Anyone who thinks they stand a chance against drones with a gun hasn’t been paying attention to what’s happening in Ukraine.
Gonna pew pew a CEO in the back? Sure, guns work for that.
Trying to save your own life against a fast and agile target that needs way less precision than you to be effective and probably never even presents a target? Nah mate, you’re fucked.
Because they have a spread of multiple shot pellets instead of a single bullet.
Fucking obviously duh, they’ve been used to hunt small, evasive birds routinely, everywhere, for like 150+ years.
Hunting a nimble flying object with a sniper rifle is a laughably absurd idea.
This actual post from this woman is so stupid I would have thought it was from a 12 year old whose only experience with guns is from CoD… but nope, its a 50ish(?) year old woman.
Guess she’s never hunted birds, and thinks its just the same as hunting deer or hogs or something???
A quick Google search shows birdshot has an effective rang on the order of 40 - 50 yards. Now, you still have to be competant with a shotgun, but the public perception of shotguns is generally skewed. They have a much tighter spread and longer range than movies and games would have one believe.
Go to YouTube and search “Ukrainian drone drops bomb” and you’ll find tons of them. Like this one where the soldiers had no chance of hitting the drone.
I’m guessing you mean just the disposable kind of drones popularized in Ukraine? We’ve been dropping hellfire missles from Reaper drones at 10,000+ feet for a couple of decades now.
This is about drones that are cheap and can shoot you with a bullet. Sure a +1M$ drone will kill you from behind the horizon, but a repurposed consumer drone operates on the same ranges as handheld guns and as such could be shot by a handheld gun. If you can hit it, which is why you use a shotgun to increase your ods
it’s not necessarily with a bullet. Most improvised attack drones drop explosive payloads, since it’s both simpler to set up and simpler to use. Outfitting a drone with a gun takes making a complicated system for aiming it, while a payload drone just needs some 3d-printed parts, some extra wiring, and usually just a single servo.
Are the cheap drones really shooting people with bullets? I was under the impression they just had small explosives strapped to them and were single-use.
you’re correct, they do not strap guns to improvised attack drones. they’re not necessarily single-use either, though. A kamikaze drone will detonate its payload while its still attached, which is an option. There is plenty of footage of IADs which use a servo to just physically drop a payload onto targets from above, and those could potentially be used over and over. I think the kamikaze version is able to be more effective, for a variety of reasons, but both versions seem to be seeing use.
Depends on the choke. A 12 gauge full choke turkey gun can probably put a pretty tight pattern that range, but it’s gonna work better with bigger shot. If you want super fine shot and a full pattern, you aren’t shooting that far.
GarandThumb did some tests in a video a while back. IIRC he did both choked and not, along with different types of shot and slugs. everything but birdshot was pretty effective out to a couple dozen yards? I’ll track it down and drop a link after I’ve rewatched.
Other people have already pointed out that your conception of shotgun spread is essentially based in video games, where the spread is (in all but basically milsim games) greatly exaggerated.
You’ve countered that drones can fly higher than an actual shotgun range.
Yep. They can.
… Did you read the article I posted?
Shotguns are being used fairly commonly by both sides.
It doesn’t matter what you or I think about how practical or useful they are…
The people fighting the war think they are practical and useful.
…
Nonetheless, here’s my attempt to explain the popularity of shotguns in Ukraine as anti drone weapons:
This is not a solution geared toward being able to shoot down any drone, of any size or capability, at any range, at any altitude.
Obviously a shotgun is not going to be able to shootdown a greyhawk or reaper style drone.
Most of the small FPV drones that attack infantry or ground vehicles do so by basically either dropping a bomb or grenade or mortar round from maybe 25 to 150 feet in the air…
Or just being rigged with some kind of an explosive to explode on contact or via a remote trigger.
(Also, these cheap FPV drones do not really handle altitudes above roughly 150 ft that well (though this will vary by exact model). Unless its a dead calm day, gusts of wind easily blow them around, draining its limited batteries as it tries to keep its position steady, severly shortening the drone’s range.)
These kinds of drones are extremely cheap, plentiful, and effective against infantry and many ground vehicles…
When it comes to these kinds of drones, shotguns are also extremely cheap and plentiful, and practical self defense weapons.
