This is going to be exciting for those of you who have been contemplating starting your own ballistic missile program.
I’m endlessly amazed by the amount of effort that some people put into creating accessible, interesting, and detailed videos explaining various stuff. The videos I have recently been consuming about naval warfare (drachinifiel) are hugely detailed, well thought-out, scoped, and funny. I’ve done bits of video editing and recording and I have to say it’s not easy at all – you can basically sink an infinite amount of time into it, if you’re a perfectionist.
This fellow intersperses his explanations with models and illustrations, which are interesting and a bit quirky. Also, he appears to have hands on access to large collections of V-2 rocket parts. That’s a trick because there are not that many V-2s around.
Here’s a walkthrough of how the turbopump for a V-2 worked. Mild spoiler: how many of you knew that a V-2’s turbopump was steam-powered? Well, it’s chemically generated steam, but that’s still pretty damn impressive.
Also, in case any of you have not heard it, here’s Tom Lehrer singing an ode to Wernher Von Braun:
“… the widows and cripples in old London Town, who owe their large pensions to Wernher Von Braun…”
I started reading your piece and immediately thought of Lehrer. My favourite line? “A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience.”
I saw the post title and thought “take a bunch of Nazi back to your country after WWII”.
@Jazzlet:
lol.
They have a cut-away V2 at the White Sands Missile range museum.
https://history.army.mil/museums/IMCOM/whiteSands/index.html
The germans also invented the thermal battery still used in nuclear weapons to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery
“In both German, and English, I know how to count down…
and I’m learning Chinese”, says Werner Von Braun.
Tom Lehrer is a friggin’ genius.
Also, don’t forget “Who’s Next”.
Also, I am reminded of my favorite quote from Ice Station Zebra:
“The Russians put our camera made by *our* German scientists and your film made by *your* German scientists into their satellite made by *their* German scientists.”
@moarscienceplz:
Alistair MacLean, right? I read the hell out of that stuff in high school… Wow that takes me back.
Like carburetors, military ordnance is a subject my brain just refuses to focus on. Metallurgy is cool, and I do enjoy a good explosion, but it’s sad that history has so many centuries of inventing bombs and lobbing increasingly lethal things at each other.
Tom Lehrer is always welcome. His style of entertainment is a refreshingly classy, intelligent version of satiric scathing wit. (With piano)
In case any of you did not know, Tom Lehrer’s real job was he was a mathematician. Specifically he taught cryptography at NSA. I think he also taught at Cal Tech or Stanford. He is, obviously, a pretty smart guy. Many years ago he deprecated his musical work and said it was all silliness. I believe he published the old videos of himself as a goodbye to his fans.
Some of his songs are timeless, but others are probably incomprehensible today. Who cares if Germany has nukes? Etc. But “poisoning thr pigeons” and the “table of the elements” are great, as is his song about Lobachevski.
I imagine Lehrer would have found a lot to write about in the last 8 years. Perhaps someone should ask an AI to write “the pandemic pavane” as if written by Lehrer.
Speaking of weapons development, the war in Ukraine is giving a lot of opportunities to try out new gadgets. Drones are getting a lot of work, which makes me wonder about the future. A drone is an excellent terrorist weapon, after all. How long before some group assembles both know-how and hardware?
@11 Yes, drones are developing rapidly and making an impact. I expect anti-drone measures to receive a lot of development money in response.
Reginald Selkirk @ 11
Anti-drone measures have been recieving some work in the UK, we had an incident a few years back when someone (never caught) was flying drones around Heathrow Airport (the UK’s largest, essentially “London Airport”), effectively shutting the place down for several days. As Heathrow is in a built up area just shooting the drones down wasn’t deemed an acceptable solution because of the risk to the public of falling drone parts. Last I saw I think they were looking at blocking the control signal.
I was hit on by Alistair MacLean in the Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles. I was fourteen years old at the time, and looked younger.
Professor Lehrer has put all his music online, freely available for any and all uses whatsoever. Yes, really.
“Note: This website will be shut down on December 31, 2024, so if you want to download anything, don’t wait too long.”
If you look at it from the right point of view there are a lot of rockets that are technically steam powered. Very hot steam, but still gaseous H2O
Complete guess, but about a year ago?
As someone who used to spend a lot of my free time in uncontrolled airspace essentially “naked” (i.e. protected from impact with other aircraft by a down jacket and t-shirt) and whose friends still do, the rise and rise of drone technology is something I’ve paid a lot of attention to.
