Turkey is Getting Military Drones Armed With Machine Guns (newscientist.com) 93
A drone with a machine gun attached can hit targets with high precision, according to its makers. Turkey is set to become the first country to have the drone, when it gets a delivery this month. From a report: The 25-kilogram drone has eight rotating blades to get it in the air. Its machine gun carries 200 rounds of ammunition and can fire single shots or 15-round bursts. Many countries and groups already use small military drones that can drop grenades or fly into a target to detonate an explosive. The new drone, called Songar and made by Ankara-based electronics firm Asisguard, is the first drone to be equipped with a firearm and be ready for service. Turkey expects the drones to be delivered before the end of the year.
It is hard for a drone to shoot accurately, partly because of the difficulty of judging range and angle, and partly because the recoil from each shot significantly moves the drone, affecting the aim for the next round. Songar has two systems to overcome these challenges. One uses sensors, including cameras and a laser rangefinder, to calculate distance, angle and wind speed, and work out where to aim. The second is a set of robot arms that move the machine gun to compensate for the effects of recoil.
It is hard for a drone to shoot accurately, partly because of the difficulty of judging range and angle, and partly because the recoil from each shot significantly moves the drone, affecting the aim for the next round. Songar has two systems to overcome these challenges. One uses sensors, including cameras and a laser rangefinder, to calculate distance, angle and wind speed, and work out where to aim. The second is a set of robot arms that move the machine gun to compensate for the effects of recoil.
drone for now (Score:4, Funny)
wait till "military AI", which doesn't need to be real AI, has these things autonomous, the blue screen of death when they go buggy will be the sky
Re:drone for now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Think of the ramifications if, say, DPRK hacked into Turkey's drones and had them assasinate Israeli politicians.
Why would DPRK care about assassinating Israeli politicians? It is hard to imagine two countries that have less relevance to each other.
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I think the idea was that Turkey would get the blame. Presumably they have Turkish airforce id on them.
Turkey used to be an ally of Israel, but with Erdogan, not so much.
Of course you could say the same thing about the relationship between Turkey and USA these days.
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I think the idea was that Turkey would get the blame.
Why would DPRK care about Turkey taking the blame for something?
Istanbul is 8000 km from Pyongyang.
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Maybe he is too stupid to know that DPRK doesn't stand for Iran.
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Because they want to distract the US at a crucial moment in and around Korea?
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Stop being silly.
China is the bad guy, yes.
Turkey will also be the bad guy if they do attempt genocide on the Kurds. They haven't however yet done that.
So America can't be letting or helping them, as they aren't doing it.
If they do start (and they have a track record of genocide; just ask the Armenians) then it would be appropriate for other global powers to respond. Feel free to request that response should it become necessary.
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Oh, good grief. Do you realize that Kurds make up about a fifth of the population of Turkey? They're no more likely to "genocide" Kurds than the US is to slaughter Californians. Kurds live throughout the entire country, with Kurdish-majority areas even on the European side of the Bosporus as well as near the Iraq border.
Re: drone for now (Score:3, Insightful)
They care very much: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewi... [tabletmag.com]
Communist-socialist dictators hate Jews. North Korea is a threat to all democracies, doesn't recognize Israel as a state and has been funding the terrorists Palestinians while both have been trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons.
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North Korea is a threat to all democracies, doesn't recognize Israel as a state and has been funding the terrorists Palestinians
The US funds Israel. It only makes sense that the enemies of the US would fund Palestine.
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North Korea is a threat to all democracies
Been watching the 2012 version of 'Red Dawn' again?
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Sounds like just desserts for me. If a politician is bold enough to turn their military into blind automatons and then gets their ass blown away by them?
That sweet sweet irony!
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They're probably running some sort of unix variant and use an SSH key to establish connection, unless they're using telnet and a default password for some hair-brained reason.
It would be interesting if someone did get a default key, or injected one during a software update, then flew one off the charger and used it as a distraction during an ambush or james bond style infiltration or whatever. An M60 machine gun strapped to a heavy lift drone is going to cost less than $10,000 in a couple of years u
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Friggin' Sharks with Lasers on their heads?
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An M60 would be a poor choice. They are heavy, belt-fed, gas-operated, high-maintenance, and unreliable. I dulled my Ka-Bar from prying crushed cartridges out of the firing mechanism so many times. An M60 also fires from an open bolt, so even the very first round is not reliable.
