```In the novel The Diamond Age, author Neal Stephenson posits a future in which the world is divided into competing nation-tribes, or phyles. The most powerful of these phyles have extensive nanotechnology capabilities, and use nanotech in various ways to gain an edge over their competitors and neighbors. Most notably, they create various sorts of airborne nanotech robots -- known as mites -- to infiltrate one another's territory and perform espionage or sabotage. Naturally, the other phyles retaliate with antibody mites, which hunt out and disable the invading mites, turning them into inert black dust, or toner. And so it goes.
The phyles' populaces themselves rarely see this conflict in their own airspace. Rather, it plays itself out in the Leased Territories and no-man's-lands between phyle enclaves. The thetes (classless members of no phyle, who live in these no-man's-lands), on the other hand, intermittently find their air full of clashing mites, flashing lidar, and the resulting microscopic debris. ```
> Most notably, they create various sorts of airborne nanotech robots -- known as mites -- to infiltrate one another's territory and perform espionage or sabotage
I suggest Stanisław Lem’s “Weapon systems of the 21st century.”
In some ways, Cryptonomicon already has become reality. We have bitcoin used as national currency in Central America, and things like stable coins (probably the closest real world analogue to the gold backed crypto in the book).
I think this is one of the reasons he has such a loyal following - he gets current tech trends and knows how to extrapolate it into the future very well.
Not really. The Turkish drone projects were created basically because Turkish engineers looked at all the drone stuff happening in the west and went "look at all these idiot westerners using all these amazing weapons as toys". Everyone who joined those companies knew from the start what field they were in.
And while the original Kargus didn't have explosives, that doesn't mean they weren't weapons. In the military sense, a radio that's being used to call in artillery is a weapon. Whether the bomb is on the drone itself or is fired at something the drone is surveilling doesn't change what the drone is.
Yup, and I've watched YT videos on that drone before...all the comments are filled with Turks who are proud of their country's killing machines. That said, there are people who are proud of MQ-1s etc as well.
Do you think the Ardupilot people were blind to the military applications of what they were making? I personally can't imagine anyone bright enough to work on drone autopilots to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications.
I know several people who've contributed to Ardupilot who are 100% "hobby guys". I've modified Ardupilot (and BetaFlight and iNav) for my own hobby use (but nothing really worth or in a state to contribute back).
While it's true drone technology "could be used for harmful applications", that's also true for, say, compilers. Do you hold the gcc/clang developers to account for being "blind to the military applications of what they were making"? Or OpenStreetMap contributors? Or the engineers who designed the HiLux? Or the Casio F-91W watch designers? None of those were "designed for military application" yet all ended up being used for them.
Where does the line need to get drawn? between my rights to design/build/fly drones as a hobby, commercial/industrial rights to use drones for photography or cinematograpy or crop monitoring or search and rescue or shark surveillance at swimming beachs - and the need to restrict "military applications" of that?
Are people who, say, write blog posts explaining how to use microcontroller RTOS libraries for hard real time guarantees, with mentioned examples like nuclear power plant control "blind to the military applications of what they're making"? (Yeah, sorry. I profile stalked you a little there...)
I don't mind the profile stalking, but if you stalked me more you'd have seen that I'm a former weapons engineer for the Dutch navy, so making things with potential military applications does not bother me as much as you might think. (Ironically, that arduino CoPilot library is based on software specifically designed for drone applications, so does that count as military software redirected towards civilian applications?)
In any case, this discussion is pretty similar to the "AWS is running my FOSS database as a service without paying me" debate. If you don't want your software to be used for certain applications, don't release it under a license stating that you can do anything with it. If you think the good that you do for the world by releasing some good new tech is greater than the harm done to the world, spread it as widely as you can. Ardupilot is in this category IMO: even if some militias try to make their own combat drones with it, the overall good done by making drone technology available to all could well be greater. The idea that you can make something "perfect" (that is with no imaginable harmful applications whatsoever) is probably not viable in this imperfect world filled with less than perfect people. Even very harmless things like teddy bears can be used to enable violent acts, but that does not mean we should stop making them.
Yeah, I guess I was reacting (badly) to "to be simultaneously ignorant enough not to realize that a drone could be used for harmful applications".
