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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see one of these drone tech demonstrations, I can't help but wonder how they will be adapted for warfare.

This one... I'm seeing flying solar powered landmines (skymines?) that can flutter around an active combat zone aimlessly for hours until it detects a personnel target and bops them near the temple with a small round. I wonder if there are any actual benefits over just putting a solar panel on a regular quadcopter and having them charge a battery, maybe staying stationary in field or ditch near the road, relocating once in a while and waiting for a target.

Slaughterbots, assemble! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

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> and bops them near the temple with a small round.

The smallest commercially available centerfire cartridge was the 2.7mm Kolibri round, which was too underpowered to inflict significant damage to a person other than maybe if you hit them right in the eyeball. That round weighed 5.3 grams while the OP article talks about a drone weighing 9 milligrams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2mm_Kolibri

This drone just doesn't have enough payload for explosives/bullets to be useful against a person. More plausible is some sort of biological attack, like a nerve gas, although you'd be pushing the limits even there. The LD50 for sarin gas is 1 milligram, and you would need a delivery mechanism.

From TFA:

> The total system required just over half a watt of power to stay aloft. Given a total mass of 4 grams, that works out to a lift-to-power efficiency of 7.6 grams per watt. But a lot of that power is lost during the voltage conversion. If you focus on the motor alone, it only requires 0.14 watts, giving it a lift-to-power efficiency of over 30 grams per watt....

> But one thing they don't have to optimize is the vehicle's size since they already built a miniaturized version that's only 8 millimeters high and weighs just 9 milligrams but is able to generate a milliwatt of power that turns its propeller at over 15,000 rpm.

9mg is just the smallest version they managed to make. Based on the size of the solar panel in the video, there's plenty of room to scale to tens of grams per drone. And this is a laboratory proof of concept, not a well funded weapons prototype.

Thanks for the insights on that half of the hypothetical! 9mg is indeed wild, and made me go check the article... The article is a bit confusing, or I'm missing some nuances. It seems to talk about 2-3 drones, I think, mentioning weights of: 9 mg, 1.13 g, and 4 g. I think the one in the video is not the 9 mg version.

If you look carefully you see that they actually started with a much bigger drone and then shrunk it down. The minimum is 9 mg (that they could build) but it sounds like the design can be expanded to almost any size. A more obvious question would be is there any functional difference between this and a balloon.

The gas ganisters would be too heavy. A better payload is razor blades / needles coated in some potent venom poison, like tetrodotoxin ricin or cone snail toxins. Launch 1000 of these drones and you can kill an army in no time.

I suspect a 5.3 gram shaped charge detonated right near the head will do much more damage.

What’s the advantage to a 5.3g shaped charge here?

There’s already drones loaded with Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, such as the AeroVironment Switchblade.

But I suppose something that can fly all day… loitering … is even more terrifying if applied

Why do you think a shaped charge is the correct ordinance type in this hypothetical?

I think it could better penetrate the skull.

Not the slaughterbots bullshit again. If someone wanted to replicate the slaughterbots video, they would use the small drones only for face recognition to find the target and then eliminate the target with a small mortar from a bigger drone above. You know, the boring stuff that terrorists have already done in the past.

The rudimentary stuff terrorists are stuck with doing. Slaughterbots are more terrifying because they can track you in all the enviroments a mortar can't reach.

Attacking with bacteria/viruses has the advantage that the payload can grow bigger by itself when infecting.

As others have said, it isn't a delivery platform. It'd do much better as a geostatic surveillance web, radio jammer, fire support, etc. Things that drones already do but set-and-forget.

Except that this one only hovers, so is wind-borne in terms of trajectory. It's a while away from being as useful as a real drone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition

Black Mirror S03E06

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