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This is why I read HackerNews.

Every month there’s a new article that improves my suburban missile defense system* and helps guarantee that my neighbors will never let their dogs poop on my lawn ever again.

Terrain mapping my neighborhood so that my rockets can navigate to the right offender has always been a challenge. Now I can just use drones!

* It’s a defense system with missiles, not a defense system against missiles. That would be silly.



These might help.

Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance, Seventh Edition https://www.amazon.com/Tactical-Strategic-Missile-Guidance-S...

Tactical missile warheads https://www.amazon.com/Tactical-Warheads-Progress-Astronauti...

Fundamentals of Astrodynamics https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Astrodynamics-Second-Dov...


I own the Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance book. I only bought it because I have a passing interest in this stuff and really couldn't believe this sort of book is publically available.


Every terrifying technology that people worry can be propagated by AI or terrorist manuals is already sitting on a university library shelf. Most of it already available via Sci-Hub or Library Genesis. I have documents on nuclear weapons that would have been top secret 50 years ago.


I actually wanted to reply to the downstream comment, but it didn't give me a Reply link for some reason.

In any case, I've absolutely noticed how even a Raspberry Pi Zero, taken back 40 years, would be a supercomputer beyond anything that money could buy back then.

A GPU that we'd consider obsolescent today would be truly insane in 1985.


I occassionally mention to people that we can effectively have a supercomputer from 90s in our home if we so choose, but it that is lost on them since they use it for browsing at best. Tech and knowledge is only as scary as the individual wielding it. Human is the problem.


I bought a detailed book about vectored thrust aircraft at a bookstore in a mall. … just a sec someone is at the door.


Woah, prices have gone up for that Missile Guidance book. Used copies were going for like $15 a couple of years ago.


$170 for 2 volume hardback set @ https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/book/10.2514/4.105845 .. fairly standard price these days for technical books.


The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't...


There’s that and there’s also anti-drone jamming. What a world we live in.


Ukraine and Russia are apparently building drones with fiber-optic tethers to defeat this. Like the old wire-guided missiles.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraines-drone-makers-produc...


I wonder why spool of fiber optic cable is on the drone vs with the operator..


Drag and fibre tension.

In the former case, you have close to zero for both. In the latter, you're dragging 2km of line behind a small aircraft, risking the line getting snagged by something on the ground.


A new cat and mouse game.


A lot of anti-drone jamming is severing the wireless communication between a drone and its operator.

In most of the write-up, these drones were on pre-planned autonomous routes, and would thus not be affected. Unless you also had anti-radar installations :-)

Or hell, some kinda highly-illegal and mostly-unfeasible microwave gun or multi-watt CO2 laser that you could point at a drone and bring it down.


Maybe old school (but sort of James Bond-esque?) but I really dig these shotgun shells that shoot nets

https://www.lesslethal.com/products/12-gauge/als12skymi-5-de...


I find that rogue poopers are most effectively addressed with loitering munitions. It's well known that immediate feedback is critical in animal conditioning.


How about a small laser with enough power for a 100ms burst in the non-visual spectrum that vaporizes 1mm radius, 0.5mm depth of protein, through 1-5cm depth of hair?

No sense sacrificing any hardware. Zero resource attrition and imperceptible evidence of action is the name of the game.

Match that with a spot of sound out of human hearing range and you can clear the enemy of its own accord far beyond your legal and overt action spheres.

If a close neighbor’s unit stays clear but expresses its dismay regarding warning sounds too loudly, well, this works for that too.

We are talking about nuisance bears and moose, right?


I lost a little chunk of flesh to a pulsed laser, didn't even know I was injured immediately-- the wound didn't hurt until later.

Clearly the solution is laser ignition of napalm-- don't want to accidentally catch the drone on fire, so the laser can be timed to fire once the stream is clear of it.


> laser ignition of napalm

Now we’re talking! Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to deploy something as viscous as napalm through my sprinkler system. I’ve been reduced to dropping it from a helicopter, the old school way.


Four words: Diesel engine fuel injection.




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