I, personally, don't ever want to let that argument stop me from building shit that I want to build for fun. Like I pointed out, Hiluxes and F-19Ws have become well know "tools of trade" for freedom fighters and terrorists. Obviously totally not the intend ofd the designers, and even in retrospect nobody sane would say "Toyota should never have built and sold the HiLux because it's too easy to mount a machine gun in the tray!"
Could my ongoing projects to build sub 100g autonomous drones be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my experimenting with LoRa Mesh Networking be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Could my project to try using GPS and ADSB to aim a camera with a high powered zoom lens on a gimbal to take pics of planes be misused by people to do harm? Maybe? Am I going to stop doing any of those things because of that? Nope. On the other hand, would I experiment with a drone carrying explosives? Nope. Would I mount a laser on the camera gimbal auto aiming at planes? Nope. I don't know if my personal lines in the sand have any valid arguments behind them other than "that's just where my personal morals/ethics draws the line", and I wouldn't hold other people to account for having their own lines drawn somewhat differently. But I will judge both far ends of the bell curve there as "way too irresponsible" or "way too paranoid".
Having said that, two companies in another comment of mine here DroneSheild and EOS have both tried to headhunt me (DroneShield directly, EOS I'm 98% certain it was them the recruiter was trying to pimp me to..) And both times I was _seriously_ tempted just because the technical challeneges seem like so much fun. I declined both approaches though, having decided I didn't want to work in that industry. My dad was a defence contractor pretty much his entire career, so I don't judge people who _do_ choose that industry. It can certainly be lucrative, and _most_ of what dad worked on at least was defence or training, rather than attack weapons.
This isn't really a new thing - the military can and will use open source code to more effectively kill people. That happens with every new technology. Drone tech is going to be the biggest killer this century assuming that we don't have a war where ICBMs get deployed.
The laser has to disable the drone in seconds, though. Wouldn't a laser with sufficient power to do so cause collateral vision damage from the diffused reflection? Think of a drone flying low and fast into a political rally with a crowd. You don't know the intentions of the pilot so it must be disabled immediately. Many people will look up at the source of noise and thus be exposed. I wonder if e.g. a birdshot cannon would actually be safer.
Your own troops would be issued PPE — in this case, laser protective eyewear.
This is already a thing due to the widespread use of laser rangefinders, designators, and the like, as well as the fact that the Chinese have fielded blinding laser weapons.
I am neither American nor a gun nerd, but from what I "overheard" on the internet a single Phalanx system should be able to take out drone swarms at incredible rates?
>>The Block 1A and newer (pneumatic driven) CIWS mounts fire at a rate of 4,500 rounds per minute with a 1,550-round magazine.
>>Shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target.[14]
>So it's about three grand to zap one drone, and you get 15 shootdowns before a human needs to shovel more ammo into the turret. That would make it vulnerable to a saturation attack.
You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo, but that only slightly mitigates it. Against drone swarms you kinda want directed energy weapons, either microwave or laser. Which don't exist, currently.
Also note that Phalanx is radar based, leaving it open to the usual suite of radar jamming/ECW/antiradiation attacks.
You can tip the odds back in your favor by emplacing more Phalanx systems, but at ten million bucks each, that limits you to stuff like defending small-size/high-value targets like the White House, rather than numerous and sprawling US military bases.
> Against drone swarms you kinda want directed energy weapons, either microwave or laser. Which don't exist, currently.
These guys reckon they can detect, locate, and take down drones and drone swarms by jamming them with directed RF (not energy weapons as such): https://www.droneshield.com
These guys build "remotely operated weapons" that include 5.56mm up to 30mm cannons (as well as grenade launchers and missile launchers), and a "Counter Drone Defence System" that can drive them: https://www.eos-aus.com/defence/
I don't know it this works anything like as well on moving targets, but what you see at about 30 secs in this video looks like it'd take down most significanbtly-smaller-than-Predator drones pretty reliably at 900m out: https://vimeo.com/429825806 And I suspect 7.65 or 5.56 would probably work just as well as 50cal for that (though perhaps less accurately at long range?)
Not anything like as vicious as Phalanx, but if you're trying to protect against quadcopter or fixed wing drone swarms instead of cruise missiles, I'd bet they're remarkably more cost effective.
Actually proximity fuzed rounds should work the best, each taking outv many swarm memvers. Its not like these things could be armored rather than as light as possible.
Proximity fused rounds do have the significant downside that using them near built up areas will cause significant collateral damage. For example, if a drone swarm attacks an election rally somewhere in the US then you can't really detonate airburst shells above the crowd to take out the drones, since you would do more harm than good with that.
