Discussion
Teever: Imagine a small quadcopter with deployment and transportation device packaged discretely inside an Amazon box.The box is shipped internationally and sent to a package delivery company that gets a job to deliver the box to an abandoned lot near an airforce base in bumfuck nowhere America.Once the package is delivered the deployment device cuts the top of the box open and lets the drone out. The drone flies in the direction of the base and then kamikazes on the nearest helicopter or aircraft shaped object that it sees.What’s the counter to that?Or imagine a scenario where a country launches a weather balloon full of the same kinds of drones but equipped with solar panels.The weather balloon explodes like a piñata and deploys all these drones over a vast area. The drones are programmed to make their way to different military or infrastructure targets and stop and recharge high places out of site of people and maybe only travel at night. They slowly make their way over days or weeks until they find their target. They’re designed to self destruct if they sense that they’re being handled by a human being.What’s the counter to that?
Veserv: 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.
05: Which 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).
Teever: How 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: I suspect they will run out of ammo much after the enemy runs out of drones.
IncreasePosts: Park your aircraft in hangars. And hope you hid your tracks well enough once the generals start eyeing their almost expired bunker busters with a twinkle in their eye
prepend: I would imagine the counter is computer vision defense systems that cover an entire base. And then eventually infrastructure.And then all drones tracked by satellite so any drone that doesnt show up gets shot down anywhere over a large geographic area.Using cheaper drones to hunt down expensive drones.Or of course, just eagles.
carefree-bob: This is the type of stuff Ukraine has been doing against Russian assets. It's effectifve asymmetrical warfare when you lose air superiority.We may even need to revisit what air superiority means in the age of long range, relatively stealthy drones that are cheap to produce using widely available tech.I also would expect Russian and Chinese Satellite intel being fed to Iran to locate these types of targets, again exactly like how the NATO powers have been providing intel to Ukraine.
AlecSchueler: Russia for sure but why would China take such an active position?
lejalv: Because how much oil they (used to) get from Iran
freediddy: The biggest security threat any country has is if an adversary sends 1-10 million drones at once, each with a small grenade on it, and overwhelms a city. They could literally target individual politicians or weak spots on infrastructure like buildings or bombs and almost nothing could stop it except possibly an EMP.I'm not sure what anyone can do about that but that to me is my biggest fear about the future of all this technology.
kennywinker: 1-10 million drones. At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place. Maybe there is an EMP. Are you willing to spend a billion dollars to find out, while also murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians?And these are either autonomous drones (more expensive?), or fpv with the fiber optic line out the back - either way you have to get them in range without being detected somehow.In short, i think this is an unrealistic scenario - fun to imagine as a horror-sci-fi idea but unlikely to be deployed. Just one opinion.
hrdwdmrbl: How long until an F35 is destroyed by a drone?
FpUser: There US has more then 600 of those with more coming. Losing one is insignificant.
kibwen: > 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: Drones 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.
uniq7: Mandatory package screenings to detect explosives? I don't know if that's technically feasible at scale, or if that's already implemented (and I'd prefer not to ask that kind of question to Google/ChatGPT)
rationalist: They 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: Imagine 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.
ChrisMarshallNY: There was this The Register story, a couple of days ago[0]. It says we can't handle drone swarms.[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/nato_air_defenses/
Figs: ~$100M/unit isn't exactly cheap to replace...
rtkwe: Right now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.
freediddy: They would just be autonomous. Setting a GPS (or alternate system) coordinate is pretty simple enough. Individual targets could just be AI controlled at this point, or 10 years in the future.
hrdwdmrbl: " Trump said that “we don’t need help,” adding that the “last person we need help from is Zelenskyy.” "https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/iran-negotiate...
mindslight: [delayed]
caycep: I feel like this was a plot/subplot of either Diamond Age or one of the Gibson novels
freediddy: This isn't a game of Command and Conquer with fog of war turned on. Of course they would have intel on exactly what they are going to attack. One cruise missile is about $4 million.China already has created a UAV that is designed to launch at least 100 drones. If they can make that 1000 drones and then fly out 1000 of these motherships at one time, that's already 1 million.And yes the drones would be autonomous, there's no reason for any person to be controlling them in the age of AI.
srean: That means it's exactly from Zelensky that he wants help.Narcissism-speak is easy, once you have figured them out. For example if they accuse you of something, others of something, that means they have done exactly what he is accusing others of.
AftHurrahWinch: Great questions, I will reinstall Factorio for research purposes and get right back to you.
general1465: I can already see Iran making FPV compilation "Death faces of American soldiers" where target is to show face of terrified soldier from the last frame of FPV camera, right before FPV exploded. This is would be a weapon of massive demoralization when relatives of soldiers will be sifting through Iranian Telegram channels just to find video with their relative right before being killed or maimed.This is a massive propaganda tool for Iran waiting to be used to full extent.
Veserv: > 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 outCool, 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.
bink: And some Canada Gooses too?
speed_spread: How long till Canada wires up gooses brains and straps then with bombs for the ultimate biodrones? They already swarm naturally in attack formation!
Implicated: > At $400 a pop that’s $400,000,000-$4,000,000,000. A lot to throw at a single attack when you don’t actually know what defenses are in place.Have you seen the price tag on some of the US jets? Are they not doing just this?
kennywinker: Jets aren’t single-use. A better comparison would be something like a tomahawk missile, which costs ~$2mil each (not counting r&d costs, launcher costs, getting them there costs, etc).The US spent $11.3b in the first six days of israel’s war with iran. So not an unprecedented amount of money, just a lot to put into a single attack that could fail, and that mostly kills humans, and that requires a shit ton of logistics to make happen.
surgical_fire: > Jets aren’t single-use.The are sometimes.
glaucon: > What’s the counter to that?In the case of the AWS scenario someone driving by who decides to nick it?Or the courier puts the box down upside down?Just by the way is a package delivery company going to be willing to deliver a package to an abandoned lot?Your solar panel equipped, "rest and recharge" idea is interesting.
kibwen: > Cool, you sent in a hundred thousand dollar cruise missile to blow up a thousand dollar turret. Turret wins.Nope. The calculus is not about individual components, but about overall cost of the entire system and all of its associated support. What was the material, labor, and opportunity cost to install the turret? What was it protecting (which is now presumably destroyed by drones)? You're also still assuming that you're facing off against guerillas fighting an asymmetrical war on a shoestring budget, but that's not the case. Whatever force you're fighting can be trivially bankrolled by a peer power who is happy to bankroll them to make you bleed to death. China will be happy to build plenty of cruise missiles, and plenty more drones.