@LykeX, 11:
I just checked and I’ve been saying the following for at least seven years: the know-how and hardware have been out there for getting on for a decade. A drone would make an excellent weapon for untraceable assassination. Consider: I know from personal experience that a highly capable hexacopter powerful enough to carry a heavy camera can loiter at about 2500 feet for 20 minutes. At that height it’s nigh on invisible and completely inaudible from the ground. It would be relatively trivial to equip such a machine with a hand gun, zeroed to a fixed camera on the drone body. Now consider a mission profile: Launch from perhaps a mile away from the target. Immediately climb to 2500ft and head to the target location – total flight time perhaps two minutes. Loiter over the area where your target is expected – workplace, home, restaurant etc. When the telephoto lens shows they’ve reached an open point, cut the motors. Drone drops 2450 like a rock, perfectly silently. This takes 40 seconds. Engage the motors to achieve stable position 5ft off the ground – another 5 seconds, max. Pilot makes last minute adjustment for aim and pushes the button to fire the handgun. Ejected casing is caught in the little net placed there for the purpose. Two or three rounds should be discharged, Mozambique-drill style, if possible. Another 10 seconds, maybe. Now give it the full beans on the motors, climb back to 2500ft, and head back to the van.
Consider that from the point of view of a witness or victim – nothing at all, no warning, then suddenly a loud noise as of a loud fan. An object appears out of the sky in front of you, wobbles a bit, goes bang a couple of times, and fucks off straight up. You’d never know what hit you. I have no idea why this hasn’t already happened. It would be nigh on impossible to guard against apart from by never, ever going out of the house.
@Jazzlet, 13:
Where to start with this? It wasn’t Heathrow, it was Gatwick. I mean, that’s a most basic fact, trivially easily checked.
Second, not only were the drone pilots never caught, it was never proven that there were any drones at all. Nobody – not one person in the densely populated area surrounding London’s second airport and not one person in that very, very busy airport produced even a single photograph of a drone or anything that looked like one. At this point I can refer to https://xkcd.com/1235/ – the Gatwick drones are in the same category as lake monsters, ghosts and Bigfoot.
This was the central scandal – not that drones had shut down the airport, but that bureaucrats had shut down the airport on the vague suggestion there was a drone or drones out there. What this demonstrated handily was how to shut down a UK airport for next to no money or risk. More on this in a moment.
The idea that shooting down the drones was ever even considered is laughable, built-up area or not. This is the UK, not some gun-happy shithole. Also, nobody who has ever actually used a firearm would suggest “shooting down” a drone – the practicalities make the very idea ludicrous.
Finally the idea that “blocking the control signal” is a thing is equally stupid if you know literally anything about the technology. First of all, there are strict controls on broadcasting jamming signals since they tend to interfere with things like ambulance control, police communications, television signals, public cellular phone networks and oh yes the massive operational airport that’s right there and whose continued operation is the entire point. Second, even if you were allowed to just broadcast jamming signals willy-nilly, what frequency do you choose? A single frequency? Can you frequency-hop to follow the control signal through its cycle? Do you even know what that means? What power do you broadcast with? The airport is big – do you know exactly where the drone is? (Then why haven’t you got a photo of it?) Is there only one? And so on.
All of which is academic, because it naively presupposes that said drone is being “controlled”. Again, this speaks of ignorance of the capability of home-build drones. I’ve friends who, when they’re not flying paragliders, fly drones they build themselves. A couple of them have ones they can program – the thing just takes off, and flies a predetermined path around a number of waypoints, filming as it goes, then returns to a predetermined point. There is NO external control beyond saying “launch”, so there’s no control signal to jam. You might consider jamming GPS, but you’d have to jam ALL the systems – nobody just uses the crappy American GPS system any more. Anyone halfway serious is tapping GLONASS and Galileo as a minimum, and serious hobbyists back that up with inertial and visual navigation. The only thing you could realistically use to bring down such a thing is an EMP. If you think the British police are looking into deploying EMPs in residential areas, I want some of what you’re smoking.
Now, as promised – the central scandal: we’ve demonstrated as clearly as possible that you can close down a major airport for days with no risk to your own life or liberty and using less than a grand’s worth of gear, the sort of gear you can buy innocuously from any hobby shop or off t’internet. If terrorists weren’t aware of that before, they are now.
My plan for shutting down Heathrow, Gatwick, or any other airport you like: buy/build three or four drones – as many as you can afford. Not off-the-shelf geofenced models – Arduino DIY jobs, decent sized, well lit. Program each one to lift off, fly a couple of miles at top speed, then loiter at about 200 feet for five minutes, then fly to the nearest large body of water and ditch themselves. You can test this behaviour anywhere, to your heart’s content, until you get it working just right, because unlike, say, a bomb, testing a drone doesn’t look suspicious or draw the attention of plod (obviously when testing, ditch into a nice field, not a pond). So you get the “fly,loiter, escape, ditch” behaviour right… drive past the perimeter of the airport in a van. You don’t even need to get that close – a couple of miles is fine, a drone can cover that in two minutes or less. Open the roof, launch a drone, drive off. Wait a few hours until the airport is on high alert and flights have stopped. Drive to somewhere else, launch a drone, drive off. Now the authorities know there definitely IS a drone, and it’s not mass hysteria. Have it loiter where it can be photographed. They spend much of their resources trying to track where the control signal is coming from and looking for the pilot – fruitlessly, because it’s entirely autonomous. Rinse and repeat every day or two at unpredictable intervals until you run out of drones, and then just go home to Poland or wherever you bought the parts from (you didn’t get them sent to a UK address, obvs). Chances of you ever being connected with the event: zero. The only possible way to get a witness is if someone see the drone exit your van and connects that with what happens subsequently. Don’t launch where there are witnesses – you only need a few seconds.
