so what is the best way of countering low-tech assassination attempts carried out by quadcopters holding grenades?
shooting wildly at the sky with shotguns everytime you hear a noise sounds like it could be more risky than doing nothing.
trained hawks that pluck the drones out of the sky and throw them in the river?
some kind of counter-drone that attempts to envelop it in a blastproof blanket?
I dunno, but from the history of manned bombing I’m gonna guess the counter-countermove is approaching from high altitude and then dropping guided projectiles or (seems more likely) dive bombing
drones are pretty noisy, but they could just switch off engines and glide in silently for final approach, making it even tougher to react in time.
A quadcopter with a grenade is essentially a very slow and small missile, so I’d expect a miniaturised version of anti-missile systems to develop, perhaps with tradeoffs to compensate for the fact that it’s not set up in a warzone or an ocean and therefore filling the air with bullets to hit the thing isn’t acceptable
perhaps a nerf gatling
That… might sort of actually make sense.
A rapid-firing weapon with sublethal sticky munitions solves the lead-in-the-civilian-sky issue present with conventional bullets and figuratively present with lasers, and depending on the variety of munition, could be both cheap and safe enough for wide deployment. The munition itself would be something that expands on contact in order to interfere with the movement of the rotors, and could be cheap enough that dozens could be fired at a drone, making it more difficult to dodge.
Probably it would be something like a foam-encased expanding tangle of metal cables, possibly in a net shape after it expands, that catches the rotors and fucks them up.
Not sure on the viability of this approach.
Drone size must be considered vs munition size, guidance, and speed. It might be necessary to create something the size of a softball shaped like a dart which also uses proximity detonation.
Winged drones move along more conventional flight paths and would thus be something to counter with miniaturized AA.
You beat me to it.
Laser dazzler. Basically a big laser pointer that flickers across the camera and blinds the pilot. Alternately you could put a big generator in the back of an armored truck and mount a 10kW commercial welding laser to the turret.
