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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Short-range air defense (SHORAD) is going to be a huge growth area for defense contractors over the next several years.

I wonder if we can repurpose mm-wave 60GHz panel antennas and SDRs for cheap short-range radars. Then combine with a commercial infrared camera for multi-mode target acquisition. Put those on a mount with servos to control a PKM or M240 machinegun, and mount the whole setup on the roofs of buildings. Critical infrastructure anti-drone air defense guns at fairly low cost.

> Put those on a mount with servos to control a PKM or M240 machinegun

Leaving weapons unattended like that is a recipe for disaster. Even worse if they're network-connected (look at the tons of insecure IoT devices already out there).

What????? What he is describing already exists and is extensively used. CRAM - it shoots down rockets and artillery. Go watch a video of it

CRAMs are both several tons in weight, require a lot of power and special mounting, and are found mounted on a warship or in a military base; you're not really going to worry about some random insurgent carrying it off. Besides, they eat 20x102mm ammunition, which isn't exactly common stuff.

That is a far cry from the consequences of leaving a M240 around, which is both man portable and consumes the incredibly common 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge.

Then you just get stealth drones (fixed wing). Bondo, styrofoam, electric ducted fans, frequency hopping radio links, all easily doable. Only hard part really is range. For that, I could see hybrid electrics that power down the gas/nitro engine for stealth.

Or even just a gas turbine, as RC people already use. 10:1 TWR, relatively cheap. Quite loud, but works at high altitudes.

Small gas powered drones for the military are already pretty common.

Those cheap antennas don't have sufficient power output or precision for that application. Going to be expensive.

Firing a machine gun in a city is a huge risk. A free falling bullet can still kill a human.

You'd think that broadband directed antennas would be pretty good at this already. The technology has been around for decades. It would be fun to maybe convert bill gates mosquito lasers (amp them up obviously) to shooting down drones if they get in illegal airspace.

Imagine a hundred thousand of these things. Ugh. I don’t wanna know if that’s in our future.

Each with and incendiary charge and the GPS coordinates of every home/building in a city. Who needs Tokyo/Dresden firebombing anymore.

Sounds a lot easier than attaching incendiaries to bats, at least...

Which is something the US actually tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Allied bombing is a thing that happened, but sometimes it seems like people really strain to relate anything to something shameful associated with Americans.

In this particular context, if you're thinking of WWII, it's kind of odd for a person not to think of and compare the concept to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

Parent just listed two of the most brutal single attack conventional bombings of a city in history.

This could be due to some agenda to shame the Allies for their involvement in WW2, or it could just be because WW2 is really the only time in history it was done on that scale and the Allies happened to win the conflict.

I'm going to go with principle of charity and assume the latter...

It would be absurd to attribute every mention of Dresden or Hiroshima or whatever to an anti-American agenda. People simply inhabit an environment where that is what comes to mind. Maybe people don't see the similarity I do, or maybe the thing that I think relevant is obscure. But I'm noting that it sometimes seems strained and odd, from my personal perspective. Blaming an individual here and now was not my intent. I'm more saying, look at the bubble english speakers inhabit, I wonder how we got here, since most people doubtlessly aren't acting out of a conscious or malicious agenda.

Elon's talked about this on stage, where easily could have 1,000 to 100,000 of them with just a tiny amount of C4 - and then have them swarm at one or many targets using AI or other training/data.

Killbots is a scifi short based on this. Don't watch if you're squirmish though.

*squeamish.

Isn’t that one of the scenes in the Iron Man? Elon isn’t as original

Using overwhelming numbers of small and expendable weapons is a tried and true strategy.

Drone swarms are coming once the technology gets mature enough, mostly in speed and carrying capacity.

On the bright side, you don't need to bomb everyone. Future wars could be more efficient.

If "winning" is what you care about.

I think that this is a great point. It's also a little scary when you think about the data sets that exist out there for advertising. Any way that someone targets an ad could be the selection criteria for these efficient wars.

My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.

But that lowers the deterrence factor. If you’ve got lethal drones that can target any individual you want then who needs war when you can establish a totalitarian state? Just eliminate all of your enemies with drones and use them to keep the population firmly under your heel.

But then your enemies also drones you, and so does the popualtion. They're pretty easy to make and import.

I wonder if it will get to the personal device level..

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