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 Ketara wrote:
There's jamming technology to interfere with signals, I believe. It's certainly the most effective way. If your signal is screwed up, it doesn't matter how many of the things you've got in a swarm, they'll just drop out of the sky.

Maybe those cheapo drones that can't carry any weight, like the $20 ones, but most drones that have any sort of range and would be useful as part of a swarm most certainly do not drop out of the sky if they lose signal. Beyond the fact a decent off-the-shelf drone is at least $700-1500, it would become a lethal falling object.

While I would agree signal blocking will mission-kill a drone* - so we fundamentally agree in principal - only the very, very cheap backyard drones fall out of the sky if they lose signal (and that range is like 100 feet at best).

The kind of off the shelf drones we are talking about being useful in a swarm attack, like a Phantom or Mavic, most certainly do not drop out of the sky if they lose signal. Losing the control signal due to flying out of range or interference is a pretty common occurrence, and drones have pre-programmed logic for what to do - wait, ascend to x height and wait, land in place, or - most commonly - wait and then return until signal is re-acquired.


*And I'm only agreeing now, in 2020. You could already program a Phantom 2 to fly autonomous paths without a control signal back in 2013, and now inertial is becoming available - they won't need GPS or a control signal pretty soon.

I should think it would be possible to use some of the algorithms developed to mimic the movement of flocks of birds or schools of fish together with some fairly minimal short range way to detect only their nearest neighbors

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-starling-murmurations-science-nature-greatest.html

couple that with a GPS based target (or any other method for remoter targeting) for the swarm to get to and you've got a pretty good semi random way to get a decent number of drones onto a target

but even so as others have said if it's big enough to be a military target it's probably going to be fairly resistant to the size of explosive a 'small' drone can deliver, civilian & infrastructure targets not so much

Because if you can get close enough to pilot a commercial drone at a target, you may as.well.just build a mortar. Bigger payload, much cheaper, just as difficult to intercept.

Don't think a cheap drone can't do something big. There are some things that even tiny amount of can be very serious.

I am not describing any, but most people here can probably come up with some good ideas as to what would qualify as a serious matter even in very small amounts.

Even an ounce of two of some powdered material with a simple release mechanism could cause massive panic,shut down an area and cost millions of dollars in financial damages and clean up bills.

And NO, I am not "encouraging" anyone to do anything. Anyone inclined to do something and temperamentally suited to do it has already thought of something like this at least once. We all know that.

Look at the old hi tech movie "Runaway" for ideas on what a clever and evil spirited person could do with ordinary domestic technology. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/ At the time the movie was made they didn't even have roombas FFS, let alone flying drones for sale in every department store.



To be honest I'm very surprised this hasn't happened yet already.

120mm canister rounds.

An individual drone wouldn't be easy to hit but a swarm will show up easier and a cloud of tank-scaled shot should rip a few dozen down.

Out the top of my head, if I had to stop a swarm of drone, I would simply use old-fashioned AA guns. The kind of extemely fast-firing 20 or 30mm guns, with explosive ammo on a timed fuze, those will basically fill the sky with shrapnel. Unarmored drones would be shredded.

Speaking of drones, people interested in them might want to watch "shin godzilla". One of the ways godzilla in stopped in it was by sending a massive wave of drones at him, each launching missiles, to force him to use his new air defense array to stop them and drain his energy reserves, rending him dormant.

They literally launched a few hundred drones at him, many donated by other countries since godzilla was a global threat, and many launched some missiles at him to force him to use his air defense array reflexively since earlier in the movie he'd nearly been killed by an air attack.

Realistically speaking this question needs some context. Are we talking about military drones on a battlefield? If so i guess anything short of a nuke goes. I could see a massive explosive like a moab producing a huge shockwave that might knock drones out of the air over an area, but it's unlikely it could be deployed in time.

Proximity fuzed air burst frag rounds are an option as drones are less survivable than manned aircraft in general.

I honestly fear the greatest threat a mass drone assault might pose is off the battlefield. A terrorist attack, with dozens of civilian drones deploying something very horrible over a city, is an all too likely nightmare scenario and I have absolutely no idea whatsoever on how to counter it. Obviously large explosives are out of the question, and the shrapnel from dozens of frag rounds is problematic. Plus if an attack is well planned and executed the damage is done before you can react.

Giant Predator-style net launcher?

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m not entirely sure Drones are useful against a properly militarised foe?

I mean, their main use has been as a counter to guerilla tactics, yes? Cheaper than a fighter jet, but still carrying enough ordnance to blow up light vehicles etc.

Against someone with half decent, computer aided AA emplacements, are they not just far too slow to be any good?

I think were talking about significantly smaller drones.

Like several hundred small drones 3-5 footers carrying tactical nukes? How would you stop that?

The only people who can build several hundred tacukes are nation states, and darn few of them. America, Russia, Britain, France, China, maybe India, Pakistan, Taiwan, and India. They have way better things to do with those warheads than put them on commercial drones.

Unfortunately some non nuclear warhead payloads could be quite devastating and well within the capacities for a large number of nations to produce.

Problem solved:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-54476734

Although this might be how we end up in The Birds...

Just to clarify. I was primarily talking about military grade drones being used in a conventional war. Massed could be anything from a swarm to simple heavy use and proliferation. More of a general question as opposed to specifically on theoretical swarms of civilian drones.

Ok, drones on a battlefield can be dealt with thru regular military means.(DAKKADAKKADAKKA!!!)

I'm far more concerned about their use as terrorist weapons in a city.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Just to clarify. I was primarily talking about military grade drones being used in a conventional war. Massed could be anything from a swarm to simple heavy use and proliferation. More of a general question as opposed to specifically on theoretical swarms of civilian drones.