I would go for something magazine-fed and electrically operated. 5.56mm instead of 7.62mm.
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Doesn't matter a whole lot, you build the drone to the size gun/ammo you have, plus duration of mission. If you use an AK-47/74 that I also mentioned, that would also solve for this. If the gun is $800 and the drone is $1500 you can afford to make it a one way disposable mission. Gun jams aren't a much of a relevant topic when the attacker's life is not at stake. If you can make them field-deployable from the back of a jeep and less than $100,000 that's cheap for the military. Plus maintaining all that stuf
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I would go for something magazine-fed and electrically operated. 5.56mm instead of 7.62mm.
Only because you're an ignorant monkey who still thinks a knife is a prying tool and doesn't know about Metal Storm type guns.
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Why the fuck would you put a multi-barrel firearm onto a recoil sensitive platform?
A semi-automatic high recoil high calibre weapon makes sense, with a slow rate of fire as you need to regain control and aim again after each shot.
Otherwise you need something with low recoil, and 5.56mm will allow easier recoil management than 7.62 in a full automatic fire pattern. It will also be a lighter payload overall, which greatly impacts operational parameters for the device as a whole.
No, the person you replied to i
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I've never understood why anyone would want to use a .223/5.56 for anything larger than rabbits. I'm sure there are reasons, but I've never had them explained. While getting hit with one would hurt like a son of a bitch it would almost certainly not kill the victim unless the shooter were lucky or very skilled.
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Lower weight, lower recoil; more bullets fired more accurately.
That's not my assessment, that's part of the justification for adopting it as the standard NATO round. While I knew soldiers pissed off that they were losing the raw power of 7.62mm they hadn't factored in how much more accurate they were with the new round and weapons.
While getting hit with one would hurt like a son of a bitch it would almost certainly not kill the victim unless the shooter were lucky or very skilled.
You know those AR15 style weapons everybody gets upset about because they're used in mass killings? 5.56mm.
Maybe you should focus on becoming more skilled. For the sake of others
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That would also be why there are far more wounded than dead in almost all of those incidents. I'd prefer to use one shot and kill a deer than be able to fire six times and still have to track the poor thing down.
On the other hand there is always the other justification, that wounding is better than killing during battle. The Viet Cong quickly figured out that a dead soldier was one less opponent, while a wounded soldier was three fewer since it took two of them to carry the injured to be treated.
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Anybody hunting deer with anything smaller than a .50 is by your logic doing it wrong.
I'm not saying I disagree either. If you need the food, assure the kill. If you don't need the food, don't hunt the damn thing.
Skynet smiles (Score:5, Funny)
Shotgun owners smile (Score:2)
Seriously, the "unintended consequence" of delivering machine guns to your enemy had to have been anticipated. Between limited fields of view, blurred/rapid imaging due to being closer to the ground than the "normal" missile launching drones, in general be a low-tech hobbyist sort of project, etc
Lookout Kurds! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lookout Kurds! (Score:5, Funny)
Here come the Flying Death Turkeys.
Weaponized WKRP turkey drop! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Can't be that old--you didn't remark on the efficacy of a Beowulf cluster of these things... :)
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I mean, would this get a +5 funny if the Palestines were looking to do the same to Israel...
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I know I'm poo pooing over everybody's fun here, but we're talking about a real, actual ethnic genocide here.. I'm not sure we should be cracking jokes about it.
The danger is apathy rather than humor. To make jokes about something is to at least acknowledge it.
Remember Gandhi's list:
First, they ignore us
Then they laugh at us
Then they fight us
Then we win.
Humor helps a cause move from step 1 to step 2.
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No, you're actually not. Kurds make up 19+ percent of the population of Turkey, the only people talking about a Kurdish genocide are the fanatical Kurdish terrorist groups that the US funds, mostly in order to justify the tons of weaponry that the Pentagon/CIA give them. Their dream of a Greater Kurdistan carved out of Iran/Iraq/Syria/Turkey would require ethnic cleansing of a scale that dwarfs the US Indian Wars. It ain't happening in this century.
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I reflect that the value of *anything* decreases as supply increases. Naturally, that includes human lives. Sure, we may have a common set of moral principles that stipulate a high value for all human lives...but for the most part people are motivated by their actual incentives, and not some theory about what their motivations should be.