Hmm, a slightly Rube Goldberg type idea - what about firing proximity fuzed "airbag rounds" ? A Kevlar bag + car airbag style gas generator. If fuzed and timed just right it could potentially punch the drone from the sky, either breaking it or casing enough flight path distortion it migh not recover.
Or maybe release a bunch nylon filaments that will entangle any propellers and make the thing fall down ?
If you can say for certain beforehand that the drones are carrying grenades, then _maybe_. But if they are "just" carrying a sharpened stick to try and skewer whichever politician is holding the rally with, then killing a large amount of the audience will be really unpopular Also, not killing them but allowing the politician to be killed will be really unpopular too. Lasers on the other hand don't run out of ammo, cause much less collateral damage and are quite effective against lightweight drones.
(Of course by the time you have to guard political rallies so much that "grenade attacks by drone swarms" becomes a reasonable threat scenario, you may have to rethink things and probably just cancel the rally for now.)
Lasers still can cause potentially blinding unwanted reflections. Still likely a better option than supersonic shrapnel from standard proximity fuzed rounds though as collateral damage goes.
Yes lasers are not perfect either, for example the chances are often fairly high that a shot-down drone will fall onto something (or someone). Like I mentioned before, if drone swarm attacks are a part of the threat model then you might want to reconsider if you want to let civilians near the event at all.
> shells fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each
That's pretty crazy to think of ... I guess the only justification for that is that the assets that are protected by such a system are worth more than that.
> You could imagine firing fewer rounds per salvo
If I learned anything from games, it's that you want AoE damage for swarming enemies ;-)
Phalanx was designed to protect battleships and aircraft carriers from cruise missiles.
Emptying 6 or 8 4500 round Phalanx turrets at the half dozen cruise missile locked onto your aircraft carrier seems like a pretty sensible way to spend a million bucks.
It should certainly be possible to develop and use a cheaper anti-drone system than a Phalanx, but that requires a static specification to develop against. The attacker's advantage seems to be that defenders doesn't have that yet.
I think for drones of this kind you can set up mini phalanxes. They don’t quite move at the speed that a missile moves, and the caliber necessary to destroy a drone is much lower than that necessary to disable a missile.
I think we’re going to see the return of shotguns as a normal weapon issued to foot soldiers. Not useful against a thousand of these, but some birdshot will be a pretty good defense against lone ones used for observation.
i guess adverserial attacks towards the employed ai-model or some form of physical obstacle (net) would be most efficient but emp or directed energy weapons are probably more reliable
For context, this was captured during a holiday drone light show. Apparently some people are letting their imaginations run wild from the confusing clip.
I'm guessing they tried to run the show too long. It looks like they all start attempting to land before their batteries run out, around the same time...
I can just imagine some guy telling his boss "I know how to make the show better, if we replace all our 2,500mAHr batteries with these 10,000mAHr ones I've found, we'll get 4 times the flying time! We could fly for 40mins instead of only 10mins!"
Then all the drones drop out of the sky after 2 minutes because the "10,000mAHr" cells only store about 500mAHr:
> It looks like they all start attempting to land before their batteries run out, around the same time...
That doesn’t immediately sound very plausible to me (as a layman who’s never dealt with drones but has dealt with battery-powered devices): I can’t imagine auto-power-down being based on flight time: surely it would be driven by battery voltage measurements, since batteries vary somewhat to begin with and vary a lot more as they age; and I then wouldn’t expect such homogeneity of battery lives that they would all drop out of the sky in such a short range of time.
You could say that their not all behaving in the same way at the same time supports the idea of low-battery emergency landing, but I think that could be adequately explained by network congestion effects too, which could line up with the claim of an attack if such an attack were some sort of frequency jamming or network saturation thing (I don’t know what wireless systems such drones use).
(The second video, “another view”, is much more interesting than the first, showing the constellation going from full strength to about two dozen left 30 seconds later, with another dozen subsequently failing very close to simultaneously in the last second of the video—I wish the video had gone for even two seconds more.)
> I then wouldn’t expect such homogeneity of battery lives that they would all drop out of the sky in such a short range of time.
Well, they have all been doing a synchronised routine. Presumably they were purchased as a batch, and operated together.
And if these were mini-drones that only had a 10 minute battery life to begin with? I could believe they'd all run flat within 60 seconds of one another.