Cost to the drone builder :less than ten grand. Cost to the police to investigate: not less than a million. Cost to airport(s) and the travel industry generally: not less than a hundred million.
The problem with this kind of attack is there’s no way to stop it that doesn’t interfere with the airport’s ability to function. Any terrorist cell that can afford an AK47 or a trip to Pakistan or Utah “to train” can afford a drone, and a drone attack is much, much safer and has a higher chance of doing actual economic damage. You can’t interfere with the command and control because it’s all on board, you can’t catch the pilot because there isn’t one. You could conceivably try to shoot one down, but they’re cheap enough that you can just keep throwing them up there – how long can you keep playing whack-a-drone?
Demonstrating that this is a viable plan is, IMO, the worst thing the police have done here.
Frankly, I can’t understand why it hasn’t happened more.
It’s not violent or martyry enough for most terrorists*, for one thing… And for them, or even a protest group like Just Stop Oil, the deniablity is not actually a plus. It’s not enough to cause mayhem, because mayhem isn’t really the point – it has to be clear (and preferably indisputable) who’s causing the mayhem. Plus the protestors are very much into that whole philosophy of non-violent direct action where getting arrested is the main aim. Basically your fundamental premise (that people don’t want to take risks or be caught) is wrong.
* I tend towards the opinion that the majority of terrorism is violence / suicide with a veneer of political rationalisation layered over the top. Offer them an alternative tactic with a better chance of achieving their ostensible political goals, but without the violence and / or martyrdom, and most of them probably wouldn’t be that interested. However, take away the politics and they’d probably still manage to find another excuse.
Yeah, fair enough. I think you’re right. Silly me, being rational.
I just looked at the google map of Gatwick. You wouldn’t even need to have that complicated a program. Drive past the airport on the A23 and launch when you’re in line with the end of the runway. Drone goes up 500 feet, sits there for five minutes so everyone sees (and photographs) it, then if flies 850m south east and ditches straight into Crawley Sewage Works main pond. Heathrow is even easier, you could launch from the M25 near J14 and ditch in Staines reservoir.
Again – if the point (for Just Stop Oil) is to curb emissions, publicise, disrupt, AND get arrested, it’s been amply demonstrated that sticking up a drone at an airport will HUGELY reduce emissions for up to several days, and arrest could be guaranteed if you wanted, just as easily as could be escape. Does make me wonder why they’re wasting their time chucking soup at paintings.
Tethys @ 9, you’re missing out:
“As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.”
more here
https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
sonofrojblake @ 17
Thanks for the well read over-view of the topic. Couple of points to add. Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) drones such as DJI are heavily geofenced to not-take-off when they shouldn’t, such as near an airport. So, a possible drone sighting over an airport is serious stuff: it means someone knows how to build DIY (e.g. using ardupilot) and is intentionally encroaching. That’s is bad news, even if the likelihood is small.
The jamming tech is here, now, and at every airport. Who knowns how it works? A wild guess is that it targets the GPS signal?
On topic of risk: a drone falling out of the sky over London can (with bad luck) kill a handful of people. An Airbus 300 doing the same can kill thousands. So, drop the drone.
I have had a strange distant association with the V-2 rocket, not very consequential but interesting to me.
My first contact was when I worked very briefly for White Sands after I got out of the Navy. I think they called it Physical Science Labratory. I used to root around the old junk they had lying around in the back and of course I spotted parts of V-2 rockets stamped with the Nazi swastika there was quite a pile of engines. It was fascinating to see the complicated engineering that went into these machines.
I moved to Utah a few years after and ran into a WW2 bomber pilot that flew raids on Peenemunde. He claimed they actually saw a V-2 launched as they got closer to the target. He said they had not been told what the target contained and he and the crew were shocked to see a rocket that they had no doubt heard about but never saw in action. This same pilot flew the Memphis Belle back to the states for the ceremonies honoring the plane. He was not a member of the original crew.
I met a gunner that flew on bombing missions on Peenemunde he was also shocked at the effectiveness of the V-1 and V-2 weapons. They were unfamiliar with rocket technology but were committed to destroying every weapon and launch sight possible. They also had a couple of brief encounters with the ME-262 which as you can imagine was also a great shock since the speed of those planes was incredible for the time.
A deal with the devil. Our space program received a boost because we rode on the backs of Nazi scientists. Medicine took advantage of the heinous medical experiments the Nazis subjected humans to. Thanks to the strange obsession of Germans ( I come from German ancestry) for keeping meticulous records. We also got much scientific material from the Japanese and their horrible experiments during the war.
Some people say war drives civilization, I’ll let someone else struggle with that concept.
