Ammunition company is selling shotgun shells designed to shoot drones

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“high end goose or turkey load”

Which, as the world now knows, were also listed as my preferences in my Ashley Madison profile.

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You’re in luck, because I’m preparing for the high end goose or turkey apocalypse!

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Shotgun shells? Why, when I was a lad we used grapeshot. Arrrrh!

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Arrrrrh!

I prefer me some chain shot!

Or bolo rounds for those who insist on shoulder fired weapons.

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So with the wrong choke, this ammo could be less useful than a round of buck or bird shot?

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The world’s most expensive skeet shooting, I suppose.

PRIVACY! WE HAS IT!

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I was gonna make a Christmas dinner joke, but yours is better.

screw the drones, I’m going after the queen.

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What this calls for is some sort of EMP weaponry that will leave most of the downed drone in a semi-recoverable state.

Quickly! To Kickstarter!

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Directed energy weapons are surprisingly difficult to pull off well.

A device possible to implement with reasonable budget and reasonable research would be a laser dazzler turret. A laser pointer that is kept aimed at the drone and neutralizes its vision sensors. With a higher-power pulsed laser a permanent damage of the sensor may be achieved, but will likely affect only some pixels. A mission-kill, temporary dazzling, is an easier-to-achieve goal.

Would have to be equipped with a rangefinder, though, to avoid accidental dazzling of a manned aircraft. This could be implemented as a pair of image sensors and evaluating the parallax of the object.

Another option is using a high-powered reflector, kind of like the WW2-style searchlight, scaled down as the target is not a B17 five kilometers up but a drone 50 meters up.

A strobe lamp, at night, may be more effective per joule of energy than a steady light, due to confusing the AGC circuitry of the cameras. Kind of like the Macrovision copy-protection on VHS tapes.

Edit: A microwave gun could be a fun to make. An old C-band dish on a pan-tilt mount, and either old radar magnetron or a homemade one (some precision mechanics, plus vacuum, nothing difficult, almost a century old tech - more if we count vac tubes in general). Then a cap bank (again radar surplus, but homemade rolled ones should be sufficient, vacuum-impregnated with oil, if possible low inductance and possible to build into waveguides) and a high-power switch (surplus from high voltage installations or old radar, but if we have tech to make a magnetron we’d have tech to make a big, fat, well-fed trigatron too).

Vircator could be also a fun homemade high-power pulsed microwave generator.

Anybody here skilled at high frequencies who’d have an idea how to design an extra-low inductance capacitor, and a waveguide for high voltage high power pulses as for such short rise times regular wiring won’t work?

People with skills that involve gigahertz-class designs at higher than milliwatt powers are annoyingly rare… :frowning: :frowning: :frowning:

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I was thinking of something more along the lines of the ESD Harpoon from 2 Fast 2 Furious (which is of course not a real thing, apparently), scaled down somehow to shotgun-shell size. But that is probably only slightly less fanciful.

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Such weapon is a dream of cops. There are already research/development activities about those. But they are pretty difficult to pull successfully even for well-funded labs.

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Shooting a load of turkey shot into the sky is safer than a lot of these other approaches to downing drones.

I am unsure that it is a federal offense to shoot a drone out of the sky, as “amateur airplane” operation falls into a grey area of FAA regulation – the same regulations drone operators are saying makes shooting down their “aircraft” a Federal Crime also forbid operation within 500’ feet of a residence.

Assuming the drone is operating below 83 feet over private property, the homeowner has airspace rights, see US v. Causby

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Man, this one must be a real puzzler for people who hate drones and hate guns.

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The confusion must rival vintage art cinema.
Pass the popcorn. :smiley:

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What is the reasoning for it being a federal offense to shoot down drones?

Are you allowed to shoot down remote-control cars in your backyard? (Proper licenses etc permitting, of course.) How is it any different? Of course you can’t shoot down other people’s drones, but that’s already covered under destruction of property. It’s illegal to shoot mailboxes, but there’s no federal law about it.

I have no desire to shoot much of anything, but I wonder whether these laws were pushed in by Amazon lobbyists.

I presume the legislation is motivated by the potential damage caused by falling wreckage.

This is quite easy so long as you have enough of the right ceramics. There used to be a French company that made 5kV 0.1uF ceramic capacitors. Basically you need a lot of circuit board, and you need to parallel them up with the wiring designed so you never get a loop. I did a design using a 19 inch rack and Eurocards to hold the capacitors. If you have a need to simulate lightning strikes on critical electronic infrastructure, this is the way forward.
[edit - each capacitor only holds about a joule, but (a) a thousand of them is a lot of joules and (b) with a 5kW magnetron that’s a respectable pulse.]

However your home made magnetron and trigatron are going to be the problem. All sorts of issues like irregular heating of the cathode, proper thoriating of the cathode, gettering, getting the nice constant magnetic field. Trigatrons tend to have short life in coulomb terms. Thyratrons - well, we had one company from which they lasted 500 hours and another which never reached 50. With that old style tech, company confidential information was critical. One process we inherited, the glass had to have helium bubbled through it for 8 hours. Never knew why, but without it the thing failed very quickly.

It is said that when the team under Tizard brought the magnetron to the US, one of the Americans remarked “Why, it’s just an electronic whistle.” He was silenced by someone (Rabi?) asking “So how does a whistle work?”

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Given that it’s apparently legal to shoot guns in many national parks, with not much concern over where the bullets fall since you don’t have to use a backstop, I can hardly see the addition of a falling drone causing much danger. It’s the bullets that don’t hit the drone you need to worry about, but in many places firing into the air is just fine, apparently.

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