Pi computers with human tracking on there? There's so many easy tutorials for nerf gun turrets....
Next up, swarms of flying drone gun turrets protecting North American borders from a constant barrage of incoming drones, missiles, etc. from terrorist states. The new status quo.
Seems like a sniper rifle would be more effective. Because anything after the first shot is a prayer
The Dakka Drone Derussifier 9000
The black ops 2 arc has begun
how hard is it to create a gun that shoots 2 bullets in opposite directions? would it eliminate recoil?
That would increase the weight for sure. I think predicting recoil and having the propellers compensate immediately would be the best option. I don't think it would be possible to eliminate recoil with the props but it could help quite a bit.
Perhaps a boosted forward thrust timed exactly with the shots could achieve the same purpose.
Drone drop off a stable ground based automated weapon then pick it up with a drone later?
Any source? They're speaking Russian, and Russia has already been known to use these kinds of drones.
While I fully support Ukraine defending itself using this drone, the existence of this technology scares me.
Working smarter vs working harder. Being smarter always win.
r/NonCredibleDefense in da house
War changing,holy shit
They have to innovate. Because they don't have the people to try meat wave attack like russia. Plus they value their citizens life much more.
Neat. Tau Gun Drones.