You can't have a swarm of drones. It would be like having a swarm of A-10 warthogs, except the individual aircraft are larger.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, drones on a battlefield can be dealt with thru regular military means.(DAKKADAKKADAKKA!!!)

I'm far more concerned about their use as terrorist weapons in a city.

When it comes to terrorist attacks, most of the time you can't do anything when they're already underway. If a guy is already in the middle of a crowd with a bomb it's too late. The best defense is to stop them before that.
A massive attack with drones and explosives requires a lot of logistics and organisation -even more if we're talking about stuff nastier than explosives. That's the kind of thing that any competent intelligence services pay attention to and shut down instantly.

 Tiennos wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, drones on a battlefield can be dealt with thru regular military means.(DAKKADAKKADAKKA!!!)

I'm far more concerned about their use as terrorist weapons in a city.

When it comes to terrorist attacks, most of the time you can't do anything when they're already underway. If a guy is already in the middle of a crowd with a bomb it's too late. The best defense is to stop them before that.
A massive attack with drones and explosives requires a lot of logistics and organisation -even more if we're talking about stuff nastier than explosives. That's the kind of thing that any competent intelligence services pay attention to and shut down instantly.

True, friend. But an attack made with a fairly small number of drones armed with warheads that are not of an explosive nature can be more devastating in terms of panic caused, damage done by that panic and even lives lost than an attack made by a larger number of drones with explosives.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Just to clarify. I was primarily talking about military grade drones being used in a conventional war. Massed could be anything from a swarm to simple heavy use and proliferation. More of a general question as opposed to specifically on theoretical swarms of civilian drones.

Which isn't all that different from the Soviet plan of attacking NATO with multi-regiment raids of Backfires, carrying two or three supersonic missiles each aircraft, and each missile carrying a 1-ton-plus explosive warhead, or a not-so-tactical nuclear warhead. Six regiments based on the Kola peninsula, around 150 aircraft, potentially 450 missiles...

 Matt Swain wrote:

 Tiennos wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:
Ok, drones on a battlefield can be dealt with thru regular military means.(DAKKADAKKADAKKA!!!)

I'm far more concerned about their use as terrorist weapons in a city.

When it comes to terrorist attacks, most of the time you can't do anything when they're already underway. If a guy is already in the middle of a crowd with a bomb it's too late. The best defense is to stop them before that.
A massive attack with drones and explosives requires a lot of logistics and organisation -even more if we're talking about stuff nastier than explosives. That's the kind of thing that any competent intelligence services pay attention to and shut down instantly.

True, friend. But an attack made with a fairly small number of drones armed with warheads that are not of an explosive nature can be more devastating in terms of panic caused, damage done by that panic and even lives lost than an attack made by a larger number of drones with explosives.

If a terrorist group can somehow get their hands on something like a dangerous chemical or radioactive material, it hardly matters what they use to spread it. You can just park a car with a bomb somewhere, or even have a guy walk with the payload into a crowded area and the result will be the same. Drones aren't really harder or easier to stop than that.

The current fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh is seeing heavy usage of military drones against conventional military targets.

 chromedog wrote:
The RAAF here uses eagles to take them out - more because we tend to have wedge-tailed eagles living near air force bases than because they train them to do it. Wedgies regard ANYTHING else in the air as prey. They've been known to take on hang-gliders.

My old workplace was developing radar tech to take a stocktake of forest areas to plan future logging. They lost three drones to wedge tailed eagles before and no counter measure beyond 'suck it up' and buy more drones.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Like several hundred small drones 3-5 footers carrying tactical nukes? How would you stop that?

If you're facing an opponent with the capacity to deploy several hundred tactical nukes, you're not stopping the attack. This was true long before anyone even dreamed of drones.

 sebster wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
The RAAF here uses eagles to take them out - more because we tend to have wedge-tailed eagles living near air force bases than because they train them to do it. Wedgies regard ANYTHING else in the air as prey. They've been known to take on hang-gliders.

My old workplace was developing radar tech to take a stocktake of forest areas to plan future logging. They lost three drones to wedge tailed eagles before and no counter measure beyond 'suck it up' and buy more drones.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Like several hundred small drones 3-5 footers carrying tactical nukes? How would you stop that?

If you're facing an opponent with the capacity to deploy several hundred tactical nukes, you're not stopping the attack. This was true long before anyone even dreamed of drones.

Given the U.S. Navy was facing exactly that sort of threat, I'd say they have a few ideas on the matter. Never got to see if it would have worked in real life, though.

 Vulcan wrote:
Given the U.S. Navy was facing exactly that sort of threat, I'd say they have a few ideas on the matter. Never got to see if it would have worked in real life, though.

Which threat? The wedge tailed eagles or the horde of drones?


Anyhow, I wasn't dismissing the idea of drones altogether. I can imagine there are circumstances where non-state actors and even some weaker states might use cheap drones in some kind of wave attack. I was just trying to put that in context, the post I replied to talked about drones with tactical nukes. That's just... no. Any state with tactical nukes that decides to use large numbers of them against a target is going to use a delivery method way above the level of a horde of commercial drones. And that consideration does massively change how we see the problem. Once we realise that any horde of commercial drones is going to have small bundles of commercial explosive it changes how you deal with it massively.

I can imagine there are circumstances where non-state actors and even some weaker states might use cheap drones in some kind of wave attack.

This was basically the strategy employed by Iran when they attacked the Saudi oil refinery last year. They've been doing a lot of development on kamikazi drones, which makes sense when you a) know you'll never have air superiority and anything you send up will likely never come back anyway and b) you want to use something smarter than a guided missile but potentially cheaper.