- Joined
- Jul 19, 2020
There's not really that much of a technical limit - Nobody bothered making much radar that could pick up something that small and slow because it would inevitably just detect a lot of fucking birds airborne weapons don't tend to be palm sized. Now that drones are more prolific, making radar that can see a quadcopter isn't the most difficult thing - Bird don't tend to hover or sideslip. The technology for high resolution radar has existed for decades, and modern computing makes filtering out false positives a lot easier. And with a gun based AA, false positives are less of a concern anyway - The local area will run out of drone shaped birds well before you run out of ammunition. The main downside is that your radar is going to be extremely easy to detect and find.
The energy would be a problem, and the sheer size required to do so. Keeping the beam focused on a drone that could be a couple kilometers away is a feat in of itself on multiple levels, and your weapons platform is going to be half generators and amplifiers to get the needed juice. You could get similar effect on target with a hail of regular bullets, since both require line of sight, and the guns will cost you far less.
If you want to use an energy weapon to deal with a drone that you have line of sight on, interference is the way to go. Those anti-drone antenna rifles, just scaled up, blast the thing across the em spectrum to ensure the controller can't use it. Most drone autonomy at any size is restrained to "Keep flying" at best - quads will just hover or go to land. If they land, odds are they tangle up or land poorly - functionally mission killed if you can't take off without breaking a rotor. If it just hovers, then you come back to the gun based solution, against a stationary target. Couldn't be easier then. Still has the radar issue of lighting up like a christmas tree on EM though.