Shotguns are more useful against these kinds of FPV drones than an average assault rifle, due to the spread of shot.
They are way, way more cost effective than using a tunguska or gephard or some kind of MANPADS platform designed to shoot down jet aircraft.
Shotguns are also just more numerous, and don’t require specialized training/equipment like a dedicated AA platform or EM jamming and all the equipment that entails.
You can just give a few out to every squad or vehicle crew, and thats way, waaay better than just hoping you’re operating near enough to an expensive friendly AA platform that exists in far more limited numbers, or being SOL if you’re not.
Further, a shotgun is also just useful as a general combat weapon.
Sure, buckshot has limited range, but sometimes fights occur within tight conditions… namely trenches or an urban environment.
Also slug rounds exist and can give you more range than buck or birdshot.
Also you can use door breacher rounds, or slugs in a pinch, to blow apart door hinges and locks.
This lets me know that you have never experienced a long term shot gun owner. Shotguns do not explicitly fire only shot or slugs. They never have. It is actually quite easy to tailor shells to a target. Someone with fishing line, a soldering iron, and a box of cheap pellets can make a net that will take out all commercial drones (or any of the 4 propeller style). And on top of that, there are widely available (albeit expensive) commercially available anti-drone shells. If you look in all of the footage of Russians being killed via drone, they all have a rifle with some kind of optic. These are very, very bad at shooting an agile flying target. Every hunter on the entire planet can tell you that. You know what’s great at that? A shotgun with the appropriate gauge and shell. Look, it isn’t that hard to hunt birds at over 50 yards (that’s 150’ as you so inaccurately put things in the range estimate) with a solid appropriate turkey gun. You have displayed a large amount of ignorance here.
Someone with fishing line, a soldering iron, and a box of cheap pellets can make a net that will take out all commercial drones
I would love to see the Rube Goldburg Shotgun you think you’ve invented and watch you try to fire it (from an extremely safe distance). Please post that shit to YouTube and share it, because god damn dude. Fishing line and cheap pellets shoved down the barrel of a shotgun for the purpose of butterfly netting an MQ-1 Predator?
Lolz. Lmao, even.
You have displayed a large amount of ignorance here.
Please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself. Yes, you can jam all that stuff in a shotgun shell and make a crude anti-drone shot.
No, it’s not going to be an MQ-1 Predator (which is bigger than many WWII fighter planes), but nobody said that, either. Most of the drones in Ukraine are the size of a DJI Phantom.
Ive heard and seen some images and videos of soliders building their own antidrone ammo. They rip the tip off the casing and heat shrink a coulple of bbs together and crimp them to the casing. I’m not certain how legitimate or effective it is but I’ve seen several videos and images of it. They recomend staggering the homemade rounds with tracer rounds to help with aiming.
People have been basically homebrewing shot gun shells since shotguns have existed. Everything from flachetes, to bolos, to XREP - even idiots that have shoved a shell full of .17 hmr rounds to see what happens. I 100% know that homebrewed anti drone shells exist and range from tying fishing line around pellets, to just launching a rope.
There’s an old story that cowboys would load nickles. It ends up being something like $1.25 in nickles, which would be enough to spend the evening with several prostitutes at the time. So probably no unless they were in a real pinch.
Anyway, they stopped being minted in 1857, but that’s still within the early timeframe of ‘The West’, and I’d bet they were still used in circulation for another decade or two.
Looking up the size of coins compared to shotgun gauges, I’m guessing the tale was dimes rather than nickles. Dimes would fit in a 12 gauge just fine. A half penny would need a 6 gauge, and a full penny would need a 10 gauge. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think 6 or 10 gauges were ever popular shotgun sizes.
Now here’s a thought… What about using drones to “take care of” a CEO? The risk of being caught would be lower, as you can be located hundreds of meters away or more. It’s also relatively easy to acquire a drone, and you can make explosives with stuff you can buy at the hardware store.
(Disclaimer: This is just a thought experiment, I’m not dumb enough to try this, don’t worry FBI :3)
Drones that weigh 0.55 pounds or more must be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. If you buy a drone, you’re supposed to register it, and that puts the drone and your name into a Federal database.
