The Birth of Skynet

[Trausti]

You have been warned.

 

[bigfield]

Reminds me of Prey by Michael Crichton, but on a different scale.

Swarm robots are awesome.

How do you think they'll weaponise the Perdix? Fill them with explosives? Give them stingers, like bees?

 

[Kharakov]

Distribute biological aerosols. Big government wins. If you aren't on the side of the corrupt, you're fucked.

 

[Elixir]

Distribute biological aerosols. Big government wins. If you aren't on the side of the corrupt, you're fucked.

The paranoid contingent is trading in their AR15s for shotguns as we speak.

 

[bilby]

Distribute biological aerosols. Big government wins. If you aren't on the side of the corrupt, you're fucked.

The paranoid contingent is trading in their AR15s for shotguns as we speak.

A shotgun will maybe take down more of a swarm than a rifle can, but for real area affect against large numbers of very small targets, a flamethrower would seem to me to be the weapon of choice.

 

[bigfield]

The paranoid contingent is trading in their AR15s for shotguns as we speak.

A shotgun will maybe take down more of a swarm than a rifle can, but for real area affect against large numbers of very small targets, a flamethrower would seem to me to be the weapon of choice.

Let's see those Second Amendment nutjobs argue for the right to bear flamethrowers.

 

[Kharakov]

Fuck. Here in the USA, we need to worry about redneck caused internet outages as they test home made EMP devices. Dagnabit.

Thanks DARPA. You gave me DARPANet and TELEnet as a kid... and now you're gonna use rednecks to take it all away.

 

[ZiprHead]

Israeli tank laser guided tank killer.
[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/e6danQxhns8[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Israeli tank laser guided tank killer.
[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/e6danQxhns8[/YOUTUBE]

That's a generation behind modern missiles.

Laser guidance means you have to keep your laser pointed at the target while the the other side will consider you to be the most important target on the battlefield. The missile in flight provides an arrow pointing to your position and they'll be perfectly willing to expend heavy ordinance (no battlefield weapon costs nearly as much as the tank) to hit the laser guy as otherwise it's hoping smoke generates a miss (and there's not much time for this) or that reactive armor will stop the missile.

The latest weapons are self-guiding, once the missile is away you can get away from the spot you fired from and self guidance means missiles that can overfly the target rather than hitting it--this allows them to attack the weaker armor on the top of the tank and reactive armor doesn't help against an explosively formed projectile. Against such a missile you spoof it, you shoot it down or you die.

 

[Underseer]

The paranoid contingent is trading in their AR15s for shotguns as we speak.

A shotgun will maybe take down more of a swarm than a rifle can, but for real area affect against large numbers of very small targets, a flamethrower would seem to me to be the weapon of choice.

They're likely to be used for surveillance, so I imagine they'll be pretty spread out. The point of these things is that they are cheap, so shooting a few down probably won't have much impact.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578439/u-s-military-unleashes-swarm-of-tiny-intelligent-micro-drones/

 

[Valjean]

Cool! A new variation of skeet.

 

[bilby]

A shotgun will maybe take down more of a swarm than a rifle can, but for real area affect against large numbers of very small targets, a flamethrower would seem to me to be the weapon of choice.

They're likely to be used for surveillance, so I imagine they'll be pretty spread out. The point of these things is that they are cheap, so shooting a few down probably won't have much impact.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578439/u-s-military-unleashes-swarm-of-tiny-intelligent-micro-drones/

Well if they are spread out, a burst of high power microwave energy to fry their CPUs would seem in order.

Or maybe some kind of laser based system. If it works on mosquitoes, then drones are just a scaling-up problem.

Corey Doctorow foreshadows just such a system, built into protester's hats in his book Pirate Cinema; The hats are supposed to zap mosquitoes, but are hacked to locate and destroy CCD based cameras, blinding any drones or CCTV units in range.

 

[Speakpigeon]

The paranoid contingent is trading in their AR15s for shotguns as we speak.

A shotgun will maybe take down more of a swarm than a rifle can, but for real area affect against large numbers of very small targets, a flamethrower would seem to me to be the weapon of choice.

No. This is where the prophecy gets started, for, unfortunately for human kind, the only parry against robot swarms is... a SKY NET.
EB