Re this fake videothat was a promo for a video game. It shows a remote control quadrotor with a machine gun attached. The video is faked in that the quadrotor does not have a working machine gun, but why couldn’t it? Other than getting a gun small and light enough what technical limitations keep this fantasy machine from being a reality?
Seems like the recoil would make it too unstable to remain airborne.
Aiming and recoil would be a challenge.
Plus, I think a real-life version would be quite large. It takes a lot of lift to pick up even modestly heavy items. And such a large object would be trivial to disable with a counter-attack. I’m thinking a few shots to the exposed rotors wourd take it out.
I think it could be built, though.
Getting the gun small and light enough is probably nearly impossible - the rotors on a device of that size don’t typically generate a lot of thrust - agile performance is usually achieved by building the whole machine out of very lightweight materials.
If you got the gun light enough, recoil would probably be a bigger problem than the fake device in the video experiences.
There is a fair number of technical issues. Quadrotor of that size is too light to be an accurate shooting platform, recoil of even a handgun would probably be too much for it. It would also require a large external antenna on the receiving side. The sort of wi-fi shown in the video can only manage about 200 feet.
Thankfully, remotely controlled weapons are quite illegal.
There’s a reason why these toys are generally made out of painted foam plastic. The first time you pick one up, you’ll be amazed by how lightweight it is.
And on a different note, the video is absurd. He’s got the prototype in his hands, but it’ll take at least ten years for it to show up on battlefields? And why are the mannequins bursting into flames when shot?
An automatic weapon on a light weight quadcopter might not fuction correctly. As I understand it, in order for a gun to cycle, the slide has to move rearward in relation to the body of the gun. If the whole gun kicks backwards that movement is impaired. It’s called “limp-wristing”.
Ah, if you watch any of the “Rednecks in marginal but mildly interesting professions” shows on the Discovery Channel, you’ll know that it’s common to put explosive materials in targets to make things more dramatic.
Quadcopters are pretty damn maneuverable, as demonstrated here. I don’t think they’d have any problem staying airborne while an on-board machine gun is being fired.
Remaining stable enough to provide consistent aim (i.e. stationkeeping) would be more challenging. Two ways to do that:
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ballast on the copter to make it more massive, mitigating the effect of recoil. You’re gonna need a bigger copter. Perhaps something like this.
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Positioning the barrel of the gun so that the firing axis passes through the center of mass of the copter. It will still experience recoil, but only in an axial fashion directly away from the target; there won’t be any tendency to pitch up or down and move the aim off of the target.
Either way, for a craft that’s so small and lightweight, you’d want automatic stability systems and targeting systems built in: operator presses a button, copter identifies a point on the ground to shoot at, and then automatically corrects for wind and recoil to keep bringing the gun axis back in line with the target, firing a round each time that happens. You could even have canned programs that keep the copter on the move, so it wanders back and forth or circles the target while it shoots at it, making it more difficult to defend against.
what if you mounted the gun facing directly down? then the recoil would help (slightly anyway)
Assuming you’ve been through all the legal hoops & hurdles, waited a year and written all the checks to be a legal owner of an automatic weapon, aren’t there certain legal issues to mounting them on vehicles?
No one here is familiar with FPS Russia?
Cite?
I have a couple of .22 caliber toys that could be stripped down to around 3 pounds at their most basic iteration. A good-sized copter can certainly lift that, and I suspect the mass of both gun and helo would make a reasonably steady platform.
Now I think I know what I’ll do this summer…