#8 Marcus,
Yes, Alistair MacLean, although I don’t think that line was in the book. I’ll have to reread it, but ISTM MacLean was too much of an American jingo to ever admit that the USA needed technological help from any outsider, let alone the Germans. The great Patrick McGoohan delivered that line in the movie, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it was his own suggestion.
I was into model rocketry as a kid, and I remember the V2 was one of the trickiest to build. Not only did it have a balsa nose cone and tail cone that had to be sanded and sealed before painting (most model kits of the time had a plastic nose cone and no tail cone), but trying to sand a concave curve into each balsa fin that would mate cleanly with the tail cone was a big pain.
@astringer:
Well yeah. They’re strictly toys, for people who just want to pick up and play. Anyone with any actual interest in drones (e.g. for FPS racing) is building their own. It’s not hard, and it’s not expensive.
Oh yeah? And you know that how, exactly?
At a conservative estimate, at least 100,000 people in the UK, assuming it exists at all. Something that can consistently jam drones without interfering with anything else would need to be very clever and very obvious to anyone hanging around an airport with radio receiving equipment, and in case you’ve never been to a UK airport, they’re usually surrounded by a carpet of geeks with radios. Those people would ALL know a new type of signal had turned up, and would be well placed to characterise it.
First question: which one? The shitty American one? GLONASS? Galileo? All of the above and more?
Second question: you mean the same GPS that most of the legit aircraft are using? The same GPS all the civilian road traffic around and throughout the airport are using? I doubt it.
Third question: why would jamming GPS help? I’ve already said why that’s irrelevant.
One, at most.
Again – how? Harsh language? Wishing really hard?
This was part of my original question. It seem to me that there’s a big difference between “someone could learn” and “someone already knows”. We’re heading into a situation where many more people know.
Every drone used represents lots of people with knowledge of drones. People from various countries, with various political views, perhaps even from various mercenary units. People who know how to make them and/or use them. People who have a skill set and who will need a job in the future.
I just feel like this is one of those things we’ll be looking back on and wondering “why didn’t we see that coming?”
You seem to know what you’re talking about, so let me follow up: Is this getting more attention by people with clout?
My cell phone doesn’t work properly near the runways and air traffic control tower of our international airport, due to interference from the radar systems. Clearly it’s possible to disrupt anything that uses wireless signaling by generating enough noise. I can see why airport security would freak out over a drone casually flying into a controlled airspace and its radar equipment.
If you know jamming happening you can plan around it. Deactivate fails safes and have the drone go full pelt in a straight line. Airports are big open spaces, and often have a lot of big windows.
What happens if you ram a plane with a racing drone at full clip? or fuel tankers?
Just out of curiosity, why would you need that much tech? Here in Murica, they would just shoot it down with a shotgun like skeet shooting. A bird trapping net would work too, I’ve even seen a low flying drone taken out by a well aimed spear.
I don’t think most drones use crypto on their comms and if they do it’s probably not implemented right. Even the US dod has used clear comms or static keys for battlefield crypto. That’s mostly a side effect of interagency pissing contests than something driven by design. Also, crypto can gobble battery life. Back when I was consulting for Taser I solved that problem but it turned out that it was a public policy issue not a technical problem.
Drones are a serious problem. Airports are not the only target – a drone trailing a piece of carbon fiber rope with weights on the end could seriously mess up elevated high tension lines or transformer farms. For that matter, a long carbon fiber bolo could be huge and very light and a jet engine would gobble it right up. Drones could deliver stochastic incendiaries, or cell-network controlled incendiaries that could be triggered in sync. Not that I have thought about any of this.
I do know that a major film studio in LA has systems for taking down drones but they won’t talk about them.
A hunter drone with a carbon fiber spiderweb that was programmed to visually recognize its target would be pretty cool. By the way autonomous visual targeting using image recognition would be a profitable technology to develop.
@dangerousbeans:
What happens if you ram a plane with a racing drone at full clip? or fuel tankers?
Drones need to be light, so they’re probably not great for ramming, although a racing drone (for example) typically has carbon fiber props and frame.
Making a drone with an explosively formed penetrator changes that equation, but access to high explosive is almost always a game changer.
DJI drones have fantastic integration and a very unique control plane. I would not be surprised if part of the deal to allow them to be sold in the USA included backdoors and restrictions. There used to be third party control software for them that could remove altitude restrictions.
DIY drones are fun. I made a couple and crashed them pretty quickly (memo to self: drones will chop up drywall) for a DIY it is possible to evade the geofences, etc. (px4, ardupilot)
The game-changer is when the drone is autonomous enough to survive intermittent comms failures. Then you could have a drone that used an internet/ip comms layer and you could remote control it from anywhere. AIs are really good at categorizing. You could train a drone to recognize and hate enemy stuff. That software layer could control anything that flies, drives, or sails – a DIY torpedo, etc. Back in the early 90s Alec Muffet and I were hypothesizing a mylar blimp with drone control software and a solar panel – tell it where to blow up and it will eventually find its way there and explode. “Go to Heathrow and hit an airplane” mode.