So, as our population continues to soar, the value of human life continues to drop, and the harmful consequences of overcrowding continue to rise....it makes economic sens
Slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Arms? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would think it would make more sense to build the drone around the gun, and mount it on a pivot, than to mount it on an arm. Putting the gun in the middle would also reduce aiming difficulty due to recoil.
If everything is correctly balanced, couldn't you also instead put the props on pivots, and pitch the whole drone?
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I would think it would make more sense to build the drone around the gun, and mount it on a pivot, than to mount it on an arm. Putting the gun in the middle would also reduce aiming difficulty due to recoil.
If everything is correctly balanced, couldn't you also instead put the props on pivots, and pitch the whole drone?
You'd also think you would want a specially designed, or at least minimalist, gun. But it looks like all they did was hook up a stockless AR-15 platform rifle to a belt-feed system and hang it under the drone. I think they even left the trigger group intact and have a mechanical arm activating the trigger?
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One word: Gyrojet. This would be the ideal drone fired round. The muzzle velocity when popping out of the gun is very slow, so it will not affect flight that much, and once the round gets up to speed, it is as lethal as a conventional round. Because the barrel pressure isn't high, it doesn't have to have the huge amount of metal to keep it from blowing apart. Heck, you could put a bunch of plastic cylinders all around the drone, rotate the drone to fire the next one, repeat.
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One of the disadvantages of the Gyrojet was that it required a change in the spin rate to account for a change in the angle of fire. Which makes it completely unsuited for a system such as this.
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While true of the original Gyrojet that's not necessarily the case any longer. The .50 caliber EXACTO round, a self-guided "smart bullet", was demonstrated successfully in 2015 and the technology would be applicable to a large caliber Gyrojet-type round.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-eve... [darpa.mil]
While more expensive than a typical round, you would only need one.
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Re: Arms? (Score:2)
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Me, I'd design the drone around the innards of an AA-12 for proper (recoil-less) CQB... 12ga is just too versatile.
You have to get in close for a shotgun to be effective. The target is likely to hear your rotors, and you will be vulnerable to ground fire.
Rifle fire gives you better range, ideally far enough that the target is unaware the drone is there.
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Against an unsophisticated enemy (e.g. regular Kurdish militia units) you don't worry if they hear you coming. You swarm them anyway.
Someone shoots at one of your drones? Two nearby ones zero in on the firing point, one fewer defender.
These things will be cheap enough to deploy in their hundreds or even thousands, and disposable enough to assault fortified positions. MTBs are going to enjoy a revival as they're rapidly going to become the only survival unit on a battlefield.
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But it looks like all they did was hook up a stockless AR-15 platform rifle to a belt-feed system and hang it under the drone. I think they even left the trigger group intact and have a mechanical arm activating the trigger?
This is a stripped down Ares Shrike. At the very least, It's a Shrike upper receiver, barrel, and rail system. The rail system on this is virtually identical to the one used by Ares Defense.
I don't think that's the future (Score:3)
Such a drone will have to be big and heavy, so an easy target for firing back. Now, a swarm of small drones, each of them with a small explosive load, that will attach to the body of the target. That I think it's the future of precision-killing drones, frankly.
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Such a drone will have to be big and heavy, so an easy target for firing back. Now, a swarm of small drones, each of them with a small explosive load, that will attach to the body of the target. That I think it's the future of precision-killing drones, frankly.
I see these machine gun drones as being best suited to defense, while explosive drones would be most useful for offense. Another option would be to use a quadcopter to deploy tracked gun drones that can hide in bushes...
Re: I don't think that's the future (Score:2)
I have a hard time seeing either form being used offensively. For one thing, a man is also a big heavy, easy to hit target, and you can't fight on your ass forever, you have to move. Nobody is going to be advancing under the fire of an even semi autonomous machine gun drone, not with today's MI, not for a while. explosive? Like a semi autonomous homing mortar? Sounds neat, but mortars are cheaper. I could sort of see that happening sooner than mg though, or... replacing the stationary remote triggered
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A.k.a. slaughterbots [youtube.com]
A bit late for 2019 (Score:2)
In related news ... (Score:2)
Who wants that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Terms are important. (Score:2)
Are we talking about a drone (autonomous platform) or a AUV (remotely piloted aircraft), or a man controlled quad copter?
