3d ago

Comfy cozy

178 comments

I live in America. It's 2 AM and I just awoke from a nightmare wherein I was running from the govt. My wife, dog, and I were in hiding at my home, with friends occupying the place to help us stay hidden. But a drone spotted me. I shot it down, but we had 10 minutes to pack what I could into a short yellow schoolbus (which quickly became a British double-decker) and take off before agents showed up to capture or kill us.
By the way, I'm a white male, married to a white woman, and by all outside appearances, cis and "normal". Probably one of the most protected classes in America right now. And even I'm having nightmares about where our country is headed and when it'll be "my turn."
I woke up, picked up my tablet, and this was the top post in my feed. 😣
- Small, probably stupid tip, but what the hell. There is an almost surefire way to kill drones without needing a firearm. Buy a high-powered laser (>5W). It obviously won't be enough to take the drone down, but just a fraction of a second of that beam is enough to permanently destroy the camera. The downside is that the beam is very visible so you'd also be giving away your location. Also works on static cameras like traffic cams, number plate readers, ...
  
  This would be a trash way to take down a drone. You would have to know where the camera is exactly on the drone and then manage to shine the laser directly into that camera long enough to damage it. As distance grows between you and the drone, that time to damage the lenses will grow longer.
  The currently most common drone takedown methods implemented are radio signal jammers, counterattack drones with nets, and shotguns filled with an intermediate shot size between bird shot and buck shot. The first two are fairly expensive options which take know-how to create, where as the latter is a shotgun, which are abundant and fairly cheap in comparison to the other two.
  
  Yeah and this way if you're imperfect in aiming the FBI will show up at your door for lasering any aircraft in the background.
  
  But the trick is you have to manage to point it directly into the camera lense. May the odds be ever in your favor.
  
  High-powered lasers have a very wide beam ;)
  
  If the beam is wide enough to make hitting the camera easy, it probably doesn't have a high enough power density to cause serious damage. And even if it does, from what I've seen the damage is usually limited to dead pixels on the parts of the sensor directly exposed to the laser. I think a shotgun would be much more effective since all you have to do is clip a propeller or an important part of the internals and the drone is going down.
  
  It definitely would be, but you can't just order a shotgun online and have it delivered to you in a day like you can with a laser.
  
  Why wait for shipping? Just take a trip to the Walmart and pick one up today. (The shotgun)

178 comments