In order then:
@LykeX, 26:
The thing is, the people who are playing with these things seriously aren’t generally doing so out where a lot of people will see them. I only see them because I hang around with that kind of geek, and adjacent types. We’re not “heading into” a situation where a lot of people know. For a reasonable value of “a lot” (e.g. a couple of dozen people in my home town alone), we’ve been there for a decade already.
On that, I have no idea. I don’t know the people with clout. I know the people with home built drones that could, with minor mods, do the things I described above. I don’t hang around with the people who’d care. I assume those people know, but I can’t see, even in principle, what they could do about it.
@dangerousbeans, 28:
Full clip or standing still is irrelevant when the “target” is taking off or landing and is thus doing in excess of 150mph. Fuel tankers? Probably nothing. Plane windscreen, wing, fuselage? Probably nothing. Minor cosmetic damage to the big thing, and the little thing would fit through a sieve. However: equip the drone with a housebrick, and have a 737 engine inhale it during takeoff… that would be bad. At best, extremely expensive. Pilots (including and especially helicopter pilots) are extremely worried about sucking stuff into their engines.
You’re (potentially) talking about a device that can do 0-60 in two seconds, in any direction including straight up. That can loiter at 50ft or 500ft and is EXACTLY as much inconvenience to an airport at either of those. Do please show me the athlete who can put a spear into a circling eagle 500ft off the ground, I’d like to see that. Come to that, show me the firearm that can bring down that bird.
But then again, don’t bother. Has your spearchucker been sitting in precisely the right spot all day and all night for the last month? Because if not, they’re first going to need to hear about the drone being there, then find their spear, then get to where they can chuck it. By which time, the drone has gone, but might… just might… be back. This is what shut down Gatwick – the fear. Regardless of what Americans think, you can’t shoot fear, just like you can’t have a war on terror.
@mjr, 30:
I can guess why. Their “systems” are a large bunch of technically overweight guys with the middle name “the” in a fleet of huge black SUVs, dotted around the streets around the studio/backlot/whatever, and if they see anyone getting a drone out of the back of their pickup truck they go over and break his toys and then his fingers. They’re guarding against spoilers, is all. They don’t need tech for that, per se, and they have a much smaller area to police for a relatively short period of time.
We’re past that. Drone are (if you like) already autonomous enough to not need comms at all, for a relatively simply mission profile like “go and loiter over there and then jump in the lake”.
Carbon fibre lines trailed from a drone though – that’s a corker. It’d make a nasty mess of overhead power lines AND the overhead lines that power major train routes. Coordinate just a couple of dozen people with the right gear and you could at least temporarily cut the power AND stop all the (electric) trains over most of England.
The thing about skeet shooting is that the targets appear from a known location, along a predefined track, on cue. It would be much, much harder (as in “completely impossible”) if they just turned up randomly somewhere in an area covering several square miles, at unpredictable intervals over the course of a couple of weeks.
Remember, nobody even managed to get a photo of the alleged Gatwick drone(s), despite the area being crawling with people with cameras – and it’s a hell of a lot easier to photograph something than to shoot it out of the sky.
Interesting discussions! On topic of jamming, there is comms (MAVLink is common) I agree that running autonomously can continue with loss of comms to ground station, but I am not sure if MAVlink (or other civilian link) can be secured? So it can be spoofed.
Back to the jamming: under autonomous or assisted (including) the vehicle uses extended kalman filters to know where it is: jam the GNSS (my bad for using GPS when I meant generic) and the EKF fails. So, jam that. I don’t know how this can be done safely with general aviation also in the air, but should be possible (directional jammer + NOTAM-esque announcement?) is this not a thing that pilots train for/know about already?
On Marcus’s topic of drone + AI + shape-charge:-
https://autonomousweapons.org/
e.g.
@Dunc
Why are you explaining skeet shooting? I’m perfectly aware that shooting Drones is going to be quite different when you don’t get to prepare and yell “Pull!”. Birds generally fly very fast and appear from random directions too, which is why duck hunters like to skeet shoot to keep their skills sharp. I know several sport shooters who are simply phenomenal marksmen, and would love to try taking out a drone.
@sonofrojblake
My question was ‘Why would you need an EMP, or that much tech?” What goes up, can be brought down.
I also specified ‘low flying’ and the video of a guy (Russian renaissance festival) taking down the drone with a spear is on YouTube.
Rocket launched antiaircraft thing, but of course new tech requires new defenses.
Let’s equip it with a homing spider drone that deploys a net to catch the invading drone, and then ditches into the nearest body of water.
Make up your mind!
Defending an airport in a residential neighborhood is necessarily quite different from taking down a drone in a war zone.
I’m imagining my local airport, which is located within a large river valley, immediately adjacent to Fort Snelling. Not coincidentally, this location is very defensible. There are high bluffs that overlook the entire runway complex in three directions, a confluence of two rivers. and wide valleys which have excellent sight lines on all approaches.
I would place triangulating defenses on the high bluffs, right next to all the radar equipment, and also somewhere between the actual airport buildings and the fence that surrounds the runways.
