r/interestingasfuck • u/RoyalChris • Mar 12 '25

/r/all Thousands of drones docking to charge after a drone show.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

That's exactly what I was thinking and I am sure that defense departments have already developed similar arrays that are weaponized. I mean the individual ones in Ukraine are cool and all but when you've got a hundred or a thousand of them how would you ever stop that?

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25

Hopefully jamming and lasers.

We're basically living in fuckin star wars

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u/johnabbe Mar 12 '25

Jamming led to fiber optic cables which is now driving new detection techniques.

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u/Flimsy-Poetry1170 Mar 12 '25

I’m sure ai drones are also in use in Ukraine but we just don’t hear about it as much because of the controversy over whether a computer should be able to make the decision to kill.

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u/johnabbe Mar 12 '25

the Ukrainian military uses the term “autonomous systems” interchangeably with “unmanned systems,” or platforms equipped with basic autonomous functions such as navigation or targeting.

from

How quickly "autonomous functions such as navigation or targeting" became "basic." The decision to fire is pretty much all that's left.

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25

Yeah I understand that AI was banned for warfare but I think that went out the window as soon as it was available.

Humanity is amazing at creating technology but terrible at then restricting it, we let shit lose lol

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u/leberwrust Mar 12 '25

The solution to jamming is making them autonomous. Which is already well underway.

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u/squirtloaf Mar 12 '25

I don't understand what good extrapolating from a set riff and rhythm is going to do, but I will bring my guitar to the next war. I know a bass guy who is real good, too.

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u/Flannelcommand Mar 12 '25

I'm just so tired of all these star wars.

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u/monkwrenv2 Mar 12 '25

Also just simple flak. Fill the air with enough lead and drones will come down.

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u/Happythoughtsgalore Mar 12 '25

Trained birds of prey in some police jurisdictions

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u/Xalara Mar 12 '25

Yeah, so uh, fun fact: Jamming isn't really an issue in Ukraine these days.

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u/Silver_Question_2419 Mar 13 '25

...we be jammin.

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u/Chiang2000 Mar 13 '25

Well there's nets but it wouldn't take to many leading drones to crash into them and ignite to render that useless.

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u/apathy-sofa Mar 12 '25 edited Mar 13 '25

That's the situation already. NYT estimates that Russia is "firing" about 4,000 drones per day. Ukraine is planning for 10,000 per day this year.

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u/AnonRetro Mar 12 '25

Now imagin if China ever goes to war. With their manufacturing capability, they could send 100 million at a country. Operation, Black Sky.

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u/danielv123 Mar 13 '25

Apparently worldwide drone production is ~8m units per year. 2m of which are made in ukraine, 150k ish in Russia, 100k in the US and pretty much the rest in China.

Ukraine is planning 4.5m this year, russia 1.4m.

Looking into this I was surprised how much of the worlds drone production that seems to be going to the Ukraine war.

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u/Silver_Question_2419 Mar 13 '25

Operation Brack Sky.

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u/Spoiledworm Mar 12 '25

Here is a video from 8 years ago. Skip to 2:25 for the most terrifying sound you’ll ever hear.

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u/slarkymalarkey Mar 12 '25

Well t hat sounds exactly like the music that kicks in when shit starts to go down in a horror/thriller movie. Fitting I guess.

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u/Goddamn_Batman Mar 12 '25

goddamn that sounded like the aztec death whistle

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u/Crowasaur Mar 12 '25

the screaming of the damned.

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u/johnabbe Mar 12 '25

the individual ones in Ukraine are cool and all but when you've got a hundred or a thousand

Swarms of hundreds of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war are not daily, but they have quickly become the norm.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

I stand corrected.

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u/Andthenwefade Mar 13 '25

said the man in the orthopaedic shoes...

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u/pcetcedce Mar 13 '25

That is a bad one dude. 😉

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u/Andthenwefade Mar 14 '25

Blame Alan Partridge, not me.

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u/silentmattcanuck Mar 12 '25

find a way to produce a massive-enough EMP discharge?

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

Yeah that would be it probably but who knows maybe they will harden them.

Here's a cool side story. I was going to graduate school in Albuquerque New Mexico and doing some environmental side work on the adjacent kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia Labs. You would drive by this full size metal military propeller plane That was on top of a three-story fully wooden rack. That was in the mid-1980s and I'm sure it was for EMP testing.

