Quote of the Day
Are you honestly trying to argue you’re going to fight the ARMY (an actual well-regulated militia) with your little small-penis-overcompensation toys?
on POST as SOMETIMESFUNNY @ZTVComedyNews
Tweeted on April 3, 2023
It’s not only another Markley’s Law Monday, it is another science denier!
This is an interesting assertion. Our small arms, such as AR-15s, are “toys”. So, this guy wants them highly restricted and/or banned. If they are mere toys, then what is the point of banning them?
Don’t try to debate people like this. You can’t have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
From Adam Piersen @AdamPiersen in the replies to this tweet:
From Michael Winter @Winterborn123 in the replies to this tweet:
From Michael Winter @Winterborn123 in the replies to this tweet:
From DissidentRexy @DissidentRexy in the replies to this tweet:
Got something funny. You ban whatever you want. And I will give it all the attention Joe Biden and clown-crew give the Southern border, K?
Ben Franklin said; “Those that beat their swords into plow-shears. Will end up plowing for those that didn’t.”
It don’t matter what my dick size is. See’ens how you cut yours off.
They sure like talking about other guys dicks.
This is Goldilocks gun legislation.
This gun’s too big,
This gun is too small.
This gun is too weak.
This gun is too strong.
This gun is a cheap Saturday Night Special,
These guns are too expensive and only gangsters own them.
There isn’t ANY gun that is “Just Right” for the peons to own.
Scott Bieser did it well: https://www.scottbieser.com/goldilocks_gungrabber.html
Meanwhile, folks might want to be considering the effects of small drone warfare.
As Matt Bracken posts: https://gab.com/Matt_Bracken/posts/110853723816948733
linking to https://twitter.com/narrative_hole/status/1688684469585076225
The eye in the sky will be a problem, or an asset (if you have your own).
So of course the FedGov strictly regulated them no long ago.
As far as I know, there is not yet any official doctrine in the US mil for dealing with them, or using them on anything like the scale now being seen in UKR.
So, for “local actions” here, the real targets will be the drone operators. Or, since they live in the next town over, their families. Or their relatives a couple states over.
In the interim, I predict “drones hunting drones.” Then again, with enough tech wizardry, take control of a Blue drone and have it drop their own stuff on their people. In any event, I hope someone is working on a plan. “Drone Wars” IRL.
One project in my head is figuring out the acoustics of drone propellers — specifically, how to make them quieter without sacrificing lift or over-working the motors.
Civilian/commercial quad- and hex-copter drones are pretty loud; even the small ones, you can hear the “buzz” from quite a distance. They put decent cameras on them — the operator can gather intel without flying real close — but the noise gives them away.
But what if some minor home modification reduced the noise, say, by half? They don’t need to be silent, just sufficiently quieter that they’re harder to track unaided.
If the video Matt Bracken linked is playing at normal speed, I timed the grenades’ release to the visible detonations at between 4 and 4.25 seconds. According to online free-fall calculators (I could do the calculations myself, but going online was faster) and assuming the grenades detonate on impact, that’s a drop of ~80-100 yards. Not so far up that the drone shouldn’t be audible and visible — and at that range, if you can see it, you can shoot it.
I have a feeling the “What caliber for drone?” question, which was a hypothetical, tongue-in-cheek question not too many years ago, will quickly become necessary knowledge.
I think more than a few have been working on some type of microwave gun, (for lack of a better description), that fries the circuits in drones.
That being said, I’m thinking the radio freq. used for drone comms is going to be incredibly easy to pick up, and possibly jam? Or as Francisco mentions, co-opting it.
I think this kind of warfare is going to die quickly. As command and control of such is going to be increasingly harder to hide also.
Frequency hopping (multiple times per second) makes detection and jamming of the signal “interesting” (nearly impossible).
True, unless you can figure out the hop sequence. If it’s a cryptographic sequence, that’s probably not feasible. Well, not unless you can capture an enemy device and reverse engineer it, and then only until the next key change. But if it’s a simpler one, like the civilian spread spectrum sequences which tend to be linear feedback shift registers, it’s easy.
Jamming also works if you supply enough power to overwhelm the coding gain of the spread spectrum scheme. Given that control is typically VHF or UHF, ordinary ham radio technology will let you send a kW or so to an antenna; add in antenna gain and you have a substantial level of jam energy on the target.
On the propeller noise, a typical issue that makes propellers loud is that the tips move at roughly supersonic speed. Is that the case here? If so, the answer would be slower turning props, made larger if needed but not enough to undo the slowdown. Another option might be shrouded props, which supposedly are also more efficient.
I could see where that is a big problem. Spread spectrum is a very interesting field.
But then when you have a thousand guys like Pkonking working on the problem?
But to me command and control is the heart of the matter. The more RF coming out of one location. The easier it will be to detect and target.
Iran used our latency problem in the encryption/decryption cycle we used for drone control. Since we had a single frequency landing control. Once it got close to their territory they just told the drone to land on their airfield. The Russians probably helped with that one also.
Glad all I can do is speculate and watch. I wouldn’t want to be a Ukrainian soldier right now.
One point of spread spectrum is “low probability of intercept”, i.e., it is hard to detect its presence because the spectral power density is so low.
Then again, do US military UAVs use spread spectrum control links? It would make sense, but of course that doesn’t mean it was done.
I’m puzzled by the “just told the drone to land”. If the control link is properly protected you can’t do that. Of course, it requires care. There are cryptographic means to protect against a whole range of attacks, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you may end up with something that doesn’t actually protect. The FCC is an example of people without clue, as you can see from the amateur radio regulations. They allow the use of encryption (defined as means to hide the meaning of a transmission) for satellite control links. But that’s not right: you don’t need cryptographic confidentiality (“hiding the meaning”) for that application. What you do need is data origin authentication (“is the message I received one sent by an authorized sender, not modified”) and anti-reply (“is this a new message rather than a copy of an old one”). Those require digital signatures and timestamps or sequence numbers, but they don’t require confidentiality. Ditto drones: if you encrypt the commands but don’t protect them against replay you’ve screwed up badly, and yes, in that case the enemy can take control of your craft. If so, the answer is: get a clue or find someone possessed of such clue.
The Russians have long very good ECM and EW tech, and it’s advancing rapidly to counter the UKR drones and NATO tech they are being sent, as well as protect their own drones and counter UKR ECM methods.
Presumably, our braintrust in the mil-industrial complex is working on counter-hardware, too. But one thing that keeps popping up for me is that simple, cheap, expendable, and large quantities are much more useful than a “perfect” large uber-hi-tek ultra-drone in very limited numbers. You can afford to commit (and risk losing) one of your10,000 $500 drones. You are much less willing to commit (and risk losing) one of your ten $500,000 drones even if it’s a lot more capable.
We need some simple, cheap, and importantly entirely domestically manufactured drones, capable of hauling a ~500g payload.
An open source project for the mechanical design and the control software would be neat. It could all be posted on the web, sort of like G-codes for CNC milling machines are.
Re “microwave gun” — it occurred to me that a high power low-microwave transmitter is readily available to anyone: it’s called a microwave oven. A bit of sheet metal work will turn that into what you need.
Not sure if that is what it is/was. The tech show had a space age looking all plastic type rifle, and the small drones they showed were burned from the inside out. In a localized area. What I assumed was a fried chip.
I could be all wet though.
I’m guessing that the person making this comment also believes that the government was nearly toppled on January 6th by an unarmed mob.
Sarah Hoyt had a meme about that: https://accordingtohoyt.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/365175456_2503773806452966_4445007728470614144_n.png