• andrew_bidlaw
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    1 month ago

    This article is so full of fillers and off-topic references. Only one quote at the end mentiones quadrocopters. Other stuff is a plain text mentioning supposed fire from the sky and supposed weird wounds left by something like nails.

    Only two paragraphs are dedicated to what is one of the problems in creating a shooting drone - recoil, and that a 9kg drone could be okay for that in their own opinion. And, piecing together what author wanted to say but failed to, we add there a special nail-like bullets from before, meaning special weapons where recoil may be lowered to somehow tolerable levels. Our usual weapons are meant for us, 60-100kg humans staying firmly on the ground, that can’t be said about copters. But they are probably overestimating the precision that can be achieved by rotors while in the air - current stabilization is okay for photography, dropping bombs down, but reliably shooting something at distance without a special homing munition is another challenge that is hardly probable just yet. And if they spam whole magazines of ammo just to hit something, that precision is even less possible to achieve because, again, recoil grows.

    Therefore, I call it a gossip that needs further proofs. This article is inconvincing and seems made to intentionally confuse the reader with how it jumps around and has content about drones spread very thin and far between.

    • NuclearPlatypus@jlai.lu
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      1 month ago

      The term “quadcopter” has become a generic term for the small, highly mobile drones, initially intended for reconnaissance, which are mounted with assault rifles (technology like the Smash Dragon from Smart Shooter, with automatic target detection, lock, track, fully remote controled).

      This can be mounted on commercial drones like the DJI Matrice 600 or military drones like the Thor from Elbit.

      Or to describe the same kind of drones that drop explosives (this could also be a simple DJI dropping conventional grenades or IEDs).

      Regarding the Smash Dragon technology:

      The SMASH Dragon is an advanced robotic weaponry payload that can be mounted on different small UAVs (drones) and other unmanned aerial platforms. Featuring SMASH’s core capabilities and proprietary target acquisition, the real-time fire control algorithms direct the weapon and accurately time the shot in order to achieve a precise hit. The system is uniquely designed to lock, track, and hit unknown targets in an unknown environment, whether they be static or dynamic, day and night.

      Sources:

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/armed-drones-israel-hamas-war-gaza-hospitals-gunshots/

      https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-drone-that-can-fire-a-sniper-rifle-while-flying-developed-2022-1

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/11/11/israels-urban-quadcopter-brings-search--attack-in-one/

      https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6166/Gaza:-Israel-systematically-uses-quadcopters-to-kill-Palestinians-from-a-close-distance

      Videos :

      A quadcopter drop explosives in North Gaza

      Israeli M26 Fragmentation Grenade can be seen attached to the drop mechanism from a drone. This mechanism is reportedly from a DJI Mavic drone (or similar) shown in the later part of the video that was shot down in the West Bank.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo

      "We [were] operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’ “That’s clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act - persistent targeting of civilians day after day.”

      Prof Mamode, former clinical lead of transplant surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London, said it was a “very consistent story”. He added: "The bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pellets and I fished a number of those out of the abdomen of small children. I think the youngest I operated on was a three-year-old. "These pellets were in a way more destructive than bullets. "With the drone pellets, what I found was they would go in and they would bounce around so they would cause multiple injuries. "I had a seven-year-old boy… He had an injury to his liver, spleen, bowel, arteries, so quite extensive destruction from a single entry point. “He survived that and went out a week later.”

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Israel is using the armed quadcopters to lure in civilians by playing recorded cries of babies and women before shooting them with the quadcopter

      Disturbing sounds of crying infants and women were audible throughout the camp. When they went out to investigate, “Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them,” the award-winning Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini reported for Middle East Eye. The quadcopters – small, cheap, and disposable drones usually used for civilian photography and, more recently, military reconnaissance – had been blasting the sorrowful recordings as a lure.

      Once the lure worked, it created a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who ran to help the fake victims became real ones. Residents struggled to help those real victims as the “quadcopters were firing at anything that moved,” eyewitness Samira Abu al-Leil, a 49-year-old Nuseirat resident, told Middle East Eye.

      Israel’s armed quadcopter innovation is not the only harbinger of future wars at work in or emanating from Gaza. Yuval Abraham, reporting for the Israeli outlets +972 and Local Call, revealed a terrifying targeting artificial intelligence, Lavender, that purports to sift through the accumulated data Israel gathers through surveillance on Gazans and predict who matches the profile of a vaguely defined “militant.” Particularly at the beginning of its onslaught through Gaza, Abraham reported, the Israeli military “almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants.”

      In February, Euro-Med Monitor compiled a study of what they said was “systemati[c]” Israeli usage of the armed quadcopters in Gaza and corroborated accounts of quadcopters opening fire during the Jan. 11 bloodbath on al-Rashid Street. Euro-Med Monitor said it had confirmed “dozens of civilians” targeted and shot by quadcopters “fitted with machine guns and missiles from the Matrice 600 and LANIUS categories, which are highly mobile and versatile, i.e., ideal for short-term operations.” Citing the Palestinian Health Ministry, the study reported that health workers in Gaza noticed corpses with “evidence of unusual gunshots,” which, according to Euro-Med Monitor, indicated "not bullets fired from rifle-type weapons, but from quadcopter drones.” Hussaini’s Middle East Eye colleague in Gaza, Mohammed al-Hajjar, said the quadcopter’s rounds resembled nails.