12 gauge would be fairly strong medicine, but it has to be close in. If the drone is a stabilized gun platform with the ability to aim decently well (<4 MoA @ 100 yards) that's not going to be a winning battle.

Taking the discussion back to reality, almost all uses of drones at the moment are via suicide ("wire guided COTS missiles", you might call them), or just plain old recon. There are probably still plenty of grenades dropped from hover as well.

For those uses, there's a fairly decent approach ["missile"] or hover ["bomber"] stage that is probably plenty vulnerable to autonomous PDS via 12 guage medicine.

Tracking / detection could even be passive, partly acoustic, partly EO/IR, with only a small fire control radar if you really want it.

That’s assuming there’s a single drone and not an intelligent swarm that will circle around you.

Yes, I'm assuming reality.

Why nobody us building automated shotgun based solutions for anti-air defenses... maybe they need more than 100-150m reliable reach? Having 300 of those covering one airfield may not be ideal, nor cost effective, nor easy to manufacture and deploy and maintain in such numbers... we talk about russia after all, they let most of their strategic bombers arrogantly unprotected on runways with full gas tanks.

I don't think western common folks grok how depraved that country is in terms of doing good work, reward systems for such and corruption on every single level. puttin' built a mafia state and pushed this behavior from top->bottom, and these are side effects. Not some soviet competence and discipline, which wasn't stellar either but light years ahead of current state.

They’re parked in the open because of the treaty requiring those type of assets be observable by spy satellites. The USA in turn does the same.

Nope. You are talking about the New Start treaty.

1) Russia suspended the treaty 2023, so it is not relevant here.

2) The use of hangars is not prohibited, as can be seen by the climatized hangars that the US keeps their B1 in.

3) Russia has announced plans for such reinforced hangars years ago, but very likely some dacha or yacht had higher priority.

My mistake! I missed the news about the suspension, thanks for clarifying.

India had successfully used its age old L70, Zu23 guns to track and shot down 500+ turkish drones sent by pak. All these legacy weapons are modernised with passive drone tracking, locking, targetting and automated firing system. https://theprint.in/defence/how-upgraded-l-70-guns-or-origin...

I really don't care what Russia does, but in a future war USA is more likely to be attacked by asymmetric exploding drones than to be attacking with them. That I _do_ care about. And for that, a PDS system on a few trucks seems kind of useful. If they can be made cheaply and the expensive bits centralized, then a few $1k every 100 yards is kind of reasonable, don't you think?

That's basically what ammo such as AHEAD is. It bursts before reaching the target and sends out shrapnel in a shotgun-like pattern.

We've had acoustic gunshot detection for years at this point though. It's not like a shotgun firing is a quiet event.

There's a huge difference between firing back at an enemy that is attacking, and spraying radio signals all over the horizon even though nobody is attacking yet. The former won't tell them anything new, but the latter (which I'm talking about), is (was?) considered somewhat dangerous.

When I said "triggered" I meant you would enable it when under attack, at which point it doesn't matter if they know you're there anymore.

Are shotgun pellets supersonic?