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[–] 70 points 18 hours ago (33 children)

I'm surprised that mass produced drone swarms haven't been deployed against populations yet. The economics of it is terrifying.

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  • [–] 71 points 18 hours ago* (2 children)

    I remember playing black ops 2 a long time ago and when a friend of mine played, he always used the drone swarm killstreak.

    I remember him laughing once about how the map we were on barely had cover from them.

    I told him he won't be laughing when it's us trying to run from a drone swarm in 20 years for stealing a rich cunt's clean water.

    Then we laughed at just how ridiculous that sounded.

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  • [–] 6 points 14 hours ago

    I remember playing black ops 2 a long time ago

    I told him he won’t be laughing when it’s us trying to run from a drone swarm in 20 years

    Well, CoD: Black Ops II came out in 2012, so if this tech gets commercialized in six years you'll be spot-on.

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  • [–] 19 points 17 hours ago (13 children)

    Ha, they'd never do that...

    btw, Have you noticed camo netting has gotten crazy expensive? Must just be inflation

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  • [–] 3 points 17 hours ago (12 children)

    Who gives a shit about nets those things have infrared heat detection.

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  • [–] 5 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

    That's why you need to use a survival blanket as an inner layer to reflect the heat, some neutral-colored canvas as a middle-layer, and the camo netting as an outer layer. Preferably with a few inches of separation between each one.

    Maybe add in some faraday fabric if you have anything that emits signals

    And an SDR on a raspberry pi with some python libraries to scan for incoming threats.

    It's not perfect but it's better than being a sitting duck

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  • [–] 2 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

    Hmmm. Problem I see with that is the thermal blanket reflects IR away from itself, so if you are inside of it, you still heat up.

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  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

    Yes, and that keeps the warmth inside the tent, so that it's not visible to IR from the outside.

    You can test it first if you have an IR lens. If you're handy with solder you can build one with parts from arduino, mouser or similar

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  • [–] 4 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Oh, I meant that it essentially gets hotter over time. If you're on the move, that could become a problem pretty fast

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  • [–] 1 point 13 hours ago*

    Oh yeah, I was thinking if you had to hide a whole base of operations, command post, resupply depot, or sentinel outpost.

    If you're on the move in a scenario like this, then you'd need to have some means of taking down a drone, and hope to high hell you won't need to use it.

    Mud is a decent insulator so you could smear yourself with that. In the winter you could wear quilted fabrics under a windbreaker. Basically the more insulation keeping the cold off your skin, the more it's keeping your body heat from being visible to IR.

    I also think glass blocks heat radiation to some degree, so maybe using that as some type of parasol or shield, but that might be less feasible. Lining an umbrella with a survival blanket might be possible, but again test it with your own IR lens to be sure

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  • [–] 3 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

    Emphasis on camo. They have some ir blocking.

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  • [–] 15 points 16 hours ago* (2 children)

    I'm surprised there hasn't been casual assassinations outside of war zones with them yet.

    There is this YouTube short movie about a future like that. The tiny drone just flies into someone's face with a small explosion to kill them.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

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  • [–] 4 points 11 hours ago

    For now they still need connectivity and a person that remotely controls them. It is very likely they jam the frequencies near important people already. Now, the time is near for autonomous seek-and-destroy drones that don't need connectivity.

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  • [–] 10 points 17 hours ago (10 children)

    We'll see these kinds of things in the next war. Russia and Ukraine would be there already if they had time to stockpile the drones rather than needing to deploy them as fast as they can be manufactured.

    With a few years of peace to build a reserve, there will more than enough drones and cheap spring-assisted launchers to serve as a terrifying new arm of MAD.

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  • [–] 10 points 17 hours ago (6 children)

    I'm not sure. Wars are won by costing the enemy's money these days. So they are using drones on infrastructure, becuase that costs more than soldiers.

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  • [–] 6 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

    Regardless of how wars are won, they are prevented by altering the risk picture for the enemy.

    This is also why many smaller NATO states are scrambling to procure long-range missiles outside of US control. In a hybrid war with Russia, they would control the escalation ladder - I.e. be able to yeet some high explosives at powerplants and fuel depots - rather than relying on Washington to grant permission.

    Ukraine has been doing similar with the flamingo and other cruise 'missile drone' projects. Iran as well - look at their response to US aggression.

    The trajectory is clear, mass precision strike is cheap and corresponding defense is not. Having a stockpile of millions of flying problems for your enemy to consider is the best deterrent short of nuclear weapons.

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago (4 children)

    Right, but I thought you were saying we would see these things to the posts drones that can follow humans through the forest, not the general drones for hitting nonhuman targets.

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  • [–] 5 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

    Ukraine built 8 million drones in the first half of 2026. Many different types, but the majority of them are designed to directly attack humans and light vehicles.

    The limiting factor in their deployment is the number of operators - currently the most common operating model is 1 drone per operator at a time, which means there are only so many drones in the air at the same time. These kinds of hunting algorithms will allow the scale of drone warfare to increase by loosening the operator bottleneck.

    There is force generation (recruitment, manufacturing, organization, etc.) and force employment (actually using those resources to achieve goals). Force generation for unmanned systems is already mature - again we are making millions of these things already - further advancement will come in force employment.

    And what a fresh hell that will be.

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  • Got any source for those numbers. I am fine with being wrong, but my impression from things I have read was that they were focused on drones that hit targets farther away. And that human targeting drones were the lesser of the production focus. The stuff I read talked about fiber optic cable for controlling the smaller ones becuase the jamming was too good. But it took a lot of cable. And each one required a circuit board and all that. The electronics were the harder to get part, so a bigger drone made better use of it. But like I said, I could have gotten the wrong impression.

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago (2 children)

    Can we just have world peace instead?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (1 child)

    No. No peace for you, only being hunted by autonomous drones. Now please kindly start running so we can test our latest movement prediction algorithms. You may feel a small pinch as the drone catches you, but don't worry, it'll soon be over.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    I feel like the nightmares I started having several years ago are starting to become real.

    People said I was having psychosis but no, I was looking into the future and seeing the most likely conclusion of the road the world is going down if we don't change course.

    It's not like I saw it in a crystal ball or anything like that. Just basic sequential cause-and-effect. But people would rather blindly step off a cliff because "well we haven't plunged to our demise yet, so clearly it must be safe to continue without adjustment."

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  • [–] 0 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    The only way we can fight back is in tunnels. None of us know how to build tunnels.

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  • [–] 1 point 13 hours ago

    The expertise might be out there somewhere. The harder part is the equipment. If you're talking hand tools, it's going to be laborious and time consuming.

    If a net can trick the lidar though, you could set up a wall of net with a small opening to run through, and hope to high heaven the drone gets stuck in the net.

    It would require some precise planning though.

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