Every electronic device with networking capability that exists has a “burned-in” MAC address that tells you info on the manufacturer, etc. This coupled with the drones serial number can narrow down specifically which device it was and allow law enforcement to figure out which specific store sold this specific drone. Then they hit the store with a warrant for the customers, match up the drone to a name, and go.
Communications with commercially available drones are generally unencrypted and easily intercepted. Triangulation of the source of the controlling unit would be trivial.
It’s sooooo fucking easy to find someone who is using a drone if you’re serious about it. It just takes law enforcement being serious about it. Also, there’s a good chance that since you have to register it with the FAA that any crime committed with it would be considered a Federal crime.
They’re supposed to be registered for use, but that’s something YOU do, on the website. That’s not done automatically as part of the purchase.
Not all stores manage inventory at the serial number level.
That requires them to be actively looking for it while you’re flying. Once you turn off your transmitter there’s nothing to track. Don’t fly near restricted airspace and they have no reason to try to fine a random drone pilot.
Every electronic device with networking capability that exists has a “burned-in” MAC address that tells you info on the manufacturer, etc.
You’re thinking of WiFi/Ethernet/Bluetooth. There’s plenty of radio control options for drones that don’t use MAC addresses. Some are completely analog (though there’s not many of those left), but even the digital ones don’t necessarily have MAC addresses.
MAC addresses aren’t some government-mandated thing. They’re something the industry came up with.
Communications with commercially available drones are generally unencrypted and easily intercepted. Triangulation of the source of the controlling unit would be trivial.
You’d have to be looking for it while the drone was being operated, so you would have to either monitor all the time or be tipped off that someone was coming to get you. This isn’t really a good deterrent to drone-based assassination.
Also, drones are trivial to build on your own these days. With a few months of extremely basic electronics education, a pile of off-the-shelf components and a little iteration you can have your own “ghost” drone that you can control via RF, cell towers from a modem you put onboard, bluetooth, line-of-sight-laser or whatever. The weapons on it are a different story, but people have been improvising ways to off each other forever. It’s kind of what humans do best.
Drones that weigh 0.55 pounds or more must be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. If you buy a drone, you’re supposed to register it, and that puts the drone and your name into a Federal database.
Now that Ukraine has made it clear that drones are “arms,” the anti-gun-registration 2nd Amendment people are gonna get right on that, right?
You don’t have to register it with the FAA; you’re already going to murder someone, who cares if you break a few more laws?
The last point assumes someone’s recording the wireless activity of the drone in the moments before the explosion, which I think is pretty unlikely. And the internals of the drone should be destroyed by the explosion, rendering it practically impossible to extract any identifying information other than the general drone model.
And even if all wireless traffic is being recorded and triangulated, pick a busy place and you’re just one guy on your phone in a crowd of thousands. You can also order the drone anonymously months ahead of time and pick it up somewhere with poor security camera coverage to all but ensure there’s no record linking it to you.
Anyone who thinks they stand a chance against drones with a gun hasn’t been paying attention to what’s happening in Ukraine.
Gonna pew pew a CEO in the back? Sure, guns work for that.
Trying to save your own life against a fast and agile target that needs way less precision than you to be effective and probably never even presents a target? Nah mate, you’re fucked.
Drones are like Obi-Wan, they always have the high ground.
Oh my god your so edgy!
you’re**
There are some, handheld firearms that are used as a last-ditch / cheap anti drone solution in Ukraine, by both sides.
Drum roll…
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/analysis-shotguns-emerge-as-a-frontline-defense-against-drones-in-evolving-military-and-security-tactics
Its shotguns.
Because they have a spread of multiple shot pellets instead of a single bullet.
Fucking obviously duh, they’ve been used to hunt small, evasive birds routinely, everywhere, for like 150+ years.
Hunting a nimble flying object with a sniper rifle is a laughably absurd idea.
This actual post from this woman is so stupid I would have thought it was from a 12 year old whose only experience with guns is from CoD… but nope, its a 50ish(?) year old woman.
Guess she’s never hunted birds, and thinks its just the same as hunting deer or hogs or something???
Using a gun with a 25’ effective range against a device hovering 50’ off the ground sounds not terribly effective, though.
