These drones aren't even purpose built. They are hobby racing drones built out of DIY components and off the shelf parts, with a grenade or other small explosive strapped to the bottom. Once these start being custom designed, they will be half as large, half as noisy, and a single central computer will fly literal swarms of them with automated mission parameters. This will be an area denial weapon- you'll be able to set up a base station, a larger recon drone will do overflights, and you can task the system 'kill anything that moves in this area'. The system can then select a drone (small anti-personnel drone or larger anti-vehicle drone) to dispatch to eliminate any intruder. Or a larger drone like a Bayraktar will have racks of these that it can drop on command to precisely target an enemy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh geez, you're right. As an area denial weapon this would be extremely effective. There is no upper bound to the number of drones in the sky over any given area aside from the budget. A large spotter fleet with IR vision could operate continuously from high above in the dark.

When a target is spotted it can command the swarm to go take it out.

I think a similar attack could be used selectively against a VIP target where a spotter identifies the location and sends waves of cheap grenade drones to pay a visit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is a potential limit beyond the budget - communications.

I found this article talking about how they're making jam-resistant drones: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a42922481/tricopter-drone-atlaspro-resists-russian-jamming/

So the original method of jam-resistant secure comms was spread-spectrum technology, which consumer drones use these days. Apparently modern jam-resistance involves frequency-hopping to unjammed frequencies, but it's an arms race. I assume it involves things like the jammers monitoring for frequencies that are being used and switching to jam them, which basically means they're playing whack-a-mole with the frequencies. Jamming every frequency is very energy-intensive and also blacks out your own comms, which could be exploited to make you go dark by simulating a drone attack and instead of actually attacking, using the enemy's own jammer as cover. There's always something to exploit.

Anyway, they apparently already are doing swarm communications with up to 5 drones, and they're trying to up that to about 50 or so. I guess part of the challenge would be that when you've got that many signals flying around the airwaves, it's a lot easier to jam at least a portion of them. That makes your jamming issue a lot harder. I mean clearly they don't think it's impossible because they're trying it, but you might not be able to do hundreds or thousands for instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Informative reply, thanks for posting!