Are remote-firing gun drones legal?

Silencers don’t exist. Suppressors do, and they’re legal with a tax stamp.

The stamp is tied to the suppressor, not the firearm, so you can move that can to any gun you have a way to fit it to.

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Meh. I don’t think this is really an issue worth legislating. Current laws governing firearm use should suffice. Fly it around in the city shooting feral cats? Bad. Fly it around on private land shooting into a berm. OK.

I guess if we get a huge uptick of people making drones and shooting others with them, but some how I think that won’t happen. Mostly because most people can’t afford both guns and high end drones as a hobby.

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You might need a more powerful platform to fire a shotgun from with any kind of reliability. I think they used a .22 here for a reason, and you can see the recoil is still pushing things around quite a bit. A 12ga is orders of magnitude more recoil.

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And orders of magnitude more engineering fun. A .22 is a good proof of concept before scaling up.

There are quite interesting cases of heavy guns on airplanes in the air warfare history. Recoil suppression is an important part of the designs. Quite a lot of prior art to learn from.

Edit: E.g. the 105 mm howitzer carried on the AC130 platform.

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Point taken. :slight_smile:

An autonomous drone that made its own decisions about who or where to shoot would be a problem.
A drone controlled by a person shouldn’t be much more of a legal problem than that same person holding a normal gun.
It’s still illegal to shoot people except in self-defense, and it’s not a particularly useful tool for self-defense. It’s also illegal in most states to hunt animals from helicopters, and a drone is a helicopter.

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Do rats count as animals?

…how much does an image amplifier tube with optics weigh? With a night vis, such drone could be an enjoyable deRATizator…

Many of them are, although this need not be assumed.

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Good to mention. The multirotors are stealing the show, but the powered gliders are still pretty good and usually way less power-hungry. (Then there are the high-speed jet-powered model aircraft, which cover the third bracket of speed ranges. I wonder if there’s a supersonic model airplane for the bracket #4…)

Whether or not it’s legal, it’s clearly grotesque and ridiculous. The proper payload for a drone is either anthrax, sarin or high explosives. Sheesh.

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Miniature Zeppelin with a Bofors gun?

Oo! Oo! RAILGUN!

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Sometimes you need a needle, sometimes a hammer. Different purposes, different tools.

I like you.

I like you! :smiley:

(A railgun would need quite high amount of energy, though. Possibly more than the drone batteries can supply, even if aided with a supercap. A chemical energy source may be more conservative but also more efficient, with less dead weight for the payload.)

(…what about an EMP generator? Would take out the drone too, most likely, but could be a royal fun. You need just a bit of electricity for the beginning, and you can supply even that with a bit of explosive and a disintegrating magnet in a coil, or a piece of piezoceramics. And a coil wrapped around an explosive core. Unsuitable for powering a coil gun, would be better to just use the chemical energy in a conventional propellant, but could do a good job against electronics, especially the soft, non-hardened kinds.)

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A good guy with a net gun?

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A frood with a herf gun?

A couple of things come to mind:

“Worst hunter-seeker ever.
-Paul Atreides

‘You can have my gun when you pry it from the crashed frame of my quadcopter.’

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Or a nuclear bomb pumped x-ray laser… You’d probably need a bigger UAV though.

Not really a good idea. The atmosphere is fairly opaque for xrays. These are better suited for space.

The xray absorption in air is what forms the early fireball in the atomic bomb explosion. Nukes in space are somewhat underwhelming, visually (unless you have an atmosphere nearby, in which case they make marvelous auroras).

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So forget the lasers part.

Atomic drone.
Insta-sun, just-in-time, door-to-door.
I like you! :smiley:

Edit: What about to power the drone with a small onboard reactor? And what about using a scramjet as a power plant and a hypersonic airframe instead of a lousy multirotor? How would Project Pluto look with today’s technology?

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Sod it.

PUNT GUNS MAKE A COMEBACK! NO COYOTE IS SAFE!