Low tech bird trapping nets could easily be adapted to deploy automatically once the drone comes into range.
You just need to disable it, and prevent it from reaching its target. One rotor is all you need to damage, and I’m sure if I learned all the boring boring technical details in the first place, I could come up with multiple very low tech ways to break that high tech gear. Guerrilla warfare tactics are highly effective and necessary if you are disadvantaged by superior weaponry.
Ok so here is how to solve the crypto comms and authentication problem cheaply: introduce a tethered mode. In tethered mode the drone samples its camera and feeds a repeated cryptographic hash with it. Effectively this a true random number generator. The drone saves 1k blocks of the sampled/hashed data and also shares them with the tethered device, which also saves the blocks. You fill a bunch of the storage on the drone and now both the controller and drone know how large the file is. That’s it! When the drone wants to send something or vice versa, it is XOR’d with the next block, which is marked as used, and transmitted. Basically it’s a light one time pad, achieved through the tether. Only authentic blocks (the first 32 bits match) cause the block pointer to move forward by the size of the amount transmitted. When the drone is re-tethered the stored blocks are all overwritten with new blocks.
Assumption, ahead of what follows: the mission profile under discussion is “disrupt airport operation by parking a drone on a flight path, then ditching it when enough people will have seen it”.
Thanks for mentioning that – MAVLink is common. It’s also thirteen years old. That’s the level of “common knowledge” we’re talking about here – a comms protocol has been out there since 2009.
It could be secured pretty effectively by having the launch initiated by hand – a physical button on the drone – and simply not having any receiving equipment on board. Hard to get your spoofed signal onto the drone if it can’t hear anything.
That may be what your vehicle uses. Meanwhile, even off the shelf consumer toy drones from years ago like the Mavic Pro do station-keeping not with satnav (which would have limited accuracy if relied on entirely) but by looking at the image from their down-facing camera and station-keeping VISUALLY.
Big deal. No satnav? No problem. I don’t need satnav to measure altitude, don’t need it to fly on a bearing, don’t need it for stationkeeping, and with accelerometers don’t need it to inertially navigate to an acceptable standard if my targets are big enough (e.g. more or less the west end of Heathrow’s runways for ten minutes, then Staines reservoir). Good luck jamming the earth’s magnetic field AND gravitational field. Why not jam the Higgs field while you’re at it?
I’d ask how directional jamming would work, but I suspect that if there is an answer, I wouldn’t understand it. Based on my ignorance, I’ll accept it’s possible to point a jamming device at an object like you would point a gun and get jamming somehow focused along that sightline.
Yes, pilots (even paraglider pilots) are required to be able to navigate without satellites, and a NOTAM could be made… but what’s the NOTAM going to say? It’s not “there’s a crane here”, or “weather balloons being released” or even “air show”. NOTAMS tend to be for temporary or justifiable interferences with availability of airspace. In this case it’s “none of your expensive navigation equipment is going to work for…” – how long? If there’s a credible threat of people parking drones over the end of the runway, how long do you keep on jamming the system? A weekend? A week? A month? Especially given that even a civilian like me knows that it’s pointless theatrics and won’t stop the drones if they’re out there and properly designed to not be using those navigational signals anyway.
Again I stress I’m not even a hobbyist dronehead – I just know hobbyist droneheads and what their toys could already do years ago, things I can’t think of a way to counter and things my (admittedly very limited) “research” hasn’t turned up any answers to. So far it seems to me the only reason our airports aren’t regularly crippled for weeks is that hobbyist droneheads are almost exclusively geeky middle aged white men who quite like going on holiday, drink responsibly and drive under the speed limit, rather than firebrand anarchists or otherwise politically or religiously motivated nutjobs.
If we’re talking disruption: do you have to damage anything to get everyone to stop what they’re doing and run around like chickens for an hour? Smash through a waiting area window with some suspicious looking chemicals and a small dispersal charge. If you mess up a windscreen do they have to check it before they take off?
Whoever is doing the counter security here will have to assume hostile intentions, and that can be used here.
An hour?. Four years ago Gatwick cancelled hundreds of flight and was effectively closed for about one and a half DAYS, and not only was there no damage to anything, no evidence was ever found that there’d ever been any drones.
The investigation cost £800,000, and compensation to the married couple spuriously arrested simply because they owned drones ran to £200,000. That’s before you factor in the cost of about a 1,000 affected flights, and the five MILLION Gatwick spent on “a system to prevent attacks” (although it seems that might simply be a detection system allowing them to ground flights more quickly if a drone turns up, rather than actively interfering with the drone in any way).
What it looked like to me, as a reasonably knowledgeable observer, was an attempted power grab by the police. Drones give civilians unprecedented opportunities to observe and record police handling of things like protest marches, and plod don’t like that. Consider that of the first seven sightings that initially closed the airport, five were from police officers. It’s very much in police interests to have a way of stopping the public from floating cameras into the air where they can see what cops are doing. In a lovely bit of unintended consequence, however, what it actually demonstrated was that there was, in the event of such an denial of service attack, pretty much nothing the authorities can do.
do you have to damage anything to get everyone to stop what they’re doing and run around like chickens for an hour?
