The Great Crapcopter Debate Revisited

 Years ago General Aesop and I first crossed swords over at Peter Grant’s - aka the Bayou Renaissance Man. Much hand waving, clucking and egg laying was going on about weaponized hobby drones being repurposed to drop bombs on squaddies. Any number of low grade CGI animations were around showing these demonic dimunitive drones busting tanks, carrying flame throwers and wielding revving chainsaws on robotic arms, HAR HAR HAR!!! Aaaaaaaaand of course….it all just HAD to be true! Or so the old boys thought. It was ridiculous of course.

As a scratch drone builder I was intrigued - the thought of bombing that insolent Californian nurse into submission appealed… so I ran some basic chit house flight tests with a larger drone I’d built…and of course, it couldn’t lift the weight of your generic garden variety NATO hand grenade that tipped the scales at around 600 grams. So it was, predictably, all bunkum: hobby drones and even small heavy lift drones couldn’t generate the lift required to carry the large ordinance required to destroy people…never mind tanks.

I am catching flak from the usual suspects now that small drone warfare is being done all the time. There’s even good videeyahs about it!!!

Apparently the Ukes and the Russians are using smaller heavy-lift commercial and military drones to drop bombs on their adversaries. There’s still a lot of deep and shallow fakes out there but the odd one like this is  legit. Here…the Russkies are having some sport with the Ukes. But it goes both ways. 

I did some sleuthing on the bomblets. Apparently it’s nigger-rigged VOG-17 ammo. The bomblets carry a 32g “payload”! That’s about the weight of a 1/3 of a pepperoni stick from the deli! HAR HAR HAR!!! As you can see… these things are pretty much just great big fire crackers! There’s maybe enough “bang” in that to surprise you enough that ya might have to check your shorts afterward… but these things score direct hits and usually produce no casualties. I suppose the fright of it made some of the Ukes drop their weapons… but apart from that? It’s more of a rude prank more than anything else. I saw another one where the target was a sleeping Russian… and the Ukes dropped a dud on him. Ilya woke up long enough to casually throw it away, then farted and went back to sleep! HAR HAR HAR! Gawd…I am starting to like Russians! That kind of attitude is worthy of a Marine!

😂👍

I suppose one of these things could kill ya or maybe put your eye out…? All I know is that if somebody dropped one of those things on me, and I found out about it…there’d be hell to pay! Ya never know, I suppose. The energy densities of modern munitions are always going up. In Starship Troopers the space marines carry shoulder fired nukes. But small drone warfare is still pretty much more in their realm of fantasy and sci-fi than it is in ours, and I don’t see it changing any time soon.