I understood it as they dont intend to get the drone back.

I did some searching, letter bombs were using 50g of RDX [1] and were able to kill a person so driving (and exploding) a drone with 171g of RDX into someone is more than enough.

If you take its 18km of reach (while I doubt the controls are able to go that far although with a 4g sim card this could be doable) you get a poor mans cruising "missile" for $1k. And there is nothing preventing (except the price) launching few of them.

I think that those drones are posing a real threat even more as probably the drug cartels have the money to realize it, if they can afford to build parallel cellular network [2], they surely can also perform this.

Their use case probably is not killing an average Joe but rather assassinations on high profile targets that are heavily guarded. And quite frankly I am really interested how bodyguards can tackle this as drone can literally fall from the sky, without any electricity being used so jamming (or frying electronics if feasible) wont work here. I think this is going to become a real nightmare in the future.

[1] 4g of RDX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Qj1qSZDKg or 100g of "something" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_664jlLwqI

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...

Hmm, isn't the idea of letter bombs that the bomb is literally within arm's length, whereas that sort of proximity for a noisy drone, keeping it close enough to a possibly moving target, while setting it off may not be super practical. It may be more realistic to get within, say, 10 meters?

Also, no way the FAA would issue waivers for this sort of mission. /s

Yes, this is certainly a part of problem constructing it.

I would imagine that replacing the motors and adding larger battery while keeping the control system shouldnt be an issue.

Also within an article there is a picture of a box with 4 motors, if lower part would be made from something like copper, it could be used as shaped charge [1] or adding shrapnel would also be an option. Or just make it to carry the normal hand grenade. The noise is surely an issue if you dont keep the distance, so I would imagine that you fly high over the target and then go into free fall.

In either case, this has a potential to become something really nasty.

Anyway, enough of this talk, it is surely an interesting technological challenge and interesting debate, but there are some really sick people on this planet and I dont want to give them any ideas. Also I bet there are some red lights blinking in some 3 letter agency somewhere :D :D :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge

A phone network is no use - latency means it’s useless for visual realtime control of a drone and you could just store a gps waypoint route on the flight controller and save the 4g modem weight if you meant as a mission control mechanism.

Achieving the precision of someone holding a letter would be remarkably challenging. Source: racing drone pilot for 5+ years.

Forget visual - DIY (semi-)autonomous drones are doable today and could be pretty scary too. 4G may not be good enough for a human pilot flying FPV but it’s likely more than enough for a drone with GPS running Ardupilot to hone in on a target tagged with a planted transmitter or bugged phone.

Hobbyists have been documenting step by steps for this since 2008, nothing you’re suggesting is remotely new.

Why hasn’t it happened? What is the part of the movie plot imagination that doesn’t translate quite as well to real life?

I'm not sure, tbh, though I suspect it's due somewhat to the general technical incompetence of (terrorist & gang) organizations. Bright people aren't exactly attracted to the idea of joining an organization which doesn't value life highly, and the bright ones that do enlist may be likely to be conscripted to work on other projects or killed by enemies/rivals. It's doable by hobbyists, but doing it with the scale/accuracy needed to be dangerous is a complicated endeavour that doesn't lend itself well to this kind of organization.

Fly a drone carrying a 500gram camera behind a tall building. You’ll learn the 6 things that stops this whole idea working. It’s consigned to the movie plots for the foreseeable future.

Think a lot of these comments don't take into consideration how cheap these drones can be made, especially if you have add a 3D printer into the mix.

Printing the air frame is a huge cost saver.

Cheap motors are everywhere, plenty of places to scavenge tiny hobby motors (doesn't have to fly super fast or lift 2000 grams)

Cheap arduino's for brains and motor control, not much to it.

You can get away with having a tiny lipo battery for powering the motors since it's a one way trip for the drone anyways...

With the right choice of materials you could get a drone BOM down to $100-150 [not included transmitter remote control] Needless to say, having a cartel budget you can really pump up production to few 100 a week if needed....

Making sumthing that's going to be used for a one way trip isn't hard, when your objective is to make a impact on target.

This is the new battlefield.

Russians use drones at regular basis to throw[1] old ВОГ-17[0] grenades for automatic grenade launchers at Ukrainian soldier at Donbas.

[0]: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%9E%D0%93-17 [1] https://www.slovoidilo.ua/2020/06/11/novyna/bezpeka/bojovyky...

You mean mostly Ukranian citizens against Ukrainian army which was unconstitutionally deployed against them? (note that I do not deny Russian involvement, but foreign involvement in civil wars is a really common matter)

Ukrainian army uses similar simple drones to throw grenades at rebels as well [0][1]. And interestingly enough Chinese develop similar drones [2], so I think they will be more and more common in future conflicts.

[0]: https://tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/202052159-Rc... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_Y810e2RXk [2]: https://www.defenseworld.net/news/24569/Weirdly_Shaped_Chine...

Yep. Ukrainian Voluntary Army used them too. Ukrainian army bought military drones from Turkey, which did show in Syria.

BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

Those Turkish drones have been bought in 2019 and AFAIK barely seen deployment for the fear of losing them. While the cheap drones are widely used by the army at the very least for reconnaissance. It's very hard to distinguish the Ukrainian army from the "volunteers", but the drone from the link in my previous comment was shot down just in 2020.

>BTW: 3 millions citizens of USSR were at Germany side in WWW2. Do you think it was civil war?

No, because those collaborationist have stayed mostly in the rear (e.g. see deployments of the SS "Galizien"), while on front lines fought forces from the invading countries. Also it's a matter of ratio. USSR was invaded by a 3.8M strong force, so even if you include those collaborationist, more than 50% of the invading force were foreigners. Meanwhile in today's DNR/LNR militia more than 90% of personnel are Ukrainian citizens (well, de jure, most of them don't think about themselves as Ukrainians anymore) and by a very strange coincidence in all recent prisoner swaps Ukrainian citizens were swapped for Ukrainian citizens. A very strange "Russo-Ukrainian war", don't you think?

To get a sense why it's a civil war, just watch footage from the early days of the conflict [0][1]. You can see that moving military forces have been actively blocked by simple folk who understood, that this unlawful deployment will simply result in Ukrainians killing other Ukrainians for political gain of the fresh-installed government.

BTW I do think that Chechen wars can be viewed as a civil war, even though the rebel forces were supported by Saudi and Kuwait money, and foreign mercenaries have actively participated in it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xp4I-prrk0 [1]: https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=039_1397631470

Why is this comment being downvoted?

Because the first sentence in the comment contains an inconvenient truth which goes against the dominant propaganda narrative and which is really hard to refute, so the only tool left for "fighting" with this information is downvotes?

> I don't know what specific model is shown in the picture but if it is a DJI Mavic Air 2 then it only weighs 570 gram and can only fly for 34 minutes.

It's worth what, on the order of $1000? Strap 100 g of explosives to it, fly it to the target's face and detonate. It does not need 34 minutes of fly time.

> So that would give us at most 171g

Grenades weigh about that much.