They’re not small drones—see the footage as they reach the ground.
The flat battery hypothesis also feels unlikely because it’s too obvious a failure mode. On the other hand, I suppose it’d be possible to have them send the drones up, then get told to delay by a few minutes, and so exceed the planned flight time. But the drones aren’t that high up (much less than 30 seconds of controlled descent), so that doesn’t feel so likely.
> surely it would be driven by battery voltage measurements
No, it's driven by a battery management system that measures battery voltage, temperature and input/output current in order to get a more accurate estimate.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to convey that battery voltage measurements would be the only factor, but I didn’t end up actually expressing that. Thanks for the clarification. Certainly the concept still applies: it’s driven by physical factors, not just time.
Yep, I agree, seems like battery failure. They do a controlled descent for most of the altitude, and then drop out of the sky and bounce off the ground/cars/trees (better seen in other videos).
I’ve never done this large a coordinated display before, but have ten years UAV flying experience (quads, hexes, octo, and double stacked octo) and have done smaller scale test flights with a dozen choreographed drones.
According to this article https://m.mydrivers.com/newsview/787157.html , 8 drones crashed shortly after the show started (initial investigation pointing to mechanical failure) and the operators initiated emergency descent for the remaining drones afterwards.
These massed drone formations, what frequencies are they using? Are these just consumer drones or are they set to a regulated part of the spectrum? These massed formations are very noisy. If they are using consumer frequencies I imagine anyone in a nearby penthouse might want to jam them.
Yeah they're doing a fast controlled descent. Whether it's a low battery failsafe or a response to loss of control signal isn't clear but they're doing their best to land.
The first few look precipitous but you don't see them approach the ground, later in the video you see one that's coming down very fast and then makes a reasonable effort to brake when it gets near the ground.
Edit: Most of them are doing a fast controlled descent, a few seem to have just powered off and become rocks.
Not sure about these drones, but on my toy drone I can absolutely cut the power and let the wind autorotate the rotors while it falls toward the ground. No need for a freewheel, since the unpowered electric motors spin freely (which isn't necessarily true for a helicopter's engine).
There's no collective so you can't "flare" for landing like a helicopter, but during autorotation the terminal velocity is still much lower than if the blades were fixed.
The drones in this video fall a lot slower though. This looks like controlled descent, not autorotation.
Okay I don't care if my account gets banned but why in the FUCK does everything about China has to do with the government?
Everyone here and on Reddit are bitching about Chinese propaganda bots but the only thing I see is people with new accounts attacking China and an immediate accusation of shilling to anyone who doesn't criticize China or even draws a parallel between whatever is being criticized and the U.S..
Seriously, y'all need help if you keep thinking China is the most evil bogeyman in the world. First it was Iraq, then Iran, now it's China.
I am not saying China is great or even good but this whole immediate "fuck China" whenever anything happening in China is reported, is just pathetic and a symptom of brainwashing.
It's not brainwashing to suspect s government are up to no good. I'm in the west and assume that my government is up to no good at times, but at least we have a free media which keeps it in check. That the CCP are a dangerous bunch of authoritarian control freaks really should not be that much of a stretch.
For context, I'm an expat who has traveled extensively in Asia and currently lives in Taiwan. I have spent time in China, and had personal and business dealings with Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans, etc. while living in the region. So I think I probably have a more informed perspective about the region than people who haven't spent any time here.
My comment is straightforward: in China, it would not be surprising if an "incident" was the result of negligence (Google search "chabuduo") or sabotage, or if sabotage was used as an excuse to "save face" (Google it).
Since nothing in my comment called China "the most evil bogeyman in the world", your hyperbolic response is curious to me. In China, at a certain level of business, the state in some form is omnipresent. Feel free to not explore the implications of that and make value judgements, but this is a simple fact that you'd know if you spent any time here.
I believe nobody said "evil boogyman". But saying "government controlled" isn't much of a stretch for any Chinese company. I expect they do have some level of "de facto" control on over any company operating in the Mainland
I think that's not a reasonable expectation. Unless you believe that setting regulatory clauses in doing business as "de facto" control. But then so does any business.
Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.
"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...
I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.
My understanding is there has been a large push to have communist party members have a formal and active role in businesses. The economist had a nice article on this: https://archive.is/HGX2L
This is at the very least much more explicit than the control political parties in the US exert over businesses.