I mean, the whole idea that Iran has a 7th gen drone army it can project to the other side of the planet is laughably absurd. And yet here we are.
I have 10 or so shotguns, of all sorts. None of them put out much spread at 25’. That would almost be too close.
Translation: I know fuck all about shotguns beyond what I’ve seen in movies and video games.
A quick Google search shows birdshot has an effective rang on the order of 40 - 50 yards. Now, you still have to be competant with a shotgun, but the public perception of shotguns is generally skewed. They have a much tighter spread and longer range than movies and games would have one believe.
Show me a shotgun with an effective range and I’ll show you a drone with a higher flight deck.
Show me a drone that can kill me outside of a shotgun’s range.
Go to YouTube and search “Ukrainian drone drops bomb” and you’ll find tons of them. Like this one where the soldiers had no chance of hitting the drone.
I’m guessing you mean just the disposable kind of drones popularized in Ukraine? We’ve been dropping hellfire missles from Reaper drones at 10,000+ feet for a couple of decades now.
This is about drones that are cheap and can shoot you with a bullet. Sure a +1M$ drone will kill you from behind the horizon, but a repurposed consumer drone operates on the same ranges as handheld guns and as such could be shot by a handheld gun. If you can hit it, which is why you use a shotgun to increase your ods
it’s not necessarily with a bullet. Most improvised attack drones drop explosive payloads, since it’s both simpler to set up and simpler to use. Outfitting a drone with a gun takes making a complicated system for aiming it, while a payload drone just needs some 3d-printed parts, some extra wiring, and usually just a single servo.
Are the cheap drones really shooting people with bullets? I was under the impression they just had small explosives strapped to them and were single-use.
you’re correct, they do not strap guns to improvised attack drones. they’re not necessarily single-use either, though. A kamikaze drone will detonate its payload while its still attached, which is an option. There is plenty of footage of IADs which use a servo to just physically drop a payload onto targets from above, and those could potentially be used over and over. I think the kamikaze version is able to be more effective, for a variety of reasons, but both versions seem to be seeing use.
Depends on the choke. A 12 gauge full choke turkey gun can probably put a pretty tight pattern that range, but it’s gonna work better with bigger shot. If you want super fine shot and a full pattern, you aren’t shooting that far.
GarandThumb did some tests in a video a while back. IIRC he did both choked and not, along with different types of shot and slugs. everything but birdshot was pretty effective out to a couple dozen yards? I’ll track it down and drop a link after I’ve rewatched.
Sounds good. Looking forward to it
prior comment edited for ya.
Cool thanks!
25’ against what, humans?
I got news for you, birds that get shot are usually more than 25’ away.
Other people have already pointed out that your conception of shotgun spread is essentially based in video games, where the spread is (in all but basically milsim games) greatly exaggerated.
You’ve countered that drones can fly higher than an actual shotgun range.
Yep. They can.
… Did you read the article I posted?
Shotguns are being used fairly commonly by both sides.
It doesn’t matter what you or I think about how practical or useful they are…
The people fighting the war think they are practical and useful.
…
Nonetheless, here’s my attempt to explain the popularity of shotguns in Ukraine as anti drone weapons:
This is not a solution geared toward being able to shoot down any drone, of any size or capability, at any range, at any altitude.
Obviously a shotgun is not going to be able to shootdown a greyhawk or reaper style drone.
Most of the small FPV drones that attack infantry or ground vehicles do so by basically either dropping a bomb or grenade or mortar round from maybe 25 to 150 feet in the air…
Or just being rigged with some kind of an explosive to explode on contact or via a remote trigger.
(Also, these cheap FPV drones do not really handle altitudes above roughly 150 ft that well (though this will vary by exact model). Unless its a dead calm day, gusts of wind easily blow them around, draining its limited batteries as it tries to keep its position steady, severly shortening the drone’s range.)
These kinds of drones are extremely cheap, plentiful, and effective against infantry and many ground vehicles…
When it comes to these kinds of drones, shotguns are also extremely cheap and plentiful, and practical self defense weapons.
Shotguns are more useful against these kinds of FPV drones than an average assault rifle, due to the spread of shot.
They are way, way more cost effective than using a tunguska or gephard or some kind of MANPADS platform designed to shoot down jet aircraft.
