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mukansamonkey t1_je3tpf2 wrote

Reply to comment by Narwhalbaconguy in Ukraine Defense intelligence shows insides of Shahed drones, which Russia uses to attack by DoremusJessup

They're slow, noisy, and Ukraine has shot down a few with handheld rifles. Literally have guys who go outside and stand around taking shots at these drones and succeeding. They're not exactly high tech marvels.

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Narwhalbaconguy t1_je3v4la wrote

But think about how this could be used. Let’s say an extremist manages to build one of these, realistically who’s gonna shoot it down before it crashes into a crowded building, busy road, power grids, etc? Unless the FBI and homeland security was already on their ass, I don’t see anybody stepping up to do it until it’s too late.

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zapporian t1_je42qr7 wrote

Sans the explosive warheads, literally all of the fairly new, revolutionary drone tech being used in ukraine right now is civilian tech, and can be improvised pretty trivially by any small group of people with some kind of engineering background.

It's a damn good thing that terrorists and pissed off political agitators have apparently not realized – just yet – that you can just strap an IED to a cheap FPV drone off of alibaba and start running around assassinating politicians from concealed positions 1km away or whatever. Or just drop pipe bombs from a heavier hexa / octa copter a la Ukraine: heck, the designs and release mechanisms that Ukraine is using for their jury rigged grenade / mortar shell delivery drones is practically open source at this point.

Anyways the Shahed isn't even 21st century drone tech; that thing is just (more or less) a mid-sized hobbyist RC plane kit, packed with explosives, that uses GPS to navigate towards a preselected geographic target. Literally just an ad hoc WW2 V1 (and with a similarly terrible accuracy rate), but built with mostly off the shelf parts that anyone in the west (or in iran, apparently) could acquire and build given sufficient time and engineering resources.

No two bit terrorist is gonna engineer and build a shahed though: much, much easier to just build (and test) pipe bombs or whatever. And the issue, again, is that you could literally just strap a pipe bomb to an FPV, and have a fairly accurate guided munition that any idiot off the street could use.

Technically speaking, yes, just about any sufficiently motivated individual could probably build and launch a shahed by themselves – but you'd have to be a pretty particular kind of terrorist wierdo to want to and be capable of doing that.

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Mr06506 t1_je49pqm wrote

Pretty good reason why we restrict access to explosives and even to common fertilisers, etc.

I think the main thing to be thankful for is that even assembling a basic nitrate explosive mix is beyond most common terrorists / attention seekers.

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UglyInThMorning t1_je4fz9v wrote

Truly restricting access to materials that could be used to make explosives is incredibly difficult because that’s a category that includes goddamn near everything. I started to give examples and then realized maybe I shouldn’t include a shopping list, but you can build a bomb out of like, three farts and a nine volt battery if you know what you’re doing.

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