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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

No mention of power output anywhere I can find, so I guess that's classified?

It must be stupid high if they don't think "Oh, I guess we have to shield our electronics now..." is going to be a valid countermeasure.

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Shielding would also add weight to the drone, which would limit their range and capabilities.

A swarm of advancing drones could collectively take evasive maneuvers to increase their probability of success. As individual drones drop out of the sky the remaining drones could reposition themselves, much like a split frame in bowling, making it harder for one of these devices to rotate back and forth and hit all of them.

Shielding costs money and will not be implemented on consumer drones. That means the cheapest/simplest options for would-be bad guys can be stopped by it. Also, if you shield a GPS antenna your simplest means of navigation won't work.

unless the shield IS the antenna

Help me understand how this makes sense, the antenna on most modern radios is directly connected to a front end amplifier, usually an extremely sensitive MOSFET circuit. The reason a Gaussian surface can block EMP from a circuit is because there’s no conductive pathway into the part you don’t want an EMP. When the shield is the antenna then the only part that can be hit by the EMP is one of the most fragile and sensitive ones.

I guess the idea is that once the drone reaches the enemy you can use an IMU for station keeping and expect GPS to get destroyed?

I suspect that the drone depends on exposed antennas to navigate and communicate. So it can't be entirely shielded.

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