Could a drone deal with the recoil of an automatic weapon?
Okay, so we mount two guns on a drone…
If the line of fire passes through the vehicle’s center of mass, then it wouldn’t be much of a problem, especially for a vehicle that’s intended to kill at least somewhat indiscriminately. The drone may tend to drift off station a bit with sustained firing, but it won’t be trying to deal with any pitching/yawing reaction from the firing.
A full-auto weapon is also likely to a rifle rather than a pistol, and so would be firing with a higher muzzle velocity and transferring greater impulse to the drone. OTOH, you need a bigger heavier drone to carry a rifle instead of a pistol, and that more massive drone would be better at coping with the recoil. So maybe the issues cancel each other out, at least to some extent.
A full-auto weapon doesn’t come cheap these days, and neither does a big drone, and you probably won’t be getting either of them back after they’ve completed their mission. For a budget-conscious terrorist, the most bang for the buck is likely to be a pistol on a small drone, with the whole thing copy-pasted as many times as the terror budget allows.
But I suspect anyone in the US with the skills to build this would have little difficulty making a semi-auto gun into full auto. There are plans out there for just that sort of thing. Plus, you could also engineer some kind of bump-stock like firing mechanism.
I’m no gun or drone expert, but if the purpose is to kill indiscriminately and there’s a big crowd, accuracy isn’t really needed, especially if attacking from very low altitude. If the person intends for accuracy, though, I’d imagine they would put in some sort of cushioned-beanbag-type sort of absorbent material to help counteract the recoil from the gun, the way that airborne gunships do put around the howitzer.
Plus ammunition is heavy.* Any cheap, lightweight drone would be able to carry only a few seconds worth. Far more effective to use several suicidal gunmen.
*In the movie Navy SEALS, not highly regarded, someone calculated the ammunition weight in one firefight scene as 300 pounds per man.
You’ve been able to buy a drone at the mall for two decades now, and there’s been buzz about them for nearly that long. When Pizza Hut and Amazon are talking about using drones to make deliveries (which started in 2013), it’s not exactly a huge leap of imagination to imagine delivering a grenade instead of a pizza.
I’ve said it upthread:
A “drone” can be a kamikaze airliner, fighter jet, light 2-person airplane, or a toy quadcopter that fits in your hand. And everything in between.
Whenever we talk about what “a drone” can do, we need to define what sort we’re considering.
As to recoil specifically …
I personally used to fly Cessna O-2 Skymaster - Wikipedia in USAF. We could carry two M134 Minigun - Wikipedia in SUU-11/A Gun Pods - Wikipedia attached to the wings.
Strafing was easy and highly effective on soft targets. We were slow and got up close and personal with our work, so putting fire right where you wanted was simple. The total ammo load was real small, and we’d be real vulnerable to anyone shooting back with a bigger gun. So unlike an A-10, we’d not be stopping any armored assault. But stopping or seriously discouraging a dismounted platoon or platoon-plus scale infantry attack was doable. And kinda fun in a grisly sort of way.
So an airplane of that size can easily deal with the recoil, vibration, etc.
As I mentioned in the Ukraine war thread a couple days ago there are companies building AI robots to strap into the pilot seat of an unmodified airplane, connect its several “arms” and “legs” to the unmodified controls and send it out to fly a mission. Whether that’s delivering Amazon packages or strafing a county fair is up to the person defining the mission for the AI. Bots don’t care.
Newtonian mechanics would move the beanbag and the drone.
You can’t change the total impulse, but you can decrease the force at the expense of increasing the time of impact. That usually makes the recoil a lot more tolerable.
As long as it doesn’t interfere with the release of the next season of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
That grenade looks like a small pineapple. I will not tolerate pineapple on my pizza!
relax - if it comes from Pizza Hut, it is normally not considered a pizza, either …
In a perverse way, that might actually help the bad guys. The recoil effect from a machine gun against a drone might have the effect of spraying and distributing bullets more effectively against a crowd. Although I’d imagine that whoever is operating the drone would be waving the gunspray around anyway if there were no recoil to take into account.
Machine guns on drones is a stupid idea in the first place. They would be much more efficient as flying bombs. If lack of C4 makes that a non-starter, then just rig a silicon mat under the drone filled with 12 gauge 00 shot shells pointing down like a upside-down Bloomin’ Onion. Fly over crowd, electrically fire all the shells at once. Or sequence them inside-out in a spiral to really spread the shot around.
It bothers me that I can be this inventive.
Sorry if this is becoming a how to topic but do you even need a drone? There was some pulp action book I was reading where the inciting terrorist incident was some terrorists at like a division finals NFL game figured out the trajectory of their bullets using a computer, and simply fired a bunch of guns from pre-positioned and presighted benches a few miles outside the stadium from an abandoned building and arced the bullets over one wall of the stadium so they would land in the seating area of the other side.
I’d imagine that while such an idea might work, the amount of seats that it could hit might be relatively few, given that the bullets would have to pass through a very narrow angle such that their trajectory takes them over the wall but is not at a flight path that would make them continue on flying over the second wall. Unless they fired them really high, like a mortar or howitzer type of angle, but then the bullets, on their way down, might be so slow that they could only really cause injury but not death, since they’d be moving by that point based off of gravity and not their original propellant.
Yeah, this. The lethal parts of a gun are the bullets, and weight limits how much a drone can lift. All the parts of the gun that aren’t bullets are wasted capacity. Replace the weight of the gun itself with explosives and projectiles like in a claymore mine, and the lethality of the whole package goes up by a lot.
Or just some kind of homemade chemical agent.
Here is an anti-drone drone. It has it’s own radar to track enemy drones and some sort of weapon to down them. (Unfortunately labeled “Skynet Payload”. I think people take the wrong message from Terminator.) They don’t say what the weapon is but it sure looks like a gun barrel. Maybe the name implies it’s a net of some sort.
Paladin is a Group‐2 Low Collateral Effects Interceptor (LCEI) designed to defeat Group 1 & 2 small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) threats. It is a fully autonomous “wingman” for security operations with a suite of security missions such as perimeter security, sUAS interception, loudspeaker interdiction, and fenceline inspection.
It will stand powerless against the anti-anti-drone drone drone.