Judging by the summary, it sounds like a man controlled hexacopter (?).
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There's a game for these people: Killbox (Score:2)
I've only seen it at the design museum earlier, so I don't know the details, but machine gun drone fans should play this: Killbox [killbox.info]
Caution: it may cause emotional distress in people who have no idea what that is
Time for a new Geneva convention (Score:1, Insightful)
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When it comes to limiting arms, one thing that Hague and Geneva conventions have shown is that bans on any truly effective weapons aren't respected.
The original Hague conventions that banned e.g. hollow point bullets, actually had a much longer list of banned item - for example, explosives dropped from aircraft...
Or look at all the conventions on landmines. The countries that refuse to ratify them are exactly the ones that are their most prolific users.
Or biological and chemical weapons. Pretty much everybo
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When President Clinton directly ordered the Pentagon to completely halt funding of bio-weapon programs they simply moved the budget for Dugway off the standard military procurement system and into the Black Budget. No one even changed desks. The Geneva Convention or Hague Conventions really mean very little to the people who actually run the world.
200 rounds? (Score:2)
How accurate do you have to be with 200 rounds? seems like that would make a nice size whole in most anything depending on the caliber.
Re: 200 rounds? (Score:3)
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Into a car, van, truck door from the side?
A house window..
Fail-Safe (Score:2)
I can't see anything that could go wrong with this shit.
I mean, who would ever misuse an anonymous, remotely-piloted, flying machine gun?
I know this is intended for military use *cough* but how long before the first personal, one-on-one murder is committed with a drone?
How long until our first mass shooting (Score:2)
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How can you be sure that a (civilian) murder with drone hasn't been done yet?
To do like this military drone and carry a gun isn't too easy.
A handgun needs a certain amount of mass to operate. I'd think that most consumer-grade drones haven't had enough lifting capacity.
Once delivery drones become more common, though, then that could change.
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Given there's youtube footage of people shooting firearms they've duct taped to their drones I think you're heavily overestimating the difficulty involved here.
Calibrating the aim with a crosshair on the feed from the onboard camera will take an hour at most if you only have to do it with a single drone and there are prebuilt remote triggers for things like BB firing tanks that you can easily adapt and attach to a more powerful weapon.
Then you either machine or adapt a lightweight firearm, strip the handle,
OK ok already (Score:4, Insightful)
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Most people don't realize that the 2nd Amendment says "arms" rather than long guns, pistols, etc. for the simple reason that they couldn't limit the weapons in use. There were merchant ships with more cannon than many naval vessels, every port city had an artillery battery, frontier communities often had mortars and carriage-mounted multibarrel muskets (precursors to the machine gun), and the "town hall cannon" wasn't just an ornament but could be used to repel raiders, Indians and Spaniards.
Oh, and there
The First Time... (Score:2)
I don't know what to predict happens after the first time one of these is let loose over a city full of people, but I can predict it will NOT be good.
Metal Storm? (Score:2)
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The idea of burst fire is you don't necessarily want all the bullets to be "accurate" in the sense of hitting the same spot/target. Your concept still makes some sense I suppose but maybe the recoil effect on the drone spraying the bullets around would be acceptable. Typical use by troops is in the 50-400m range, effective further out but that's fairly typical I'd say. Drones could get to the closer edge of that so even if their lighter weight gets the recoil effect bad the spread of fire might still be des
First ? (Score:2)
It's scarier (Score:2)
The future is scarier than we were afraid it might be.
Just some thoughts... (Score:2)
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I thinks that the classic 'Predator' style drones (fixed wing not rotor based) are still more effective from an air ordnance type perspective, but these 'gun style' drones probably (if used properly) are better in urban or dense settings (jungles, etc).
Predators carry two expensive missiles. These drones fire what, 200 rounds of cheap ammo? Not sure how much of that will fit in that box in a belt. They do very different jobs in every way. Predators can take out armored vehicles (which are most lightly armored on top.) But they're an expensive way to kill people.
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Blackwater already sells a semi-autonomous tracked 'perimeter patrol' robot with a belt-fed machine gun and automatic aiming.
A better clip of a drone in action (Score:3)
Ever closer (Score:1)
To sharks with lasers!
Am I the only one not thinking "Skynet"? (Score:1)
It wouldn't be hard at all to expand this model to program swarms of smaller drones. All kinds of Very Bad Things could result.