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A sub $5,000 intercepter drone?

I've mentioned before in this column that I've had several approaches to start designing and building drones for military purposes.

My stance has been pretty clear that it offends my principles to do anything that could result in the loss of human life so to date, I've said "no".

However, the requests keep on coming and I've been considering my options again.

What if I was to work solely on "defensive" drones?

Although most people think of drones as offensive, front-line weapons that deliver explosive payloads to attack infrastructure, assets or troops, there are other types of drones that I may consider becoming involved with.

Right now, for example, Ukraine is using huge numbers of surface to air intercepter missiles to bring down Russian drones and that represents a huge cost.

When it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) to bring down a drone that is worth no more than a few tens of thousands of dollars (or perhaps just a few thousand in the case of the many decoy-drones Russia is launching), defending against such attacks soon becomes financially unsustainable.

Ukraine has now twigged to the fact that drone-on-drone warfare is now a thing and they're increasingly using their own drones to bring down Russian ones -- saving a lot of money and allowing them to keep their expensive intercepter SAMs in reserve for dealing with higher-value targets such as cruise missiles.

The attributes and design-goals of an intercepter drone can be significantly different to the traditional FPV drones we've seen operating in the war theatre to date. Intercepters require significant speed rather than an extended loiter time and rather than using expensive explosives, can often produce better results simply through impacting the target directly. Such impacts can damage the target drone's airframe or pegg the gyros and thus cause it to tumble from the sky.

There have been attempts at rocket-powered intercepters but these tend to be limited in range and provide only one chance to strike the target. A similar craft powered by a low-cost jet engine would be a far better option -- providing much-needed speed but with an increased flight time that would enable multiple attempts to strike a target, if needed.

The really cool thing is that these drones need not be manually piloted either... advances in AI image processing now allow for autonomous targeting and tracking.

I have a $300 store-bought drone weighing 140g that will track and follow me autonomously using AI-based video analysis. Adding this tech to a low-cost jet-powered intercepter drone built from readily available materials could be a game-changer in the battlefield.

Best of all, such a craft would not violate my own principles. In fact, it is the stort of tech that would be saving lives, not taking them.

Perhaps I'll build a proof of concept prototype over the summer and see where this goes.

That is unless our local council decides that defensive weapons development somehow breaches one of their crazy bylaws and shuts me down (no, I'm not joking).

Carpe Diem folks!

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