Shotguns are also just more numerous, and don’t require specialized training/equipment like a dedicated AA platform or EM jamming and all the equipment that entails.
You can just give a few out to every squad or vehicle crew, and thats way, waaay better than just hoping you’re operating near enough to an expensive friendly AA platform that exists in far more limited numbers, or being SOL if you’re not.
Further, a shotgun is also just useful as a general combat weapon.
Sure, buckshot has limited range, but sometimes fights occur within tight conditions… namely trenches or an urban environment.
Also slug rounds exist and can give you more range than buck or birdshot.
Also you can use door breacher rounds, or slugs in a pinch, to blow apart door hinges and locks.
You put a lot of effort into trying to teach someone who is clearly dedicated to not learning anything. I appreciated the information at least.
I’ve also noted that a lot of these sightings are of airplanes, satellites, and stars.
I’m sure Betelgeuse is terrified.
This lets me know that you have never experienced a long term shot gun owner. Shotguns do not explicitly fire only shot or slugs. They never have. It is actually quite easy to tailor shells to a target. Someone with fishing line, a soldering iron, and a box of cheap pellets can make a net that will take out all commercial drones (or any of the 4 propeller style). And on top of that, there are widely available (albeit expensive) commercially available anti-drone shells. If you look in all of the footage of Russians being killed via drone, they all have a rifle with some kind of optic. These are very, very bad at shooting an agile flying target. Every hunter on the entire planet can tell you that. You know what’s great at that? A shotgun with the appropriate gauge and shell. Look, it isn’t that hard to hunt birds at over 50 yards (that’s 150’ as you so inaccurately put things in the range estimate) with a solid appropriate turkey gun. You have displayed a large amount of ignorance here.
I would love to see the Rube Goldburg Shotgun you think you’ve invented and watch you try to fire it (from an extremely safe distance). Please post that shit to YouTube and share it, because god damn dude. Fishing line and cheap pellets shoved down the barrel of a shotgun for the purpose of butterfly netting an MQ-1 Predator?
Lolz. Lmao, even.
Happy Hunting!
Please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself. Yes, you can jam all that stuff in a shotgun shell and make a crude anti-drone shot.
No, it’s not going to be an MQ-1 Predator (which is bigger than many WWII fighter planes), but nobody said that, either. Most of the drones in Ukraine are the size of a DJI Phantom.
The US manufactured drone weapons that have been coming over for the last two years are significantly larger than the DJI Phantom.
Stop digging. That’s completely beside the point.
Shotguns just can’t stop winning
“winning” and my dumb brain…
I heard that guy’s a real crack shot.
Ive heard and seen some images and videos of soliders building their own antidrone ammo. They rip the tip off the casing and heat shrink a coulple of bbs together and crimp them to the casing. I’m not certain how legitimate or effective it is but I’ve seen several videos and images of it. They recomend staggering the homemade rounds with tracer rounds to help with aiming.
Hah, I suppose that could work!
Reminds me of ratshot .22 rounds.
Maybe somebody will start properly manufacturing basically ratshot 5.56 rounds.
Old people can be stupid too :-)
Also, people seem to be forgetting that shotguns don’t only shoot shot or slugs:
https://www.lesslethal.com/products/12-gauge/als12skymi-5-detail
I did not know an actual anti drone, net round existed!
Not especially useful against drones, nor open warfare, there are also less than lethal rubber rounds…
… and a self contained taser round:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/taser-x12-xrep-a-taser-in-a-shotgun-shell/
I don’t know if the xrep is still actually manufactured though.
Oh right! Dragon’s breath! Illegal in half the country!
https://www.firequest.com/G12-113.html
People have been basically homebrewing shot gun shells since shotguns have existed. Everything from flachetes, to bolos, to XREP - even idiots that have shoved a shell full of .17 hmr rounds to see what happens. I 100% know that homebrewed anti drone shells exist and range from tying fishing line around pellets, to just launching a rope.
Oh yeah, I was trying to stick to retailed products, but yes, homebrew shotgun rounds have been around for basically as long as shotguns.
Another kind of homebrew shot is coin shot:
https://www.alloutdoor.com/2020/06/17/shooting-pennies-shotgun/
I’ve heard anecdotally that people have been doing that for quite a while.