Actually, you can do a tremendous amount of damage simply by musing out loud that you may do a tremendous amount of damage. I used to call this a “denial of clue” attack. [cyberinsurgency]
Smash through a waiting area window with some suspicious looking chemicals and a small dispersal charge.
My favorite utterly evil idea would be to go to an airport with some good theatrical makeup on and get there using public transportation. You are wearing gloves. You touch lots of things that will be touched by other passengers. You keep putting your hands in your pockets when you aren’t touching things. Your pockets are full of finely ground ammonium nitrate. It gets everywhere. If you want over the top freakout you can put something mildly radiologic, like the uranium ore you can buy on ebay. Don’t breathe it!
Aaaaand since we are on that topic, perhaps now would be a good time to casually mention that you can buy high explosive from amazon.com and it comes in neatly packaged containers perfectly suitable for conversion into charges. [disposable cold pack] Getting anfo to deflagrate is difficult but it’s nice that they are conveniently packaged to get through security because they’re hermetically sealed and have no nitrate on the outside of the pack.
$21 for 2 dozen, which would be enough to blow a hole in a plane.
From a recent Charlie Pierce column:
“When German expatriate rocket scientist Werner von Braun released his autobiography, I Reach For The Stars, comedian Mort Sahl said that the book’s title should have included the phrase “…But Sometimes I Hit London.” (It was such a legendary bit of snark that President Jed quoted in on an episode of The West Wing.)”
Marcus @ #42, while I agree with the sentiment, those particular cold packs are made with calcium ammonium nitrate, which does not explode. It’s not even classed as an oxidizer, like ammonium nitrate. The calcium-containing component (calcium carbonate or calcium nitrate) must be removed first.
@cvoinescu:
Really?! Damn!
Sounds pretty simple to decant and dry it.
I think the captured German rocket scientists ended up with the last laugh, though!
The genius move behind this feat of epic trolling was to do all the engineering calculations in the proper units, so the equations actually worked; then just convert everything back to US units at the last minute. It wasn’t even really a secret they took to the grave with them; it was common knowledge pretty much everywhere else, just hiding in plain sight behind American pig-headedness.
Force = mass * acceleration, as any fule kno ….. and yet, that’s only partly true. It’s certainly correct to say than Newtons = kilograms * metres per second squared, and every sensible country does, but that’s kind of baked into the definition of the Newton as the unit of force. You can’t expect to divide pounds-thrust by feet per second squared (or inches per second squared, or miles per hour-day) and get pounds-mass.
I still remember watching an elderly American woodworker divide up a length using all kinds of fancy tricks involving folding string back on itself, all contrived for the express purpose of avoiding measuring anything; while their younger rival from elsewhere just punched the readings from a ruler straight into a calculator.
@Tethys, 37: I missed this reply somehow, sorry. To reiterate, when I say “drones”, I’m referring to light multirotor semiautonomous or entirely autonomous hobby-built things, NOT stuff like Predators or even ScanEagles, deployed to annoy rather than destroy.
I’d love to try. My requirements would start with – where is the drone? You seem not to be engaging with the central issue that in order to be disruptive, a drone needs only loiter in a particular visible position for a matter of five minutes or so – far too short a time to mobilise any reasonable shooter unless you surrounded the airport with them 24/7. (Not saying you couldn’t do that…)
If we’re trading trite aphorisms, “what can’t be seen, can’t be shot down”. Or, if you like: “what hung around for five minutes but buggered off twenty minutes before you arrived with your countermeasures, can’t be shot down”.
So you’re solving a problem of your choosing, rather than the problem presented by reality. That’s certainly a way to improve your chances of success.
You think a MANPAD can hit an eagle? How do you think that works? I’ve flown with birds of prey (ospreys, peregrine falcons and kestrels, mainly) and I don’t think you have any appreciation at all of how well they can see or how manoeuvrable they are. Rocket launched missiles fly fast, but they fly aerodynamically – in long, curving lines. Drones have almost no use for aerodynamics, and can turn acute angles. Birds of prey mostly fly aerodynamically, but when they want to they can turn stupidly tight.
Which is why I’m careful to repeatedly specify that we’re talking about the former, not the latter.
So…. not like most civilian airports then? Again, you’re addressing the problem you want to have.
Again, you’re labouring under the misapprehension that it HAS a “target” in the sense you wish it had. Its “target”, if it’s aiming to do what I describe, is a point somewhere near the flightpath of an incoming or outgoing flight. This doesn’t need to be inside the airport perimeter.
Maybe on an off-the-shelf toy, but you can easily google videos that show people chopping off the ends of the props on drones which then employ real-time machine learning to adapt to the altered lift pattern and carry right on flying.
I’m not sure, in this sentence, whether you’re saying the guerillas are the people with the drones or the people trying to stop them.