Being explicit in your doings is not necessarily evil. Governments frequently push to control everything that they think might benefit themselves. China just has everyone's balls in a vice and so can do it publicly.
But yeah. I'm only here to say that equating control of giants to be very different to control of everyone.
In the US, "human resources" is a misnomer for a corporate department that ensures regime compliance. Thankfully, most policies exist for the sake of worker's and minority's rights.
Every government has some level of "de facto" control over companies through legislation and whatnot. Sure that control may be more direct in China (and that's a big maybe in my opinion because I doubt a huge country with complex interactions can be handwavely summarized as that) but I just don't see the need to bring that up whenever anything happens in China.
then you've probably never worked in the Chinese tech sector because it is the literal Wild West. The competitor manipulation story in this case is utterly believable to anyone who has ever seen in what kind of quasi feudal wars Chinese tech companies are often engaged, because there is virtually no government oversight. Regulators on the mainland were generally so far behind the curve that tech companies until very recently more or less did whatever they wanted, which accounts for their enormous growth over the last two decades.
About ten years ago there was the infamous "3Q war" where Tencent and Qihoo engaged in pretty ridiculous measures over the messenger market by blocking each others usage on consumer machines when the other one was installed, orchestrating fake media articles about pornography, police raids and at some point calling on users to go into a general strike. The war basically only ended because at some point the government stepped in and for the first time enforced anti-trust law.
This has changed to some degree but China's tech sector always was so hilariously under-regulated it makes most Western countries look socialist in comparison
I genuinely don't understand how the parent comment triggered this response for ... just saying they think both battery failure being "covered up" or sabotage are likely?
Btw, all comments here explaining rationally why immediate hate on China does not belong in a lot of places, but shows up anyway, are being flagged.
So you can actually tell how well the propaganda has worked on a lot of people. They just love the outrage so much that they'll censor anyone who questions them.
The brainwashing has been complete. Poor US citizens.
It's because they are actively, right now, as we type fluff about cute drones, engaged in the rounding up, brainwashing, rape, torture, and murder of millions of ethnic uyghurs and other "undesirables" like homosexuals, political dissidents, and have implemented armed imprisonment and starvation of people suspected of having covid. Because their oblivious middle class is blithely and ignorantly enabling an evil the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Nazi fucking Germany.
It's not about US interests or anything external. It's entirely and only about the atrocities being performed. It's about the forceful harvesting of human hair from prisoners for sale to blissfully ignorant western nations. It's about the organ harvesting of the poor and disenfranchised for the medical privilege of the elite. It's about the chattel slavery of tens of millions of Chinese citizens who are put to use at gunpoint by the power of the communist party. Kept in this world living conditions, brainwashed by the party to know their given role in life is to do nothing but farm, or labor in the fields or factories. Thedrug cartels, the human trafficking, the weapons and money provided to bad actors around the world, the unmitigated environmental destruction and pollution all over the globe.
It's about the soul corrupting oppression of hundreds of millions of human fucking beings who deserve more than willful disregard by us in the west, who'd rather not be inconvenienced by having to think about what the plight of those people means to our own place in the world. About the supply chains and economic advantages in life we enjoy because of the exploitation of those people. About what I it means to ignore the evil in favor of the easy.
So yeah, bub, sorry to burst your bubble. Some of us just aren't comfortable with the "just like us" modern happy narrative crafted by the CCP.
Yeah, as if everything come out of China is wanting to kill you. From robotic space arms to toy drones. It's kind weird to have that kind of thoughts here, really.
That been said, the actual reason for cities to use these drones is surprisingly simple: China banned firework show few years ago for environmental reasons, so cities use drones as alternative to celebrate October 1 which is China's national day and the longest holidays (the Golden Holidays).
See? Just that simple.
Also, using drones is a smarter choice: Not only it's eco-friendlier, but also cheap, fixable and safer compare to fireworks. You can even put ads in the sky to cover part of the cost after the show is over, it just make more sense.
In this very case, I think the drones are doing fail-safe landing maneuvers, probably due to lost of control signal. Reportedly the drone company has already called the police on the suspicion of sabotage.
The phyles' populaces themselves rarely see this conflict in their own airspace. Rather, it plays itself out in the Leased Territories and no-man's-lands between phyle enclaves. The thetes (classless members of no phyle, who live in these no-man's-lands), on the other hand, intermittently find their air full of clashing mites, flashing lidar, and the resulting microscopic debris. ```