There’s an old story that cowboys would load nickles. It ends up being something like $1.25 in nickles, which would be enough to spend the evening with several prostitutes at the time. So probably no unless they were in a real pinch.
So I have no actual source on any kind of coinshot…
But why not use half pennies?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent_(United_States_coin)
Yes, the US used to have half pennies.
Imagine buying an apple for $0.03½
Anyway, they stopped being minted in 1857, but that’s still within the early timeframe of ‘The West’, and I’d bet they were still used in circulation for another decade or two.
That’d be cheaper than using nickels, haha.
Looking up the size of coins compared to shotgun gauges, I’m guessing the tale was dimes rather than nickles. Dimes would fit in a 12 gauge just fine. A half penny would need a 6 gauge, and a full penny would need a 10 gauge. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think 6 or 10 gauges were ever popular shotgun sizes.
Not gonna lie, if she can take a drone out with that I’d be pretty impressed.
just do a 360 noscope you noob
They hear the word drone and think of those little remote control camera drones you can buy at Walmart/Target and not, like, a Predator.
We never see successful drone interceptions but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen. Not the kind of odds I’d like to take, though.
Now here’s a thought… What about using drones to “take care of” a CEO? The risk of being caught would be lower, as you can be located hundreds of meters away or more. It’s also relatively easy to acquire a drone, and you can make explosives with stuff you can buy at the hardware store.
(Disclaimer: This is just a thought experiment, I’m not dumb enough to try this, don’t worry FBI :3)
Drones that weigh 0.55 pounds or more must be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. If you buy a drone, you’re supposed to register it, and that puts the drone and your name into a Federal database.
Every electronic device with networking capability that exists has a “burned-in” MAC address that tells you info on the manufacturer, etc. This coupled with the drones serial number can narrow down specifically which device it was and allow law enforcement to figure out which specific store sold this specific drone. Then they hit the store with a warrant for the customers, match up the drone to a name, and go.
Communications with commercially available drones are generally unencrypted and easily intercepted. Triangulation of the source of the controlling unit would be trivial.
It’s sooooo fucking easy to find someone who is using a drone if you’re serious about it. It just takes law enforcement being serious about it. Also, there’s a good chance that since you have to register it with the FAA that any crime committed with it would be considered a Federal crime.
You’re thinking of WiFi/Ethernet/Bluetooth. There’s plenty of radio control options for drones that don’t use MAC addresses. Some are completely analog (though there’s not many of those left), but even the digital ones don’t necessarily have MAC addresses.
MAC addresses aren’t some government-mandated thing. They’re something the industry came up with.
You’d have to be looking for it while the drone was being operated, so you would have to either monitor all the time or be tipped off that someone was coming to get you. This isn’t really a good deterrent to drone-based assassination.
Also, drones are trivial to build on your own these days. With a few months of extremely basic electronics education, a pile of off-the-shelf components and a little iteration you can have your own “ghost” drone that you can control via RF, cell towers from a modem you put onboard, bluetooth, line-of-sight-laser or whatever. The weapons on it are a different story, but people have been improvising ways to off each other forever. It’s kind of what humans do best.
Now that Ukraine has made it clear that drones are “arms,” the anti-gun-registration 2nd Amendment people are gonna get right on that, right?
…right?
You don’t have to register it with the FAA; you’re already going to murder someone, who cares if you break a few more laws?
The last point assumes someone’s recording the wireless activity of the drone in the moments before the explosion, which I think is pretty unlikely. And the internals of the drone should be destroyed by the explosion, rendering it practically impossible to extract any identifying information other than the general drone model.
And even if all wireless traffic is being recorded and triangulated, pick a busy place and you’re just one guy on your phone in a crowd of thousands. You can also order the drone anonymously months ahead of time and pick it up somewhere with poor security camera coverage to all but ensure there’s no record linking it to you.
Also you can, like, buy the drone with cash? So no traces there?
True, though you’ll probably be recorded by security cameras if you buy it in a physical store.
Buy used and pay cash, although the previous owner of the drone will almost certainly be questioned.
Register with the FAA? Lmao
Yes, yes. Let’s also register our crime gun before we do the crimes with it.