Whoa, that was quite a discussion. Just two little remarks:
– V2 yes, impressive engineering. AND a humungous waste of talent, materials and personnel. No military advantage gained, and if those resources had been used “wisely” (that is, in a more evil way), the war would have ended months later. So yay for W.Von Braun and his gloriously useless wartime petards.
– Drone horror? We are going to see some of that I fear. Good thing terrorists are, usually, not big in the brain dept – their usual mode is “killer ape huh huh”. I don’t know about the handgun drone idea, getting it into range with the necessary stability looks a bit iffy, but one could do plenty of other bad stuff, some of which was suggested above. Yikes.
An acquaintance had finished flying his model gliders for the day, and was diddling about near the car park with a couple of drones he’d pulled out of the boot of his car. I was grilling him with questions, and he was more than happy to demonstrate answers. One thing I remember clearly was him saying “I’m not flying it. It’s flying itself. I’m just telling it where to go, sometimes.” He also showed me a trick, something he’d coded into one particular one – he called it fast landing. I didn’t ask why he needed it, but at the time there were a few people making waves by flying drones in places where they shouldn’t (e.g. through the stanchions on rollercoasters on Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which is inside the ATZ for Blackpool airport), then posting the results on Youtube. You didn’t need to be a genius to work out why someone might want to be able to safely retrieve land a drone extremely quickly.
The flight profile went like this: he launched it, flew it about a bit, then turned off the controller. When the drone sensed loss of control signal, it shot straight up in the air like a rocket, vertically upwards. When it reached its programmed ceiling (I think it was 1000ft, but it might have been 300m – drone pilots didn’t have much use for airspace ceiling units as marked on the maps), it flew fast back to a point directly above where it launched, then switched off all its motors. When it was near-ish the ground, they all came back on, hard. The visual effect was as of dropping the thing onto a bed. There was some “give” – it didn’t look like you’d dropped it onto a solid surface like a table – but from the motors kicking up to the drone stopping dead flat, level and motionless was less than a metre of vertical drop and certainly less than one second. It made a lot of racket and it wobbled a lot getting itself right – but it got itself right REALLY fast. Then it settled to the ground and shut off.
Caveats: this was a light drone, not carrying any appreciable payload, so there wasn’t much inertia to it. There was no “fuselage” like you get on proper toys, just the 3d printed support frame, motors, props, cameras and a PCB. Also, the “stop” point was a good four or five metres off the deck, and he did say he’d started with the “stop” altitude set to TEN metres, having little idea how long it would take to stabilise, and had gradually worked it down the setting he showed me. His design intent was to get the thing out of the air as fast as possible without actually crashing it, and if he’d wanted he could have set the “stop” height at 2m and been pretty confident of a nice result.
All that said – if that was possible with that drone and that software when I saw it done in 2014, I can see no reason in principle why you couldn’t do as well or better in 2022 with a larger, more powerful drone carrying a, ahem, larger payload.
Guerrilla warfare is using what you have in a clever way, to fight against superior technology or forces. Ukraine needs easy ways to take down kamikaze drones now, so I’ve gone for pragmatic low tech solutions rather than worrying overmuch about theoretical drones hovering around airports.
At my airport, the National Guard response would be immediate as they are literally on Runway 6, and I’m certain they have some people and equipment that can see and target the drone. There are all sorts of interesting arrays of transponders, antennae, and NSA tech on top of various tall federally owned buildings in this area since 9-11. I’m surprised to learn that the territorial era Fort Snelling is legally federal land, and remains an unincorporated federal district despite also being South Minneapolis.
‘What goes up, must come down.’ is not only a line from a song and an aphorism, it’s true because gravity always works.
YouTube has compilations of ‘Human vs Drones’
video that have proof that you don’t need high tech solutions to take down a drone. Humans have evolved a rather exceptional ability among animals at accurately throwing projectiles at targets for < 200,000 years
A short list of these projectiles includes;
20 gauge shotguns
Fishing pole + lure cast at drone!!
Soccer ball
Basketball ( kicked)
Spear
20 gauge shotgun + shell that contains a net
(3 for $20.00) highly effective!!
Pumpkin cannon
The cannon shot is quite impressive, it’s #3 here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsqi4ft0MIw
If you watch The Chieftain (Nicholas Moran) at Youtube, you will be aware that the claims the tank is obsolete and the drone will rule the skies are both questionable.
There are many details I will not bother to get into, obviously there will be enormous efforts by engineers all over the world to make life harder for drones and their operators.
I am more interested in what will happen when drones (and static sensors) get more sophisticated and less dependent on operators.
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William Gibson is probably a decent guide to possible near-future consequences of smart drones and missiles. Paparazzi will get supplanted by drones and bodyguard companies will be forced to branch out into anti-drone low intensity warfare. “Privacy” as we know it will be available for the rich, but not so much the rest.
Tethys now reaching the stage of simply ignoring inconvenient stuff, eg #47.
Just going to leave this actual advert here.
https://youtu.be/4McPHBQ9pNw