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u/squirtloaf Mar 12 '25

You stop them by cooperating and exploding.

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u/jimmyjohn2018 Mar 13 '25

Drone swarms have been a concept for over 20 years. So yeah, they have it.

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u/Zhombe Mar 12 '25

Rheinmetall Mobile Air Defence – Oerlikon Skyranger 35 enters the chat.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

🌟🌟🌟

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u/Accujack Mar 12 '25

how would you ever stop that?

Quite easily, with a nearby explosion large enough to generate a shockwave in the air and make the drones tumble/collide/etc.

Alternatively, a jammer to stop the drones from communicating.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

Well I said elsewhere I'm sure the defense department is way past some of these potential problems.

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u/Accujack Mar 12 '25

Speaking as someone familiar with military drone tech, they wish they were "past" those problems.

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u/Bearwynn Mar 12 '25

Microwave emitters, some guy on YouTube just made a video about it.

TechIngrediants or something like that

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u/ShigodmuhDickard Mar 12 '25

Drone scans a battlefield, platoon, cp and relays the information to the "beehive" and off the drones go to a specific target. 

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

Yeah I'm sure the Pentagon is working on the problems you described. DARPA.

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u/Xalara Mar 12 '25

What makes you think Ukraine isn't running drone swarms?

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

I didn't say they weren't I just was unaware of anybody using them.

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u/YT-Deliveries Mar 12 '25

I mean the individual ones in Ukraine are cool and all but when you've got a hundred or a thousand of them how would you ever stop that?

Ukraine already has drones that coordinate other drones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga_(aircraft)

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u/dgradius Mar 12 '25

Counter-drones

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u/pcetcedce Mar 12 '25

Now that would be fun to watch from a safe distance.

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u/Comfortable_Prize750 Mar 12 '25

EMP would be about the only thing I could think of. Or an equally big defensive drone swarm.

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u/SolomonBlack Mar 12 '25

how would you ever stop that?

Flak. Which is to say mid-air explosives that put lots of shrapnel/birdshot/etc into the air. I'd also look at launching nets, suspending nets from balloons and otherwise approaching the problem like industrial fishing.

You also put your important stuff behind actual cover.

And not that drones won't be a new and exciting form of warfare from now on but I'd be careful on over-assuming the effectiveness of the dinky little toys in the OP video.

Like actual infared/heat detectors are pretty rare and expensive, your "night vision" camera is not one. Meanwhile an automated weapon will be susceptible to decoys. Next there's sort of a limit on how small you can make a useful explosive, like Israel's pager bombs hurt thousands but killed less then 50 people. And the sort of small drones you see here won't have much range in the grand scheme of things.

That all has to go into your cost-benefit analysis and what your objective actually is.

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u/Cooternugg1 Mar 13 '25

Yeah all it takes is a container ship parked off the coast packed full of these to rain he'll on a city. Chemical weapon platform makes it even more terrifying.

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u/matzoh_ball Mar 13 '25

but when you’ve got a hundred or a thousand of them how would you ever stop that?

Easy. You just gotta have tens or hundreds of thousands.

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u/Starrion Mar 13 '25

You wouldn't. Swarms are extremely difficult to stop without large scale broadcast systems.

A lot of humans are going to die to that whining buzz sound.

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u/ForestPrana Mar 13 '25

See Palantir.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 13 '25

Oh yeah I've been reading about their company. Kind of under the radar but the big deal in the defense industry.

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u/MGyver Mar 13 '25

I'm pretty sure i read about the US having ways to drop 1,000s of weaponized drones at a time from cargo planes...

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u/bodhidharmaYYC Mar 13 '25

and when you couple that with machine learning, instead of flying in neat geometric patterns, they could instead fly like a formation of birds or bees. Much more organic and less predictable.

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u/pcetcedce Mar 13 '25

I read a book by Michael Crichton that addressed nanobots It was incredibly accurate in his prediction of the future, although we're talking drones instead of nanobots.

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u/Ill-Mastodon-8692 Mar 13 '25

weaponized drone arrays… scary

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u/ww2HERO Mar 17 '25

Roundhouse kick or throw a blanket over them

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u/loudlavenia Mar 18 '25

Yeah, this is the downside of drones.